Experimental MumScience + Children = Fun + Mess

BBC1 are looking for a family with two or three children to take part in a a new show, “Make Yourself at Home”, where they will take part in an exciting new experiment looking at the way in which families live in and use a contemporary domestic environment.

Contact details are here and the film will be produced by Dragonfly.tv but be quick the closing date is 4 September 2009.

Have you been watching Bang Goes the Theory?

It’s a 10 part BBC1 series of putting science to the test with extreme experiments.  The girls and I really enjoy the show and I definitely plan to try the frying an egg in a newspaper experiment!

It reminds me of a sciency version of Blue Peter. The next episode is on Monday 7 September BBC1 7.30pm and the first five episodes can be downloaded from iplayer.

To complement the show is the super cool website and roadshow or you can take part in the interactive science challenge. Check it out, I’m sure your kids will love it!

Oh my goodness, with such a busy summer juggling children and working from home, my blogging time has been drastically reduced! Like most Mums I spend many hours waiting for my children at their activities and for a while I’ve been fancying something that would allow me to work on the move.

After much “Googling” mini netbooks and smart phones, I finally decided on the Ubisurfer which I bought from Maplin yesterday.

After a pretty quick charge up time, I spent last night trying out my new toy (essential working Mum’s kit).

Here’s a review of my first 24 hours with the Ubisurfer:

What I Like:

• Seems well built and sturdy
• Small but useable size (about as big as a paperback)
• Nice shiny black colour
• Re-charges fast and charge lasts a reasonable time (about 3 hours each)
• Keyboard size is functional and fairly easy to use
• Fast and stable connection to Internet using GPRS mode
• One of payment for “free” Internet

What I Don’t Like:

• Parts of the manual don’t relate well to the product (screenshots wrong etc)
• Not all the functions are explained in the manual
• Can’t set the clock display to correct time
• Battery monitor pretty rubbish, resulting in instant death if you’re not keeping an eye of the time
• It won’t open documents from my USB stick
• File Manager not intuitive, in fact clonky and difficult to locate docs
• Strange font choices, not sure how well they’ll translate when I open them in MS Word
• Although the WiFi Internet mode, gives better resolution, viewing and functionality, it’s was slow to find my home WiFi connection and won’t save a WiFi profile
• Based on the above, not convinced it would work well with Hotspot Wi-Fi

I’ve emailed Customer Support today with my list of issues and unbelievably their email address is wrong, so my email got bounced back as undelivered. Tech support need to work on their own system!

I’ve forwarded my email to the manufacturer of the product Datawind, so hopefully they’ll be able to help.

I’m sure these niggles are due to it being a first release and I hope they are able to iron out these bugs, at the moment it smacks of a product being released a few months too early.

I for one want it to work, as on the surface it seems to do everything I’d need from a tiny netbook.