well, if you're a normal person (and since you're on slashdot, you're probably not), if you search for cars once in a while, you'll start getting car ads everywhere you go on the internet.

When I started testing my employer's website, I started seeing a lot of ads for our/their sites which I never saw anywhere before. I'm not allowed to click on them, since that will cost us money.

Maybe the neatest thing was that I just missed my bus last Thursday, and spent a brief sprint chasing it down a few blocks to the next station unsuccessfully. While waiting for the next bus, I started poking around in my Nexus 5 and some random app popped up a full-screen ad for a taxi service asking "in a hurry?".

OTOH, I was browing Amazon for some wheel covers for my aunt's old car a while ago, and the "what other customers looked at after viewing this item" list had a fleshlight. I stopped shopping for wheel covers.

NPR had some article on how Target targets their ad mailers based on purchase history... They can tell by purchase history when people are expecting, and adjust the ads in their junk mail coupon books accordingly. Some teenager's dad got pissed off at them when they suddenly started mailbombing his family with baby products, and then apologized when he found out a few weeks later that his daughter was pregnant... but Target knew first.

Personally, I like what Google's been doing (and not doing) so far with the data they collect... as a nerd/engineer, a lot it just makes sense. But I'm not as concerned about my privacy as most.

OneBusAway works great for that kind of thing in the Seattle / Puget Sound region. Though I still use Google Maps to provide the best transfer schedule, OBA is then good for tracking if the busses are running on time.

Unfortunately, I found that there are some dead ones where the busses aren't able to check in for a while... So the system might start to assume that a bus is running 15 minutes late, but then the bus will suddenly check in as on time just a few minutes before reaching the stop down the road from me. So. Mrrr

We had a lot of good apps back in the PalmOS days. I used to use JPluckX / Sunrise to download a compressed image of the day's Slashdot using the AvantSlash filter. I could even download the front page of any URLs provided as links, so I could even RTFA or see the AC's goatse links if I wanted to. Plucker for palmos was instantaneous on navigating and loading links from compressed data, much faster than using Avantgo at going back and forth between links, which was in turn much faster than downloading crap from 3g networks at the time over a mobile browser, which was in turn so much faster than trying to use the Slashdot beta AJAX / reactive / adaptive / redaptive interface we have now that doesn't even let you use the "open in new tab" feature that modern mobile browsers have.

I could get virtually all of /. on my device each day, ready to entertain me while I was on the subway or even out camping without cell service. And I couldn't make any comments, so everyone wins.

Yeah, I feel badly for you young'uns, we had things so great back in the day.

Doesn't exactly have to be Old-skool... the best games (or franchises, even) will change the way you look at the world. Some of the essentials:

Simcity (4 is probably the "best" one, if you were to play no others)
Civilization (II is the classic version, though it seems like they got a lot right with V)
Ultima VII (runs well under the modern exult engine)
Sims (III, no expansions necessary. You can pretend it's an architecture program instead of a dollhouse, that was originally how it was intended)
EVE Online (do the free month, that's enough to get your fill of pretty graphics, frustrating controls, and spreadsheet/economy engineering)
Any top-rated FPS (if you've played one FPS, you've played them all, though some have better single-player stories, and others have better team play)
Portal (I, and then II)
Grand Theft Auto (III:SA is the best, though I've heard good things about V. All of them are nice little satirical time capsules, though)
Starcraft (II BW , and maybe III, just so you know what a nice RTS is like)

Here's my running list of games I want to introduce my kids to:
http://trumblings.blogspot.com...

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.