Lego Ghetto Blaster

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.

Hull is Awesome

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.

Lego Vidiyo is a good value at knockdown prices

Lego Vidiyo.jpg

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.

Very expensive lego bricks

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.

Cups of Lego are a thing

Saturday finds us in the Lego store in Leeds. The back of the store is filled with dispensers for individual pieces. I’ve never found these very interesting, but today it turns out that they are the only way to get the pieces for the nice little Halloween themed bat and ghost designs they had in store.

So we went round and filled a pot. The cost was 6.99 which compares favourably with the price of a set with a similar number of pieces. And you get to keep the pot. This meant I was able to distract myself during Strictly Come Dancing by building the models and then working out what to do with the rather large number of bits I had left.

I realise that this will probably require the use of more imagination on my part than just buying a kit, but I can see me picking up a pot full of interesting colours and shapes on my occasional visits to the store. It also raises the prospect of buying particular Lego bricks to make custom cases for devices and perhaps even gluing them together.