Monday, November 05, 2012

Review: The Beginner's Bible

Title: The Beginner's Bible
Publisher: Zondervan

How often does your iPad find it's way into the hands of your children? It's definitely a bonus to keep a collection of educational and entertaining apps for your children. I know mine has saved me many times. The doctor's office, dentist, church, the list goes on... Zondervan's latest Beginner's bible is a great collection of bible activities and stories designed to entertain, educate and edify your children. Once you open the app, kids will have the opportunity to choose to read (or be read to) or play. Clicking on the read icon opens a colourful bookshelf with 6 included bible stories. The stories included are; The Beginning, Adam & Eve, The Sneaky Snake, Noah's Ark, The Tall Tower and A New Home. You'll also have the opportunity to purchase story packs that include new stories, colouring pages, puzzles and bonus activities.

The stories are a great opportunity for new readers to follow along with the narrated voice. The words are displayed on the left of the page while an interactive picture appears on the right. Kids can choose to have the story read to them or read it for themselves. Touching on the picture as the story progresses triggers little animations and sounds that can also be turned off (for times where being quiet is important).

The Play button opens a similar bookshelf with colouring pages and simple puzzles. Kids can colour the pages and the finished product can be saved to your picture roll or emailed to a relative or friend. 

Overall, the app is well designed and the pictures are colourful and kid friendly. Although I am not a fan of apps that rely on a lot of in-app purchases, this one seems to give lots of content for a relatively low price and any time spent listening and learning about the bible is less time spent playing Angry Birds or Cut The Rope! Check out the Beginner's Bible app by Zondervan on the App store for iPad and iPhone! It's a great opportunity to introduce kids to interactive, bible based learning.

Jeff McCann

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Fix for Windows XP Fresh Install Stop Error Code 0X0000007B (0XF898F524,0XC0000034,0X00000000,OX00000000) on a Dell E520

Recently, I have been having some issues with some old machines I had lying around the house. Since I have started into cutting vinyl decals on an older Roland CJ-60, it's made it necessary to have an older PC around running Windows XP. My Dell Dimension E520 fit the part perfectly, except that no matter how hard I tried, I could not install a fresh copy of Windows XP on it. 

Nothing worked.

I tried everything from using different XP install discs, scanning the hard drive for errors, fdisk, erase and refresh the master boot record (MBR), swapped cables (it uses SATA DVD and hard drives) and I even installed Ubuntu on it to prove (mostly to myself) that both the DVD and Hard drive were fine and the issue was either a stubborn virus or a very tricky intermittent hardware issue that was playing games with me.

Each time I tried to install Windows XP, the same thing would happen. It would boot up, I'd push F12 for the boot menu, choose to boot from the DVD drive and Windows XP installation would begin, it would load the drivers and just before it would begin to install files, it would give me a stop error.

After days of running tests, trying things, talking to friends, I came across the solution.

Dell built this particular system and set it from the factory in RAID configuration. This setting is found under the drive listings in the bios (hit F2 when you see the Dell Logo to get into the BIOS settings). For whatever reason, changing the setting from RAID to AUTO clears up this issue. My only question, is why would Dell ship a system that defaulted to RAID if it would only cause problems?

My hope is that anyone else with this issue will find this article and benefit from it!

If you read this, and it solves a problem for you, let me know in the comments!

Jeff.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

New Link for Cueator 3.0 Pro

Since this is the second most read post on my blog, I have provided a new link for Cueator Pro. It is now privately hosted.

Here's a link to the updated post. http://thehopelessgeek.blogspot.ca/2006/05/cueator-30-genius.html

Enjoy!