Cloudpilot by Christian Speckner is a great little Palm OS emulator that runs in a browser. If you save it to your home screen on a smartphone, it runs fullscreen and makes for a very nice user experience.
Network HotSync is unencrypted, unauthenticated, and completely insecure. Cloudpilot’s network proxy does at least use HTTPS, but it’s still a bad idea to expose it to the Internet (it will give everyone access to your local network!) I use a free Tailscale account to securely connect Cloudpilot to the proxy even when I’m not at home.
Follow the instructions to install Cloudpilot’s network proxy on your server.
Install Tailscale on your server and your phone.
Start the Cloudpilot proxy using a command like cloudpilot-server serve
--cert "$CERT" --bind "<your tailscale ip>" to make sure it’s only
listening over Tailscale.
On your phone, set Cloudpilot’s proxy server address to your server’s Tailscale IP. If you tap “Test” it should be successful at this point. Make sure you followed all the certificate instructions in Cloudpilot’s docs.
In the emulated Palm OS, follow Cloudpilot’s docs for “Setting up Network
Hotsync”. Under “Primary PC Setup”, enter 127.0.0.1 if you’re running
Coldsync on the same server that has Tailscale and the Cloudpilot proxy. You
can also enter any address on your server’s local network, so you could eg.
use a Linux server as a proxy to your Windows PC running Palm Desktop.
When running Hotsync, make sure Tailscale on your phone is turned on or else Cloudpilot will complain that it can’t connect to the proxy.