Bingo Game for a Dollar?

July 16th, 2011

Today, I stumbled upon a Bingo Game for $1 at a dollar store. Wow. You can’t buy much for a dollar… so I bought one, hoping for a few laughs.

And I get some.

Here’s a picture of the front of the box.  This box is packaged with a little ~5 inch tall plastic bingo cage roller under clear plastic packaging.

 

Here’s a picture of the assembled game. Dear Daniel kitten not included – he is borrowed from my sister!

 

A few minutes after opening the package I realized that this wasn’t standard American style bingo. Here are a few of the deviations:

  • There are only 72 balls, not the normal 75 –  LOL, the box says there are 62 balls, I had to count to discover that there are 72.
  • The 8 reusable bingo cards with fold down flaps have 24 randomly selected numbers; however, on the card, the numbers are sorted from lowest to highest.
  • Numbers do not have a specified column. On one card, 19 is in the first column, on another card, 19 is in the second column.  In theory, 19 could end up even further down the card, but that would be unlikely.

Since these are non-standard numbers, you won’t be able to use standard bingo cards. So, you’re normally limited to the 8 cards that you’ve been provided.  However, using our custom bingo card generator, I have made a workaround.

Click here for numeric bingo cards that use the numbers 1-72 with 14 numbers in each column – with the exception of “O” which has 14 numbers – http://print-bingo.com/card-design/fsqbci.

You can print enough for a small party.  Do NOT mix the original cards with cards generated on print-bingo.com.  The ones from our website generally follow the American format bingo card scheme.  I.e. numbers within a column are randomly sorted and are assigned to a column.

All things considered, it’s a pretty good value for $1, but it’s unfortunate that it’s not quite standard bingo.

PS, the roller doesn’t stay on the mount very well on the arm side. A well placed twist tie holds things together a lot better. Also, a sticker on the back of the  bingo game box says that this game  is either manufactured or  imported by Mountains China Co. Ltd.

 

Update: I glanced inside the cage after initially publishing this post and I realized that there were numbers past 62 in there! So, I had to count, and the box is wrong. There were 72 balls in my kit. It’s still non-standard! The custom design above has been revised.

This blog moved. No moving trucks required.

June 24th, 2011

The Perceptus Back Story blog was down for an hour or so yesterday while we migrated it from one virtual private server to another.

The reason for the move? It’s about time we install a few WordPress plugins that we’ve had our eye on.  We know that commenting on this blog is awkward – you have to register.  We’ll be playing around with 3rd party logins for commenting.  It might even happen today.

Plus, the old server is destined to be rebuilt sometime in the hazy future – the software on it is nearing it’s end of life.

You can now “+1” print-bingo.com

June 20th, 2011

We’ve recently added Google’s new “+1” button to print-bingo.com.

We encourage you to try it. We suspect that it will help other users find custom bingo card generating website over time.  Then again, who really knows what Google’s plan with the +1 really are?  And… couldn’t they come up with something less gramatically awkward than +1?

Minimizing Data and Voice Costs when Travelling to Europe

June 18th, 2011

I’ve recently returned to Vancouver after a trip to Europe – a couple days in Barcelona and a Western Mediterranean cruise on the Carnival Magic.

I try to avoid using Fido’s atrociously priced international roaming for voice and data.

Here’s a rough overview of the system that I’ve pieced together:

  • I carried my iPhone with me and left it on. Technically, I was roaming, but I had no intention of receiving or making phone calls except in emergencies.
  • Data roaming on the cellphone was also off.  I considered buying the roaming data package, but $50 for 10MB of data seemed a bit steep. In hindsight, it’s not a horrific rate if I could somehow make sure only email was being downloaded.
  • Before leaving, I unconditionally forwarded all voice calls to voice mail.  With some cell providers, if you are roaming and you choose not to answer a phone call, the call will route back to your cellphone provider and you are charged roaming rates while someone leaves you a voice mail. I don’t think this currently applies to Fido; however, I wasn’t about to take the chance. Besides, I didn’t want my phone ringing during the middle of the night (I was, after all, in European time zones).
  • I instructed people to text message me if there was anything critical.
  • I have rules in my mailbox to forward emails that are critical (like our web servers being offline) to Fido’s email to SMS address, e.g. 604nnnnnnn@fido.ca.  These are actually active rules at all times, not just when I’m travelling.
  • Of course, the normal voice mail SMS notifications would get sent to me too.
  • With my cellphone on and technically roaming, I would receive the most important messages.  Receiving text messages while roaming is supposed to be free on Fido. I haven’t checked my invoice yet, but I’ve done this successfully for previous trips.
  • Interestingly, modern cruise ships have satellite based cellphone service, so even in the middle of nowhere, I could receive these text messages.
  • Internet access on board the ship is a pricey $0.75 per minute.  This was OK for briefly viewing email, but I wasn’t too comfortable using this too often.
  • On dry land, if I had some time to spare, I would look for WiFi.  At some ports, I stumbled upon Internet cafes.  But, much more common in Europe, as opposed to China, is a WiFi enabled coffee shop. With WiFi, I could download  email for offline review.  Internet cafe pricing was less than a few dollars per hour, which compared to the on-ship pricing, is roughly equivalent to free.
  • For voice calls, on the iPhone I used the 3CXPhone VOIP App with a Voip.ms account to make ridiculously cheap phone calls. I set these up prior to travel. Even while in Vancouver, this combination is useful for making cheap long distance calls on an iPhone while on WiFi – in theory, I can make VOIP calls on 3G; however, it hasn’t worked too well in my limited testing.  There’s either too much lag or too little bandwidth.

All in all, for me, the iPhone was a great tool to have when travelling, even if you don’t plan on paying for pricey roaming voice or data.  This obviously only works if you have similar needs to me – I didn’t really want to be connected, but I did want to know of anything critical.

Also useful for the iPhone was the CityMaps2Go App which had offline maps for nearly every city that I was in – perhaps I’ll post about that separately some day.  Evernote and Dropbox were also useful, but make sure that you use the flagging features to make the files and notes that you need available offline!

SPAM Registrations to a Blog?

May 25th, 2011

This blog started getting hundreds of automated new user registrations per day, starting a few days ago.  I’m not entirely sure what the point of that would be, nor, do I have any idea why now, after several years of this blogs existence, these are showing up now.

Anyway, skipping to the point of this post: If a spammer used your email address to create an account on this blog, we’re sorry.  No one at Perceptus had anything to do with it.

We’re playing around with the well reviewed SABRE plugin for WordPress to try and stop this annoyance.  Fingers crossed.