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Downloadable Printable UK TV Schedule – World Cup 2018

Fun Stuff, Sports

So the World Cup 2018 has started and there are games on every day and it can be a bit difficult to keep track of. Obviously you will know when your own team are playing but you might want to watch out for other teams too.

So if you are looking for a printable UK TV schedule for the World Cup so that you can keep something with you to hand to refer to and know when all the games are on then we have one here for you.

Yes you can go all techno and get the official app but sometimes it just makes things easier to look at the whole schedule on a piece (or 3 in this case) of paper.

So here is the schedule, showing what date and time the matches are on, together with whether they are on BBC or ITV and with a space for you to complete the scores.

We will update this as we go along with the relevant teams showing in the quarter finals, semi finals etc so if you want to you can come back and print page 3 again once these things have been decided.

Download the printed World Cup 2018 schedule of games here. The format is a 1 page Word document (updated for the last 16).

Kindle Fire Kids Volume Stuck on Mute

Children, Entertainment, Technology, ,

Recently we had an issue in our house where my son’s Kindle Fire was stuck on mute and I couldn’t get the volume back up whatever I tried. He, funnily enough was happy to watch his Fire with no volume! I guess it was better than nothing.

It is the kids Fire with the sturdy blue cover that it happened to but I guess maybe it could happen to other Fires too if they work the same way.

I dragged down the settings from the top and sure enough the mute button was on, so I tried dragging the volume slider and it dragged fine but still the mute button was on. I tried holding the mute button to turn it off but that also had no effect.

Even the volume buttons on the side of the Fire did not make any difference, the volume was still off.

I couldn’t figure out what my son had done to turn off the volume and I couldn’t find any answers online. I did find something talking about some settings that may have caused it but I couldn’t find what they were talking about.

Anyway, I found an answer (it is not ideal but it works so I guess it is an answer), and it was the age old answer where technology was concerned, a hard reboot. I turned the Fire off by holding down the power button until it asked if I wanted to turn it off and then turned it back on again by holding the button again and sure enough when I tried it again the volume was back on again.

no volume on kindle fire
Eventually I managed to unmute the Fire!

I have had the problem of no sound on the Fire a couple of times now. I can only assume that my son presses something somewhere along the line to do this. It doesn’t seem to be a simple mute as this should then come back on again when you unmute it, but it doesn’t.

Oh well, at least there is a solution that will not drive me completely crazy!

Update: We now have a new Fire and the same thing happens with this too. Apparently there may be a certain app that causes this issue but I don’t know which one so that doesn’t really help! In any case the reboot does still work and the mute problem does not happen so much that this gets annoying.

 

How to Swallow Pills

Food & Drink, Health
How to swallow pills
Some pills (if not all!) can be hard to swallow!

If you are like me and have a really bad gag reflex and don’t know how to swallow pills without retching and bringing the thing back up (assuming it actually gets anywhere in the first place beyond your tongue) then it seems like we are not alone!

Many people struggle to swallow pills, even if they are smaller than what seems like normal bite sized pieces of food. Even to myself I think it must be some kind of psychological thing together with the gag reflex as a lot of the pills we have to swallow are not really that big in theory.

Anyway, I have found a way to swallow pills that works for me in most cases (I still struggle with the really big capsules).

What you need to do is to take a chunk of biscuit/cookie (you can use many other foodstuffs but I find biscuits/cookies are the best and also easiest just to grab on the go) and chew it up to the point where you are almost ready to swallow it. Keep it maybe a little bit more chunky than you otherwise might do before swallowing.

Once you are just about to swallow the biscuit/cookie, pop the pill in your mouth among the biscuit bits and swallow the whole lot together. If you have a pill that will break into 2 then if might be worth doing it in 2 goes. It may be harder to do with those big plastic capsules but for others it should be OK.

I have to say this works for me 90% of the time and I am one of the worst for taking tablets and pills. I hope that it works for you but I guess it is not going to work for everyone.

Give it a try and let me know if it does work!

Make Your Own Very Hungry Caterpillar

Arts & Humanities, Children, Fun Stuff, Recreation,

Here is a fun craft activity to do with the kids – how to make your own very hungry caterpillar. This could be an activity for your own kids or something you can do in batches for a group of children, e.g at a playgroup or preschool.

The result is this, the caterpillar before he ate through all that food and got a tummy ache!

Instructions

What you will need:
  • green card (or paper or can be white)
  • red paper (again can be white)
  • white card
  • sticky eyes (optional)
  • lolly stick (optional)
  • green paint
  • yellow paint
  • glue stick
  • sellotape

Firstly paint your green card or paper with a very rough mix of dark green and yellow paint. Make sure the colours don’t blend together too well!

Mark up the back of the card with discs. If you are just doing one or two you can obviously make them much bigger.

Cut them out so that they all have slightly differing colours in them.

Cut a body shape out of white card and a head out of the red paper. if you don’t have red paper colour in some white paper with a red pen!

Use a glue stick to start gluing down the body pieces one at a time, overlapping each other onto the card body.

Stick on the head and then you can either use sticky eyes or else just draw on your own eyes (the rights colours are green in the middle and yellow outside but sticky eyes do just fine). Draw in his mouth with a marker or felt pen.

You can then use sellotape to attach the lolly stick to the back of the head so that you can move the caterpillar around – ideal to use with the story book.

And there you go, the finished hungry caterpillar:

How to make your own very hungry caterpillar

 

And if you want to buy the book…

External Hard Drive Not Deleting Files

Computers & Electronics, Technology,

external hard driveI recently had the problem where my external back up drive was nearly full so I deleted a bunch of files off it. However, even after deleting these files no more space seemed to become available on the external hard drive.

Why No More Space?

I couldn’t figure out why I was not getting any more space on the drive even after deleting the files. I was planning on buying a new hard drive at some point anyway but I knew that there were files on the hard drive that I didn’t really need so I might as well delete those first.

Recycle Bin

I searched around for a recycle bin on the hard drive to empty to make the space but there didn’t seem to be one.

Anyway, after a bit of searching, I realised that all of the files that I had deleted were in the Recycle Bin on my PC. This actually took a bit of finding in itself as the recycle bin now does not show in Windows Explorer which was what I was used to and how I used to find it!

(If you also can’t find the recycle bin then check for a link on your desktop and it is probably accessible from there).

Yay, Free Space!

So, once I deleted the files from my recycle bin on my PC the space did indeed get freed up on my external hard drive.

Hopefully this will help someone else who might be in the same situation!