Yesterday I discovered LEGO's superb Digital Designer program (also known as lego factory). This is a fully fledged computer aided design (CAD) program that allows you to construct a vrtual lego model from a huge variety of bricks. The program is powerful yet extremely easy to use - a superb programming achievement. Even more amazing is the fact that having designed your virtual masterpiece you can then buy the pieces you need to make it all at the click of a button. There must be a very sophiticated warehousing system behind this that allows lego to pick individual kits for every order. I am happy to report that lego digital designer got the thumbs up from my two kids (5 and 7). However something became apparent very quickly as we built our virtual models. You can have any colour brick you want as long as it is a very masculine red or white, green, grey or blue. There are no pink or purple bricks. I thought this was surely an oversight. Surely lots of girls like to play with lego and they might appreciate the more feminine colours. A quick trawl of the website revealed that lego don't make a range of pink bricks. The do offer a range of "Clickit" toys aimed at girls which focusses on jewelry design but it is not the same thing. You can't build trees and houses and people with it. Googling around showed some people on Ebay selling a rare item called a "Girls Pink Fantasy Bucket". I could find no reference to this item in the current lego product offering. Perhaps this was a failed marketing experiment. I find this hard to understand. Are girls really not interested in the world's greatest creative toy? I am so surprised I think I will write to LEGO and ask them about it.
Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein
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