How Much Time Should Kids Spend Playing Video Games

Posted on by
Reply

Peter Gray has a nicely contrarian article at Psychology Today weighing in on the debate over how much “screen time” children should have each week. I’ve talked to about a dozen psychiatrists and psychologists about this over the past few years when it comes to my own kids and it is interesting how diverse the opinions were, from one person who didn’t allow his children any screen time, to another who was more “anything goes.”

Gray comes down closer to the latter view,

I have a very high opinion of children’s abilities to make good choices about how to use their free time, as long as they really have choices. Some kids go through long periods of doing what seems like just one thing, and then some adults think there’s something wrong, because they (the adults) would not make that choice. But in my experience, if kids are really free to play and explore in lots of different ways, and they end up playing or exploring in what seems to be just one way, then they are doing that because they are getting something really meaningful out of it.

In my family, both my wife and I play a lot of video games. And what we emphasize to our kids is the importance of balance. Mom plays World of Warcraft, but she doesn’t say, “I’m not going to make dinner or go to work today because I’d rather play video games.” In fact, although we play a lot of video games, we also do a lot of reading, and other activities in our free time.

We’re more project-oriented than time-oriented at our house. Kids get home at 4 p.m. and bedtime is 9 p.m. Each day there are a certain number of tasks that each child is expected to finish, whether that is homework, helping out with dinner, cleaning, etc. Once our children have finished the tasks we expect them to finish that day, they are free to use their free time as they wish. Sometimes that means my 9 year old whips off a three hour session of World of Warcraft or Skyrim. More often it means they tend to mix up their activities, alternating between watching television, playing video games, reading, or other activities such as playing board games or going swimming.

Which is not to say I wouldn’t step in and place limits on my children’s screen time if they failed to live up to their responsibilities. My son knows the laptop in his room is there because he does such a good job of keeping up with all of the things my wife and I expect him to do, and that it can easily be removed or the password changed if he acts inappropriately (something we’ve only had to do a handful of times).

TapLog for Android

Posted on by
Reply

TapLog is customizable logging application for Android that makes it easy for the user to log whatever it is they want to log.

First, you decided what you want to log. I track sleep and wake times, food, daily weight, television and reading habits and a few other things. TapLog then makes it easy to set up buttons that will quickly create a time stamped log of the event/item you’re tracking. For example, here’s the sample logging screen from the Android Market (love the rabbit sighting option):

Click the button and it creates a time stamped log. TapLog also lets you update the quantity, record location, and add notes. So I can hit my Weight button and input my weight. Or I can hit the reading button and input how many pages I read as well as add a text note summary of what I was reading, what I thought of it, etc.

The key here is that, unlike many other logging applications, TapLog really makes it easy for the users to set up the application to log what they want, how they want. It also supports having a button open a sub-menu. So a user could create a “Food” button which would then open a second screen of buttons labeled “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Dinner.”

The log can be exported as a CSV file and either shared to the SD card or emailed. The app also supports emailing a non-CSV log of events. An export to Google Docs would be nice.

Other than that, TapLog does an excellent job and is easily the best logging app available for Android at the moment.

Locking a Windows Laptop on Lid Close

Posted on by
Reply

Like many people I’m a Windows user not because I have any particular love for Microsoft’s OS, but rather because it is the best OS overall for what I need to do on a day-to-day basis. Given the resources Microsoft has to throw at Windows development, however, it is amazing how much you can’t do in Windows.

For example, here’s a pretty straightforward thing I’d like to do in Windows — I’d like to set it up so that when I close the lid on my laptop, Windows automatically locks itself. Based on a couple Google searches a lot of people would like to be able to do this.

And yet, as of 2012, there is no version of Windows in which this can be done. Microsoft will let you put a laptop to sleep automatically when you close the lid, and you can always hit the Windows key+L to lock the computer, but there’s no way to configure Windows to lock automatically when the laptop lid is closed.

That, my friends, is f***ing stupid. I did find a couple of people who had created programs that intercepted the lid state and would automatically lock the lid when closed, but none of these were currently available (the website of the most popular utility for doing this was hijacked by hackers a couple years ago and is still compromised).

So if you know of a decent utility for automatically locking a Windows laptop when the lid closes, I’d be glad to hear it. Or maybe Microsoft could actually follow up on a simple, obvious feature that many of its users have requested. Just don’t hold your breath on that.

WorkFlowy.Com

Posted on by
Reply

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been playing around with online outliner WorkFlowy.Com and it has gradually become a tool I’m finding indispensable.

On the one hand, WorkFlowy is ridiculously simple. Set up an account, login, and you have an empty screen to start entering parent and child nodes like pretty much every other outlining tool in the world.

On the other hand, WorkFlowy adds a couple of powerful twists. The first is the ability to take any child node and focus in just on that. So while I’m writing this post in WorkFlowy, I see a blank page with just the title of this particular child node at the top, so I can focus just on writing down my thoughts about WorkFlowy.

WorkFlowy also features both # and @ tagging systems. For example, as I am outlining the various steps on a project I am outlining, I can tag any of the action items as #todo and then easily view all of my todo items throughout my huge spreadsheet. Similarly if I had a todo that I needed to assign to someone else, I could add a @name tag. Some people are using WorkFlowy as a full-fledged task manager, but I just want to keep track of tasks to transfer them to Toodledo, which I prefer to use for task management.

Finally, WorkFlowy works very well in Android and iOS browsers. I was on a long trip and spent a couple hours adding and reorganizing items in WorkFlowy on my Android phone. It worked like a charm. This would be awesome on a tablet.

As for the downsides? At the moment WorkFlowy is entirely browser-based. The developer is apparently working on mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms, but at the moment there is no app version and hence no offline option either.

The export options are also fairly weak. In a popup menu associated with in each node and at the bottom of each page on WorkFlowy is an export option. Selecting the export option will pop up a new windows with the text of either the entire outline or a particular subset of it pre-selected which you can then copy and paste into another application. At the moment, that’s pretty much the extent of WorkFlowy’s export options. Obviously, an export as CSV/email to Gmail/copy to Google Docs, etc. would be extremely useful to have.

That said, WorkFlowy is one of the more useful tools that I’ve run across in a long time — I’ve pretty much started using it for every text-based thing I do, from tracking tasks to writing blog posts like this.

Scansnap S1100 USB-Powered Scanner Review

Posted on by
Reply

Since I’m a huge fan of the Fujitsu Scansnap 1100, I should probably get the two things I absolutely hate about it out of the way first.

Fujitsu insists on using its proprietary software for its Scansnap line. That means no scanning directly into applications that are perfectly capable of utilizing TWAIN-based scanners. Rather, you’re stuck using Fujitsu’s proprietary software for your scans.

Fujitsu compounds this idiotic decision by making it impossible to download the software from its website. You can download updates to the software just fine, but if you lose that original installation disc, you’re pretty much screwed — unlike its much friendlier competitors like Epson, you can’t simply pop online and download the software again. I just copy the stupid CD to Dropbox in case I ever need it again for a reinstall.

So, from the software end Fujitsu sucks. Hardware-wise, though, I’ve owned several ScanSnap’s and if you can live with those limitations these are awesome document scanners.

The ScanSnap 1100 is Fujitsu’s portable version that operates entirely off of USB power, and unlike some other USB-powered scanners, the ScanSnap 1100 requires just a single USB cable for power.

Now that limited power supply does mean a couple of other drawbacks that are common in this class of devices. The biggest drawback is that the ScanSnap 1100 only scans a single side of a document at a time. It is fairly easy to flip a document over and scan the reverse side, but if your primary use for this would be scanning lengthy double-sided documents, you’re going to want one of the desktop versions that can do so.

The second drawback is that the scanning speed is relatively slow — 5 to 8 seconds to scan an 8 1/2″ x 11″ piece of paper at highest resolution (I don’t bother with lower resolutions, so I couldn’t tell you how much faster it is if you’re willing to compromise on scanning quality).

Despite all of the above, I absolutely love this scanner. Having a scanner everywhere I am makes it so much easier to keep on top of scanning all of the crappy pieces of paper people insist on giving me.

The ScanSnap 1100 is perfect for receipts, business cards and other paper ephemera.The first couple of weeks I had this, I was able to finally power through the 500 or so receipts I had shoved in a desk drawer. I also used it to scan hundreds of shorter one and two page documents, leaving the longer, double-sided documents for my ScanSnap 1500.

If you will be carrying this with you a lot, I’d recommend purchasing the carrying case that Fujitsu makes for this as well. The case is absurdly expensive at about $40, but it has a cutout on the side so that the scanner can be operated without taking it out of the case.