If you were lucky enough to get a Playstation 4 for your kids or have one bought for you this Christmas, you’re in for a treat! Console gaming is probably at a peak at the moment, in terms of value and the quality of games.

There is currently a sale online at the Playstation Store, with some real bargains. You can view that here but if you prefer physical copies of games (you can always trade them in later, which is a bonus), I’ve collated a few bargains below. I’ve included the Metacritic scores but if you’re in doubt, don’t forget most games have a demo you can download to try before you but. These are current as of the day of publication but I can’t vouch for how long they’ll stay at these prices!

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Dashcams are never far from being in the press, even if it is by association. Just google “crash for cash” and you’ll see how depressing prevalent this new cottage industry is. I’ve even heard from a friend of an instance he was involved in where a car reversed into him in traffic and then claimed he drove in to the back of him. All in the name of a whiplash claim.

This is where dashcams generally and in this instance, specifically the Philips ADR810, come in handy. They plug in to the lighter for battery and fix on to the windscreen to record a wide angled (think GoPro style) record of whats going on in front of your car. Anyone trying anything unfair will be captured on camera. Philips kindly sent me one to review and keep afterwards. If you’ve read my view on reviews, you’ll know as a hobby blogger I tend to be very picky on what I choose to review as my time is finite, so anything that I do tend to review is usually pretty good as I will have done my homework before saying yes.  View Full Post

A while ago I wrote a couple of posts about things you could do with Lego that defied the normal building convention. I didn’t anticipate at the time that there would be an important additional use that I’d be writing about from a rather closer to home point of view.

Earlier this year my friend Mat had a stroke. He’s only in his mid 30’s and although I don’t think he’d be cross if I said the only athelete he particularly resembled would be a mid 80’s era soviet female shot putter (especially now he has a beard), he is full of energy and enthusiasm and a genuinely nice bloke to hang out with and talk geek to.

Mat loves his comics, superhero movies and sci-fi. When I was invited to an advance screening of Ant-Man with Fifi, I managed to bag an extra ticket for Mat and he more fun than every single other person in that cinema.

Mat was sent home from the GP with symptoms that should have demanded immediate attention, and if you want to know more about what to look for, there is a great list of what to look for HERE. Mat spent a long time in hospital and even longer having physio. In fact he is only now beginning a phased reintroduction to work.

Mat had one of the classic stroke effects in that he lost the feeling and mobility/dexterity in his left arm. If you watch Andrew Marr on the television on a Sunday morning, you may notice that he picks up and moves his left arm around a lot, he has limited mobility in it after a massive stroke a few years ago.

Mat’s stroke wasn’t as severe as Marr’s but he had literally no feeling in his left arm in the immediate aftermath of his stroke and it’s only recently begun coming back. Imagine you’ve had the worst nights sleep ever and you’ve slept on your arm and got pins and needles. Imagine that goes on for months. It’s not pleasant is it?

A lot of Mat’s physio has been based around learning how to use his arm and hand again and building up the dexterity and strength in it. Lego is uniquely suited for this as it requires hand to eye coordination as well as concentration. I am on the Lego blogger panel and while our kids (and me) absolutely love building Lego, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help someone who genuinely needed it, so I contacted Lego and explained the situation and theraputic use of Lego. They kindly sent Mat a set to use in his recovery:

The photo is a bit wobbly; Mat has just had a stroke!

Mat is now back at work and although he’s not back to his old self, he is on the (long) road to recovery.

Cheers Lego, and well done Mat, it’s been a humbling experience seeing how well you’ve coped, I know I wouldn’t have been anywhere as brave as you!

I was half awake in the middle of the night the other day when I started down a train of thought that I haven’t had in many years. It was of course a big mistake.

Breathing.

Initially I as I sucked air in through my nose, I thought, “Eh.This isn’t right. My nose feels like it’s sucking air in and out but it’s just a passage.”

I then had a moments blind panic about how I actually breathe. I was so asleep I couldn’t remember how the mechanism works. As panic woke me up a bit I remembered something about the diaphragm and other muscles and I calmed down a bit.

I was properly awake now though and as I lay there, I decided to concentrate really hard and see if I could feel my intercostal muscles tensing and relaxing to enable me to breathe. Nope, all I could feel was the air whistling in and out of my nose.

I briefly panicked again.

What if my whole breathing mechanism was broken? What if my nose was the only thing keeping me alive by somehow sucking air in and out? As I tried to focus on where the breathing was happening, it seemed like the only part of me that was vaguely interested was my nose. Oh God, I’m going to die, I thought glumly.

Always one to share such thoughts I asked Claire if she was awake. “Mmmm?” was her emphatic reply. Undaunted, I continued. “You known when you think about breathing, but you can’t actually feel the muscles that are doing it? Weird isn’t it?” I tentatively asked.

Big mistake.

Five minutes later we were both lying there in bed, overthinking our breathing. Was I breathing too shallow now, hang on am I hyperventilating now? How long long should I hold a breath before I release it? Am I feeling light headed from oxygen deprivation or am I just tired?

Breathing is one of those things that you just do and it doesn’t work as well if you consciously think about what you’re doing.

Friday night was the inaugural plus one* instalment of the annual Vuelio Blog Awards. Once again I was one of the first to accept the invite when in landed in my inbox. I’m firmly of the belief that there is such a thing as a free lunch, or in this instance a free dinner, and I’m not shy about it.

As it turns out there was a task I had to carry out at the Awards but it was one I was super glad to carry out and indeed felt honoured to do. View Full Post

This time last year we were lucky enough to review the Anki Overdrive starter kit. If you’ve not heard of Anki Overdrive, it’s basically the technological evolution of the slot car racers you’d have had as a kid. Basically with Anki Overdrive, there are no slots, and the cars the star. The cars have all sorts of clever sensors in them and connect wireless to your phone/tablet/iPod. They can change lane, accelerate, and even “shoot” each other to temporarily disable other cars. It’s so much fun, and it is proper “all the family” fun too, as even our 4 year old can play it. View Full Post

While being part of Netflix’s Stream Team means we get to look at a whole load of brilliant kids stuff, Netflix obviously has so much more to offer than Voltron, Paw Patrol and Horrible Histories. Mind you, I often sit and watch the Horrible Histories stuff myself, it’s brilliant, so brilliant, we even bought Bill, the Shakespeare movie from the people behind the show. Fifi loves it so much, it’s on constant repeat and will undoubtedly confuse the hell out of her when she actually gets to do Shakespeare at school and finds out he didn’t have to dress up as a large vegetable of thwart the Spanish.

Anyway, I’ve digressed because I wanted to enter the adult area of Narcos. Narcos is a show that charts the rise and fall of a certain Pablo Escobar, the world’s most notorious drug lord and, considering that it’s based on real life events, presumably future series will continue the battle against the Colombian drug cartels. View Full Post

I saw this cartoon doing the rounds the other day and it made me chuckle. It speaks volumes about bloggers and craft activities. It reminded me though of something we discussed 20+ years ago in a sociology/media studies group at university, over the construction of reality. Heavy stuff huh?

Hyperreality/the hyper real is a notion in post modernism and semiotics (the study of how we make meaning) that has a number of different definitions but the one I’m going to plump for is

An inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.

The media has long built hyperreal interpretations of many things- if you hear a gun go off, it sounds flat and unimpressive, not as real as somebody firing a gun in a movie. Anecdotally when I was a student, a friend who was making a short film told me that they started with the sound effect for a pistol, moved up to a shotgun, then to a canon and finally on to a large artillery piece when they did the sound mixing on someone being shot. The actual sound of a gun wasn’t realistic enough. That’s bonkers. View Full Post