This brings my total number of LEGO bricks to 13,301, with 7,925 in whole sets and 5,376 as loose parts.

Regarding my next big LEGO project, that I alluded to when writing of the Gay Deceiver, it shall be a LEGO-man-scale version of the Belafonte from The Life Aquatic.

I was being a tiny bit secretive as no-one has yet made such a model, the closest so far being the submarine and the crew themselves. So I vaguely wanted to be first, to not let anyone get in there ahead of me…

But that seems a little silly. A few years ago, I had all kinds of plans and sketches and writings detailing the “perfect” ebook reader (electronic ink display, touchscreen interface, clockwork powered, always-on-internet connection) and I was going to make a website out of it, with the intention that, if I would never make it myself, it would put the idea out there for someone else to. Of course, many other people were thinking along similar lines, and the Kindle is pretty close, only without the touchscreen or clockwork (I’ve since learnt that clockwork provides nowhere near enough juice).

So anyway, if someone else makes the Belafonte before me that doesn’t matter too much. If it is exactly what I wanted to build, then I can simply follow their instructions, and if it’s not then I still have my mighty plans…

I’m writing to Eric Anderson to ask if he has any sketches/drawings I may see, and when I’m next in London I’m going to visit the National Maritime Museum in order to get some plans of the Ton class minesweeper, which is the kind of boat the Belafonte was.

So, that’s one of my future LEGO schemes. Right now I’m in Aschaffenburg, have a few assignments to work on over the coming weeks, an interview for an internship with Nintendo too.

Ooh, I am a published writer now, with an article on pages 12 and 13 of the current issue of my university’s student magazine, The Courier. You can download a PDF of the issue (59.4) from the Archive and a more in depth version of my piece is online too. Sure, it’s just the post I wrote last November, but now… published!

Ooh ooh, I also finished Guitar Hero III in Expert mode on Wednesday 12th March! After drinking some booze and playing some multiplayer, I was so very much in the zone that I beat the devil first try. Hoo-hah. Now, to play through it all again on the new Xbox 360 Kitty and I will be buying tomorrow…

If you read through all twelve pages, you will see the attention to detail I shall be striving for myself.

Also, quite a while ago now, I finished inventorying all my LEGO bricks (well, all save three models (1381, 4027 & 4029), the parts for which are mostly still in London as part of a mighty whale). The final numbers were 12,853 bricks in total, of which 7,488 are from models I’ve acquired in the last few years (2,056 from Café Corner and 1,045 from the ginormous Batmobile alone) and 5,365 are from my childhood, reclaimed from my siblings the Christmas before last.

My next model is rather ambitious in scale, and so even all that LEGO shall probably not be enough, but I shall use Bricksmith for a lot of it anyway as I shall likely not have my LEGO with me when I’m in Germany. However, having the database of all my parts on Peeron means I will be able to know which parts I need to buy and which parts I already have, which was the goal of all that cataloguing in the first place.

Finally, No Country for Old Men was interesting and sad, the 2nd and 3rd seasons of My Name Is Earl get much better than the 1st, with an engaging ongoing story, and I’ve finished all but the final devil-battle-song on Expert mode in Guitar Hero 3.

Over the next few weeks, I shall be posting several articles and also the photos from Hong Kong. Hoo-hah.

The cataloguing of all my old LEGO bricks has picked up steam due to me finding Peeron.com. 1928 pieces have been logged so far, or 392 different colour/type combinations. Still at least double that amount more to go.

For Christmas I was given a lobster, a chess set and a Martian. Ooh, and Kitty and I built the Café Corner we’d been hungering for since summer.

Yesterday, thanks to a tip-off, I bought one huge Batmobile as it was reduced from £50 to £25. It took five hours to build and I listened to the last five episodes of This American Life whilst I did that, so now, in my mind, it is linked with murderous superintendents and Cambodia too.

These last few days I’ve also been watching some films, including The Royal Tenenbaums, The Big Lebowski and The Butterfly Effect. I would also watch No Country for Old Men, Aliens vs Predator 2 and Sweeney Todd, cinemas permitting, and maybe also The Darjeeling Limited again.

Guitar Hero III is nearly finished on Expert, just two songs left; Raining Blood and One. Mike and I also completed the game in co-op career mode, he on Hard and I on Expert, and that made the Metallica song doable. However, it would seem that Through the Fire and Flames doesn’t get unlocked until the game is completed in single player mode, so though I played it over the holidays, I’ve not been able to since getting back to Aber.

There are other things to do, so I would go sleep now.

So, to mark our fifth anniversary, I had the idea of recreating the room we did said hooking up in, the living room of that first house. But not just any old recreation, ho no; I would build it out of LEGO!

The first thing to do was to craft a maquette of said living room. In addition to my memory, I had two whole photographs to go on:

These being the photos that Kitty sent me in that very first email on 15th September 2002, telling me about a house that she and a couple other people needed, “ONE, just ONE person,” for…

So, after about a month, I had finished the sketch model, complete with firemen stand-ins for Kitty and myself:

The next step was to construct a 3D LDraw model. As I’ve written before, Bricksmith is my weapon of choice for doing this on the Mac, but there is plenty of other software for other platforms.

Using my maquette as a starting point, I worked out the actual bricks I’d use to build the final model, which included the obligatory unofficial ones:

30179: Door 1 x 4 x 6 Frame

30178c01: Door 1 x 4 x 6 with 3 Panes

If you like, you can even play with the LDraw file I produced.

Unfortunately, LEGO only ever produced the door itself in grey, black, yellow and blue, not the white I needed, so I went with the closest of the four. Also, I initially wanted to use a grooveless grey tile on the PlayStation, so that it would look more like the real thing. However, as such a part has not been sold since 1981, the one I got in the post was very scuffed and discoloured, so in the end I decided to use a shiny new grooved one instead.

Speaking of parts, I bought most of them from 17 different BrickLink sellers from all over the world:

Additionally, I got what I could from the LEGO Factory and also a few bricks from the Milton Keynes LEGO store.

So, once I had all the pieces and could build it for real, the next step was to produce a printed instruction manual in the same style as one you would get when buying a LEGO set in the shop.

The instruction rendering stage was far more convoluted than you might imagine but can be briefly summed up as; I used Bricksmith’s “Export Steps…” facility, ran the .ldr files produced through L3P Launcher and then added a few lines of text to each of the resulting .pov files to add appropriate lighting and outlines. Finally, I used version 0.7 of MegaPov to render the final images. Allen Smith, the creator of Bricksmith, was of great help during this process, and without his advice I would not have been able to produce such fine quality images.

As well as the individual steps of the living room itself, I rendered instructions for the furniture and roof, and also each piece all by itself so that I could produce inventory pages. I originally planned to produce box art as well, but as I could not find anywhere that would print on the card stock I required, in the end I decided to use a simple gift box. I managed to find one exactly the right size too, which was nice.

The copy shop in the union of my university was able to print the manual itself just how I liked it:

Following in the style of recent LEGO models, I split the building process into three distinct stages and put the pieces for each stage in appropriately numbered bags:

Two final comments on the manual itself. First, the LEGO logo on the front cover is courtesy of brandsoftheworld.com. Second, throughout all my painstaking work, I somehow managed to miss that I had written November instead of October in my message on the back cover…

I didn’t spot this until I actually gave the present to Kitty. I felt rather sheepish but happily she was simply bemused by my mistake, almost certainly on account of all the rest being so very mighty. I’ve updated the online version of the pages that is soon to follow, but left the model number on the front cover as 2511 (instead of changing it to 2510) as a reminder of my own foolishness.

Finally, here are the instructions themselves:

And last of all, finally finally, some more photos of the actual model once built:

Finally finally finally, I bought enough bricks that I could build two models and got two instruction manuals printed and bought two boxes and stencilled numbers on two sets of plastic bags so that… both Kitty and I have a version of this LEGO set! And when, on our actual anniversary, we could not be together on account of her being in Germany and I being in Wales? We used Skype and an EyeToy connected to her PowerBook and a video camera connected to my MacBook and we built it together, watching each other play with LEGO… it was mighty.

Also, I am back in England, in Aberystwyth soon enough. Hoo-hah.

This model was made by my ladyfriend out of some of the LEGO she recently got me for my birthday. You can download the LDraw file if you want to play with it yourself and see naice little details not apparent here.

On account of the LEGO used was so new, some of the parts do not exist in the appropriate place yet. This meant I had to create/use some substitute parts, namely for the sword at the top of the tower and that carried by Space-Tramp (his head too), the four moulded rock panels, the pikes either side of the entrance into the tower, the King Skellington’s shield (and his arms and torso too) and, finally, the rat and snakes just up the stairs that I have removed from the rendering as they looked too poo. Additionally, there was one unofficial part I could add (the pillars holding up various bits of the tower) and two I could not even make substitutes for (the spider and his web).

Also, the software I’m using to do the 3D rendering seems to not understand some of the new-fangled colours and so, for example, bits which are actually golden appear as simply yellow. But it still looks pretty good, I reckon.

As for story, this is indeed the same Space Tramp I wrote about a few weeks ago. Perhaps this adventure is from before he even became a regular Tramp, let alone the Space variety. He is an archaeologist, out to recover the fabled Master Sword from a castle with a certain Triforce atop its tower. But those dang skellingtons, not to mention their pesky booby-traps, they both hinder his progress and warp his fragile little mind, preventing his return to a life of academia and dooming him to forever wander the stars, drinking booze out of his barrel-styled-replicator.

That or he is already Space-Tramp, said barrel-styled-replicator is on the blink and so in a far-too-sober daze he is attempting to nick some treasure in hope of exchanging it for parts to fix it. Or just buy a drink. I don’t know why Space-Tramp is such a booze-hound, there’s no good reason for it…

For a little while they existed in their original forms but then I felt that space-ship-building urge I seem to get every so often and so I smashed them up and built the Space-Tramp out of their parts (8823, 7770, 4953 and 4939):

If you want to see how it is built / give it a poke, you can download the original wheels-down model and also a wheels-up version.

These building instructions are viewable in Bricksmith on a Mac and MLCad on a PC. However, I had to use eight “unofficial” parts due to them being too new to come included with the current LDraw distribution. If you know what you’re doing, those eight pieces are:

43121: Plane Jet Engine Large	48336: Plate 1 x 2 with Handle Type 2
42610: Wheel 11 x 8 with Center Groove	50945: Tyre 11 x 6
54383: Wing 3 x 6 Right	54384: Wing 3 x 6 Left
50304: Wing 8 x 3 Right	50305: Wing 8 x 3 Left

Otherwise you can simply download this unofficial parts ZIP file I made and copy the files into the same locations inside your LDraw folder. If you are using Bricksmith, said LDraw folder would be in the Bricksmith folder that contains the application itself. You can also place a copy of my modified Bricksmith Parts.plist file inside of the LDraw folder if you want to be able to use the unofficial parts in your own models.

Space-Tramp has all the usual niceties; retractable landing gear, a door for the LEGO man to get in and out plus a removable roof so as to make it easy to play inside of. There’s less glass than I might like but the upper shaft of the long nose is accomplished using some sexy hinge action. The door also has a disco-ball on the outside, which I guess could provide some kind of propulsion for space travel, the two big wing-mounted engines being used when flying in an atmosphere.

I call it Space-Tramp because the LEGO man head I’ve used (unfortunately unavailable as an LDraw file, unofficial or otherwise) looks very much like a tramp, yet he is driving a swish-looking space-ship. My reckoning is that the craft itself is some sort of rich-kid’s sports-car, hence all the booze in the cockpit, and our tramp has happened to… acquire it. Now he flies about the galaxy, getting drunk and using the barrel-replicator for both waste-disposal and booze-dispensing, landing on planets every so often to regale folk with his incomprehensible gibberish.

Finally, here is an animated GIF of the model automagically building itself:

Tonight, after seeing the mighty Hot Fuzz again, we turned said LEGO into something magical:

Not only that, I have made up some LDraw instructions, viewable in Bricksmith on a Mac and some other software on a PC. Here is a preview:

The file to download is but 4KB. You know you want it.

We was Kim, Anita, Tim and myself, hence the cunning acronym of KATS.

So… damn… cunning… I may just burst.

Also, for photos from Germany (though mostly France) from a few weeks ago:

- http://www.flickr.com/photos/89153937@N00/sets/72157600158472923
- http://s161.photobucket.com/albums/t212/WendyR_photos/Strassbourg/
- http://timsymons.com/wp-gallery2.php?g2_itemId=3202

One project down, one Java beast to go.

Hoo-hah.

It is everything LEGO’s own Digital Designer promises to be, before it crushes your hopes and dreams in its hideously-sluggish, limited-inventory, unintuitive-interface maw. In the few years I’ve had Digital Designer on my computer I have designed exactly zero models with it.

With Bricksmith, in just one evening I have completed the instructions for a model I’ve been thinking about for the last few months, and I now have a full list of the 295 pieces required to make it a reality. I shall post more details soon, once I have bought the parts.

The only thing that could possibly make it better would be if you could click a button and it would automatically source said parts off BrickLink, total it up and let you pay for them right then and there. As it is, I shall do some hunting tomorrow.

Love you, Bricksmith, love you!

A little rickety and oddly spaced due to a somewhat limited supply of parts, there are four whole levels (dungeon, court, balcony and roof). Stairs take you from the dungeon to the court and the court to the balcony, whilst a retractable ladder takes you to the roof. There are pretty flames and leaves, a rifle-wielding Merlin and even a monkey-loving dragon.

Also, in non-LEGO news, I did my first presentation ever today and it went fairly well. Got to use my MacBook and its remote control and Keynote to be all swish-like and I think I was both coherent and entertaining with the talking about GNU and Richard Stallman and BSD. Hoo-hah.