What are the Chances of Winning Higher or Lower with 5 Cards?

Children, Entertainment, Fun Stuff, Games, Recreation
Play your cards right set up (higher or lower) with A4 sized cards
Play your cards right set up (higher or lower) with A4 sized cards

Higher or Lower, or Play Your Cards Right, is a card game using a standard deck of cards, where you have to guess whether the next card is going to be higher or lower than the one you have just turned over.

You can play it with different numbers of cards but for the game that we set up for our summer fair, we decided to pay with 5 cards. We bought these A4 playing cards from Amazon UK. (You can also get jumbo playing cards in the US but I am not sure how popular this game is there!) Continue reading What are the Chances of Winning Higher or Lower with 5 Cards? →

Eco-Friendly Newspaper Kids Party Bags

Children, DIY, Eco-friendly, Fun Stuff, Shopping

If, like me, you are trying to do your bit to reduce your waste footprint on the planet and reuse whatever you can, then this is just a small way to help with one of those things that can create unneeded plastic waste at kids birthday parties.

I decided this year that instead of buying (very cheap I have to say) themed plastic party bags I would either make something myself or buy paper bags.

To be fair you can buy reasonably cheap paper party bags so that is always an option, but I wanted to go one step further and make my own. Continue reading Eco-Friendly Newspaper Kids Party Bags →

WordPress Plugin for Managing a Rota

Internet, Technology, ,

I recently had the situation where I wanted to install a plugin on one of my WordPress sites that would enable a number of people to volunteer to man an art exhibition for various shifts on a rota basis.

I searched around for a rota plugin but the only one I found had only been updated 8 years ago so that was not something I was happy with using.

There were a bunch of plugins that came up for managing employee shifts etc but it took me a while to find a plugin that seemed to do what I wanted it to.

In the end I found a great plugin for a simple rota system which is called Sign-up Sheets and you can create an entry for each shift and for each date and also add how many spots there are available for that rota spot.

An except from the sign up view front end

To show the rota on the front end you need to add the code [sign_up_sheet] to a page you have created (this was not immediately obvious!) and that will show you all the available slots for the dates and times you have created.

Another good thing is that when someone signs up for a slot they get sent an email confirming that slot so that they know what they have signed up for.

I have only used this so far for the one exhibition and it seems that I will need to delete any old data if I want a new rota to be the only thing to show on the website but that is fine, once the date is gone then I won’t need it to show any more.

There is also a pro version of the plugin with extra functionality which I have not tried but will do if I need it.

I just wanted to share the info about this plugin being useful for rotas as it did not come up initially in my searches.

John Martin’s Book on Surviving the War

Books, Society

Anyone who watched The One Show this week and saw war survivor John Martin telling his story about how he survived being blown out of his plane and being held captive in the 2nd World War, could not have failed to be moved by it.

In secret, the One Show had arranged to get his memoirs published into a book as it was his one great wish. The book is called “A Raid Over Berlin” and it is available to buy from many bookshops.

It is an important book, we think, as it is a record of what happened in the war from a personal point of view and these stories should not be forgotten. Future generations need to know about the sacrifices that a whole generation made.

Unfortunately, after his story was told on the One Show, the book quickly sold out and there were reports of the price going up to £32 – obviously upsetting people as the proceeds of this book were going to charity.

There is still a high demand for this book and as we write it is currently unavailable on Amazon, eBay and Waterstones but can be ordered though some book shops with a wait time of 2 weeks.

No doubt the publicity spurred a large number of sales but the publishers obviously didn’t realise how many copies were going to be sold.

We expect that there is another print run going on right now and will be buying it as soon as it is back in stock.

If you do wish to buy it through Amazon, then this is the link – as we are Amazon affiliates, we will get a commission for any purchases made through this site but will donate 100% of any commission made on this book to the Royal British Legion.

Has Facebook Gone Down?

Social Networks & Online Communities

There seem to be more and more occasions recently when people are unable to get into Facebook. Sometimes it can be your own issue (perhaps with your wireless connection or with your computer) but other times it may be the case that Facebook has gone down for a large number of people, if not everybody.

Today (20 November 2018) Facebook seems to have gone down or just gone slow for some people but there will likely be other occasions when this happens.

Sometimes you may get a completely blank screen, either with or without an error message or it may be that your feed just loads really slowly or you can’t click through to another area of Facebook.

You may get different messages when Facebook goes down

Inevitably people turn to social media alternatives to find out if Facebook has indeed gone down and the hashtag #facebookdown is a well used one.

If you are looking to find out if Facebook has gone down, or its it is just you,  check out this link so that you can see if there are a bunch of posts from users unable to get into Facebook.

You can also just tweet with the hashtag yourself to add to the conversation that tells people that Facebook is offline!

Why does Facebook go down? Well that could be down to a number of factors including a possible error when an update has been installed and for some reason things haven’t been checked as well as they could have been.