I think we all do it from time to time: make up nicknames for common things in our lives. In our family it’s “jim jams” for pyjamas and “nonsense juice” for soda. Rinee Shah started a blog to collect these words from different families and illustrate them, and now you can even get the entire collection as a physical book.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks, almost as much as I listen to podcasts and music. So inevitably I spend a lot of time looking at audiobook covers in iTunes and iBooks on my Mac and iPhone. I even create my own audiobook covers when the standard iTunes and Audible covers aren’t good enough.
I first started experimenting with Mailbox a few years ago but sadly it was bought out by Dropbox and promptly discontinued ? I went back to the native mail app and while it’s come a long way, there are features I just can’t live without anymore. After spending six months jumping between a dozen different apps I have found some amazing tools and eventually decided the best Mac mail app around.
Our eight-year-old has started to love reading and her teacher has set her a mission to read 40 books in the year. And not just any books, proper kids novels from a variety of of different genres. It’s a brilliant idea and she’s really excited about it :) Like most parents, we have plenty of awesome kids books by Dr Seuss, Roald Dahl and Jeff Kinney but I suddenly realised… we have zero science fiction books in the house ?
Time to fix that. We quickly went on a hunt for some really great sci-fi novels for elementary school kids. There’s some real gold out there so we thought we’d share the best ones here, so other parents can help their children be inspired by the genre.
If your kids are reading our books then odds are you’re reading some sci-fi books yourself! With life being so busy I’ve found that audiobooks are the best way for me to get through my novels, but it drives me crazy how iBooks mangels book covers. iBooks seems to be designed to fit the square music album covers from iTunes, not traditional rectangular book covers.
This year I took matters into my own hands and came up some alternate versions of popular sci-fi novels which fit iTunes much better. If you have any of these space operas in your iTunes library use these covers instead, iBooks will love you for it!
I’ve been a long time user of Flycut for Mac, it’s a brilliant clipboard manager but doesn’t sync with iOS. So I decided to try out all the clipboard management apps I could find, a day of testing later and the result… was somewhat unclear! It depends on what you need it for so here are the top three apps I tested and the type of user they suit best…
Our kids love to play on mum and dad’s iPhones, our girls started before they were one year old. Within moderation I’m quite happy for them to play games at this age, it’s a lot more stimulating than just watching TV. Apple recognises this growing market too and their new kids app store has made it easy to access a lot of children’s apps, but it can still be very hard to know which ones are brilliant and which are a waste of money.
Our daughters (now 3 and 6 years old) have been working hard on a three year research project: finding the best kids apps for the iPhone and iPad! They’ve been playing testing lots of games apps, we’ve made sure they’re wholesome and spam-free, and now we’re ready to share the scores thesis with you. So here are the top 10 best kids apps, ranked by the time our kids spend on them over the last three years.
Every week I hear about another amazing product which teaches kids about technology, programming or engineering. Here’s a list of our favourites, enjoy!
I haven’t made a post about robots and donuts in a while.
Real tough guys don’t need guns, they just need a positive, can-do attitude ?