It's that time of year again

Merry Christmas to our visitors (4k hits yay).

It's that time of year again (for me at least) when you need to be thinking about what critical systems will be left running and unattended over the festive period. In these days of virtualised systems, some of us need only worry about our personal workstations and desktop accessories. If you are looking after your company servers or infra-structure over the festive period then my thoughts and gratitude are with you. We take so much of our digital lifestyle for granted these days (home internet, film streaming services, banking systems, IP telephony etc) and often forget that while most of us may be away from the office, some poor soul may be called out at a moments notice to fix these things.

I consider myself lucky not to be in that situation these days, although it wouldn't be a holiday without at least one person bringing me a broken computer to fix. As for work, I shall be removing the power cable from my machine at 5pm this afternoon and not have to worry about it getting hacked. No doubt the price of this will be lots of updates on January 6th but at least I'm doing my bit to save the planet by turning things off :).

All the best for 2014 from the oblogs crew.

MIT App Inventor 2

DON'T DO IT!!!!

MIT what have you done? Now the blocks editor opens in a tabbed window rather than a new pop-up. Can I change it back? It was useful to have the second window as I dragged it over to my second monitor. Much easier to use when you could see the design and blocks windows at the same time.

Not only that but the AI2 Companion app doesn't seem to work on my original Nexus 7 (Your device isn't compatible with this version?). I know there have been lots of driver issues connecting to Windows boxes over USB but a shortcut to the adb.exe was enough to fix this when we encountered it.

Oh well I guess it's back to AI-1 for now.