In a particulary geeky manoeuvre, the Poorhouse has decided to learn the arcane technique of building a conduit to interface between Windows and a PDA running the Palm OS. Conduits are the type of software that ensure that your lovely shiny palmtop and desktop PC synchronise such that they have the same contacts, memos, events, news and so on.

It didn't turn out to be the simplest of tasks; the documentation for getting started didn't seem to make the early steps trivial at all. As such, this section will detail a few notes about how I got started in case either I need to do it again, or anyone else is in a similar situation.

To set some background, I intend to be testing the conduits I make with a Palm Lifedrive. The Lifedrive software, including Hotsync manager, is all already fully installed on my PC (running Windows XP) as per the CD that comes with the device.

• Setting up the programming environment
• Running your first conduit
• A conduit to sync Palm todo tasks with MS Access