#“LEGO - Bring Back Beautiful”

via buzzfeed.com

Lego went down a terrible bolt-hole with all the boy-movie-centric crap. Good for biz in the short term but leaves behind 50% of the potential target market.

Our 8 y/o daughter loves Lego, but it's the normal building blocks she likes so she can make architectural stuff (like the wonderful Ad above), not all that character-driven single-use rubbish.

I'd love to see kits for London Eye, Empire State, Golden Gate, Olympics 2012 etc that would appeal to boys and girls. And, as I said before, a Mindstorms that average families can afford.

As for this pastel cutesie nonsense they are trying to do now for girls, we have enough stupid barbies in the house with the 5 y/o daughter's obsession, we don't need any more of that thanks.

#“Don’t Forget to Download Your App Inventor Projects - Shutdown on Dec 31st”

If you ever did anything on GoogleApp Inventor, you have 9 days to download your code.

#“nide, a browser-based IDE for Node.JS is just what I need”

via coreh.github.com

I like the Cloud 9 IDE but it isn't integrated into my workflow.

nide, OTOH, is installed on my servers. On first try, I love it already. Editing code in the browser is so much easier than using console Emacs/VIM or SFTP remotely. It looks like they have tied Git support in too.

They need to add some sort of simple access control soon and I'll be a complete convert.

Try it.

#“We Need a Shrine to Tomorrow’s World in The Grafton Arcade”

Ask many people of a certain age (around 40) where they first encountered a computer and you will invariably hear “Tomorrow’s World in the Grafton Arcade”. Yet strangely if you google it, most of the mentions online are by me since 2005.

I can’t overstate how important that shop was for several years in the 1980s. Just like the first McDonald’s on Grafton Street was a Mecca for us muckers up for our Christmas shopping in the 80s, so too was Tomorrow’s World for anyone who knew what a home computer was.

It was a school trip to Dublin by St Kieran’s College Kilkenny in 1982 that led me to where I am today. And that is no exaggeration. BASIC -> Forth -> Z80 Assembler -> Fortran -> C -> C++ -> Python -> JavaScript. 1982 -> 2011.

One of the lads on the trip had been to Tomorrow’s World before and brought a bunch of us with him. They had a variety of US machines like the TI-99/4A (the first and last time I touched one) but they also had the ZX81, and it was love at first sight.

I badgered my parents for one in the latter part of 1982 and luckily for me, Sinclair released the ZX Spectrum around that time. My Dad arranged for a co-worker in the UK to grab one from WH Smith and a secret meeting in a hotel in Portlaoise landed the 16K model in my lap.

I have genuinely never looked back. I also still have that Spectrum and it still works.

I googled Tomorrow’s World this evening and finally found some other mentions of it in New Scientist. It was an ad for a HP Scientific Calculator from December 1982. Poor HP, always launching things at exactly the wrong time.

Some screenshots from Google Books of the Ad in question:

See the full gallery on Posterous

Plus the ZX81

And of course the legendary ZX Spectrum:

But what is the modern Spectrum of the 201x years? It’s certainly not the iPad, which is the Nordmende TV to our Spectrums. It is (mainly) a consumption device, just like most consoles. Can I suggest that it is Android phones and Google App Inventor. If I’d had tools like that back in 1982, I’d have been doing a hell of a lot more than drawing circles on the screen in BASIC. The future is mobile and we need all of our kids to be completely adept with everything mobile.

I’ll do an updated report on how things are going with App Inventor lessons in my kids’ school over the Christmas. Suffice to say that it has been very very very slow but we are finally seeing some great results, particularly from kids who have never used a PC or smartphone before. I am optimistic for their futures as creators, not consumers.

But back to Tomorrow’s World. I think it’s time for a plaque on a wall on Grafton Street like those ones for famous authors: “Tomorrow’s World 198x-198x. They accidentally kick-started the entire IT industry in Ireland.”

#“Se\u00e1n Sherlock Needs to Watch and Listen To This”

I listened to last night’s TWiT podcast in the car this morning on the way from Cork to Dublin. The bulk of it is a brilliant debate between host Leo Laporte and guest Nilay Patel about online piracy, SOPA and intellectual property rights. 

What’s marvellous about it is that both of them seem to initially be in opposition to each other but both have extremely relevant points to make and refine their arguments. Of course the Louis CK experiment comes up too.

So before some junior Minister, along with some Civil Servants, devise some nonsense piece of legislation to “block illegal downloading sites”, they need to listen very closely to both people in the podcast.

You will never, ever, stop copying of media once it becomes “bits”, but there are ways of minimising it to the benefit of all.

And that means providing all media, to anyone, anywhere in the world, when they want it and where they want it, for a fair price. (cf Louis CK). It’s 2011, the internet is global. Time for media companies to accept it and stop treating their customers like they are all potential thieves.

Sidenote: More of this kind of thing please Leo, I nearly unsubbed from TWiT recently due to the repetitiveness of it in the past few months.

#“MongoPress - A MongoDB-based CMS inspired by WordPress”

These guys started out building a plugin for WordPress to make it use MongoDB instead of MySQL but found it was almost impossible. So they decided to build an alternative called MongoPress based on many of the good things about WordPress and hopefully none of the bad things (Die-WordPress-Editor-Die-Die-Die).

#“Android 4.0 (ICS/Ice Cream Sandwich) is Pretty Lovely”

I’ve got to hand it to Google, ICS is an absolute pleasure to use. Everything feels integrated and consistent and beautiful. It’s really interesting how much of a difference even a font change can make.

I just played around with an early community Alpha firmware of it for the HTC Sensation and even at this buggy stage, I want to switch. The iPad2 I’ve been using for the past 10 days feels like a clunky locked-down VTech toy in comparison. Looking forward to trying out ICS on the Asus Transformer Prime.

Here’s a few lovely screenshots.

See the full gallery on Posterous

#“Jesus Christ Facebook, Now You Decide to Fuck-Up Python Users?”

Earlier in the week I got annoyed at Facebook for changing yet another API for no good reason (oh let's change blah_blah to blahBlah from now on, just for kicks). I've come to the realisation that they are breaking the web bit by bit. A site you built in 1997 willprobablybe 100% functional in 2011. A site you built in 2010 with deep Facebook integration, will probably be 90% broken in 2012 if you are notmaintainingit daily.

#“What do you young hipsters use to protect your iPads from the rain?”

I’m thinking some sort of European Man Purse?

I went with this in the end, from the North Face Outlet in Kildare.

#“iGo Stowaway Keyboard and iPad 2 = Awesome”

Wayyyy back in Feb 2008, the iGo Stowaway keyboard was being end-of-lined due to its non-HID compatibility and I managed to snare one for £18 in the UK. It had previously been north of £100.

It’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. Over the years I have used it with a Nokia N770 tablet, an N95-8GB phone, a HTC Desire, Boxee/XBMC on our TV PC and now, drum-roll, hurrah, it works on the iPad2 too!

Yes of couse it’s as stable as a ball on top of a cone in that config, but with the iPad tilted up on the smartcase, it works beautifully too.

Now to jailbreak the iPad so that I’m in control of it, instead of Steve from beyond the grave.