For anyone who reads this and is put off by the thought of having to update their system from source; there are binary patches available (both OS and packages) using the `openup' utility from https://stable.mtier.org/
MobileOrg[1] was good for a while—it had Dropbox and WebDAV support—but it hasn’t had an update in a couple of years and is badly in need of a new maintainer.
Recently someone has made a new client called Orgzly[1] which is actually really well designed. Sync works well enough for me over Dropbox, though I'd really rather use ssh. I guess overall there's a little impedance mismatch between Org-mode plaintext and mobile interfaces but overall I think it works well.
Dropbox support was cool, but I recall MobileOrg being buggy to the point of making it completely useless, not to mention pretty bad UI. This project really needs some love.
On OpenBSD the integration with physical devices is done via builtin software. I run a stratum 1 OpenNTPD server on OpenBSD, with a GPS attached via nmea [1]. The GPS data shows up via the sensors framework, which OpenNTPD interfaces with [2].
Not the person you asked the question of, but we’re building AMIs (and VMware images) using packer.io (via the masterless puppet provisioner). It works nicely and with a minimum of fuss.
I looked at inotify and quickly realised it was Linux only, which for me isn't a good fit as I tend not to be on a Linux box when I'm using my ssh client.
