HotWheels; Storytelling for kids

Usually when I arrive at home from work I ask my little daughter how her day was. Although she is not able to respond yet, it seems that she wants to tell me that everything was fine, or she shows me her knee or hand to show me she fell.

I would love it if she could show me some highlights of her day. This could be made possible, there's a guy who transformed a car toy into a vehicle for telling stories. Kids just play with the car and with a push on a button a camera inside the car is activated and starts recording. And afterwards these recordings can be shown on a TV set.



I can imagine buidling such a camera into a doll or a teddy bear which my daughter could carry around so I can have a quick glimpse at what happened during her day.

src: www.3eyes.co.uk

Tijgerspin (Argiope bruennichi)

Yesterday evening my father called me because he had found a spider he had never seen before. I went outside and saw this beautiful spider sitting on my daughter's toy. I quickly went back inside to grab my camera and took the following picture of it.



Today I found out that this spider is called "tijgerspin", where tijger is Dutch for tiger and spin for spider (they also call them wasp spiders). Well about a week ago I found this 2 centimeters big ball hanging in a web against a wall outside. I had never seen this before but now I know what kind of spider comes out of it.

These tiger spiders look dangerous but fortunately their bite is harmless for humans.

The RFID game

For some project at work we are going to look at the RFID technology. RFID ? This is what wikipedia has to say about it: "Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is a method of storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. An RFID tag is a small object that can be attached to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person. RFID tags contain antennas to enable them to receive and respond to radio-frequency queries from an RFID transceiver. Passive tags require no internal power source, whereas active tags require a power source."

An RFID tag.

Two colleagues of mine now used these RFID tags to create a kind of quest. On these RFID stickers they wrote a URL. We have a Nokia GSM for writing information on the tags. For every URL they wrote a web page with mulitple choice questions on it, to read the question you just had to hold a RFID GSM reader close to it. When you answered correctly to a question, the site told you where you could find the next RFID tag etc. So if you answered everything correctly you won the game, but if you answered incorrectly it somehow messed up your trail and in the end you did not win. So the order in which you completed the track decided wheter or not you won.

I won of course, although I cheated, I used Google a couple of times for answering to the questions. Shame on me!