By ordering at a shop, you’re basically using a very expensive mail order firm, one that is unreliable and unpredictable, and appears to hang on both the whim of the shop, and also of the distributor who supplies the shop. In the old days pre-chain reaction cycles, it was pretty common to have to order things from shops, and I never had something ordered in a shop come in on time, and rarely had a phone call that I was supposed to get from the shop telling me things had come in.

Shops are for buying things that you can walk into the shop and buy right away, or for fixing stuff you can’t fix yourself. Mail order suppliers are for mail ordering. Neither are any use for the other.

Heard it summed up as being a number of short runs broken up by a lot of queuing.

Only if you’re slow off the start. Worth pushing hard at the start before the field spreads out.

Smacks of silliness to me. If you want something hard, enter a proper long tough endurance race, plenty of them around. No need to crawl under wires and have wannabe squaddies screaming at you.

Obstacle races are a very different thing to an endurance race. A lot of people who would do well at endurance races would be rubbish at doing an obstacle race, and vice versa.

I’m pretty fit, could easily run the distance, and I got a mates place in a similar obstacle race last year when he was ill, and whilst the running was easy, the obstacles can actually be proper hard, particularly when you’ve got 20 people clambering over you to get over them too. I also did a few a few years back when I was fitter, and again, the lack of upper body strength, and the lack of training at jumping up stuff really hammered me.

If you can run anything like the distance okay, and have some upper body strength, they’re great and really fun. If you have good upper body strength, and ability to jump high, you can make up for a really slow run too – I’ve been beaten by significantly slower runners in the past.

The ones I’ve done, it isn’t really anything like the military, even the ‘Tough Guy’ one which is very military themed in theory. It is actually like a childrens adventure playground, but on a massive adult scale – basically, if you like climbing up things, jumping off things, playing in mud, swimming outside, zip wires, massive waterslides or anything like that, they are a real laugh to do. If you are the sort of person who goes down the waterslides for fun when you take your kids swimming, and you’re not fussed about getting muddy or bruised, you’d probably enjoy them.

Oh and don’t worry about fitness levels – they attract a very wide range of fitnesses, way more than your average running race – whilst the people up the front are very fast, I can get top 30% in one of these without real training, and I’d be at best halfway down the field in your average fell or trail race.

The front of the race is still fast mind – I’ve got a friend who primarily does obstacle races, and at the Dovedale Dash normal trail race, he got out of his van just after the starting horn went, came from behind the back of the extremely crowded field to pass me in the first 5 minutes, and finished well up the field, something like 10 minutes ahead of me, despite losing a shoe 1km from the finish. Bastard.

Oh and anyone hoping to pop them on ebay, best do it quick, LG said that stock will be equal to demand by early to mid February.

I’ve been using one for work – just took it on a trip away. It is nice, definitely nicer than my Desire, in a way that I don’t really feel about the Galaxy S3 that I’ve also got at work.

It just feels nice, the software feels nice, and all works as it should. It is just on the verge of being too big but not quite.

Haven’t really got an excuse for buying one for personal use though – the Desire still working great just under three years after I first got it, and I don’t upgrade phones until I really need them – is quite useful to develop on an old slow phone anyway.

Well its a bit late now as Ive thrown it in the bin !!

For future reference, before you go chucking things like that that are broken, worth checking how much broken ones go for on ebay. Assuming it was an old ipod touch then possibly not much, but broken new phones can go for an awful lot.

Iphone screen repair is not very expensive, or do it yourself and the parts are about 15 quid. I’d be surprised if ipod touch is different. Will be youtube tutorials on how to do it.

The interesting thing about comparitive advantage theories and all that is that if you look at more sucessful exporters than us (or at pretty much any other major exporter), they all have big cultures of buying their local products – for example in USA, Germany, Japan etc. locally made goods have a cachet that made in the uk doesn’t obviously have here.

Dunno what that means, probably just that it is as always more complicated than economists would have you believe, and yet another reason why economics is essentially ablack art.

I’m not fussed either way about what people eat. I don’t eat meat because it grosses me out and I don’t like the taste.

It does annoy me when because I’m vegetarian people start spouting rubbish like saying about how much extra space we’d need to grow grain if everyone was veggie, or how many more animals would get killed by farming all that grain. When it is pretty obvious to even the most dumb assed of people that animals also eat grain, so to eat animals requires far more grain or vegetables to be grown than to eat a vegetarian diet.

I don’t think there’s a moral point to be made either way – we all pick an arbitrary point at which we stop eating things, unless we’re cannibals. But there is certainly a very clear environmental argument if you like that sort of thing.

I hated lots of the books on here. Jane Eyre – pointless rubbish with an idiot main character. Zen and motorcycle maintenance – cod philosophy rubbish. 100 years of solitude, most boring book I ever read.

Not that they’re bad mind, I just didn’t get on with them. I don’t think there are any guaranteed book suggestions that’s all. Best you can do is pick a book that you found significant and get her that and tell her why you like it. If you can’t think of one, then it’s probably a stupid idea for a present.

I much prefer Jane Austen if you’re talking old books, actually strong funny characters you give a damn about.

Consider what type of lifestyle you realistically want to have – do you want to spend your weekends doing DIY or riding your bike

I would agree with that.

I always think the only reason for DIY hell is if you really *need* a much bigger house than you can afford, so you have to buy a house shaped shell and do it up. It still costs the same or more money, but comes out of your salary after the mortgage, so the banks will let you buy a the house. Houses that are done up typically increase in value for less than the cost of doing them up.

Any system of recording HR will give dodgy readings at times. At work, we used medical grade ECG units on people riding dune buggies very fast, and pretty much all of them spiked up to way beyond 200. Looking at the raw data, it was almost certainly some kind of error. Those are units costing a couple of grand.

If it’s the sort you can upload to a computer, then look at the graph – if it consistently goes that high, and isn’t all spiky, then it would be out of character for a connection error (either the electrical & physical connection between the strap and your body, or the digital connection between the strap and the HRM unit). Could just be that you have a high HR. I could easily go up to above my theoretical 220-age calculation last time I tried a few years back.

When I was out there, accomodation in beautiful places plus hire car was cheaper than camper van hire. If you’re only there for six days, i’d not bother camper vanning it.

And like people say above, don’t underestimate the roads, and how many really slow drivers you’ll see on the wiggly, no room to overtake bits. If you do Queenstown – Arthur’s Pass and loop back, that’d be 15 hours or so of driving. If you love camper van driving, then that’s fine – personally I would aim not to spend a third of my holiday behind a wheel. If you’re coming from oz, you can always go again next year to see bits you missed.

How much of this is BS/ to what extent do these thermostats take that into account?

The thermostat stops when it reaches a certain temp (T-on), then starts again when it gets to a lower temp (T-off). The width of that (T-on,T-off) band changes how well it works with a particular radiator system.

With our honeywell one, you can change the width of the band. I think it defaults to 1.5C, ie. .75c either way around the set point. Our heating system seems not to overshoot massively.

It also has an option for pre-warming, where you set what temperature you want it to be at a particular time, and depending on the current temperature, it will turn on the radiators earlier so that it reaches the set temperature bang on the start time.

Really though, while it may theoretically be a problem, I’ve not noticed it being a pain. Yes the house temp fluctuates slightly, but not so much that you’d notice.

If you really want to deal with that, you can get fancy systems that control each radiator based on a thermostat as well as the boiler, and allow a controlled amount of flow into radiators, so that they smoothly bring the temperature to the set point and don’t overshoot much, and can then smoothly add a bit every so often to keep it there.

Oh, and unless your mate is very cheap, paying someone to do it is money for old rope – we’re talking wiring a plug level of complexity here.

If you’ve got a timer wired in an okay place for a thermostat (somewhere that warms up when the heating is on), you should probably be able to replace that with a wired thermostat. If you unscrew and look at the back of the timer (with power off at the fusebox preferably), if you are lucky, it will have two normal mains wires, plus two ‘switch’ wires. So will a wired thermostat. If you’re very unlucky, the timer will have a different wiring arrangement, or a battery to power the timer so only two switch wires, if so, I’d ignore me, and get a wireless one, like recommended above.

Whatever you get, you quite likely want something that is 7 day programmable or at least allows different weekday vs weekend programs.

You can get a wireless one which you attach to the boiler itself, but personally if you’ve already got wiring for a room stat, I’d just switch that over, saves opening up the boiler. I’ve had a cheap one, and it was fine for a few years, but the transmission distance went down, then it died recently, now have a fancy honeywell one, which is much nicer to program, and supposedly should not die in the same way.

I’ve got a toddler, and I’d have some sympathy for you here. We’ve always tried to be careful about baby noise in our terraced house, the kid is in the room with no party walls, and we do go to her if she shouts in the night. And I do think that whatever your view on leaving kids to cry or shout at night, a terraced house or semi-detached, on a party wall is not a good place to have a kid making loads of noise at night without comforting them. .

But then if they’ve got a 2 and a 4 year old, and the 4 year old is the one waking up, that’s surprising and unpredictable. They may well have put the 4 year old in that room because they didn’t want the 2 year old disturbing the neighbours and then the 4 year old started waking up in the night.

Like some people have said above, it is hard to know what it might be, whether it is night terrors, waking up after nightmares, waking up hungry or needing the loo, or what, and whether it is something that you can comfort them out of or not.

And whilst it is no excuse for threats of violence, they probably are pretty stressed out if they are being woken up all night and having to deal with it too.

Personally I’d see what they were like next time I saw them. If they were ‘sorry about last night, kids been having sleep problems’, then okay, fair enough, it is a pain, but at least they are apologetic. I wouldn’t be going round apologising though – not to someone who threatened violence last time you spoke to them.

joemarshall just undermined my whole life

Relax, the sale is on at Urban Outfitters, and there are some new vinyl releases at the hip hop shop, I’m sure you can sort yourself out!

I’m a computer nerd. We have different conventions, easy haircut – long unkempt hair or shaved off, easy to choose clothes – jeans and t-shirts (bonus points for nerdy jokes or ancient rock band shirts), sensible shoes (lightweight hiking boots are the thing at the moment). Right now nerdy people are liking the latest android phones and are just getting bored of ‘cloud computing’.

The problem graphic designers have, and why they are so easy to take the piss out of is that their trends are so visually obvious, whereas most nerd trends are things that non-nerds wouldn’t understand, like if I said Python was a trendy computer language, most people don’t really know what a computer language is, and almost certainly wouldn’t know what Python in particular is.

Joe

Teachers often live a fair way from schools nowadays. So it has to be safe enough for them to drive in.

In the old days, most teachers used to walk to school, so there’d usually be enough teachers to look after the kids who managed to get in. Nowadays if there aren’t enough teachers to look after the kids, they can’t run the school.

Not exactly sure why teachers live further away, but then I guess people in general live further from their jobs, so unless we all work a short walk from home it is hard to moan about teachers driving to work. It’s also probable that teachers move around jobs more than they used to, and it isn’t always possible to move home every time you change jobs.

Also, I remember when I was a kid, they used to wait and see, and send us home at lunchtime if it looked bad, because most parents worked pretty locally (or one parent didn’t work). Nowadays, parents are also much more likely to work a long way away, sending kids home at lunchtime is harder if many of the parents are in a city an hours drive away (potentially a few hours drive if there is bad snow). So if there is a forecast of bad snow, it is probably more practical to make a decision the evening before or early in the morning and cancel a full day.

Anyway, the answer to the original question is no, if you’re a (graphic) designer, you are almost certainly a complete slave to convention, following whatever the latest fad is, whether it be edgy typography without any capitals, or monospace fonts and stock photography of cities at night, or cutesy bubble writing and dayglo colours or whatever! If you’re anything like most designers you probably wear a lot of expensive skate-wear, and whatever trendy jeans are in fashion this year. Hardly anyone is unconventional, and certainly not people from ‘edgy subcultures’ they just follow different sets of conventions; if anything many people who look odd in a particular way are more conventional than people who don’t.

If you’re not happy working in a mixed office with people who are slave to different conventions than designer ones, then you need to find a job in a purely design office, or at least one where more than one person is a designy type.

They work on the basis that a true tech *should* set a windows machine up in that the user you log in with doesn’t have direct admin rights so has to request admin rights to change anything important.

Admin rights are a bit of a red herring really. Without admin a trojan horse or virus can connect to the internet, read or delete all your important files, run any old bit of code that it likes. Windows 7 has annoying default levels of asking for admin passwords every time you sneeze, so viruses will not bother doing things that need admin because they don’t always need to. Getting admin on a big multiuser computer is an achievement that is useful, but realistically all a virus wants is to send spam emails from your computer, or in the worst case to delete files.

Windows has more stupid users that when presented with a box saying ‘this random thing you got off the internet might be full of viruses’, will just click to run anyway. It also has more different bits of software that might be broken and allow a virus to get in without displaying the stupid message above. The risk with macs I guess is that if safari or the mac email client or something gets badly hacked, it could affect 99% of users, whereas if one web browser gets hacked on pc, that would only risk some users.

Most important things on any computer are not to open dodgy websites, and not to go to dodgy links that people post on your facebook or email you.

Out of interest, what do mortgage advisers offer that just looking online at all the mortgages doesn’t?

I guess if you’ve got a complicated situation, like you’re self employed or super duper rich and want to avoid tax or something, it might be worth it, but otherwise, are they realistically going to have access to any better deals than you, in this age of easily searchable online databases?

I can see in the olden days, when you might not necessarily have known that an obscure building society in Lancashire had a brilliant deal on (our last mortgage was with Marsden Building Society), an advisor who had a view of the whole market might be useful, but nowadays, what do they offer?

And as for mortgage ‘advice’ from the bank – what kind of idiot would do that, it is obvious that they won’t do a good deal unless you happen to be at the bank that has the best deal anyway.

I would recommend trying to spend as much time looking after the kid as possible. The more you look after them, the more rewarding they are.

I took 3 and a bit months off from 8-11 months and was a full time dad for those 3 months and it was great. Nowadays I work 4 days a week. If financially and work-wise you’re able to do that, I’d really recommend both things; if you work long hours and don’t get much time with the kid in the week, you miss out on all the weekday things, which are often quite a laugh (like we have Twistin Tots, which is basically an hour long baby rave, with loud music and different things to wave / bang / shake for each song, complete head-**** that is!), and the social things with other parents* which often happen in the week.

I agree about the outside stuff – Rose was running (in a pram) from about 3 months, biking (in a trailer) from 6 months, biking on a balance bike from 22 months, first time playing in the snow at 7 months, tons of picnics in the woods in her first year, decent length walks in the Peak District & Lake District in a sling, and she has always loved being outside. In some ways, particularly once they’re a toddler and become self propelled, they are annoyingly slow and limit how far you can go, but I see it as a long game, you enjoy the time with them going 2 miles in a walk, because that is fun anyway, and as a bonus, you get the chance that at some point they will be fast and big enough to go on a proper outing with you. The bike trailer is brilliant though – you do 40 miles in hilly terrain with that in a day, and even with the playground / nappy stops & picnics, you still feel like you’ve done a pretty good bit of exercise.

Oh and swimming – swimming with kids is brilliant fun – we go a couple of times a week to the pool, and in summer we’ve been in the local river, the sea, a couple of big alpine lakes, she is a complete swim addict.

Joe

* other parents in the week are mostly mums, but that doesn’t matter too much – I’ve always found everyone to be friendly, I think a lot of the stories you hear about dads not being welcome is people feeling shy because they were the only guy there. Or maybe it’s a city thing, people are generally pretty friendly in our small town.

Maybe there is something like the swimming Channel Rules for cyclists, and you just don’t know it!

I am embracing Channel Rules for my weekly swims this year, so skimpy speedos, a swim hat and nowt else this morning for my bracing swim. -4 air temperature, 3 degrees water. I have to be honest, I did not warm up as I got going, had to drink 3 cups to tea to get back to normal afterwards.

Oh yeah, I assumed by White Peak you meant Dark Peak and that it was a mistake, coming from Sheffield as you are.

Personally I would recommend the steeper hills of the Dark Peak, or something on the edge of Sheffield – the White Peak is further to get to from Sheffield, on small roads, but also on the less steep stuff (Bakewell, Rowsley rides from the White Peak book, that sort of thing), if there’s lots of snow, you find yourself pedalling on the downhills which is a pain. Down this end in snow I’d always head for some of the steep (but unofficial) stuff at the edges of the White Peak (like round Cromford) and enjoy the kamikaze descents into snow drifts and depressing pushes up, rather than the less steep stuff where you’re slogging even on the down hills.

This is a bit late for this particular one, but on the rare occasions I do anything that isn’t my main work, if there’s money to be had, at the first discussion, I talk about how money is going to work (fixed amount of money, or hourly), then always follow it up with an email stating what we agreed.

That way everyone is clear, and if by chance someone doesn’t pay you, it is just a matter of sending an invoice and being (very) persistent.

On the other hand, it’s a small world, I bet you personally or through contacts know 90% of the people who sell these particular specialist bikes, if you’ve got tons of evidence that you helped with the design in return for a share of revenues, and you haven’t been paid, you could easily make a lot of hassle for the manufacturer if you were to publicise this, or say to notify all the dealers that you were liable for a share of profit on the bikes, or similar. It would probably be legally unenforceable, but when faced with potential hassle, chances are the small shop owners involved wouldn’t want to deal with the bikes any more, or at least would bombard the manufacturer with worried questions; if you’re selling a niche product to a small section of an industry, you rely a lot on good publicity and dealer goodwill.

I’d link him to this thread too. It’s not exactly good publicity for the bike is it.

I would bear in mind the roads are likely to be a pain if we get a decent amount of snow.

Personally I’d take a sledge also, and drive out into the Peak towards Hope or Edale, there’d be fantastic descents in the deep snow (even if it’ll be a nightmare slog to get up) then if it looks like complete snowmageddon or the roads are too bad, you can always stop and sledge instead.

Unless it is absolute snowmageddon in which case Wharncliffe might be a better bet, but personally I’d always go for magical snowy scenery given half a chance.

Rose really likes her childminders (3 days a week, we both work 4 days a week each), and it has been a good thing overall, although part of me would love to be a full time dad (I did it for a few months just before she was 1).

I’m not entirely convinced how everyone seems to know that it has led to massive strides in speech, social stuff and all that; kids I know who are primarily cared for by parents don’t seem any more or less advanced in any way than those who are full time at nursery or childminders. All babies and toddlers have massive developmental leaps on a regular basis, it is hard to know what to attribute them to. Rose had a big leap in her speech and comprehension over Christmas, does that mean that exposure to relatives is massively important for kid’s development.

When it comes down to it, we send our kids to child care because we like our jobs, or want/need the money. Parents are happier because of that. Kids benefit a lot from having happy parents, it’s very important for their development. The fact the childcare setting may be a positive experience is a bonus, but lets face it, how many of us would leave our kids in full time childcare from a very young age if we had the combination of a job that we hated, and enough money spare to be able to easily afford not to work?

Some people use two sleeping bags inside each other, if you happen to already have some lighter weight ones, although two complete summer bags might not be warm enough still. Don’t forget a rolly mat or thermarest thing too, thicker the better. Plus any blankets you have.

If no one will be sleeping in his bed at home, then bring the duvet off that. Don’t forget pillows too – they make a difference.

And wear warm clothes, and make sure you’re really warm before you get in the sleeping bag, cup of tea and cake helps.

This was openly discussed and three years ago, my allowance went from X to Y on the basis that its “less costly” for the company to give me a pay rise that way. I ried to negotiate it as salary to no avail.

When you say ‘openly discussed’, I take you mean only spoken about – no one was so stupid as to put such an obvious tax scam in an email in such a way that could imply that the money was actually in effect part of your salary?

Any ‘real world’ ideas?

Other than the obvious funding solution, there is a potential solution to this kind of case, which is to offer multiple breaks with the proviso that any break may be disturbed for a top category emergency, and schedule calls accordingly, on the hope that at least on of the breaks does not coincide with there being a top category emergency with no other responder available. You’d have to run the stats on that from past incident history to calculate how many breaks you’d need to offer and how long, but I imagine it would be pretty easy to work out if it was a goer. The problem being that it would inevitably have a bad effect on response times to lower category emergencies, meaning they might be worse by the time someone got there, leading to the inevitable press stories ‘man with broken and bleeding leg has to have it amputated after ambulance takes an hour to arrive’, or mis-categorisations: ‘man with heart attack dies after person on phone thinks it was probably nothing serious’. It might have an effect as to control room categorisation also – if people knew that by going category B, they’d be putting people in for a long wait, they might be more likely to push people up to A if they were uncertain.

It also depends a lot on what particular target culture is in fashion at the moment – if you’re on targets for Cat A and Cat B, clearly that solution would have a big negative effect on Cat B, for a potential improvement on your cat A targets. And picking up your non-life threatening’s later might increase the numbers of those who had complications once you got them into A+E. All in all it is a bit depressing really.

It’s silly really – he only mentions as an aside at the bottom, that they never got the call by control, it was control that didn’t pass it through due to a policy on breaks. It isn’t anything like the first bit of the article, that a load of medics were hanging around listening as calls came through about it.

Ambulances respond to emergencies, kind of by definition. If you say that they should stop their breaks when there is an emergency, then they most likely aren’t going to get any breaks in a lot of shifts. It isn’t safe for anyone to have someone looking after them and driving them around who hasn’t had a break for 11 hours.

Obviously there are different levels of emergency, and they have various categorisations of them (and associated response time targets), but even then, they would still quite likely never get a break if they only took top category calls on break. So the only logical thing to do is to not put through calls while staff are on breaks, and to provide adequate cover for staff on breaks.

It’s just a sign of the ambulance service being chronically underfunded. The fire service is pretty well funded, police emergency services are not too bad for money, but the ambulance is so piss takingly underfunded it is amazing what they manage with the money. Or at least that’s how it was a few years back when I was involved with the three lots. That’s why the ambulance guys have been on the forefront of things like off-base stationing during shifts (that is why you often see an ambulance sitting at some rubbish petrol station on a city ring road or similar waiting for a call; they station ambulances at points off their home base so that they are closer to where a call is most likely to come from), whereas the fire service have managed to keep things station based.

Have you read ‘feet in the clouds’ yet? If not, you probably should. Everyone and their dog gets into fell or trail running after reading that.

I love playing – I guess my job as a researcher is in part imaginative play dressed up in a more structured environment. But everyone can get bored with kids play at times, it is often hard to understand why they want to do particular things or why they do things a million times. I think when you step back from things slightly, kids are intellectually fascinating – if you’re at all interested in science or psychology or anything, there is so much going on.

If you are a facty researching things type, I read this book when Rose was little, and it is a fascinating insight into why babies and toddlers do what they do. Really made me think a lot about what is going on in her mind and how she learns stuff.

Anyway, once you’ve read that, you can at least in part see her playing as an interesting intellectual adventure for you – rather than thinking that things are a stupid and childish game, you can think of imaginative games at least in part as a way of rationalising and making sense of and organising things that they’ve encountered or that have happened to them, or of experimenting with things she is thinking about in a safe environment. For example we often catch Rose telling her toys off for doing things that are surprisingly like things we’ve told her not to do – “no Mr Mole, you not jump off there. Too high.”

Also, if she likes particular things, and you are good with facts or projects, then you can combine the two – Rose likes jumping in rivers and walking on the muddy path by the river. We spent some time sitting on a high bank chucking things in and watching them go round, and she now knows about eddies, currents and things, because I’m quite into the dynamics of the river and I think it’s a really interesting thing. She also has her own synthesizer, which I built over a few evenings, bit of a project for me, and a fun toy for her.

If she is zoo keepers mad, learn some facts about animals*, or find some new and exciting animals to look after. Or just subvert her games and make the animals be naughty and try to escape. Subverting games is often more fun than playing them nicely, and kids seem to like it; things like when she’s putting her animals to bed in their little beds, it turns out the animals are a pain at bedtime, and don’t want to put on their night time nappies or whatever, and just want to play, I see that particular game as revenge for her evening antics, but she seems to like it.

Joe

* might not work at 2, but a good (and true!) animal fact for older kids is that you can tell giraffe poos from other animal poos really easily – the giraffe poo will be all splatted out because it fell from a great height!

The coolest solution would be to give this lot a call and see if they have any hanging around. If it is like any research labs I’ve known, they probably have thousands of them in a box somewhere that they no longer want. They haven’t changed their webpage since 2010 after all.

http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/firefly/

I got one ordered late December, arrived last week.

It was online to order for about half an hour before going out of stock though – I only got it because I signed up for an email and they seem to have removed that option.

Joe

OP – I would hesitate. If she has a bad nights sleep/cold etc – she’ll forever associate camping with misery.

On that argument, you could say don’t let her ride the bmx track, cos if she crashes, she’ll forever associate bmx tracks with pain and misery, whereas in practice, whilst she crashed once or twice, she got back up and really loved going to the ‘zooming track’. Similarly, she still likes going to the woods for picnics, even though we’ve been in some pretty minging weather.

She already knows that camping is brilliant, been a few times now, is definitely hooked. But I do need to get the practicalities right, as whatever a cold grumpy night might do to her in the future, more to the point, I’d be sharing a tent with a cold, grumpy and extremely vocal and energetic toddler. I can’t see how if you jump around the tent for half an hour before bedtime, whilst wearing all your thermals, which is pretty much inevitable behaviour from her, you wouldn’t be warm enough to kip inside a huge pile of blankets and things.

Hmmm. Maybe just one night is in order to see how it goes. Is only an hour’s drive from home in the worst case scenario!

Many people will happily blow £500 on the latest tablet / phone and then balk at paying two quid for an app. So instead now we get free apps which hook you in and then go “want a new sword for your barbarian / carrots for your farm / earrings for your princess? That’ll be 69p please.” It’s basically the same model as drug dealing; first hit’s free, kiddies.

It’s more cynical than that.

Most parents wouldn’t pay £2 for a pretty rubbish mobile game for their kids. Most kids don’t understand the value of £2 or mind spending their parents’ money. So by making it so that parents can download the game for free, then kids can do the spending, they know they’re onto a winner.

Apple are going to be really good on refunds of this type right now, as they are setting themselves up for a massive scandal on this. So many kids apps allowing vast amounts of money to be spent on in-game purchases, often with cynical timing of when you are told to spend money so that it is within the time limit after the password is entered to download it, and also sometimes things being ridiculously expensive, so expensive that no adult would ever buy them, but kids who don’t really know the value of money might.

The restrictions are great for people who have a clue, but given we are talking about a device that has a minimal manual it is supposed to be so easy to use, they really have to start assuming that people don’t have a clue and defaulting to things that stop your kids spending tons of money by accident.

Google currently are even worse. Personally I don’t have a credit card on my google account so I don’t risk this, but it is a pain to have to worry about this, and it has to be a big scandal at some point.

It is a pain, as games are heading to being primarily mobile, particularly kids games, and prior to in app purchasing letting kids go wild with their parents credit cards, no one had really worked out how to make lots of money out of them. Now they have, it is really sinister and immoral, and makes you long for the days when you could just buy a game for £20 for a gameboy, and that was sorted, no worries about ongoing cost to play or anything.

Don’t mess around – use something designed for it – 192 LEDs per board, and it is an arduino too, so you can do the processing on the driver board itself.

http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/rainbowduino-led-driver-platform-plug-and-shine-p-371.html

You have to wire up your board as if it was an LED array
but that shouldn’t be a massive problem, it’s just a matter of making the right circuit layout, it doesn’t care where the LEDs are.

Oh, and that one is even designed to be daisy chained, so if you buy one, wire up the first 192 LEDs, then you want to do more, you can buy another one (and repeat until done).

There are various other LED matrix drivers out there too.