Collection Control: 10 Tips to Tame Your Hoard
Remember, collecting should be fun. If it isn’t, you’re doing it wrong.
Continue Reading
Tag: How-To
Give the Gift of an Unforgettable Experience With IfOnly
IfOnly is a very special kind of online marketplace and the inspiration for GeekDad’s “Top 5 Geeky Experiential Gifts for the Holidays.”
Continue Reading
How Not to Install a Water Heater
Say your water heater leaks, and the home warranty company sends a plumber, who tells you the water heater needs to be replaced. Say that same plumber arrives the next day with a new water heater that has fewer BTU than the last one. Say you discover this while the water is being drained from the tank, and the pipes have been cut. Is it too late to tell the plumber to stop working? Or do you let him install a lower capacity tank?
Continue Reading
Best of GeekDad 2015: Our Most Popular Articles
As parents and geeks, we write about a wide variety of topics we hope you enjoy as much as we do. Some topics, however, are more popular than others. Here’s a list of several of our most popular GeekDad articles from 2015!
Continue Reading
Trading Card Games for the Rest of Us – Decks, Formats, and Strategies
The next installment of Trading Card Games for the Rest of Us is here! Join the author as he introduces strategies and rules for deck building.
Continue Reading
Learn to make a Pixel Painting
One of the many skills I’ve developed in my time as a creative geek is pixel painting, the art of painting video game sprites with acrylic paint on canvas. I recently started picking it up as a hobby again, and I thought I’d share some pointers on how to get started–in case anyone would like to paint their favorite old school video game character!
Continue Reading
Create Your Own Snap-Together Plastic Models
Last week I had the opportunity to conduct a camp titled Beginning Electronics and Robot Building (BERB) to a group of 21 kids, ages 8 to 12. It went great, and I’ll be holding the camp again for another group in late July. In addition to learning some basic electronics skills (such as soldering and breadboarding), the kids also got to build a full-fledged Arduino-based robot that they took home. It was a great week, and it also gave me an opportunity to introduce the kids to some other concepts and tools, including 3D printing.
Continue Reading
Get a Glimpse of Amazing Steampunk Style
I’ve got a number of steampunk-related artwork books on my shelves full of paintings, sketches, jewelry, sculptures, clothing, weapons, and goggles… lots of goggles. But most of them have a decidedly British or American style running behind the scenes, probably due to the fact that I’m an English speaker and tend to collect books that I can actually read and don’t require any translation. This means that I’m most assuredly missing out on a number of foreign books that focus on steampunk, and that’s a real shame.
Continue Reading
10 Sneaky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning
A little confession: I am not a morning person. In fact, I hate getting up before 9 a.m., and I’d probably sleep until 10 a.m. if I could. But sometimes you just have to get up.
Continue ReadingDon’t Be Bored, Be Unbored – Review and Giveaway
Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun is a wonderful collection of makes, activities, inspiration and knowledge beautifully presented and well worthy of a space in any GeekKid’s library. Leave a comment for a chance to win a copy.
Continue ReadingPinewood Derby Racing: A Great Parent/Child Project
This last weekend my neighbor and his son (age 7) invited my son, Decker (almost 5), to come and watch his Cub Scout Pinewood Derby race. If you’re not familiar with this event, the Cub Scouts host a race every …
Continue ReadingGood Techniques for Learning How to Draw Steampunk
My skills do not lean in the direction of drawing, and never have. I’ve taken a course here and there, trying my best to improve my sketches, but I’m honest enough with myself to admit I’ll never be producing the …
Continue ReadingLet’s Put on a Show!
I was hanging out with my nephews over the weekend. Jack and Henry are aged 8 and 4 respectively. A couple years back, Jack took tap dancing lessons. When he outgrew his shoes, and became a wee bit self-conscious about being …
Continue ReadingThe 6 Demandments of Train Track Design (With Sweet Plans!)
Stretched before you is a 32″x48″ tabla rasa and a drawer of track pieces. The stakes are high. Success means hours of independent, uninterrupted, creative playtime, eventually resulting in your child’s acceptance to MIT. Failure to build is the surest …
Continue ReadingWho Needs “Moo?” – Five Exotic Animal Noises to Share With Your Kids
Bored with moo, baaa, and oink? Here are some slightly more *exotic* noises guaranteed to thrill the playground and/or terrify your child into immediate behavioral correction. Some practice required.
Continue ReadingBooks for Dads: Handy Dad vs. Man Skills
Hopefully by now you’ve already got something planned for Father’s Day and you’re not still scrambling for ideas. (We’ve had our Gift Guides #1 and #2 in case you need to refer to those again.) But just in case you …
Continue ReadingKotaku Editor on How to Raise a Nerd
Editor and self-proclaimed nerd Brian Ashcraft of the very fine video game blog Kotaku explains why he gave his son a Tezuka-inspired name: “To fulfill his destiny as a nerd. Let’s be honest. I am a nerd. Perhaps, you are …
Continue Reading10 Steps to an Awesomely Geeky Kids Birthday Party
Birthday season is upon us here. Seven weekends in a row we have parties to attend, with our little girl’s right in the middle. At the end of last year, around the time that Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox came …
Continue ReadingHow to Have a Game Night: Part One
So, maybe you read my post geeking out about board games and you’re thinking, I want to give that a try, but where do I start? Well, you’re in luck! This is the first in a series of posts about …
Continue ReadingHow to Make Your Very Own Superhero ABC Book
It all started as a simple car ride. Vowing to never have to hear my kids say, “Are we there yet?”, I always do my best to keep them entertained in the car. (Okay, fine. The DVD player helps a …
Continue ReadingA GeekSon’s Guide to Sharing Facebook With Your Kids
My Mother – Happy Mothers day, Mom! – recently dipped her toe into Facebook. It seems some of her old high school friends had discovered the service, and coerced her into joining. After making her profile, her first action was, …
Continue Reading10 Geeky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning
A little confession: I am not a morning person. In fact, I hate getting up before 9 a.m., and I’d probably sleep until 10 a.m. if I could. I’m not sure whether it was too many late nights during college, or if I’m a night owl by nature, but it’s far too often “late to […]
Continue ReadingIs Your Family Ready For An Emergency or Natural Disaster?
As recent winter storms here in Ontario have once again illustrated, it’s always a good idea to be prepared for an emergency. We’re big on this concept at Wired, having put out a few emergency guides like How To Survive a Power Blackout and The Smarter Emergency Kit. But, I figure the US Department of […]
Continue ReadingTwin Cities Makers Find a Home?
Seeking to fill a perceived need for an adult hackerspace in the Twin Cities area, a guy named Paul Sobczak has created Twin Cities Maker, a forum to discuss founding such a space. Twin Cities Maker was created to spark the discussion about creating a maker shop in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area in Minnesota A […]
Continue ReadingBehind the Scenes at the Premiere of Make:television
MAKE:television invited GeekDad to their premiere event in Minnesota this week. GeekDad John and I played with some of the projects they built on the air, met the host, John Park and got a preview of the series. It was a fun evening and a fitting start to a great program. MAKE, the magazine, is […]
Continue Reading5 Simple Ways to Stretch Your Gaming Dollar
Image by Simon Davison via FlickrBeing a geek is both time-consuming and expensive, and being a gamer-geek even more so. Sadly, with our economy in perpetual shambles, the latter seems to have become an even more difficult issue than the former. So how’s a gamer supposed to afford new titles as well as incidentals like, […]
Continue ReadingYour Costume Automatically Loses
I’m not one to talk; if I make a costume at all this year, it’s likely to be something that’s geek simple, like MC Frontalot. Still, I think everyone can agree that this AT-ST costume by Cheston wins the geek costume contest hands, or at least articulated legs, down: Design and construction are described in […]
Continue ReadingGeeks Getting Off the Grid
So you think it’s hard being a parent in today’s society? Try having a newborn in a one-room house you built out of mud and rocks! Actually, my brother-in-law Abe and his wife Josie, are doing just that, and he tells me that little Leo fits quite nicely into their off-the-grid lifestyle. And they’re happy […]
Continue ReadingMaking a Pirate’s Treasure Map
You’ve got the eye-patch. You’ve got the peg-leg. You’ve got your sword. You’ve got a Jolly Roger ready for hoisting. Your voice is hoarse from talking like a pirate all day yesterday, but you don’t have a treasure map…What do you do? Make one. It’s what we did on a rainy Saturday morning. And you […]
Continue ReadingHow to Build a Paper Cup Waterwheel
I live in an area — near the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers in upstate New York — that was once booming with water-driven industry. Today hydroelectricity is still an important source of energy. In fact, in place …
Continue Reading