Personalised Life Calendar Generator
I'm a fan of the Life Calendars that can be found on Tim Urban's website www.waitbutwhy.com. It's basically a calendar for your whole life on a single poster, with a single box representing a week, a single row represrenting a year (52 boxes), and 90 rows for a total of 90 years.
I liked having it on my wall, and for a while I tried using it to mark significant past events, as well as future goals & plans. There are a couple of practical problems with this, however, because of the current design of the Life Calendars. The main problem is that there are no real date references on the poster, unless you write them in yourself, so honing in on a specific box (say, the week you're currently in right now) is tedious and error-prone.
The reason for this is obvious; the dates shown would be specific to your own birthday, so you can't make one poster for everybody if there are dates on it. The minimalist design of the poster kind of compensates for this, since you are left with plenty of room to write/draw whatever you want. Fair enough.
I'm lazy, though. I don't want to write all those dates in. Plus, if I lose or damage the poster, I'd have to do all that work again. So I did this instead.
This script takes your birthday as an argument, and generates a .pdf file containing a life calendar annotated with your personal dates. (Document size is 29x40 inches, for best printing results)
Several additional features make navigation through the calendar a bit easier;
- Rather than just starting exactly on your birthday, it starts on the last Monday before your birthday (i.e. the first day of the week you were born). This makes it much easier to identify which box holds a particular date, since every box starts with a Monday and represents "the week starting on <date>"
- For each row, the date of the first day of the first box in the row is printed on the right hand side. This date is always a Monday, as explained in #1.
- Boxes containing your birthday are shaded
- Boxes containing the first day of the year are shaded (a different shade)
- Number of calendar rows (years) is configurable between 90-100
Installation
Dependencies
You must install pycairo before you can generate a
Life Calendar:
PyCairo (Python library for drawing stuff & generating documents/images)
pip install pycairo
Or if you're running something like Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install python-cairo
If you are getting Error: out of memory when running pycairo on windows after installing with pip,
try instead installing from this archive of pre-built pycairo wheels for windows.
Make sure to pick the right wheel for your system, i.e. if you are using 64-bit python 3.11,
you should pick pycairo-1.21.0-cp311-cp311-win_amd64.whl.
Download
Clone this repo to get the generate_life_calendar.py script
$> git clone https://github.com/eriknyquist/generate_life_calendar
Usage
After cloning this repo, run the script, passing in your birth date (format can be either dd-mm-yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy)
$> cd generate_life_calendar $> python generate_life_calendar.py "23/10/1990" Created life_calendar.pdf
By default, the output will be a file called life_calendar.pdf. You can
change the output filename with the -f option
$> python generate_life_calendar.py "23/10/1990" -f my_life_calendar.pdf Created my_life_calendar.pdf
If you would like to fill in the squares for past weeks but don't want to do
this by hand, just pass the -d option to darken past weeks
$> python generate_life_calendar.py "23/10/1990" -d Created life_calendar.pdf