Lego Digital Designer

My boys got some Legos for Christmas (of course!), and my 7-year old brought me the brochure that came with his set and said, "Dad, go to legoshop.com!" I obliged and he, my three-year old, and I had fun looking at the expensive Death Star and Millenium Falcon sets for a while. Then we poked around some more and discovered the Lego Digital Designer, which is a very cool program. It basically let's you build with Legos on your computer in 3D--kind of a little Lego CAD program. Finding pieces is much easier than digging through the big pile on the floor. You can rotate views, zoom in and out, and play to your heats content. You can also take screenshots of your designs, print them out, or even send your designs to Lego and they'll box up all the pieces needed for it and sell the kit to you. Genius!

It gives you some base models you can use to get started. My boys liked starting with those and they had a lot of fun just discovering the pieces that were available and how they fit together. This expands their collection a lot, and Mom doesn't have to worry about our one-year old finding small pieces on the floor to eat. Here's a screenshot of one of their creations:

You gotta love the disembodied heads.

The widoze software (there was a Mac version too) runs under wine on my two Gutsy Gibbon boxes (one for each boy, luckily). The fast Core 2 Duo machine seems to have no problems with it, but it locks up the old Celeron machine at frustrating times. Overall, It's really fun to play with. I'll probably have to install it on my laptop too so I don't have to fight my boys for time to play.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SystemVerilog Fork Disable "Gotchas"

This is a long post with a lot of SystemVerilog code. The purpose of this entry is to hopefully save you from beating your head against the wall trying to figure out some of the subtleties of SystemVerilog processes (basically, threads). Subtleties like these are commonly referred to in the industry as "Gotchas" which makes them sound so playful and fun, but they really aren't either. I encourage you to run these examples with your simulator (if you have access to one) so that a) you can see the results first hand and better internalize what's going on, and b) you can tell me in the comments if this code works fine for you and I'll know I should go complain to my simulator vendor. OK, I'll start with a warm-up that everyone who writes any Verilog or SystemVerilog at all should be aware of, tasks are static by default. If you do this: module top; task do_stuff ( int wait_time); #wait_time $display ( "waited %0d, then did stuff" , wa
Read more

'git revert' Is Not Equivalent To 'svn revert'

I just learned that if you have some changes in your working tree that you want to get rid of, you don't type 'git revert' like you might guess. No, that's what cvs, subversion, mercurial, and bazaar (to name a few) use revert to mean, but not git. With git, revert is used to undo actual commits. Thankfully, you can undo your revert with another 'git revert', I just learned. So let me repeat to be clear, if you have changes to your working files that you want to abandon, DO NOT do this: git revert HEAD That will undo your last commit. Do this instead: git reset --hard HEAD I'm glad I have that straightened out now. I'm wondering if /etc was really a good place for me to start out playing with git. UPDATE: Nearly two years later and I'm still getting comments on this. I'm glad I've been able to help people out this way. The discussion in the comments is good, and one thing I'd like to point out is that I now always use
Read more

Git Rebase Explained

Image
Introduction Rebase is a helpful git command that can be used to turn a branchy two-headed version history into an easy to follow linear one. A linear history is much easier for a human eye to follow and a human brain to understand. Rebase is a very safe command to use, despite some fear that people have about it. This post should explain how rebase works and clear up any misunderstandings about it. Rebase Basics The short summary of rebase is that it cuts commits out of the git history and reconnects them somewhere else. Let's say the common scenario comes up: you commit a change to the main branch of a repository, you then run  git fetch , and in come a couple changes that other people made on the main branch. If your commit is version 46f and the others that just came in on the fetch are versions ef9 and 4a2, your version history might look like this: The main branch now has two heads, 46f and 4a2. You can run  git rebase  to disconnect your commit from version d88 and connect i
Read more