As I dropped my youngest off at daycare this morning, the teachers’ in the 18 month old ro… more
Posts Tagged ‘iphone’
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i spy spooky is better than candy
By Daddy Troy Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Note to spooky grandparents who plan to send Halloween gifts from afar: Don’t send candy. My next door neighbor already plans to give my kids twenty pieces. Instead, send a copy of I SPY Spooky Mansion.
“Oh, come one Daddy Troy,” you might say. “You had tons of candy when you were a kid, and you are now only a slightly overweight middle aged guy.” You might be right, adverbs aside, that a once a year candy binge does not add to the national childhood obesity problem or promote long term tooth decay, but I am not so sure. Finding a direct correlation would be difficult, but with childhood obesity tripling in the past 25 years and candy sales trending higher and higher, one has to wonder if this is a good place to make a stand about nutrition.
Or you could take the cowardly route. Every Halloween night in our house the halloween monster comes and throws away 90% of the candy in our household. The kids don’t know about this monster yet, but I am sure they will come to discover him soon as they start to track their bounty.
Or you could buy a copy of I SPY Spooky Mansion in addition to all the candy. Who am I to judge?
I must have been hiding under a pumpkin for the past few years as I had not head about the I Spy series from Scholastic. Now both my son and I are hooked. In I SPY you are presented with a beautifully crafted image, say of a spooky room full of cobwebs and bookcases. Embedded in that image are hidden items that you have to spy. For example, in the image below there are goggle on the skeleton in the lower left corner. Can you find the other pair? Eventually you earn keys and access to other rooms in the mansion.
With games for the iPod, iPod Touch, Mac, Windows Wii and more, it makes a really great Halloween gift, and it lasts a lot longer than candy. My seven year old plays it for hours, although not continuously as he has a daily screen time limit. Remember the whole childhood obesity thing.
Here is what I like about the game, as well as the whole I Spy series from Scholastic.
1. It is not time based or score based. It does not need to be paused to go to dinner. You simply come back to wherever you were. 2. Its not scary spooky, but instead fun spooky. A seven year old does at ever feel scared by it. Instead he is looking for a broom or a black cat.
3. The graphics are beautifully crafted, and I must think that this sinks into a kids consciousness. Check out this story about the photographer Walter Wick and his books.
4. Kids practice a little reading.
5. There are synonyms and other word tricks. For example, a pin might be a straight pin or a bowling pin.
6. Its UX is seamless. There are some bad iphone apps out there. This one, alongside the actual computer app, are easy to use for a kid. The interface never gets in the way.
7. There are other iSpy properties, all equally fun and cool.
8. The variations are clever. For example there might be a wispy cloud to look into instead of room. In some spaces there is an X-ray feature.
9. I have found few games that can challenge me and a seven year old at the same time. I get most things a lot faster than him, but there are a few that stump me in the short term.
At just a buck for the iphone app, its even cheaper than 20 pieces of candy (minus the ipod), and the Halloween monster can play it too.
Thanks to the folks at Scholastic for sending us a review copy of the iphone app.
DadNews and Tech Reviews Roundup 8-13-09
By Daddy Clay Thursday, August 13th, 2009
This post is a bit of a preview of the live show that we do every Thursday at 2pm (if you haven’t checked it out, please give it a watch some time – just click on the Live tab above). But there have been a few items out lately that I’d like to bring to your attention.
- This article in the New York Times sites the assault currently being carried out against American Family Breakfast by Technology. I am both a fan of breakfast and technology. Reading this article is like watching my kids fight. Can’t we just work this out peacefully? I am guilty of turning off my alarm clock and checking my email all in one fluid motion (both are on my iPhone), and I have noticed my wife taking a quick peek at the new Blackberry before getting the kids up. But overall, I would say that the invasion has been unsuccessful. Facebook has not made a beachhead in our breakfast nook. Maybe it’s a teenage thing and I should not speak so soon. How about for you?
- A study soon to be published in the Journal of Population Economics (WTF?) indicated that we’re #4! Go American Dads! The study polled 13,500 men and women in twelve industrialized nations to find out who had the most helpful husbands. Not Surprising to those that have spent any time in Nordic countries, Norway and Sweden were the top two (BabyBjorn, anyone?) Then the UK and the US! Pretty good showing, fellas. Norhern Ireland rounded out the top five. Bottom of the heap: Australia. WTH is going on down under? Maybe that crazy football they play has addled their brains. Hey mate, slap on a helmet and do the dishes.
- Then there is this frackin’ thing in Time Magazine telling me that exercise is useless in losing weight. Really? Is it not hard enough to stay motivated to do the right thing for your health when you have kids? I get it, reward eating after a big workout tends to obliterate the weight loss potential. I’ve been exercising almost every day since New Years (FitFatFit Dad Challenge) with pretty minimal weight loss. So maybe the article has a point, but it pissed me off and is fundamentally unfair and bullshit.
Two tech notes:
I updates the maps on my Garmin nuvi GPS unit. This is the second map update I’ve bought. I sprung for the one mostly because the old map did not have the new road leading to our house, and I found driving through empty space to be disconcerting. That and the fact that they are opening new toll roads in the Austin area all the time. But I’m not feeling good about my purchase. These updates are almost $70 a pop — a pretty ludicrous price point, when a new unit can be had at Costco for $150. It would be like Apple charging $750 for Snow Leopard. You can get a lifetime update for $120, but I balked. These updates really should be baked into the cost of the device. Somebody out there offers this, I suspect, and I will be shopping for this next time I’m on the market.
I was much more satisfied with my recent upgrade of me Eye-Fi SD card for my DSLR. Full disclosure, I was sent a free one to test and review. At first I wasn’t all that impressed. Being able to wirelessly transfer photos was cool (I hate having cables al over my tiny desk at home), but then I had to import photos into iPhoto and I kept losing track of which photos I had already loaded. Plus, the social sharing features seemed to be too shotgun to appeal to me (I do have some remaining privacy concerns re my kids). But the card has been upgraded to integrate with iPhoto and — poof — instantly invaluable technology. I shot pictures of my son’s car wash in the front yard. Walked inside and the pics were sitting in iPhoto albums. Wow. And I’m looking forward to having fun with the GeoTagging features that the Eye-Fi will enable me to take advantage of in iPhoto.
Childproofing Your Phone: ATT Smart Limits for Wireless
By Daddy Clay Friday, July 31st, 2009
The phone in my son’s pocket chirped about every five seconds, and everyone giggled. His friend was pestering him with a comical stream of text messages. It was funny, but also troubling, and it sent me scrambling to find ways to appropriately monitor and limit my son’s cell phone use. What I discovered was ATT’s Smart Limits for Wireless.
Recently my wife got a Blackberry from her place of work. She rarely used her “family phone” even before she got the smartphone, but we decided about a year ago to upgrade to a rugged, shock and water resistant Samsung Rugby because we anticipated our son using the phone situationally. Now, with the arrival of the Blackberry, the Samsung has become Bubba’s phone.
My oldest is eleven, headed off to middle school, so now seems like a reasonable moment for him to have a phone, but having recently been burned by going over my minutes, I wanted restrictions on the phone use. Unlike Apple devices, the Samsung does not have onboard parental controls to limit web access or store purchases. After a few minutes exploring the ATT website I came across the “Smart Limits for Wireless” program.
The program costs $9.99 per month and offers parents the ability to limit the number of text messages, data usage and store purchases, to filter web content and to set time restrictions on outbound calls (with exemptions for approved numbers).
I configured Bubba’s phone as follows:
-200 texts per month (our plan limit)
-Data usage allowed: 0 kb/mo (aka internet off)
-Purchases in ATT store: $0/mo (aka store access denied)
-Outbound calls blocked after 9 on weeknights, 10:30 on weekends (with exemptions for our phones, an essential feature)
-I activated the internet filtering (redundant since he has no data allotment)
Curiously, the program does not allow for limiting inbound calls, so the phone still needs to be out of the child’s room at night. I wonder why this restriction is not available. Clearly they are able to exempt family contacts and 911. Why not apply this to inbound calls?
I look forward to reporting on how well this program helps my son to use his phone responsibly.
Looking to the future, I’m eligible to upgrade my first generation iPhone at the subsidized prices and will probably do so in the next six months. Should I pass along my old iPhone to my son? The expense of the data plan would be partially offset by canceling the Smart Limits program. I feel pretty comfortable with the built in parental controls on those devices, but an iPhone is a pretty powerful device to hand over to a pre-teen.
I guess we’ll keep an eye on how well he manages the Samsung over the next few months.
[update: Bubba called me this morning before dawn wondering why he couldn't use his phone to call his grandmother (he's on vacation -- I'm not). Guess I'll be setting those morning hours a little earlier. But it works as advertised.]
Gadgets Gone Wild or Family Vacation Unplugged = FAIL
By Daddy Clay Monday, July 13th, 2009
Today, we achieve the remotest reach of our annual family vacation — a tiny flyspeck of an island miles off the East Coast. We are hosted by my brother-in-law in rustic cottages of endless charm. No TV or cable. The plumbing is primitive and somewhat suspect (“In these isles of sun and fun, we never flush for number one.”) No A/C, washing machines, or traffic. Finally, blissfully unplugged.
That is, if you don’t count: five iPods of various types and generations, three cell phones (the coverage here is excellent), three digital cameras plus a Flip video, a Nintendo DS, a Garmin GPS, a Kindle (how did I ever travel without one), and a laptop. And thanks to my sister-in-law, the island now features wireless internet.
Unplugged = FAIL.
I treat my gadget addiction like I do most of my dependencies: I recognize it, offer it occasional resistance and periodic abstinence, but ultimately I have no strong urge to give it up. I felt a twinge of guilt when I came downstairs to find Coop curled up in an ancient wicker chair watching SpongeBob on the iPod Touch 16G, but I was confident that by the time I sat down to write this post that the thing would lie abandoned on the coffee table. The call of the beach is stronger. And there it sits.
Maybe it’s a sign of my addiction that I don’t really see the need to quit cold turkey. It’s a part of our life. If the imaginations of the kids on the island are stunted by the level of media saturation we permit, I didn’t see much evidence of it last night. There was an media enabled device on just about every flat surface they screamed past in their elaborate games of hide-and-seek.
Am I sounding defensive? Then allow me to hit the save button and post this blog to the internets and you can give me your thoughts on the subject. Vacations: plugged or not?
