Aqueduck Bathroom Faucet Extender - Review

Aqueduck Bathroom Faucet Extender

This product is made by Peachy LLC

For anyone with toddlers who are potty trained or getting that way, this is a really useful product!

You've got a toddler up on their stool, trying to wash their hands and they just can't reach and you don't want to be lifting them up every time, especially when they're starting to get a little heavy.

This is a simple, plastic piece that has a rubber attachment on one end which holds this onto the sink faucet and the plastic folds up creating a tube. Easily attaches to a variety of sink faucets.

Simple, easy to use product that'll help your kids out.

Best place to buy this seems to be on Amazon for $13

Ni Hao, Kai-lan Discovery Game - Review

This game is aimed at children 3 plus, so we got it for our 3 year old. I don't recommend it, certainly unless the child is much older.

The dice popper, which I thought would be fun for our little one is incredibly hard to pop, I struggle to push it hard enough as it is.

The little pieces are really cheaply made and the card board inserts to the plastic base of the pieces just slide about and never stay put. There is also no box to this board game, so it's really hard to keep all the pieces together without losing them.

The instructions, if you actually want to play this properly are also not printed on the underside of the board, which is a really flimsy piece of cardboard, which is such an over site. The plastic that sits on the board is also rubbishy, weak and within minutes was cracking at the corners and falling apart.

Not very impressed with this game, which is a shame because it is very cute.

Sing-a-ma-Jigs The Hot Toy?

The Sing-A-Ma-Jig

It is supposed to be the big hot toy this Christmas. Little furry plushie toys who sing and jibber when you squeeze them.

You will end up killing anyone who gives your kid one. They are insanely annoying and they're shit. You need a whole group of them to make any decent rhythmical tunes but unlike other toys who are meant to interact with each other like the Dino's, these chaps you have to press them each and every time and timing is what counts to make the tune sound anything but a drowning cat.

Not a fan and not sure why so many other parents seem to like them, but there you go.

Things to Do - The Ecotarium

The Ecotarium out in Worcester, MA

It's a great day out for kids, especially those 2-8 as they have a lot of activities for the kids to play around with, water toys, mini wind tunnels, music and light toys.

More than that, a collection of live animals, great collection of turtles, frogs and birds.

On a good day, they have lots of trails outside which are lovely too, nice short walks around a pond, with places to observe the water life and bird life, those some of these paths aren't very easy to get around with a push chair while others were. The kids playground is also very nice and spacious.

Some of the attractions were closed such as the walking tree canopy, which I could see being fun in the summer, and also the polar bear wasn't on display. The train ride is though and that is very cool, but it is a shame that some of these attractions cost extra.

One big tip, get a library pass to this place, entrance is then only $5 for adults and kids under 3 are free and older kids are $3 instead of being $12 for adults and $8 for kids.

Mass Innovation Night

Mass Innovation Nights - A monthly event held in various locations in Massachusetts.

You can follow info about the event on Twitter here. #min20 was the tag to follow specifically what happened last night.

This event is a free event for people to show off their products and get some simple marketing with word of mouth. IP lawyers were also there to offer advice as well as people who run marketing sites who also offered advice to people for free.

Some of the products and people who stood out for me last night though included a anti-piracy software, which was more analytic's of who was pirating your iPhone/iPad software and had ways to help try and convert those users into paying users. Simple marketing for e-commerce, cloud based group collaboration projects and simple education animation software.

iCreate to Educate

They have a great, simple to use stop motion animation software program called "SAM", which is aimed at K through 12 year old students, which has mostly been used towards science and maths classes, but can be used to enhance any kind of class by having kids create simple animations to show off their ideas and understanding of a project.

It really was very simple to use and a lot of fun. The free version is great and has most of the features, but a few extra editing features are in the licensed version which was $50 but a site license was only $300 and individual license costs would be deducted from a site license if you decided to upgrade at a later date.

Mtiks

iOS apps anti-piracy software you can bolt on to your apps, with Android coming soon. The free version has basic analytics which is pretty good and then a paid service for more features.

What it does is identify how many users are using pirated copies, how and where, allowing you to use the info to help convert some of those users into paying users, but the paid service can go as far as allowing your app to be used for a short while before bringing up notices to buy your app or lose the high score, or other such stuff to inhibit the fun of the game.

Webiva

A whole suite of features from building your website with simple CMS funtions, to e-commerce and easy social media integration. What made this pretty interesting though was the level of realtime statistics, the huge amount of information it can provide for you in simple graphics was kind of neat, especially when seeing which affiliates of ad programs seem to be working the best for you.

Spreadable

A spin off from the Grasshopper Group. This was simple way to market your products using your customers, by allowing them to have a shout out on Facebook, Twitter or whatever they used to spread the word that they just got something they liked. Really useful for e-commerce, but probably less useful to convert sales in games where you are already on the platform, but it might work. There's a decent free trial of this service.

Novell Vibe Cloud Computing

Cloud based collaboration software services. You can do ad-hoc group communications and work collaborations, file share and consolidate enterprise social networking with messages, chats, blogs and wikis all within one program.

There is free beta testing at the moment, but the licensing is $100 set up and then $20 annual service fee per seat.

Clock Tower Law

Erik J Heels, of the above firm specialise in patent and trademark work with special interest in working with start ups to help minimise their costs. He does seem to understand the software and games sphere pretty well, so certainly with a talk to if you're in the Boston area looking for a lawyer, based in Maynard, MA.

Zhu Zhu Pets are evil?

Quite the fad at the moment, Zhu Zhu Pets!

They're furry little toy hamsters that have little wheels so they can zoom around the floor and through their own little hamster track.

What makes them evil? Kids are kids, and though there is a tiny sticker underneath them saying not to put them anywhere near hair, kids will eventually put on on their or someone else's head. When that happens, the wheels which go like the clappers will tangle and snag the hair and the only way to get out of the tangled mess is by cutting the hair down to the scalp, either that or your kid freaks out and rips a chunk of hair off.

Seems to be quite a common theme, there's thousands of posts of this type of incidence happening all over the interweb.

Definitely not a toy for little kids, even though it does say over 4 year olds, I'd be sceptical about anyone younger than a teen playing with one of these and even then...

WD TV Live Media box review

There are loads of these media boxes around so it can be hard to chose, but I personally went with the WD TV Live - Mainly because I know quite a few people who have one, or at least the models down, the WD TV and WD Mini.

First the alternatives, which there are quite a few -

Dragon Tech

Popcorn A-200

Acer Revo - a mini desktop using XMBC media streaming network software.

Main reason I went with the WD, it was a cheap option at $120 did nearly everything I wanted from it and was easy to use as well as being nice and small.

So out of the box, you've got the player which is about the size of an external hard drive, a tiny remote and the audio/video cables and composite cables, you have to get your own HDMI cables.

The player has two USB slots so you can use a thumb drive or plug in a wireless adapter to get it online, but the list of adapters that are certified to work is fairly small, you can see the list here. You also have the option of plugging in a network cable.

There is no hard drive in this, unlike other players, but using a thumb drive to get media on the thing is pretty good for tele shows or movies, but if you wanted to get the most out of this, you should get it hooked up to your network where it can play music and movie files from a shared drive on the network or media shared device.

Once you've got a USB wireless adapter that works for the device, getting it set up is a breeze, plug it in and go to settings to select wireless and automatic settings and then you plug in any network passwords and it hooks straight up. You also can store user name/passwords for any shared drives if you want which is quite nice.

So far, it has played all kinds of media files I have thrown at it, streamed them really well and upscaled non HD content wonderfully. It also remembers where in a file you were if you have to stop the show and go to another show for example. Fast forwarding files also seems to work really smoothly, as does the ability to read subtitle files.

Product support is great too, with regular firmware updates to sort out any issues, which are really easy to install. For the more adventurous out there, they also provide beta firmwares here.

Online features, Youtube, Pandora, Live365 radio, Flickr. Really easy to use and they all work really well with the device.

With all the love and I'd highly recommend this device to anyone, there are a few cons and I'll go over them.

The remote, you can't use the player without the remote and it is a small remote, make sure you don't lose it, and for anyone with a large media catalogue, it would have been nice to have a rocker switch to quickly scroll through your library.

USB slots, only two of them, the one at the back, which you'd probably use for the wireless, it is right next to the HDMI slot, so unless you've got a narrow adapter, you'll have to use and extension or there won't be room for it. The other USB slot on the side is slightly recessed and isn't lit up at all so can be difficult to find if you've got your player in your TV cabinet, but that is a small gripe. There really needs to be a third USB slot though because you can use a keyboard, but there isn't room to plug one in, and you'll see how useful a keyboard is if you use the online features like YouTube, Panadora etc. Still don't know why they couldn't have built wireless into the device as it would reduce there need to support other adapters but oh well.

The online features, it is missing Hulu and other services such as Netflix, which apparently can work if you have a media server set up and stream the content from your desktop and there are also hacked firmware files out there that do add extra services. Would have been nice to be able to put in proxy/VPN details so you could use a BBC iPlayer service etc. Also the player can't play DRM protected content from say iTunes

Audio, it's stereo output, automatically downscales it for you, but it would be nice not to if you've got an A/V receiver to put it through, less of a concern for me but it should be mentioned.

I'm still loving it, works a treat, simple to use and no messing around to get it up and running in minutes.

Storing those Plush Toys!

Found the perfect answer on Think Geek - The Otto Plush Animal Bag

Store all your plush animal toys in this big blob plushy.

Baby Monitors

Here's a short review of a few baby monitors because we had to finally replace our original monitor because new neighbours below our apartment has caused some interference so we went for an upgrade.

Our original monitor was a Graco Respond which we managed to find at Big Lots for $10 and has been a fantastic bargain as well as a great product.

It is well built, very sturdy and can be thrown around lots without breaking. The receiver has a battery built in that can be charged up and gives you great usage which is handy when when you've got to run around the house as the range is also very good. The signal also is generally very good, except when placed around a phone or router.

Other features of this monitor include a recording option so that if your baby cries it can play your recording, or it can play a few nursery rhymes.

Very happy with this unit and give it 4/5

The replacement unit we got was a Graco iMonitor Digital Vibe - What we liked about this, it's very simple to work out of the box, comes with a built in battery for the receiver which charges from a cradle and the base monitor can use batteries as a backup, which aren't included but the power adapters were universal for both the base and receiver.

Also the receiver has a power socket so you don't need the cradle if you don't want. This is a nice mobile unit, small, well made, light and sturdy with a pretty good belt clip. The battery life on this isn't as good as other monitors but it is good enough to get you around a long nap time.

The range on this is advertised as 2000 ft, I haven't confirmed that, but it has been crystal clear through out our apartment which is lovely, and it really has been crystal clear with no static or interference, being a digital unit really does make a huge difference here over the older analogue systems. The receiver also has a vibrate function to let you know your baby is crying if you have the volume turned down which is a nice idea but not something I use.

We'll give this a 5/5 rating.

Before we got the above, we tried and then returned a couple other units, the first was:

Safety First Go and Glow Monitor - Looks great, quite cheap depending on where you get it, $25-35 and nice and sturdy design. The major problem we had with this unit was interference, it wouldn't work anywhere at all in our apartment, the receiver was just bleeping out static which was horrid. Other things that dinged this in our minds, the belt clip was rubbish and this didn't include any batteries. The base unit was nice and stable though and had a thermometer. Finally the nightlight feature didn't really light up, so was a bit pointless.

2/5

Fisher Price Sound's n Lights Monitor - Another cheap unit around the $25-35 price range, analogue and returned because it also suffered heavy interference, it was better than the above unit in that it would work if the receiver was placed close to the base unit or in certain parts of the apartment but not anywhere that was useful for us.

This does advertise itself as being "green" with the power supply, the irony being that it was least environmentally friendly in the packaging having the most disposable rubbish. The antenna is not built in on this either, which potentially means it could be unsafe as a large protrusion, certainly something easy for the baby to grab and throw. The base unit was very light and didn't feel sturdy, but it did have a nice night light feature, which wouldn't automatically shut down incidentally which is a shame. Also no built in batteries for this unit and if you wanted to place your own batteries, the compartment comes with screw fitted fixings which isn't very convenient, this is aimed at the parents and not the child after all.

A nice feature about this unit though, the light indicator is visible from both sides of the receiver and the belt clips is quite sturdy.

2/5

Other units we looked at but didn't try out, but you can read the reviews on Amazon, which came highly recommended were the:

Safety 1st High-Def Digital Monitor

Sony 900 MHz BabyCall Nursery Monitor

Cool Toddler Crockery

The Loopa Gyro Bowl - This thing is awesome, a gyroscopic bowl that will always face up, so hopefully reducing the chances of spilled food when your toddler is on the move.

Bed Bath & Beyond has it online for $8

More Boon Products

Following on from the Boon Spoon which is awesome, we went and got more of their product line up.

Fluid - A toddler cup, nice and chunky, easy to hold and doesn't spill so in theory should be a great cup for the baby to get the hang of, but the tip is a bit unwieldy so baby isn't finding it that easy to drink out of, shame.

Catch Bowl - This is a great little bowl with a lip that is supposed to catch dropped food, there is also a sucker on the base that is supposed to keep it securely held in place on the table. The reality is, the sucker doesn't actually hold the bowl down that well and nor does the catcher actually catch the food that well, it's a little to flexible and the baby just pushes it down. This also isn't machine washable, but it is easy to wipe clean.

Benders - This is a spoon and spork combination, the heads bend quite easily so that the baby can hold them in either hand, which ever they are most comfortable with. These are great, they are easy to hold, not sharp and the head has a nice dip that allows the food to slide off into the babies mouth nice and easily. This is a superb product!

Snack Ball - We thought this would be a fun little container to hold the snacks. The reality is, it is a bit rubbish. It's a round sphere, no dimples or rubber pads to hold it in place so it rolls all over the place when you put it down. Also the sliding top that opens isn't all that secure so it is quite easy for this to slip open and dump the snacks in your pocket. Bit of a disappointment.

There are other products in the line up to check out, more for the toddler age and we will probably give them a go later on.

For now, we highly recommend the Boon Spoon and the Benders, some of the best small baby purchases we've made. They are available all over the place too which is handy.