Memory lane

This morning I was looking for a picture of the Styrofoam castle that Citadel released in the Late Eighties (early Nineties?) and found this gem of a resource on old miniatures: The Stuff of Legends
As a teen and a young adult I spent a lot of time and effort participating in the wargaming hobby, playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles, Warhammer 40k, it's predecessor Rouge Trooper, Blood Bowl, and Talisman.  I collected full armies of Orcs, Goblins, Chaos Dwarves and a mixed force of Bretonians, Elves and Dwarves with a few Empire war machines thrown in for good measure.  I competed in painting contests winning top prizes which I spent on more miniatures.  I was so bitten by the bug to collect miniatures I stared a mail order business at the age of 14 selling miniatures.  Of course my main goal was to provide myself with more miniatures.  Eventually I discovered girls, and spent less time and money on miniatures.  I sold off my 40k stuff in newsgroups during the early days of the internet but I held on to my Fantasy armies for the memories, also knowing I would regret parting with them.  Most recently my boys have gotten into the hobby, though it was not through me.  Actually their grandfather played Napoleonic in the 60's and he has been funding their army building.  They each have armies, a lizard man army and a Elf Host along with some smaller forces of undead and Chaos.  It has been great to see them enjoy the same hobby.  Setting up their war gaming table on the   I even got into the act writing a set of rules for Warhammer that are more friendly to a 6 year old's attention span.  Now if I had a generous benefactor funding and painting my miniatures for me, image how many I would have now.

I love that multiple generations of gamers are all enjoying the same hobby, sharing stories and techniques.

Setting up a PC for the kids

This year I set up a PC for my boys to use.  Basically I re-purposed my old dual boxing PC, adding a larger hard drive as it only had WOW and Chrome on it before.  I also threw in a second video card and set up SLI.  This was to give it a bit more rendering power and satisfy an urge to set up a SLI system.  I upgraded the OS to Windows 7 as I wanted the boys to have access to security updates and I wanted a minimum of down time for the system.  I also logged into each browser and locked Google and YouTube to safe search.  While I know they can turn this off, I periodically review their history and the PC is kept in the open.

Next was to get some games right?  The system already had World of Warcraft on it and it still plays very well, albeit with the original character models not the new ones.  I also put a hard drive full of emulated games that came out of my old Home Theater PC into the system as a way to introduce them to older games.  Lastly I went online to Steam and Origin to get more games for the boys.  Steam has a huge library of games with regular sales and lots of free games available.  Most importantly Steam does a good job of listing the system requirements on most games so I know if it will work before I add it to the system.  While not anywhere as expansive as Steam’s, Origin also has a large library of games.  Most importantly they regularly offer free top of the line games via their On the House program.  I check it periodically to get new titles for the boys.

This approach has worked so well for me that one of my friends had me come over and help him set up a PC for his kids along the same lines. I look at this as a way to keep old hardware out of landfills as well as provide entertainment.  

Android phones as mini tablets

Having changed cell phone carriers earlier this year we ended up with some older Android phones that were not compatible with the new carrier’s network.  I initially considered selling them but realized I likely would not get much for them I decided to re-purpose them instead.  I decided to set them up as mini Wi-Fi tablets for my boys.  The boys being nine and five years old I was not sure if they were ready for their own cell phones.  This would be an experiment. 

First thing I did was complete a factory reset on both phones.  Then I turned off the connection to the cell towers.  When setting up the phones I created a Gmail and a Google Voice number for each boy.  We periodically pull up the Gmail accounts via Thunderbird so we can review everything that is coming to them.  After that I installed a few apps to make the phones useful.

Currently the boys are using Google Voice & GTalk phone by Mo+ to make calls over WiFi.  Apparently Google has recently rolled WiFi calling into Hangouts, so I will have to look into that.  The next app was Netflix.  This is a real family peace keeper, sometimes the adults want to watch one show, and the boys another, this way they could quietly watch their show while all of us were sitting on the couch together. 

All in all it has been a very good experiment.  So far I have only had to remove one minor bit of malware from one phone and periodically help my youngest free up space by deleting games he downloaded but is not playing.  If you have kids in your life and have old Android phones I encourage you to consider this super easy project.