Detour Water Night

Tonight was the last night of Detour. For the third year in a row, we ended with Water Night. Water slides, soapy slip-n-slides, sprinklers, squirt guns, etc. This year we had the addition of a fire engine, thanks to Michael Kelzer and Oldsmar Fire Rescue. He sprayed 2500 gallons of water on the kids. Well, kids and adults. I think between me and Julie, we caught at least 500 gallons. "Did you feel like a big rain cloud was following you all night?" He also sprayed the kids down with foam (baby shampoo).

No major issues. A couple girls that didn't meet the "no two piece suits or bikinis" rule. A couple bumped knees and heads, especially on the slip-n-slide. Someone apparently took the wrong shoes home and lost-n-found gained a half-dozen pairs of shoes, some towels, and some assorted clothing. A few families showed up not expecting Water Night, but we've been promoting it for weeks through almost every channel we had available. Even the little kids seemed to handle the night well. Lots of extra volunteers helped out, which made it run as smoothly as it's ever run.

Thanks to everyone involved. I really need to do at least one wrapup post for the year or the last two years, to review what did and didn't work as we tried different takes on children's ministry workshop rotations.

How Stuff Works: Flint and Steel

Somehow I added "look up how flint and steel actually creates sparks" to my todo list in the past year. Now I know. I knew the flint wasn't actually that important and other stones could do it (or a grinder.) It turns out that the only "magic" is breaking off small enough particles of iron. The iron rapidly oxidizes when air hits it. If the new particle is small enough, the heat from the oxidation is enough to ignite tinder. Chemistry at work.

(Photo by Merriwether, who's first camping trip with his kids is about how I think most of our vacations would go if we didn't live right next to Disney World.)

Felony charges for peanut allergy prank

A 13 year old student is being charged with a felony (wanton endangerment) after intentionally putting a crumbled peanut butter cookie into the lunchbox of another student with known peanut allergies.

Good. I hope that we see more criminal charges for kids that chase peanut allergic kids with peanut butter sandwiches. That's way beyond typical bullying or teasing. To a peanut allergic kid, it's just as dangerous as chasing them with a knife or gun.

Nalgene drops polycarbonate and adds stainless steel

Nalgene is phasing out their flagship polycarbonate bottles over the BPA concerns. They've got a new line of bottles made from Eastman Tritan, a newer plastic. It'll be interesting to see if this leads to all the knockoff polycarbonate bottles eventually disappearing from stores.

Nalgene also has a new website, Nalgene Choice, that helps people pick the material for their Nalgene brand bottle. What's cool is that they feature the Guyot Designs stainless steel bottle. It has a Nalgene brand label on it but it looks like they didn't acquire the company. Hopefully that means we'll start seeing Guyot's bottles in more stores.

Technocrati tags: nalgene bottles bottled water

How to listen to Overdrive audio books on the Palm Centro

I've finally been able to use Pocket Tunes my Sprint Palm Centro listen to free audio books from OverDrive, available through our local library's website. This was the hardest thing to set up on my Centro but I got it working and it makes a great audio book player. This same setup should be able to listen to any DRM-protected media that Pocket Tunes supports.

First you have to get the OverDrive player working on your PC, which can be a pain. I had it working on my desktop just 3 months ago but now the Windows Media Player DRM is broken again. I did have it working on my laptop though, so I used it.

You can't just use Windows Media Player to copy the audiobook files to the Centro's microSD card though, or Pocket Tunes won't get the media rights. The trick is to sync directly with your Centro while Pocket Tunes is running. Then the Centro appears to Windows as an MTP device, like any other Windows-happy media player.

But before you can do that, you will probably have to install a driver for PocketTunes/MTP on your computer. If you bought Pocket Tunes and installed it to your Palm, you might already have the driver installed, but the Sprint Centro comes with it already installed so you need to get the piece for your PC. The driver is inside the PocketTunes update install on their downloads page. You can go through the whole install, including synching with your Centro if you want to, or you can just install the driver on Windows by unzipping the install package, right-clicking on mtpptunespalmone.inf and picking "Install" from the menu. That will install the driver.

Now if you start Pocket Tunes on your Centro, then connect it to your PC with the sync cable, the Centro will appear in Windows as a portable media player. You can now use Windows Media Player to sync content to your Centro and the media rights should be transferred properly.

I tried to get the same thing working on my Verizon Treo 650 a few months ago, but never could. I assumed that Pocket Tunes needed a data connection to acquire the rights to play the media, but I don't think it does. At the time I didn't know about the trick of using Pocket Tunes as a MTP device and syncing with it that way. That probably would make it work. I need to go back and try it. Maybe I can even get it working on my old Zire 71.

The rewards for all of this work? Well, Pocket Tunes is a great media player for audio books. You can bookmark exact spots within the tracks. Being able to click and drag instead of fast forwarding through the track also helps. Another plus is that just like my Sansa Express player, the Centro with Pocket Tunes doesn't appear to realize that the media has expired. So instead of having to race to finish a whole book in just a week or constantly checking the same title out over and over, I've got plenty of time.

Technocrati tags: Sprint Centro Overdrive DRM