After the news broke yesterday about LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) being discontinued, the following message was apparently posted on the Ambassador forum by LCE Team manager Tanja Friberg:
Bill Ward
LEGO Digital Designer to be discontinued
Update 1/21: It appears that rumors of LDD’s death have been somewhat exaggerated.
The LEGO Digital Designer (LDD) software, available since 2004, is soon to be discontinued, according to reports. The following statement was issued by the LEGO AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) Relations Team:
New page: LEGO Train Types
I’ve added a new page to the Reference section of my site, LEGO Train Types which outlines the various types of train sets LEGO has produced over the years.
Happy New Year 2016
I hope you had a safe and happy New Years celebration, and wish you happiness and success in the coming year.
Merry Christmas 2015
I used parts from the City, Advent, and Star Wars Advent Calendars to build this little scene.
Advent 2015
2015 was another year of three LEGO Advent Calendars: City, Friends, and Star Wars. I barely made the Day 1 deadline, posting at 11:46 PM! As usual, each post was originally a separate blog entry, starting with Day 1, and continuing with a daily post about that day’s advent models. However, to clean up the site, I’ve condensed all those daily posts to a single post per year. Here’s the 2015 edition.
Each year LEGO produces several advent calendars, featuring 24 mini-models, one for each day of December through Christmas Eve. For several years I posted these entries each day on my blog.
If you haven’t gotten your Advent calendars yet, here are some links to them on Amazon: Star Wars, City, Friends.
LEGO Christmas Star
I designed and built this for my Christmas Tree. Instructions are included in case you want to build one too.
Silly experiment in head swapping: Scooby Doo & Mini-Doll
When I was building the Scooby-Doo sets, I realized that Scooby’s head/neck connection is the same as that of a mini-doll from Friends or Elves…
Use a fry bagger to sort LEGO parts?
Use a fry bagger to put LEGO parts into Ziploc bags!
What a great idea! I saw this today on Facebook, posted by Soyary Sunthorn‎ in the AFOLs of FaceBook group. He got a fry bagger – a tool used in fast food restaurants to put french fries into the bags or other containers they are served in.
Updated Brick Geometry from BBTB 2015
I gave my Brick Geometry presentation yet again at Bricks by the Bay this year, and here’s the slides.
Bricks by the Bay Just Around the Corner
I’ve been quiet on here recently, and haven’t been building anything in a while, but I wanted to say something about Bricks by the Bay which is coming up in just over a week.
Anger by Angus MacLane
Angus MacLane, who works at Pixar, recently posted pics of his excellent model of the Anger character from the new Disney-Pixar movie Inside Out. I had the pleasure of watching the movie last night and enjoyed it quite a lot. (Living here in the San Francisco bay area it was an extra treat seeing Pixar’s version of SF, which was a bit grittier than I’d expect but captured the essence of it quite well.)
Maker Faire Bay Area 2015
Earlier this month, BayLUG (Bay Area LEGO Users’ Group) participated once again in the annual Maker Faire Bay Area, in San Mateo, CA. This is the 10th annual Maker Faire and the 10th that we particpated in (though I personally was out of town for last year’s show). We had a 75′ by 15′ space featuring a train layout, Great Ball Contraption, robotics demonstrations, sculptures and mosaics, WWII ships, and a kids’ play area.
Easter Bunny
Spring is here and with it come two ages-old symbols of fertility – the rabbit and the egg. But since Easter comes in the springtime, these symbols are part of the Christian tradition of Easter. Either way, they’re cute and so I decided to make a LEGO bunny and some eggs.
Desktop LEGO: Easter Bunny and Trees
I won this bulk bricks box (#6177 Builders of Tomorrow) at the annual BayLUG raffle, and took it to work, where I built a couple things: Easter Bunny with two eggs, and a couple trees (not to scale).
Reverse Engineering Contest IV
My solutions to the challenges in the Reverse Engineering Contest IV group.
Sheep
The February BayLUG meeting had an “animals” contest theme, so I put this together the night before. Like the Xmas Ornaments I posted about a couple months ago, it’s basically an elongated Lowell sphere, with head and legs attached and an ice cream tail.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
March 17th is St. Patrick’s Day, the day when just about everyone in the U.S. claims to be at least a little bit Irish, which means wearing green clothing and often imbibing copious amounts of beer with green food coloring added, especially when it falls on a weekend. (There’s very little to do with saints involved.) And more to the point, images of leprechauns.
Pie for Pi Day
In the American way of writing dates at least, today is 3/14/15 which is of course, Ï€ (pi), that irrational mathematical constant we all love to memorize the digits of (or at least the geekier of us do). In honor of this special day I have created two new models…
Improved LEGO Calendar
If you’ve built the LEGO Brick Calendar 853195, you might have discovered that it’s a real pain to rearrange it each month. So I’ve created my own version, using the parts from that set plus others from my collection, to create a better version.