All posts by admin

Monster Doughnuts With No Plastic!

Children, Eco-friendly, Food & Drink, Fun Stuff, Recreation

For an event we were running as a PTA we wanted to sell monster donuts to the children and adults who were coming so we looked around for a recipe for monster doughnuts that we could easily make.

We weren’t actually going to make the monster doughnuts ourselves but instead buy some and decorate them with monster faces. The ones that we had seen on Pinterest had edible eyes and then plastic mouths that opened over the hole of the donut  (which you can buy very cheaply online) but we didn’t want to use any more plastic than we needed to so we decided to go another route with the monster mouths! Continue reading Monster Doughnuts With No Plastic! →

How to Connect the HP 2600 Printer to Wifi

Computers & Electronics, Internet, Technology

So I recently purchased an HP 2620 (one of the 2600 series) all in one printer – it was pretty cheap and had a good deal whereby if you don’t use much ink you can get it free with HP Instant Ink.

Anyway, I wanted to set this up and connect to a Chromebook which was a task in itself. In order to do this I first needed to connect the printer to the Wifi network. In theory this should have been very easy by pressing the Wifi button on the printer and then pressing the WPS button on the Wifi router. Continue reading How to Connect the HP 2600 Printer to Wifi →

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.