19 May 09 Kids Are Messy, Clean Up
It will happen. Somehow junior’s bowl of cheerios will find its way into your laptop. Or the crayon art projects will extend to the wallpaper. So how to best clean it all up? Trial and error may not always be a good idea as some solvents and cleaning solutions can leave stains worse than what you are trying to remove. Well the internets to the rescue. Over at HowToCleanStuff.net there are numerous guides on, well, how to clean stuff. Organized neatly by category and searchable as well, it should come in handy for junior’s next big adventure. (more…)
08 Apr 09 An Instruction Set For Family Fun
DIY projects can be a great way to spend time with your kids and having a good set of instructions to work from can really help. And there is no better place to find piles of fantastic DIY guides than at Instructables. So we here at Dadmins were very excited to hear that Make has partnered with Instructables to release The Best of InstructablesVolume 1 in print form, because DIY doesn’t always happen around a computer. but it gets even better than that. The whole set of howtos from the book are all online and linked together so you know exatly what is in the book before you buy it! Content online for free! The sky is falling.
Seriously, this is some good stuff. Buy a copy and go build something (and some memories) with your kids. (more…)
07 Apr 09 Big Inputs For Little Hands
Little kids love to push buttons, even more so when pushing buttons makes something happen. Computers are great at making things happen when you push buttons so kids and computers are a great fit, right? Well little keys on big keyboards don’t get along with little clumsy hands so well. And somehow kids can always find that one key, that magic key that downloads the virus, deletes the file, or crashes the computer. I don’t know how they find it, they just do. So what to do?
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26 Mar 09 Helping Kids Learn to Take Credit, For Other’s Work
It was second or third grade, and I built a ‘robot’ for the school science fair. It wasn’t so much a robot as an upside down trash can with two motors to make the arms spin, two motors to make the wheels spin and a cassette deck head with an electrical tape smile. And yes my dad helped me with it. Would you let a second grader loose on a soldering gun and a jig saw? Maybe a light soldiering iron, but that’s not what we had back then. No sir, we had a soldiering gun that weighed about 5 pounds and made the lights dim when you pulled the trigger.
So yes my dad helped me by soldiering the wires and cutting the plywood base. But as he went we talked about circuits, how the wires went from the motor to the switch and then to a battery so that when the switch was closed the electricity would go to the motor and make it spin. Every step of the way I was there with my dad exploring, learning, and building. Four motors, four switches, and a weekend at the workbench with my dad. I feel no moral qualms for having presented that as my science fair project. But sometimes the question of “whose project was this” is a little murkier.
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Tags: cheating, help, parent project, Robot, science fair
24 Mar 09 Dad Combines Two Loves, Arcade Cabinets and His Daughter
James loves arcade games. James loves his 4 year old daughter Bella. How to best bring these two together for a happy and harmonious life? Build Bella her own arcade machine. So that’s what James did, back in 2006 he started building an arcade machine just for his daughter. At about 80% standard size it is big enough for her to grow into, but still small enough to accommodate little gamers. The whole thing is topped off with a fabulous pink finish that extends from the trim to the gui skin. Want to win your own dad of the year award? Jamie has the entire build process up on his blog, but maybe you want to start the build in secret. Even with another arcade cabinet build under his belt it took Jamie two years to complete Bella’s Arcade.
Tags: arcade, kid sized, mame, pink, woodworking
23 Mar 09 Preparing Babies for the Robot Apocolypse
It’s not a matter of if, but when the Robot Uprising will occur. And when that day comes how prepared will your child be? Not satisfied with the old fashioned prison escape trainers (aka cribs or cradles) Ron Tajima seems to have devised a robot escape trainer for his offspring. Either that or he is a dirty turncoat who is working with the robots to condition children to be lulled to sleep before being subjected to fiery robot doom.
via Hack-a-Day
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Tags: cradle, Robot, robot uprising, roomba
25 Feb 09 Dadmin in Chief Addresses Congress
Two well known facts about President Obama: he is a dad, and he is comfortable with technology. Sounds like a Dadmin to me. Last night in President Obama’s first address to a joint session of congress he touched on parenting and technology, or more specifically television and video games. (more…)
Tags: politics, president, video games
30 Jan 09 More insides for your perusal
Going along with our “take it apart to see how it works” culture as a dadmin, I found this little photo set quite intriguing. Seems the blogger attended a photo trade show in Japan, and wandered over to the Nikon booth – where they had on display a neatly cut-in-half Nikon D3.
I only wish I could get a high resolution photo of this.
Oh – and I wouldn’t mind playing with the tool they used to do the cutting.
Tags: camera, exploded view, how it works, take apart
21 Jan 09 Determined Dad Builds Home DNA Lab
Sometimes being a dadmin doesn’t just mean applying patches to the home media server. Sometimes it means patching your kid, anything from a band-aid to insulin shots. Well one father is taking it even further with an at home genetics lab.
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07 Jan 09 Finding gold within the garbage; parts and knowledge a byproduct of our disposable society
Teaching your kids to make things is a wonderful part of being a parent. Teaching your kids to take things apart is (arguably) even more so. Of course you can find info on the web to read but nothing is better than getting your (and your kids’) hands dirty.
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Tags: Disassembly, Do-it-yourself, Electronics, Hand Tools, Make, Pack Rat, Scrounging
Polls
Friended by your Kids?
- My child doesn't have a facebook page (I think.) (33%, 1 Votes)
- Nope, and I've asked. (0%, 0 Votes)
- No, because I haven't and don't intend to ask. (33%, 1 Votes)
- You bet. We're a facebook family. (34%, 1 Votes)
Total Voters: 3
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