Had this idea on the way to work today:
The Empeg's got an IR port on the front that can send/receive data, correct? If so - it should be possible to create a program for the Empeg that could do the following:
1) Hotsync with a Palm via the IR port.
2) Backup/Restore your Palm in the event of a Palm crash (perhaps the source for Penguin Backup could be modified to do this? The data would be 16MB MAX, if you had a Visor Pro... so it'd be a drop in the bucket on the Empeg's drive)
3) Read the Calendar database and give you a popup reminder of a meeting or other scheduled event on your calendar while the Empeg is running. (I'm not talking about a full sync, that wouldn't be practical, as you probably won't enter an appt on the Empeg. Simply a reminder service, that's all. Perhaps the source for ColdSync would help here.)
4) MAYBE: read the contact DB and allow you do do phone number lookup. Depending on how it's implemented, you might be able to use the Empeg IR remote to search contacts.
In any event, I think the reminder feature would be a decent value-add to the Empeg. I know my Palm's constantly going off while I'm in the car - opening it and reading the tiny screen at 60+ mph is an accident waiting to happen. The backup/restore option would simply be an added convenience to that. Something like "BackupBuddy", where it only sends what's changed, rather than all the memory of the Palm every time you sync.
Anyone think it's worth possible, and worth pursuing? If so, I'll spend some time researching/coding something. Caveat: I'm not the best programmer <wink> but I'm OK at taking things other people have written and tweaking/modifying them to suit my needs.

Sounds like a fun project. So when will you be releasing the first beta?

Hasn't some of this already been started? I seem to remeber Hugo saying he tested the Mk2's IrDA port by sending a Palm contact back and fourth from the Empeg. If this is true, the basic transfer system has already been written (and whom better to have written it?).

EDIT: Here's Hugo's post.

What would be almost more useful than being able to look up someones phone number would be to look up their address. If you are in your car chances are you might be driving over to visit them, and it's easy enough to forget a house number ... Their phone number is probably saved in your cell phone anyway.

Would be cool. I tried to load IrOBEX stuff on mine, but got stuck because I was using Hijack which doesn't have IrDA nor kernel module support. Here's mlord's reply to my question.

I don't know if the standard kernel has module support or if Hugo was using a custom one.

I seem to be able to get my irDA basically going with the hijack v200 kernel I have compiled with the time alignment. I did need to get irda-utils package and compile irattach as in this thread

http://empeg.comms.net/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=hackers_prog&Number=4299&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1

My Nokia 8210 phone shows up in the discovery log and that's as far as I got - same as Hugo.