Lego designer software

(free – not open source)

I was a huge fan of lego as a kid, theres been a surge in interest in old kids toys recently, there are now Star Wars, Harry Potter and other variations of Lego sets now, but the town, space and technical are still ever popular.

Where as the media got awfully excited by the return to the cinema of Transformers, a toy that can convert into two things, us Lego fans quietly enjoy having infinitely more variation in our little coloured bricks.

There has been several Lego designer programs for computers now, none I have tried until now, giving the new version 2 software which has been out since March 2007 I thought I would give it a try.

Quite often looking at buildings that have mainly linear angles and regular sharp edges (curves tend to be tricky!) I have often thought how some every day structures could easily be produced in Lego.

Using non-physical pieces has a few advantages. You can clone a piece or a group of pieces, which means building certain elements of a design in sub-assemblies and duplicating them a good idea. You can change the colour of pieces on the fly too a

The business model for this application for Lego is of course you can have your model (at quite considerable price unfortunately) ordered online and they send you the pieces and you can make in real life, you can also amazing make your own instruction leaflets as the application can make the how to guide (in traditional Lego pictorial diagrams with few or no words, meaning easy to be used by anyone without any language barriers.) to be saved in HTML format.

Some commercial models you can buy in the shops are some of the winning models made by the Lego digital designer community, probably saving them quite a few bob in their R&D budget. Some of the examples on the web site are very very good, although cost around £100-200 when you load them up and it shows you the total cost of the components.

Sadly this app is not without its flaws, it took me a while to get used to the user interface you definitely need to check out the documentation to get anywhere, with a complex model with a few hundred pieces it starts to get horribly slow to rotate around. I build a small block (4 storeys) of flats, and built the 3 middle sections and the ground floor in sub assemblies and attached them altogether and thats when it starts to struggle. Im running a XP based PC with P4 3.0 processor, 2gb of ram, and a not so special Geforce 128Mb 5200 graphics card, but my guess I dont think a super duper card would be that much better. Picking and placing pieces in tight spots can be fiddly and awkward. Disappointingly is a desperately small number of mini figs and some quite common generic pieces were absent.

I havent bought anything yet, it would be interesting to see how Lego handle ordered complex designs if their could be any issues with certain pieces out of stock.

Its well worth a play, its certainly a quite a capable 3D CAD application and you can avoid trending on the sharp bits without your shoes and socks on.

youve seen the fairly pointless ads showing two comedians representing a PC and a Mac, and you must of heard of the Men from Mars, Women are from Venus books right? Something else similar I read a long time ago.

PCs are dogs.

They come in hundreds of breeds, shapes and sizes, mainly crossbreeds, can be unpredictable, they can carry parasites and arent always very clean, they require a fair bit of cleaning up after them and maintenance.

Macs are like cats.

Generally quiet, sleek and clean looking, they are quite independent, they are have a strong loyalty from their owners who often say they wouldn’t been seen dead with some other pet. They can have parasites occasionally but their owners are to prude to consider this something that could actually happen.

Crikey – half a year has gone by and I havent written anything,

The news today says the Vatican is looking to see if there is life on Mars.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7399661.stm

When I was a kid I thought it would good to find out if there is life out there, there was the hugely exciting Roswell tapes in the 90s which were deemed to be a fraud after all.

My thinking recently was God would of told us if he made another set of people somewhere else, and there is nothing out there. There is far more exciting tangible stuff that scientists can study like new breeds of animals and plants, like that Squid type creature which has the largest eyes of any animal known to man.

Whilst we are on the subject, I really dont get Catholicism, my relationship with God is with Jesus and I have great interest in Israel because of the origins of the bible and plans outlined for Christ’s return in Revelation, but the Vatican is a strange phenomena as its base for the Pope, an also strange man made tradition of needing to have overall representative of your faith who gets to have his own custom spec car to stand up in. Having his own very small country enclaved in Italy, and it seems Catholics often seem to have more of a emphasis on Christ’s mother Mary, seems rather close to what the bible calls idolatry? To me its a bit like going to a football match because you are a fan of the linesman.

I am sure the Pope is good chap and means well and promotes good Christian causes, and I wouldn’t mind meeting and chatting to him, its not really a good representation of what Jesus’s plan for us, so cant say its something I would encourage.

Hope I am not offending anyone is a catholic but I do tend to speak my mind a bit sometimes, and would consider anyone reading this who is in to this stuff, to pray and ask God what is the correct priorities and focus on being a Christian.

ok Christmas is over, we just have to deal with lack of money, illnesses and the chill of the weather that comes after it.

I get annoyed at people (often some other Christians) who moan that Christmas is commercialised and we should boycot it or something, often, “oh I think Jesus was born in July or something so Im going to sulk in the corner and ignore it”

I think Christmas is whatever you make it, as a Christian myself I do think its hyped up, you are forced to spend money and forget the real ocassion itself the birth of Jesus.

The company I work for is based in a non-Western country and therefore doesnt celebrate Christmas, but often some of the people mention a casual greeting.

What Im trying to say is you can be a sucker and do whatever people on the television tell you to do, or you can celebrate Christmas in a way that I think Christ himself would approve of.

Christmas cards – sometimes we just send out dozens out indiscriminately to anyone with a generic message in them, instead write an encouraging message to someone whose helped you this year, someone you have only just got to know, you know nothing smalshy just encouraging and genuine.

Go shopping in a market – a traditional market often has different and imaginative things to make getting gifts for people more interesting, if you are buying food from a farmers markets, the goods may often be sometimes cheaper than the supermarkets, and you are getting something made locally and helping your local economy

Midnight mass – visit an old style church service, great, especially if its different from your normal church, often they are not to long, and singing carols and a couple of beers before hand in a pub across the road with a few friends is always good.

Cooking for other people – why not use the season, or after Christmas to do entertaining?

I was watching a brief glimpse of a 70s movie Smokey and the Bandit the other day, one of the amusing things about 1970s American rural towns is everyone has a CB radio in their car.  Its kind of like internet chat before the internet.  In cars.

People have a nickname and get lost in an imaginary world, but there is a kind of slightly rebelious community spirit, ie: warning other drivers theres a hidden police speedtrap ahead.

I wonder what happen if this was to happen in the 20×0’s on my commute to work, seeing I often see the same vehicles regulary.

(this is using some kind of hands free radio microphone and a small computer on the dash that tells you who is talking :o)

<bob in green focus> morning everybody.

<photocopierrepairmandave> morning mate.

<xx white van lady xx> hello cutie

<the_red_french_tractor>  (me)  hmm no snow then as predicted on the news, oh well, no accidents then :o)

<chav in a 1.2 corsa> does anyone like my new lexus rear lights?

<bob in green focus> no, they look stupid, did you get plenty of Halfords gift vouchers for Christmas to get tat for your car?

<xx white van lady xx> why thankyou Graham for being the first courteous BMW driver I have seen in a while

<Grahams blue 99 3 series> thats ok, woohoo I should reach my sales target this month!!

…and so on

Saw this fascinating site showing creative talent of people making things in Africa. Inventors at work making things such as a simple water pump, and a satellite telephone that has a battery thats charged up from a bicycle, this home made helicopter from recycled parts of a Toyota is simply awesome though.Stuff like this quite excites me, as these people are a world away from the wasteful disposable attitude of the west, and have an abundance of creative and resourcefulness with limited materials, this kind of attitude to solving problems is something the rest of world should be adopting.

Many 3rd world countries are about to get computers given to children, the $100 laptop known as the OLPC (one laptop per child) project aims to provide IT to kids everywhere in developing countries. Running Linux and able to have the batteries charged by a hand crank or solar power, this is a completely new approach to IT infrastructure as no hard disk or CD drive but using flash memory and tough construction able to survive harsh environments, this proves an incredibly exciting initiative. People have criticised the project due to not being able to stick the original target of $100, more like $170, its thought once the first production run of laptops has been shipped, and R&D costs, have been covered after a year or so this should much less. Where as you could reason people are more need of food, clean water and medicine, this uses the “teach a man to fish..” idea that people can get training on farming, healthcare, education and communications from what they find and share on the internet.

If you look at IT and cars, both are similar, as vehicles running on alternative fuel to petrol always get shown in the media as an exciting possibility of the future, but never quite get there. The knowhow for electric cars is there albeit with some limitations but
to me the real reason why cars on other fuels aren’t being adopted yet is that government haven’t found a workable business model yet to get tax from it.

With these low cost computers and technology provided in the right way, who knows, with a clean sheet of paper to build their IT infastructure, the African and South American developing nations may be able to teach the west a thing or to about technology.

Recently I discovered a interesting app that lets you use your gmail account as a drive.

This is a quite slow but handy and has all kinds of possible uses.  In terms of backing up files, if you are a mobile laptop user and are working on the move, in an internet cafe or at a client’s premisis, copying files onto DVDR or a USB memory stick isnt quite a good idea if the laptop then gets stolen with items of media with sensitive information in the carry case.  One example of this is a friend of mine who went on holiday to New Zealand and did web design on a laptop whilst on the move.

The gmail drive works by sending the file as an attachment to your own gmail address, Gmail have now upped the storage space from 2.7Gb to 4.3Gb.

Now Im not sure what the limit of individual files that can be sent as attachments as google, but I think a zip application like WinRAR or 7zip could chop up a large file into small pieces.

Imagine that, you could compress a large amount of files you want to back up into one file as a zip or rar file, then cut the file into smaller chunks (where necessary) then send to your gmail account whilst you are in hotel room on a wireless connection, whilst probably quite slow, this method could maybe used as a handy disaster recovery set up for a small bunch of traveling salesman or engineers who travel quite a lot.   If a problem occurs the user could recover the files themselves or the IT support person could put them onto a DVDR and post it out to the user’s location.

in most places I have worked, and when supporting people on private basis people want to upgrade or replace their PC when they get performance issues but dont always understand the root of the problem with their system.

I find PCs tend to run slow because of software problems, and getting the sandtimer appear and the hard disk is being accessed for a long time to do something as simple as getting the start menu to appear.

Its fact that its often necessary to reinstall Windows on your PC every now and then as the systems get slow, clogged up and unstable.

You can use a defrag program, repair registry, clear browser settings and check for spyware and viruses, but expecting on special application to get the machine working like it was when it was new, is a bit like asking the chemist a drug to cure cancer.

Im experimenting with imaging my PCs like I do in my work. Installing Windows XP and service pack 2, then put on drivers (I dont put a live internet connection on yet) install antivirus and antispyware tools, a few favourite applications, MS office or Open Office, Adobe reader, etc. Then plug in network cable and put on all windows updates. I think take a snapshot of the hard disk in its current state as I have everything the way I have it, so it can be restored back to this point. Its worth considering that the work to install everything before this point can be around 3 ours worth of work.

The PC needs to be managed so all work can easily backed up, in terms of all documents, not forgetting mail, address book, internet favorites needs to be saved in such a way that they can be backed up so they can easily be re-added when the system needs to be reinstalled.

Often lately when I go into Commercial Road in Portsmouth, I get treated to some music being played by the fountain.  Often it used to be panpipe play South American who are think are from Peru or Chile.  Lately it has been Chinese or Native American music.

The Chinese band was particularly interesting with two unusual instruments played by the two gentleman, one was something across between a harp and a xylophone which has strings and played with a pair of hammers, the other being a kind of upright violin leaned onto a table.  The music was superb and unique.  I regret buying a CD off them now.

Am curious to know where these bands get checked out by the council to get permission to play, is there a way of finding out where they are playing next?   Can someone out there from the council tell me where anyone can get information, if they have a web site?