From Palm, to Google Calendar

As part of my cunning plan to move my data online, I decided to move away from using my Palm for managing my diary - and towards Google Calendar instead. I’ve already stopped using the Palm to-do list; all I really need to do now is find a decent online addressbook; Plaxo being one possibility that Chris suggested.

It took me a while to figure out how to get my data out of the Palm. Palm don’t provide a decent export to anything other than Palm formats for the datebook, so a third-party exporter was called for. The web is seemingly full of dodgy Windows shareware to do the job, but jpilot (which I already, but rarely, use on my Linux machine) turned up trumps. It exports directly to the modern iCalendar standard, fully supported by Google Calendar. Hurrah! Since this solution doesn’t seem to be well-documented, I thought I’d write it down.