Obviously the only thing to do is to actually write a book about Amelia Bedelia's antics. Then all would be well with the world.

/ off to write a wiki article about how humanoid sexbots will free humanity from its chains

I had been using an HTC myTouch Slide 4G (doubleshot) , and the MTS3G (espresso) before that.

It was great, I would always win at the little online "pictionary" games since I could type out the answer faster than practically anyone else. Also, it was good for reading in a supine or other odd positions, because I could set it to only switch to landscape mode if the keyboard was slid out... it's a constant annoyance to me when other phones switch orientations because the accelerometer is giving readings it doesn't cope with well.

The MTS4G was not supposed to run Android 4, but thanks to CyanogenMOD... http://trumblings.blogspot.com...

Gradually, all of the apps on it got slower and less responsive, and I would gradually get rid of widgets and apps that would run into the background until I just had the bare essentials... Chrome, Maps, and Hangouts. But what finally did it in was that the SD card would get corrupted every time I let the batteries run all the way down.

Finally broke down and picked up a Nexus 5. The screen is big enough, esp. in landscape mode, to hunt and peck out the keys with reasonable accuracy. Unfortunately, Google hasn't made every app work in landscape mode, and some critical things (like the launcher and the frickin' Google search widget) force you to enter stuff on the tiny portrait mode keyboard. I think CyanogenMOD's Trebuchet launcher app was better with this, and I'm eagerly awaiting it to go stable on the Nexus 5 so I can switch over.

I've also been looking for a good Bluetooth keyboard case, but haven't found one yet. There are several good-looking ones for the Nexus 7, though. That would certainly scratch the itch for me. Of course, not many Android apps have good keyboard support, but they're out there... Jota+ , VXConnectBot, etc.

As an aside, after the last update to 4.4.4, my wife's Nexus 4 started getting noticeably less responsive too. Hoping it's just a matter of going through and clearing some of the Dalvik cache, and not because Google is (intentionally?) making older devices obsolete faster by adding in too many bloated features in their core apps :P

some guy was gushing about irccloud.

I don't really have that muchtrouble keeping track of IRC on irssi on my 24x7 server though. That makes me a dinosaur I guess.

Yeah, the Trek angle is sort of covered by "Engage!" , but this one is so much better.

And the parodies are priceless
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Was that perhaps the day you got a bigger monitor? Motion sickness is primarily influenced by what goes on in your peripheral vision. I've only ever gotten motion sickness on sims with wraparound displays on the sides, and it's quite awesome. Still saving up for extra screens for my gaming rig at home so I can have those side panels.

Heh, thanks! My old man will appreciate the correction ;)

The God of Thunder is at a particularly successful orgy and sees a good-looking woman wandering around in her toga. He puffs up his chest and proclaims to her, "Hi, I am Thor!"

The woman looks back and says, "Ugh, yeth, I'm thor too, I'm thor all over."

Yeah, the Lenovo T420s has an array of mics up top around the webcam, and in theory they can be used to filter out noise from typing and be tuned to pick up the voice of the talker and not the speakers. But I went through all that calibration and it still sucks... it does filter out a lot of the keyboard noise but it also attacks the voice as well. Maybe someday Lenovo/Conexant will release better, more tunable drivers, but I haven't seen anything positive on any of the Lenovo support message boards yet.

In Lenovo's defense, I bought a z710 for my wife, and it appears to work great with Skype and stuff out of the box (though I've never sampled the audio quality on the far end of the call). It's a nice little desktop replacement box, at the time probably the cheapest laptop I could find with a 1920x1080 LCD and a half-decent NVidia GPU. Of course, it still has an Intel 4000 integrated GPU as well for "hybrid power savings"... you can't disable the iGPU, and the thing would BSOD with any 3D applications using the Nvidia GPU until I installed the right combination of driver updates relatively recently.

Onboard sound sucks.

My work laptop (Lenovo T420s) is useless for microphone audio (some Conexant chip). The company keeps wanting us to use Skype and Lync and SoftVTC to do meetings, but all the people who try to use the onboard audio are inaudible (because the built-in noise cancellation keeps ducking their voice), or if they manage to dig 5 dialogs deep to disable the noise cancellation (with an option that gets reset every reboot), they have lots of system noise over their voices (even if they're using an external mic. ). So everyone dials in via phone for group VTCs and mutes their PCs.

I have an expensive Jabra headset with a USB dongle. That gives me pretty clean audio. Should be able to use bluetooth too, but that takes more driver updates and even then it's still a pain.

My gaming PC has somewhat nicer onboard audio, but even with a S/PDIF link to my Logitech Z-560 speakers, I still get a hiss whenever the OS turns on and "opens" the audio device. Would be nice to be able to input digital audio somehow for Skype, but I ended up just plugging in a cheap USB webcam with a digital mic instead.

Still, it's kinda sad that any cheap mobile phone has a better microphone with AEC (for speakerphone use) and NC than you can get on most computers.

Ha, and don't forget the "I'm a talking parrot! Say something to me!" thing with the shrill voice too!

Null hypothesis: Does human activity have no impact on the environment?

eh, there's ArsTechnica for that kind of thing. Or of course, you know, the /. comment filters that can also make the ACs invisible to you.

That said, I haven't really figured out what to use my Pi for yet. I have enough old smartphones to throw at random little projects that could use cameras/audio/touchscreens/wifi, and an Arduino Uno that does a better job at little ADC/DAC projects. Critically, I have only one monitor with an HDMI port, and my my PC is connected to that. Best I could come up with so far is just a device I could use to throw the BSOD screensaver up on LCDs at work or in public.