Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks
Brickshelf has returned, but with a prominent notice saying “Notice: Brickshelf will be shutting down on 2007/07/31. Please save your files to your computer.”
I copied all my LEGO photos to Flickr some time ago, plus I kept copies on my hard drive, so I think I’m OK for now – though I will take this opportunity to find out. I suggest everyone take advantage of this opportunity to make backups if you need to![tags]lego,image hosting,brickshelf[/tags]
For many years, brickshelf.com has been the primary image hosting site for the LEGO community. But sadly, if you visit it today, you get nothing but this cryptic message:
“Brickshelf has discontinued operation. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
Now I’m sure it must have been a very expensive site to operate, but its sudden disappearance has been a really traumatic experience for many LEGO fans.
Read more about it on LUGNET.[tags]lego,image hosting,brickshelf[/tags]
Have you seen MeatSpace yet? If you live in Australia, and watch the TV show “Good Game” (Tuesdays, 8:30pm, ABC2) then chances are you have. But for those of us in the rest of the world we have to wait until it goes up on the Internet.
MeatSpace is the latest innovation from Australian filmmaker Nate “Blunty” Burr, who has been producing Brickfilm videos for years. His video Circle Circle Dot Dot broke out of the Brickfilm community when it appeared on YouTube, and next thing he knew he was a professional animator working with LEGO.
There’s a great interview with Blunty in Volume 8 of Brick Journal. In fact that’s how I found MeatSpace. Here’s the latest episode:
One of the more impressive LEGO robots I’ve seen lately is Daniel Rojas’s Cable Car. He came to one of the BayLUG meetings recently and met some of us, and told us about the project, and when he finally posted his finished product he was kind enough to email us about it.
It’s a great model of a cable car, and a very clever robot too. Like the real deal, it has a grab-arm which goes below the track to hold on to a cable which pulls it. And it’s controlled by an RCX (Mindstorms). It even has a working emergency brake! Daniel even made a great YouTube video so we can see it in action:
If you liked that, check the rest of the pics on Daniel’s site.
Every once in a while someone comes up with a new way to modify LEGO parts to do something unexpected.
The latest example is a USB flash drive by an Australian company called Zip Zip. They are taking 2×2 LEGO bricks and installing USB connectors and flash memory. For about US$50 you can have 1GB of LEGO for your very own. As much as I generally dislike modifying LEGO, I have to make an exception here, this is just too darn cool. I gotta have one! Don’t you?
Courtesy of Engaget, brought to my attention by my brother-in-law Jim.
Recently I posted about some little houses that I had built for the BayLTC train shows. The photos for that are on Flickr, but I wanted to also publish them on Brickshelf which I now have done.
In addition, you can find LDraw instructions for each of the three houses should you be interested in building them yourself. Here are direct links to the building instructions:
Each one is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License so you are basically free to do whatever you want with it as long as you give me credit. Enjoy!
We had a great time at Maker Faire again this year.
We had a train layout like usual, around 23 feet square, featuring a city downtown, CJ’s Hollywood diorama, a suburban area, farm, Bruce’s 10 foot bridge, rail yard with lots of rolling stock on display, James’s Goofy Train, and a new feature, with Jim and James collaborating on a double-figure-eight loop with Mindstorms control preventing any wrecks at the crossover tracks, and featuring Jim’s Hogwarts castle diorama. In addition we had several tables along the perimeter of the room with several items on display, including Jim’s Mindstorms/pneumatic calculator. Click the big picture to go to the set page on Flickr, or click on an individual photo. Or, you can view a slideshow of the photos. I also had a chance to wander around Maker Faire and take pictures of some of what I saw. You can find those pictures on Flickr (slideshow) as well. |
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[tags]lego,baylug,bayltc,makerfaire,makerfaire2007[/tags]
This weekend, BayLUG will be taking part in Maker Faire, a celebration of creativity – from electronics to sculpture to sewing. We took part in it last year (see my blog entry including pictures from that event) and will have a bigger, better layout this year! Come by and say hi![tags]lego, makerfaire, baylug, bayltc[/tags]
I built a trio of small houses (16×16 stud footprint) as practice in building in different architectural styles with LEGO.
There is a Victorian with bay window, a house with a dormer window in the roof, and a steeply-roofed house.
They’re all a bit too small to be realistic, even by LEGO standards, so I am planning to scrap them and try to build some new houses on a 32×32 footprint. Stay tuned.
View all the pics on flickr (slideshow) or just click the photo on the right.
Update 30-May-2007: Photos and LDraw instructions are now available on Brickshelf.[tags]lego,town,architecture,house[/tags]
BayLUG member Russell Clark has posted pictures of several recent BayLUG and other LEGO events:
Enjoy![tags]baylug,lego,russell,brickfest,brickfest2007,baylug,tca[/tags]