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I have a 5 year old kid who loves playing the odd puzzle/logic games on my iPad (thinkrolls) and is already doing lego for kids twice his age. I'm thinking about getting a Nintendo Switch for him to play games such as Yoshi / Captain toad which require some creative puzzle solving to advance levels. However I'm concerned about him being too young and the effect on his brain development. He is a very active and healthy kid. If we got it I'd strictly limit play to a few hours per week.

We've been strict regarding TV with our 2.5 year old, none before age 2 and 20 mins per day since then. I recently installed an educational app on my phone to experiment and he went crazy, learning colours, shapes and numbers overnight. The potential for learning seems undeniable especially given the fun factor.

However I'm scared about addiction and us caving in to giving him more time on the device over time. When I tell him its time up after his 20 min limit he has a tantrum, every time. And first thing in the morning before even getting out of bed he asks to play on Daddy's phone. This scares me.

I'm considering buying an iPad and making it clear that its mine and not his and he gets 20 mins only when I'm home and together with me (This prevents him from bugging my wife for it during the day when i'm not home and makes it clear that I am in charge of when it gets used).

I feel buying this iPad is a big step and I'd love to hear thoughts from any other parents in our position or who have already taken this step and can reflect on the decision and what they may have done differently?

I work from home doing mostly devops and for everyday computing (browsing, mail, vlc, skype etc) I find Windows 7 to be fast and stable (unlike most of the Linux desktop distro's I've experimented with over the last few years). However, for development I need the GNU toolchain and for that I use virtual machines (virtual + vagrant). For remote sysadmin tasks I also run an Ubuntu virtual machine from which I can SSH etc. My long term strategy is to move to Linux as the host when I feel the desktop is sufficiently mature although when I do I will continue to use vagrant + virtualbox to keep everything tidy (and stable).

However, I'm about to invest in a new Mac and I'm wondering whether I should switch my workflow to OSX or just continue with Win7. Does OSX have any obvious advantages over my current setup for development and sysadmin?

As a developer I need to test code on multiple versions of Windows and for this I have 4 virtual machines running on a Lenovo W500/8GB/256GB laptop plugged into a 24" monitor. For convenience I often have all four running concurrently. However with 8GB ram I often run out of memory and I'm low on disk space, hence my motivation to upgrade. I'm just about to purchase the new retina Macbook pro/16GB/512GB as it would appear a perfect fit as I could easily run all the VM's concurrently with room to spare and being on an SSD they would also be super-fast.

However I really value mobility especially around the house and the Macbook Air 13"/8GB/256GB comes highly recommended by peers. I had an epiphany thinking that perhaps I could rent a dedicated server to relieve the memory and disk requirements. With an Intel i7-2600 Quad/16GB/6TB-raid1 from Hetzner.de (50 Euro p.m), I could host all my Windows desktop VM's and also a few Ubuntu server VM's and use remote desktop and SSH to access them respectively. I realize there will be some additional latency but that’s fine for what I need to use them for and I have a 60Mb/s fiber connection.

Has anyone else attempted something similar? Am I missing anything? My preliminary research points me to using Linux KVM as the host. Can I really forgo the weight/size of a Retina 15" (+- $3900 here in Europe) for the Macbook air ($2300) + a remote server. Obviously I would be sacrificing the Retina screen and the dedicated GPU but neither is important to me, especially as I spend half my time plugged into a 24" monitor + mechanical keyboard. Additionally I'm not concerned about the cost of a server as I already have many very underutilized servers at my disposal and so it wouldn't cost any extra. Any advice would extremely helpful. Cheers!