The Gamer With Kids

How would you guys like to know about an easy way to get free paid apps that works? I’m not talking about cheap little freebie apps that you will only play a couple times but real apps that you actually want. I discovered this website called FreeMyApps.com. What it is is a site where you try out apps that they list and get credits for trying them out. After you’ve accumulated enough credits, you can trade those in for popular paid apps like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and Bejeweled.

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This is actually going to be a very simple tutorial. It only takes a few steps to complete the process and it’s much faster than trying to update your iOS device using iTunes. The OTA (over the air) update files are much smaller so you’ll be saving a lot of time.

First of all, your iOS device is not going to tell you there is an update. You soft of just need to know there is one, like right now. As I’m writing this, there is a new update, iOS 5.0.1 out and it’s the first to make use of OTA updates. As opposed to the 700mb+ file you’d need to download from iTunes, this one was only about 45mb.

To reach the settings for OTA software update, just head to your Settings App > General Tab > Software Updates. From there, press the Software Update button where it’ll verify if you have an update of not available. If you do, your device will download the update for you and then install it. (With your permission of course). That’s it. Done.

The whole process for me only tool about 10 minutes as times will vary depending on the speed of your internet connection. Enjoy your new update!

I believe this was only offered in Canada before, but now Netflix offers it’s US subscribers a way of managing their video quality settings. This is especially useful to those who currently have data caps with their internet service provider. You can reach these settings from your account page here. There are three different options to choose from depending on your needs.

[via Engadget via Netflix]

This is an older video that our very own Nikki aka FullMetalPiglet put up some time ago on her Youtube channel. I figure I’d post it up here today since this is the year of Sonic’s 20th anniversary. It only seemed appropriate that this tutorial on how to make your very own Sonic the Hedgehog be re-featured here on our site. Again, Nikki does a fantastic job talking you through the steps while visually showing you how to make everything. Hope you guys enjoy this as much as I did. I really need to get cracking on making my own one of these days.

[via GoldenJellyBean]

Last time, I showed the process for making a Mario Sackboy doll. Thus, to be void of favoritism, it’s only appropriate I make his brother as well. Poor Luigi, so often looked upon as inferior to Mario. In spite of having the courage of the cowardly lion from Wizard of Oz, he happens to be my favorite of the two. He shows up for every adventure to fight alongside Mario, but is never credited for his efforts. Still, he works tirelessly to help Mario rescue his leading lady. So to celebrate Luigi for a change, I bring you his sackboy counterpart. Hmmm, come to think of it, Baby Luigi was equally adorable…… perhaps he will be my next project. “Wahhhhhhh.” Hope everyone enjoys the tutorial!

Since this is my first ever post for The Gamer With Kids, I suppose an introduction is in order. I’m a Filipino girl with three favorite hobbies to pass time: reading, playing video games and watching movies. As this is a gaming website, I’ll focus on video games and consider the other two inconsequential. My gaming “history”, so to speak, is not very rich. I only started a year or two ago, but that does not deter me from playing the classics (well classics of my generation). Although I can play Halo 3 and Bioshock for hours on end, my first love remains in RPGs. Namely Final Fantasy X and XII, two of the finest games for the PS2, but then again, that console had so many (GTA, Tony Hawk, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus….. the list goes on). In my spare time, I took up doll making. It started with a simple Totoro (the lovable forest spirit in My Neighbor Totoro). After creating all three from the movie, I kinda wanted to branch out. The result: a merger of video games and yarn dolls. I have made Sackboy interpretations of Ezio (Assassin’s Creed), Kratos (God of War) and even Mario…… oh yes Mario (such an unholy union between Sony and Nintendo). Video tutorials on how to make the dolls can be found on my YouTube channel (Goldenjellybean) and the patterns on pigcorner.com. With these two sources, I hope to teach others how to crochet these dolls and maybe even inspire them to come up with creations themselves.

This week is the Mario Sackboy tutorial. He comes fully equipped with the blue suspenders and famous letter ‘M’ cap.

Editor’s Note: I am very happy and blessed to have Nikki’s famous Sackboy puppet tutorials on the site. If you’ve seen some of her work before on her blog or Youtube page, then you know how awesome her work is. Since I’m assuming most of our readers have children, this could be a wonderful project to do with them and a great bonding experience as you both learn to make your very own sack puppets. I hope you enjoy this new addition to The Gamer With Kids as we’ll have more from her in the future.

Recently, my wife lost her iPod Touch and we have still yet to recover it. The only light of hope rests with the fact that I had enabled the “Find My iPhone” feature on the device. Even though it’s an iPod Touch, you can still enable the feature to provide some useful functions in case you lose it. This tutorial will show you how to enable it on both your iPhone and iPod Touch running iOS 4.2 and higher. The only difference is that because the iPod Touch only transmits data when on a WiFi network, the “Find My iPhone” features will only activate if the lost or stolen device has access to WiFi.

Step 1

Make sure your iPhone is running iOS 4.2. If you’re creating a free account for the first time, you need an iPhone 4 or iPod Touch Gen 4.

Step 2

Tap the Settings icon and choose Mail, Contacts, Calendars.

Step 3

Tap the Add Account button and select MobileMe.

Step 4

Enter your Apple ID and password.

• If you have an iTunes Store account or have ordered from the Apple Online Store, you already have an Apple ID.
• If you don’t have an Apple ID, tap Create Free Apple ID and follow the onscreen instructions.
• If you’re already a MobileMe subscriber, enter your me.com or mac.com email address and password.

Step 5

Verify your account.

If your MobileMe account says “Not Verified,” check your email inbox for a message from Apple. Click Verify Now and sign in with your Apple ID.

If you don’t see a verification email in your inbox, select your MobileMe account and tap Resend Verification Email.

Step 6

Return to the MobileMe screen and switch on Find My iPhone.

When the Find My iPhone message appears, tap Allow.

That’s it. Now you can track you iPhone 4 where ever it is by logging into MobileMe.com. It will find the exact location of your device thanks to the GPS chip in your device. From the MobileMe site, you will also be able to remotely lock your device, send a message and alert, and remotely wipe your device as a last resort. Since the iPhone 4 has 3G data signal, it’s a bit easier track, although not guaranteed you’ll get it back.

As for the iPod Touch, this is a bit more tricky. Find My iPhone can only find it if its connected to a WiFi hotspot. That means that if you lost it and whoever found it never connects it to WiFi, you’ll basically never find it. This is what is happening with us as my wife’s lost device has yet to be connected to WiFi. I have set an automatic lock and message on it just in case the person who found it ever connects. Until then, it’s a waiting game but one that we think we’ve already lost.

Still, even though the Find My iPhone feature isn’t 100% guaranteed, it’s still an added security measure that is free and worth activating as there is always that slim chance that you’ll find it. If anything, at least you’ll be able to lock down the device or remote wipe it so that all your personal data gets erased.

For a more detailed description of the steps needed to activate Find my iPhone, visit Apple’s site here with detailed images included. I recommend that everyone who buys an iPhone 4 or iPod Touch Gen 4 enable this function the day they get their device.

[via Apple]

Being a parent and having a son who loves playing games on my iPhone, the first thing I made sure to do was disable In-App Purchases. I don’t know how many times I’ve read stories about this on the internet about a parent whose child has racked up some insane amount of money on their bill because they had purchases items within the app.

Granted, it’s not really a feature they they tell you about when you first purchase your device, however most users who have played with their devices long enough know about this it.

Basically, by disabling In-App Purchases, you are doing just that. You are making it impossible for any user on your phone to make purchases when within an app. I do this because many of the apps I download to review include In-App purchasing options and the last thing I need is my child accidentally making a ton of purchases. It’s a feature that is very simple to enable and it’s also password protected so only you can re-enable it.

Settings Icon > General > Restrictions > Allowed Content

Just click the Settings Icon and hit the General section. From there look for Restrictions and enable it. It will ask you for a password. Here, you can enable restrictions on a number of different features. You want to look for the Allowed Content Section and click “off” on In-App Purchases. Simple.

If you want to take restrictions a bit further, you can also disable installing of apps, deleting of apps, app ratings, and Game Center privacy settings. If you have children who sometimes use your iOS devices without supervision, I highly suggest enabling these restrictions.

Many of you probably received Nintendo Wii’s this holiday season and also probably picked up a few extra controllers too. One of the most frequently asked questions is how do you sync your remotes to work with your new Wii?. It can be quite frustrating getting the sync to work, but it’s actually a surprisingly easy thing to set up once you know how to do it.

Step 1 – Turn on your Nintendo Wii console.

Step 2 – Remove the battery cover on your Wii remote. Make sure you have new batteries installed.

Step 3 – Press the red sync button on the controller. The 4 main player lights will blink blue continuously.

Step 4 – On your Wii console, open the SD Card slot door. You’ll see another red sync button there. Press it. (Only press once. Do not need to hold down the button.)

Step 5 – After a few seconds, the remote should stop blinking and now only show 1 light indicating the player number on the remote.

Step 5 – Repeat for other remotes you want to sync.

Google just made my life much simpler. I’m not sure how new this feature is but I only just noticed it last night while trying to organize my Gmail inbox. You see, I have thousands of emails in one of my Gmail accounts that I never bothered to archive or mark as read. It’s my junk account that I use for stuff like newsletters, signing up for websites, promotions, etc. and I rarely organize it because of how much mail I get in it on a given day.

Last night while selecting all emails on the page to mark as read, I noticed a new option that popped up that you can see in the image above. The new option is to “select all XXX conversations in inbox.” What this does is allow you to select every single email in your inbox regardless of what page it’s on. You used to have to go through each page individually before and it was a pain especially if you had thousands of emails in there. I promptly clicked it and archived everything instantly making my inbox clean and organized. That saved me what used to take me maybe an hour of cleaning. Thanks Google!

Please note however that this only seems to work so far on the main Gmail site. If you have email through Google Apps, the feature is not available there yet which is a bummer but hopefully Google will add that feature soon to Google Apps.

UPDATE – It seems that the option is now available for Google Apps customers too. I just tried it with my account and it now works. Time to organize my emails.

Today I wanted to back up my photos from my iPhone onto my Macbook. On a PC, usually you would just plus in the iPhone and it will show up under “Scanners and Cameras.” From here you can usually just click on you iPhone and browse the entire camera roll and transfer them to your computer. On a Mac however, it’s not so straight forward.

Method 1: The easiest way to transfer photos is with iPhoto where it will allow you to browse the device and transfer the photos automatically into the iPhoto album. Now, this is where it gets confusing for some. If you point Finder to the pictures folder on your drive, you’ll only see a file labeled iPhoto Library. Clicking on it will only just open iPhoto up again. If you are new to a Mac, this might be frustrating to you as you will not know how to get to your photos outside of iPhoto.What you would do to see your images in Finder is the following:

• Step 1: Right click on the iPhoto Library file, and click “Show Package Contents.”
• Step 2: Click on the folder labeled “Originals” and all your photos should be in there to view outside of iPhoto.

The one thing you want to watch out for is to not organize your photos with this method. I hear that it will do terrible things to your iPhoto database and really screw it up. If you do need to organize your photos, do it from within iPhoto. This method here is really if you want to copy those folders and back them up to an external drive or something.

Method 2: Method 1 is not really too hard but it can be confusing if you didn’t know about the “Show Package Contents” option. There is a simpler way if all you want to do is transfer your photos into a folder so you can back them up on an external drive or optical media directly.

• Step 1: Open up your Applications folder and find “Image Capture” app. If you have your iPhone plugged in, it will automatically detect it.
• Step 2: In the “Download To” menu, select a new folder where you would like the images to be downloaded to.
• Step 3: Click “Download All.”

In method 2, you completely bypass iPhoto. I don’t use iPhoto at all so I prefer this method as I like organizing my own folders and I usually back them up to an external hard drive instead of leaving them on my Macbook. If you do use iPhoto, method 1 would be your best option.

I hope this helped some of you as this was something I had to figure out on my own after moving from a PC to a Mac.

Welcome to our first of many tutorials here on The Gamer With Kids. Since it’s the holiday season, many of you may receive iTunes gift cards or codes and not know what to do with them or how to redeem them. We put this handy tutorial together for you on how to redeem codes in the App Store on your iOS device. Redeeming codes within iTunes on your iOS device is pretty much the same way except that instead of the “Features” tab, you would go into the “Music” tab within iTunes on your device. Click the read more link for the full tutorial.

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