Let me join the crowd of users extremely irritated by Microsoft’s decision to force Windows Updates on users. It is arrogant and disruptive and I will not forget as other options become more and more viable (think Chromebooks).

I’m a laptop user and this morning I woke to find my laptop in the middle of the infamous Windows 10 Anniversary update, all apparently done automatically. Now, this particular update takes a long f’ing time, requires multiple reboots, and you are told not to turn off your computer! So, Microsoft, what am I supposed to do about going to work? You leave me with two bad choices, 1) don’t take my laptop, or 2) disobey your instructions not to power off the laptop. I am not going to sit for hours waiting for the update to finish, so you’ve ruined my day.

The arrogance of forcing this major time consuming update on me at the most inconvenient time is unbelievable. As I said earlier, I will not forget.

The CCTools application available on the Google Play store has the capability to install a Perl add-on that gets you a functional Perl installation! That means you can write Perl scripts on your Android device, oh what fun 😉

Installing CCTools and Perl

The instructions for making this all work are as follows;

1. Install the CCTools app on your device from the Play Store

2. Open CCTools on your device. Select the menu and find the add-ons section, in that section add the following add-ons;
  

• GCC GNU C Compiler
• wget
• Perl

3. Test your Perl install, create a simple hello world Perl script and run it.

4. CPAN won’t run on the Android, so if you need to install CPAN modules follow the manual instructions below.

Installing Perl Modules without CPAN

1. Locate the module you want to install on CPAN, get the url of the package, for example, the Text::CSV module url is http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/M/MA/MAKAMAKA/Text-CSV-1.32.tar.gz

2. in CCTools, open a terminal session

3. do the wget,

wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/M/MA/MAKAMAKA/Text-CSV-1.32.tar.gz


4. once the gz file downloads, do the following;


gzip -d Text-CSV-1.32.tar.gz
tar xcf Text-CSV-1.32.tar
cd Text-CSV-1.32
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install


Worked perfectly on my Android. Click on the image in this post to enlarge it and the terminal session of the Perl install of Text::CSV.

View my Flipboard Magazine.

Flipboard seems to have a winner with their new magazines. They are easy to assemble and look great. I can envision them becoming an important publishing tool with a few more improvements. Some areas that need beefing up include:

• The ability to add editorial content to flipped content.
• More flexibility with images included in the flipped content, like choice of image used.
• The ability to embed content that isn’t hosted elsewhere, for example an index to the content or a publishers statement explaining the purpose of the magazine.
• An easier way to manage expiring content. As it stands now, the magazine just grows and grows and grows as more content is flipped into it. I would prefer a way to expire off older content (perhaps by age or perhaps by article count) so the magazine doesn’t become unwieldy. Using the Flipboard Editor to manually delete pages is a pain.

For an example magazine, check out the NotSoFAQs Mag.
View my Flipboard Magazine.

Flipboard Android, Flipboard iPad and Flipboard Web are all available to view the magazines.