Naijel

The assumption that anything made in China is crap is ridiculous and out dated. 50 years ago people used to say that all cars made in Japan were terrible. They were not great, but that changed. In the 1990s people said cars made in Korea were terrible. They were perhaps not great, but things have changed. The high quality manufacturing of Apple iPhone and iPad housings is done in China. Lots of very high quality things are made there. Some terrible things are made there, but that does not mean LEGO made in China will be terrible.

I quite like this idea. It could help solve basic problems with minifig utensils/accessories such as a pirates who can't actually put their telescope up to their eye.

None at all in Australia. :(

Oh, nice one!

The minifig as a whole is quite squat. It's fun and fine in and of itself and there is no problem with it being an artistic direction the company continues along. But it's a pain in the butt when you try to make some real world vehicle and the minifigs look like kids because they are too short for their width. I'd love it if the current minifig was designated as a child sized fig going forward (rather than the current short legged figs) and that taller figs be made with bending knees (at a minimum) and preferably elbows as well. The knee joints would could be much like the current hip joints in simplicity. I would not want the head changed like those horrible Jack Stone figures, nor the overall styling, again, like those horrible Jack Stone figures. The Jack Stone stuff was so lame, trying to look cool but failing miserably. A lot of minifigs from the late 90s and early 2000s suffered from this in the same way though. Thankfully the quality of design now is much better and consistent. If the current design team put their mind to it and stuck to the classic styling of the minifig I'm sure they could work out a better and taller figure.

As far as I'm aware LEGO sold their baseplate production machinery when times were tough and they buy the baseplates back from the new makers. Apparently they tried to buy the production equipment back a while ago but the new owner declined to sell. A senior designer lunched with members of my LUG 18 months ago. We asked about this topic. They revealed that there was a lot of effort put into trying to engineer production of 16x16 plates, which was quite difficult, and that there were experiments with large sizes underway. So, I'm wondering if TLG would prefer us all to stop buying baseplates. It would be interesting if the colour change was to make us stop wanting them. However, I have a feeling they have made a lot of 16x16 plates in bright green for certain themes and are just looking to hook fans of those themes up with a baseplate option. They went with regular green for the 16x16 plates in 2 Elves sets and one City Swamp Police set so far in 2015 while keeping to bright green for 2015 Friends and Creator/Classic sets including the Ferris Wheel.

I don't get why they keep making them orange. Sure, it's a high visibility colour which helps when you want to grab one quickly. But they made a green one for the Horizon Express and other colours are easily visible too. Why don't they make them a new colour each year, even if only in the most expensive sets? It could be like a badge of honour to own them. Like, "I got the enormous new *Friends Death Star/UCS Double Decker Couch/LEGO Ideas Goonies ship* and check out my *dark pink/sand blue/white/trans-purple/medium azure/tan* brick separator!". Or you could just BrickLink them. :P

Pretty cool. Thanks. Takes a while to load but it's nice being able to click on the dots to see what set they are and where those sets sit compared to others.

If you are doing a simple render in POV-Ray and it takes 11 hours I would recommend looking at whether some settings could be modified to lower the quality and still be good enough. The defaults may be for very high and un-necessary quality . You may find that 80% of the time could be saved for very little drop in quality. It really depends on what you are doing of course. It's also usually best too to do a low quality and low resolution render to ensure that the scene is framed correctly before committing to a high quality and high resolution image.

We have a winner! Almost perfect IMO. I want this setup!

I bought some 47397 and 47398 12 x 3 wedge plates once for a plane I was working on. When they arrived not only were they smelly, they were dirty. I don't know what was on them but it was sort of like dead skins cells. I work for a PC repair place that gets notebooks mailed in all the time and I often see where heaps of dead skin cells have come out from the keyboard all over the screen when they were upside down. It was like that, like really fine, flat, but soft, beach sand. I had to wash all the parts. Never going back to that store.

I'd like to know your evidence/reasoning. The licensed sets are generally a lot more expensive in my area than non-licensed with similar numbers of parts and minifigs. Star Wars and super hero sets are way more expensive than Friends, City, Chima, of comparable content.

Whaaaaaat?

Bricklink is probably best but there is also LEGO Shop @ Home's Pick A Brick section. That's the US site but you can change the region at the top right if needed. And there are the Pick A Brick walls at LEGO stores. That link has some recent news and photos of what they look like. The contents change from time to time. Some stores have a bigger wall with more bins than others so have a greater variety of parts available. As far as I'm aware if you need a lot of one part you can also ask for a whole box of them but I can't remember if the analysis was that buying them by the cup was actually still cheaper...

Great job and great writing. Go SydLUG!

I dislike how squat minifigs are. I wish they would make taller ones with longer arms and legs that bend at the elbows and knees. I'd be happy to keep the current size as children and the current child minifig legs that can't bend at all can go away. Then with the taller figs start new CMF lines. I like Technic figs and wish they would come back somewhere. I hate silly sci-fi designs, like the Power Miners rock monsters and the aliens from the Mars Mission sets. I hate that there is no Lego store in Australia, because that means there is no pick-a-brick wall. I hate when things like Chima have lots of cool parts in useful colours but heaps of weird parts, mainly the trans colours, that I have no use for. Even some Chima battle packs have single trans-light blue legs that render the minifig legs useless for other uses like GoH. I hate that City doesn't have more varied businesses. There should be two $30-$50 sets every 6 months that can expand a LEGO city gradually. But they just keep making damn vehicles. I hate Ninjago as a theme. Sets are cool but the story... Mixels animated show was terrible. Elves was cool but they blew the whole damn storyline of the sets in ONE episode. What the hell? Why not make an intro/setup, then make each subsequent episode a quest for the map or one of the keys and introduce one new set/character. LEGO do quite a poor job on the media backing some of their themes. Why is there no long running LEGO City animated show? This boggles my mind. I guess they don't need it, the stuff sells anyway. I hate the "_insert animal name here_ suit" figs in the CMF range. Pig man, unicorn girl, bee girl, rabbit, crocodile/alligator, gorilla, etc. The last Castle release was too small and disappeared from stores too quickly. The last Castle range had little fantasy element beside the dragon. Fail. I hate Bionicle, Hero Factory and large constraction figs.

That's a set released in 2008! Wasn't it replaced by other sets more recently? Is it expensive because the people still stocking them know that they are retired and are ramping up the value for set collectors? I know that would be weird for a basic brick box. In Australia the price of basic brick boxes, including the current Classic sets, has remained largely the same for the last 5 years as far as I can tell while actually increasing in the variety of parts.

There is a thread in the customisation forum where a guy is using acetone to melt bricks so I don't know if using that will be helpful here. Could have a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark-ending type situation, if you know what I mean.

Lovely work.

Very nice! Great build. The story and shots to illustrate it are also very good. Thanks.

I like using the LotR gold rings as bangles on Friends/Elves minidolls. Not sure if they fit on a minifig wrist though.

Tough to narrow it down to a favourite. I've always been a fan of Classic Space, Pirates, Castle stuff. I also love Technic, Star Wars and a lot of City though. I prefer MOCing so I don't actually build a lot of sets these days, mainly buy sets for parts and Bricklink bulk stuff. The sets I've built lately are all the latest Pirates sets except the ship ($ ) and some of the Elves plus Mos Eisley Cantina. But the sets I build the most are City trucks.

Holy crap, how have I not heard of this app before??? Looks awesome!

I used to have a lot of trouble with hobbies and entertainment, running out of money towards pay day and just scraping through. So, one of the app types I was keen to try when I got my first iPhone in 2008 was budgeting apps. Unfortunately I found that most of them are next to useless. They were often about looking at what you had spent money on, essentially backward looking, while having little in the way of helping you actually PLAN your forward spending or visualising where your cash flow will be. They were too inflexible too. You could set fixed amounts or percentages of total income to assign to certain categories for the future but they usually focused on fixed periods, like a month and there could be times in the middle of a month when money needs to go out but money hasn't come in. They also usually used a few basic categories with not much flexibility for fine detail. But the main problem was not knowing when each expense was and the affect on cash flow. My solution was to create a spread sheet ( I used Google sheets but Excel, Numbers or others would be fine obviously) which is really long horizontally with a column for every day. On each day the top row shows how much money I had left over from the previous day (the first/current day is zero). It then lists, going down the column, my current bank balances and cash on hand (on the current day only), any income that I expect to receive that day and anything that will go out. At the bottom is the end of day total that will carry over to the top of the next day's column. I literally have like 300 days mapped out (I think Google still don't allow 365 columns in a Sheets file). Finally, below this is a bar graph that visually shows how much money is left at the end of each day. I stretch the graph out and place it so that each column in the graph is directly below the corresponding numbers. The beauty of this is that I can put in everything I know about, including how much I expect to pay for food and transport each day, my estimates of utility bills, car maintenance, fuel, insurance, etc., my haircut every 4 weeks, EVERYTHING, and it will show me at a glance in the graph the ebb and flow of how much I have left over. Not only can I tell how much money I have to spend at the end of the month, I can tell for every single day exactly how much I could spend that day without going negative before the next pay day - or after. You see cash flow is not just about the current pay period. If you have a huge car expense coming up in two months it's not good enough to just get to the end of the current pay period and be above zero if you needed to be well above zero to not be in trouble two months later. I can scan up to about 10 months ahead in seconds to see any upcoming issues. And of course, I try keep a certain buffer amount so I don't see how much I can spend before I hit zero, I see how much I can spend without dipping below the buffer amount, just in case of emergencies. The key to using this system is to load up the file each day or two, set expenses that have been paid to zero, set income that has been received as zero and update your bank balances and cash on hand to reflect the fact that those incomes and expenses have already come in and gone out. About once a month I spend half an hour adding on another month at the far end, adding in all the default income and expenses. Apart from that it can literally take 2 minutes a day after initial setup to update the latest stuff and see where you are heading. Since I created this system 3 years ago I've found I have MUCH less stress leading up to pay day. I'm much less likely to run out of money and if I do spend too much on LEGO or other fun stuff it's easier to recognise the problem and cut back on things to keep the whole in check.

So nice. Was great to see this in person the other week at the Sydney Brick Show.