It makes some great sounds too
The Lego Radio is a lovely build. It comes with a little sound brick that plays different sound effects as you scan through the radio channels. Great fun. You can put your Smartphone inside it if you want to turn it into a bluetooth speaker.
Tom Nook and his money
Turns out that the Animal Crossing Lego sets are a satisfying build and make really nice models.
Can you spot whichi is the LEGO camera?
I got given a Lego Camera kit on Saturday. It’s awesome. And there are two other models you can make with the pieces. And it comes with little rolls of film with pictures on them. Great fun.
It’s become a kind of ritual. When we go up town in Leeds we visit the Lego store and fill a plastic cup with bricks from their “pick and mix”. I like doing this because you can get a huge number of one particular Lego piece. On a previous visit I got an enormous number of Lego gear levers and we used them to make a brush, among other things. This time we got some funky angled pieces and I used them to make a Lego Ghetto Blaster with six speakers and a sub-woofer. Great fun.
Culinary innovations at Ferens Art Gallery cafe. We call it the “shot sandwich”.
What do you do if you have a five year old that you want to impress. Why, you take them to Hull of course. We started with a coffee (we had coffee - she had juice) at the amazing café in Ferens Art Gallery. Then on to the next room, where they had a fantastic Lego exhibition. Then down to the Museums Quarter to scoot round searching for robots and dragons. Then back for lunch in Ferens, a look at the fountains and then back home for a rest.
Hull is awesome.
I’ve spent a happy few hours building a Lego Orchid. It looks very realistic. The only slight issue is that the plastic bits waggle in a non-realistic way when you walk past them, but it is very nice to have a Lego Flower build that comes with its own vase.
Went on our first proper “up town” shopping trip for ages today. In the Lego store they were selling Muppet mini-figures. Managed to get this chap. It says a lot about me that I’m very pleased about this.
Lego are billing their bonsai tree kit as “their most therapeutic kit yet”. I’m not sure about that, but I did rather enjoy building it. There are two variants. A green one and the blossom one you can see above. Fun fact, some of the blossoms are actually little tiny frogs, there are 101 of them in the model.
The flowers arrived on Valentine’s day. We’ve just finished building them and finding a vase to fit. This is just half of the set, we thought they’d work best as two bunches. Great fun and almost romantic.
This looks completely awesome. Not sure where I’d put it though……
Not everything that Lego touches turns to gold. Lego Vidiyo has not been the success that Lego hoped and figures and sets are now on the market at temptingly low prices.
The idea of the product is very good. Place animated mini-figures in augmented reality pop videos and control the action using collectable tiles that you scan with your phone or tablet camera. Add in some stage sets that can be incorporated into the videos, tie in with the music publishers so that there’s a good range of 1 minute music clips and you’d think they would be on to a winner.
And I think they would have been, if the application that underpins the whole thing had been a bit better. As it is, the program ls clunky to use, insists on downloading stuff when you start it up and has a confusing interface. The videos are great fun, the sharing element is well implemented and safe for kids, but the whole thing is just that bit too painful to enjoy using.
This has of course not stopped me from picking up a bunch of figures and sets at knock down prices. After all, Lego is Lego. Although I’ve not managed to pick up the party llama yet.
Lego say that they are only resting the project for now. I hope this is true. I think it has massive potential once they’ve sorted out the software side.
We bought a Lego magazine yesterday (actually, it wasn’t entirely for me). This was on the cover.
Number one son has come to see us for the Easter break, which is lovely. He’s managed to get hold of the new Lego Space Shuttle kit and has spent the last day or so building it. The model is really good. You get a Hubble Space telescope which fits inside the cargo bay. The level of detail is excellent and it looks great on its stand. I’m only a bit jealous.
What do you give a little lady who has fallen over, grazed her elbow and is really not very happy with life?
You give her a Rocket Girl mini-figure.
Actually it was dumb luck on my part, I had no idea what was in the packet. But I’m really glad it came out the way it did.
This pleases me a lot more than it probably should. Sometimes I think that I only build the models so that I can take them to pieces and put all the parts in the right place.
One of my Lego models got dropped today. I watched with a mix of horror and fascination as it shattered into a large number of pieces. As I was searching for the bits under the furniture I wondered whether taking videos of falling Lego was a thing. It turns out that it is, as you can see above.
One of my attempts from yesterday when we were al trying to take a picture of something small and make it look large. I think that the binary on the girl’s T shirt spells “LEGO”. Awesome.
Spent some of my Christmas money (yes, I still get Christmas money - thanks folks) on this amazing Lego Dinosaur kit which is now gracing our mantelpiece. Very nice.
Years ago I made a picture using Lego bricks. They had this service where you could send them an image and they would send you back the bricks to make a 44x44 version on a Lego back plate. Turns out that I was way ahead of my time, in that there are now lots of apps for phones and whatnot that will do this for you.
In fact I was so far ahead of my time that some of the bricks changed have faded and changed colour. Which is rather sad. I wondered about replacing them, and so I went on to the Lego site where they sell individual bricks and started pricing up replacements. Each tiny brick is 6 pence and I need quite a lot of the, nearly sixty pound’s worth.
I’m now learning to appreciate the “retro charm” of the faded colour scheme.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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