> "Shouldering" the phone is an age-old technique.

I used to play violin! Still I'm not good
at shouldering a phone. When I try I
pick up one of the hundred or so square
terry cloth towels I use for everything
from kitchen spills to napkins and use
the towel as a shoulder rest.
I need
to get a shoulder rest for my phone, but
my phone is an old AT&T thing with a
hand piece with a strange cross section
so that I didn't try to find a shoulder
rest.

The Microsoft editor Notepad is no competition
for KEdit (except for some strange cases
of files with Unicode); I've heard of
notepad++ and assume that there's a Windows
version but have not tried to use it.

Using a service like dropbox? I'd want
to have encryption, and I haven't set that
up yet. For de/encryption, I just want
a little command line program that reads
in data in base 64 and writes a file in
base 64. I do have some little base
64 utilities I wrote maybe 15 years ago!
I have the source
of an old, very simple version of PGP
-- that likely doesn't have any
back doors --
that I could use to create the little
de/encryption command line program,
and I have some references to some
such programs in open source
that likely also have no back doors,
but setting that up is just another
little project on the back burner.

Maybe I'm over thinking sync: I've
got several file types of my own
and in total some thousands of instances
of those types, and a true sync operation,
for each instance,
would essentially merge the contents
of a few of the instances; the merge
would have to be particular to the
file type of mine, and I couldn't find
any software to do that and don't
want to write any.

For me, if I really made good usage of
a smartphone, then during a busy few
days I'd have a file on my main PC
and a file on my smartphone, each file
with several additions (changes are
also possible), and have to sync,
i.e., essentially merge, the two files.
Else I'd have two files where I only
want one and/or lose some data.
More generally I'd also want to
sync two file system
directory trees; I don't want to
write code for that, code that would be
so good I'd want to
depend on, and haven't seen any code
for such an operation
that looks nicely polished.

I've been staying with the Microsoft
world and avoiding the Linux world
and guess that there are pros/cons
with that decision. My main consideration is that I
want the best software, documentation,
and live technical support
I can get
as a foundation for my servers in my
business; that Microsoft software I'm
counting on includes Windows XP and 7,
the .NET Framework, IIS,
Windows Server, SQL Server, and
various other of the Microsoft
products. And I want to be able to
continue to run my favorite text
editor KEdit (for which I have
about 150 macros) and my long standard
scripting language ObjectRexx.
And I have a TeX setup I like which
now is a bit non-standard, works
on Windows, but likely doesn't
have a Linux equivalent. Why not
on Linux? Because what I like is
some parts and pieces I've pulled together
from more than
one Windows distribution of TeX.

Broadly, doing things with Linux,
de/encryption, dropbox, smartphones
(VPN, backup/recovery, sync, Notepad++)
is all on the back burner instead of
crucial for getting my production
software done and my Web site live.