The Smrtcase Glide for the iPhone 3G / 3G S has an integrated cardholder for a your most frequently used cards. It has this clever sliding design so that you can easily swipe your Metrocard without fumbling. The cool design allows you to stash your credit card, ID, etc, for ...
The Best (Fake) Camp For Spoiled Children
Now that the school year is fully in swing, and all the "What did you do this summer?" show and tell conversations have been had, I'd like to tell you a little bit about a fake summer camp that I created this summer for my two kids who were going ...
The beautiful dragon crawled from the crooked trunk… Seems like the start (or end) of quite a story. I made this simple Android application using Google’s App Inventor program.
This program fill gaps “Mad Lib” style with a random word to create a single – and, most likely, silly sentence.
I have a button at the bottom that randomly picks “Beginning” or “End”. So, the silly sentence is either the beginning or the end of a story. Me and the family has to fill in the rest. Its a fun way to tweak our imaginations.
Every button (except for the two “the’s”) can be pressed, changing the meaning of the sentence in surprising, existential, and silly ways.
This is a project I made during the 1-in-1 (1 project in 1 day) challenge in early June. So far, the kids and I have had fun with it. Though my daughters obsessed with fairies, so she keeps clicking the subject button until its a fairy. Then the adjective until its beautiful.
Here’s what the block code looks like. If you have an Android and Google App Inventor, you can download the .apk file here. You can customize it with your own word groups.
Fed up with “clip-art” temporary tattoos for her kids, designer Tina Roth Eisenberg (swissmiss) founded a temporary tatoo company of her own. I think I’m going to surprise my better half with this “Mother” one and tell her that its not temporary. Hmm, wonder how that will go down. She has pulled together some great design talent to make a nice collection of temporary tattoos that are fun, whimsical, and smart.
I am late to the game on this great site (and internet phenomenon) that encourages people to send in new pictures having inserted an old one from the same spot. Kids change so quickly, I do find myself getting nostalgic for events that were just a year or two ago. The boy in this photograph is all grown up with two kids of his own.
What a wonderful idea – an interesting way to track time and changes in the landscape and architecture around us.
Smartphones are great. Their built-in cameras enable parents to capture video and photos of things that we normally wouldn’t have the ability to capture. Think of all the first steps, words, and cute moments that have would have otherwise been left unphotographed or unrecorded. Thanks to smartphones, babies born today are the most documented in the history of the human race. That’s great for the parents, but can unfortunately be painful for the adults around them. Because, also thanks to smartphones, parents have entire media libraries at their fingertips. Gone are the days when dad would have to set up a slide projector and screen in order to bore a table full of people out of their wits. Why just tell the story about “the big hysterical spaghetti hat” when you can whip out a smartphone and show a picture?
I was recently subjected to a dad’s multi-media storytelling about his child that included ten minutes of shaky (isn’t it always shaky?) video and over twenty photos. The episode started off innocently enough. He was talking about some trip they went on together (details are left vague in the interest of maintaining the friendship). I nodded and was genuinely interested in my friend’s videos – for the first sixty seconds.
But the videos went on and on – for a full ten minutes! Every time I started to pull away, steer the conversation in another direction, or focus on something more interesting like the pattern of uneaten risotto on my plate, he’d shove the phone under my nose and say, “This next part is great. Watch this. It’s coming up!” Then, ten seconds later, “It’s coming up!”
I thought about all the people in the world who have been subjected to KMO (Kid Media Overload) and, based on an informal polling process of other parents, I pulled together this handy chart to help people understand the minimum required viewing of photos and videos of other people’s kids – based on their relationship to the parent.
Now, there are certainly variations to these guidelines and other factors can come into play: geographical location, frequency of sharing, quality of the photography or cinematography, objective cuteness/humor of the kid or the situation. That’s why they are guidelines and not rules!
Certainly, its a reminder to all parents (myself included) need to remember that your kids are never as interesting, cute, and watchable to other people as they are to you. Sharing is nice. Over sharing is irresponsible.
Oh, summer! Time to hop in the station wagon and take the family on an awesome family vacation. And its also time to shoot goofy pictures. After all, it is our duties as fathers to embarrass our families as often as possible.
It’s not for the kids, but parents and non-parents will appreciate this zombie take on Pat the Bunny. Perhaps this is another sign of the impending Zombie-pocolypse that a beloved children’s character has been recast as a Zombie. It’s never too soon to educate the young about Zombies and their habits. Still, I got a good laugh out of this one.
Kudos to Aaron Zimm and Kave Soofi for a “dead-on” parody.
Here’s a potential solution to a common problem shared by many iPad toting parents: their kids can’t keep their little fingers away from an object with such shine and color. This Etsy shop has a solution – at least in the short term. Its a little whiteboard with a set of icon-like magnets for kids to fool around with. It could also double as a prototyping tool for an app developer. The only problem is that, as many parents know, kids have a way of sniffing out the real thing from these fake distractions, but it should buy you at least eight minutes of peace. Totally worth the $30.
A couple of years ago, I was building stuff from paper towel and toilet paper tubes with my two kids, then 3 and 4. We assembled a bunch of random sculptures using tape, scissors, and lots of glue, then I had a light-bulb moment, “If only there was a way to easily connect these things.”
So playtime turned into a product brainstorming session with my kids, then 2 and 4. Over the following weeks, I couldn’t stop thinking about tubes. Everywhere I looked, I saw cardboard tubes that needed to be connected. I regularly pulled them out of “recycling” bins and trash cans with a view to giving them a new life as a cool new sculpture. At first, I thought an eco-friendly set of connectors would work. But tubes are tricky: they come in different diameters and thicknesses and injection molds aren’t inexpensive.
This is an awesome kit that I stumbled upon on Kickstarter. The bidding is closed to fund the project, but it looks like designer Rafael Atijas had no problem funding his project – got 437% of his funding goal and, from what I can tell, looks like he’s getting ready to ship out the first Loogs soon. This is a three string guitar made specifically for children – comes as a kit so that you build it with your kids – what a great way to let them see the fundamentals of how the instrument works.
He recommends an open A tuning at the outset, so pretty much everything sounds good, but you can also tune the three strings as a traditional guitar.
And his site says that the shop is “opening soon”. Sign meup Rafael. I think lots of people missed the kickstarter round, but think this is a very cool project and I’d love to get my hands on one!
I connected with my pal Morgan Taylor of Gustafer Yellowgold fame and challenged him to tell a story on a single page. He spent about an hour and a half completing the drawing as my camera snapped about a frame a second. It was a blast watching the picture – and the story – come to life on the page.
The result is a charming story about a picnic with friends that turns into a rescue mission. I am hoping to do more of this with other authors, artists and storytellers in the future.
