“Swartz Creek church helping drive to aid world’s needy kids - MLive.com” plus 2 more |
- Swartz Creek church helping drive to aid world’s needy kids - MLive.com
- Ticked off! @ neighborhood kids, short light - Orlando Sentinel
- Kinect and your kids: What works, what won't - msnbc.com
| Swartz Creek church helping drive to aid world’s needy kids - MLive.com Posted: 12 Nov 2010 04:06 AM PST Published: Friday, November 12, 2010, 7:05 AM Updated: Friday, November 12, 2010, 7:28 AMSWARTZ CREEK, Michigan — A child in another part of the world will learn a few things about Alyssa Werth this holiday season. The Flushing 10-year-old's favorite beverage is Pepsi. Her favorite color is blue. In her free time, she likes to play hopscotch. This and other information about Alyssa will be included in a shoe box full of goodies assembled and donated by Alyssa through Operation Christmas Child for a needy child in another country. "Maybe some crayons and some toys and stuff," Alyssa said of what she plans to put in her box. The United Methodist Church of Swartz Creek, 7400 Miller Road, is a collection site for Operation Christmas Child for the sixth year this year. Boxes can be donated at the church starting Monday until Nov. 22. The next closest drop-off center is in Brighton, said Hope Moreland, a church volunteer and coordinator of the donation site. Alyssa was among about a dozen elementary school students helping get things started this week by filling boxes with items already donated to the church. "They try to get them into the hands of the kids before Christmas," Moreland said. Last year, the church collected more than 5,000 boxes filled with items such as school supplies, toys and candy. Most of the boxes go to Third World countries. Donors can track their packages online to see where they end up. To see where a package goes, register the box and pay the $7 to ship it through www.samaritanspurse.org, said Moreland "It's really great to do this with children or grandchildren," Moreland said. "You can look at the map and see where that child lives." Operation Christmas Child What: Fill a shoe box with school supplies, toys and other items for a child in another country. Drop-off location: Swartz Creek United Methodist Church, 7400 Miller Road. Drop-off times: People can drop off boxes from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Nov. 15, 16, 18 and 20; from 2 to 6 p.m. Wednesday and Nov. 17 and 19; from noon to 5 p.m. Nov. 21 and from 9 to 11 a.m. Nov. 22. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Ticked off! @ neighborhood kids, short light - Orlando Sentinel Posted: 10 Nov 2010 11:56 PM PST •I'm ticked off that the neighborhood kids play in my yard when they have three of their own right across the street. •I'm ticked off at lawyers who are paid with taxpayer money put criminals back on the streets. •I'm ticked off that our servicemen are still fighting in the Middle East for an unjust war. • Why is there a ten second light at Goldenrod and Colonial for a left turn? •To the bus drivers who think that being handicapped is a big joke. I hope you're in my shoes some day. •I'm ticked off that people pull down our street early in the morning and honk their horn for their friends to come out instead of getting their butt out of their car and ring the doorbell. •I'm ticked off at buying raffle tickets at a pet supply place and getting expired treats as the prize. •I'm ticked off at the new rules for drivers licenses. •I'm ticked I have worked hard all my life and paid my taxes. Now I have been out of work a couple of months due to surgery, in danger of losing my house and can't get a penny of help because I have a job to go back to when I recover so I can pay more taxes to help everyone but me. •I'm ticked off at people who complain about police for doing their jobs. The flip side •Thanks to the wonderful person who turned in my red glasses to the church lost and found. •Thanks to the staff at the Orlando VA Community Living Center who looked after my husband for the past five years and for the wonderful care they gave him during his life. You did a wonderful job. •We're so glad that Allegiant will be returning to Sanford. Thank goodness! •Thanks to the two families who rescued me from the rain when my power scooter broke down. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Kinect and your kids: What works, what won't - msnbc.com Posted: 10 Nov 2010 04:33 PM PST When I first unpacked the Kinect, the new controller-free motion-capture system for Xbox 360, I thought how awesome it would be to play with my daughter. She's 2 1/2 (going on 14), so I figured Kinect Sports' rudimentary bowling and ball kicking would be easy. And it was, when it worked. The sad fact was that though my kid was definitely ready for Kinect, Kinect wasn't ready for her. When I spoke to Josh Hutto, on the Xbox Kinect team, he explained that there is a recommended height minimum of 40 inches, corresponding roughly to kids 4 and a half years old and up. "The [Kinect] camera needs a field of view, side to side and up and down," Hutto told me. "It's trying to get as many people into that cone as possible. Getting a small person and a tall person in the same space is a technical challenge." While my kid is probably going to have to sit out a couple of years of Kinecting, there are some good tips for anyone with small kids closer to the 40-inch mark who do want to give it a try. For starters, you should mount the Kinect camera box above your TV, as high as 6 feet if possible. Since game play has to happen 6 to 8 feet from the camera, raising it up closes the distance required between the TV and the players. At the same time, it makes it easier for the camera to track people of different heights, since it is looking down, and not across. This is also a good tip for people who find their quarters a little too cramped for Kinect. Even an average sized living room like mine could benefit from the tighter camera space, and for city dwellers, it's a must. "My sister lives in an apartment in Manhattan," said Hutto. "I told her the same thing. If you get the camera height up to 6 feet, it's going to make the play space as small as possible." As you might have guessed, there's already a bustling business in Kinect mounts. With Microsoft's blessing, a company called Performance Designed Products (or just PDP) is selling a Kinect wall mount for $15, a floor stand on a tripod for $30, and a special flat-panel TV clamp for $40. (PDP is also selling a 10-foot-long "officially licensed" USB cable for $50, which sounds awfully steep. If you do need a USB extender, try this one at Monoprice for $1.43 first.) A colleague of mine decided to skip the fancy rigging and instead screwed an L-shaped bracket to the wall, attaching the Kinect to it with doublesided tape, and securing the cable to prevent accidental yanking. It probably cost all of $2, and did the trick. Once you've got the Kinect up in place, run the Kinect Tuner with your kid(s) in the play space, and within that tool, manually adjust the camera to tilt down a bit. Don't just tilt the camera down by hand, because the system will just compensate by angling back up. Mind you, since you basically tweaked it for the smallest members of the household, you may need to re-tune it when the kids go to bed, and the grown-ups queue up to make fools of themselves. It's important to demarcate the play area somehow. The best advice I've heard is to set a yoga mat or some other floor mat down in the Kinect sweet spot. Everyone can get carried away playing Kinect, but kids especially get over excited and tend to lunge towards the TV, which not only screws up the tracking, but is a tad bit dangerous too. One dad I talked to set out a line of shoes, telling his son not to cross it. Hutto had one other tip for kids and Kinect: clear enough play space in front and back, and to each side as well, so that everyone stays safe during playtime. I don't think anyone assumed Kinect would be injury free, but it was a little surprising to see the accident videos hit YouTube so quickly. Maybe I should be glad my kid can't get involved. Aw, who am I kidding? If she doesn't grow into this thing soon, she's getting stilts for Christmas. Catch up with Wilson on Twitter at @wjrothman, just don't ever make fun of his Xbox Live Gamerscore. Only Todd and Winda can do that. © 2010 msnbc.com Reprints This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| You are subscribed to email updates from kids shoes - Bing News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 comments:
Post a Comment