Recently on Instagram

Posted on May 20, 2012 by petercostello

I’ve been on instagram for a while now and while I’m not a power user or anything, I think it’s probably something I’m going to be using a whole lot more of. Not because of the facebook $1bn thing but rather, quite the opposite. It’s a great place to record and share all the little, throw away, sketches that I do with the lads without bombarding friends and family on facebook.

I guess it’s kind of “opt-in” social, if you want to follow, you kind of know what you’re going to get and if something makes sense to share elsewhere, I can do that too.

Anyway, this is the closest I could manage to finding out my user details but if you use other sites like followgram.me, you can see my pics there. Hope to see you round the traps.

Have fun
Pete

So, I kinda broke the site

Posted on May 18, 2012 by petercostello

I’ve been wanting to mess with the site for a while. It was all feeling a little bit too “template”, “designer”, “spared” and there was definitely too much Din going on. In short there wasn’t enough of a sense of fun that carried through the site. That said, I don’t want it to look all like “Hey, look at this crazy, fun site”. Not at all, the content should hopefully take care of that, but I do want it to feel like the kind of place where you’d expect to find that kind of content. Make Sense?

So… I just started hacking away at the live site and have, in effect, made a mess. So if you are one of the few people that actually visit the site, I apologise. Talk about making work for yourself! Note to other people like me, Don’t hack away at a live site, make a local install of wordpress or whatever. That way you won’t break everything.

Anyway… hopefully, I can get it cleaned up over the next couple of weeks, It’s mostly OK but it’s really broken on mobile and there’s some font problems going on and I don’t even know what it looks like in ie. But… When it does load, how hot is Populaire as a font!?

Anyway, Wish me luck.

Fun with Milk, Food dye and Dishwashing liquid

Posted on May 15, 2012 by petercostello

Our good friend Sam shared this post over at flutterflutter with us last week and after having a look at the photo’s, let alone reading the text we just had have a crack at it. We didn’t even wait till an appropriate time of the day, we smashed it out at breakfast. We were like, “Got milk for the cerial? Awesome, let’s do this!”

Anyway, The basic idea of this little art/science experiment is that the fat or oil in the milk reacts with the soap in the detergent and the food dye renders this whole process visible, the byproduct is that the food dye get all mixed up and makes super pretty / psychedelic colours. There’s a cool video over at elvie s to see it in action or alternatively grab the gear and see it for yourself because seriously, it takes minutes.

So… What’s involved in making this happen.

You’ll need some full-cream milk (not much), assorted food colouring, some dish liquid and a plate, preferably white so as not to distract from the colours.
Pour a thin layer of milk on the plate, use full-cream so that there is some fat in the milk for the detergent to react with.
Add in your food dye, we were fairly sparing with this and we also had a bit of fun swishing it around in the plate first. It’s worth mentioning that you’ll get better results if you start out with the lighter colours before you start throwing your blues and greens in willy nilly.
The awesome bit. Add in your detergent. We made up a mix of water and detergent and used an aspirator as a dropper. Drop some detergent on the colours and watch your kids faces. AWESOME!

Finally

When you’re done with the mixing, there’s still some fun to be had with the cleaning up. We used kitchen towel to clean up but what we did was to lay a sheet of paper towel over the top of the plate and then the boys would poke it down to touch the liquid. When the inks hit the absorbent paper, colour blossoms out into the paper, preserving your beautiful milk creation.

You can experiment with other liquids too, vegetable oil, water or whatever. Go Nuts!

So thankyou to Sam and flutterflutter for putting me on to this rad little idea.
Have Fun!

6 tips for long car trips with toddlers

Posted on April 13, 2012 by petercostello

We just returned from an Easter trip up the coast. This involved a car ride that is increasing in length each time we do it. This time we had potty stops in addition to play stops, food stops and petrol stops. In total we clocked a 13 and a half hour trip on the way home. This was in small part due to traffic as we approached Melbourne but largely due to having two kids running things from the back seat.

A thirteen hour trip with two kids was actually pretty fun and given that it is a full day of holiday, we might as well try and make it as much fun as we can. Below are a couple of tips for surviving enjoying a long trip with little ones

Embrace the kids music, it’s fun to sing along and happy trip is a short trip.(Sort of) You don’t have to like the wiggles or Yo Gabba Gabba or the like, you just have to not hate them. That said we have one particular CD that does not make it in to the car EVER!
A cool idea is to make a playlist or burn a CD that has a mix of both your types of music, or as our toddler calls it, “Both our shows”. That way you can introduce them to your favorite songs but they also get what’s familiar to them as well. Just make sure that “Your” songs are still kid friendly, we chose to leave the Dubstep and Gangsta tunes out of the mix.
Take a ball. Our little ones are old enough to run around and a ball is a rad toy for running them out of energy, at each stop, we try to run around as much as possible, they love it and it makes for a much happier trip post stop.
Don’t, repeat, do not give your kids a cup of milk before driving up a winding mountain road. Not sure how we’re going to get the smell of vomit out of the car from that one.
Eye spy is awesome! We’re still too young to use letters in the something that starts with “S” context but I spy something that’s green with lots of leaves is just as effective at keeping the little ones engaged.
We tried to answer questions as best we could. We’ve recently hit the “Why” stage and there were a lot of questions on the trip. It was actually really enjoyable trying to explain things in two year-old terms. And when it stops being enjoyable, change the subject. Chrissie Swann does this with a well placed, out of context word like “Sunshine”. I thought this was really sweet.

It turns out I really enjoy the car trip, it’s actually a great day of adventure and games, with a few little set-backs (but what day isn’t) and if it allows us as a family to spend time together and visit the Grandparents then even better.

Have Fun
Pete

Caine’s Arcade

Posted on April 11, 2012 by petercostello

I don’t normally like to straight up post other people’s content but this short film is just too freak’n rad not to share. The cynic in me immediately thought that this was an advertising piece, and it is. But… The creativity at the heart of it, a nine-year old boy making awesome things out of, you guessed it, cardboard just totally rocks my socks.

I’m hoping this isn’t a campaign for reddit (I don’t think it is) but even if it is, this is the kind of really nice socially responsible campaign that I’m down with. I think of the back of the whole thing they’ve raised like $40k for Caine’s college fund. Very cool. Nice work Cain, Nirvan and interconnected. Very, Very, Cool! Also, thanks to craftzine for sharing this in the first place.