Despite having been in the web design industry for several years, it’s taken until this week to get myself into a community of like-minded people in that respect.  I’m surprised at myself that it’s taken me this long.  Still, better late than never.

It all stemmed from a problem I was having, and searching the net hadn’t provided an answer, so I felt asking some actual people might prove more effective.  And so I found myself wandering around the Web Designer Forum, a UK-based community (well, the web site is based in the UK, the members could be from anywhere I suppose) specifically for web designers like me.  I was able to introduce myself, ask my first question, get some responses, and answer some questions other people had, all within a couple of days of discovering the site.  They seem like a genuinely nice bunch of people, so I’m expecting to hang around this site for some time!

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Yesterday morning when I turned my PC on it refused to let me into Windows.  It got as far as the logon screen and then rebooted itself.  It took until this morning to figure out what the problem was – the USB wireless dongle had come loose and the dodgy hardware connection was causing Windows to panic.  Aww… poor Windows… can’t cope with stuff…

Anyway, a byproduct of that temporary glitch was that I started looking into getting Linux working again.  I say again, it wasn’t actually broken before.  I had installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy on the PC over a year ago and never really used it because I couldn’t get it to recognise the wireless dongle I had.  However, having got Windows back online with a CAT5 cable I decided to see if I could persuade Ubuntu to go online too.  And that’s proved to be a mammoth operation, and I’ve got little work done today so far.

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I have been making slow but promising progress on my second attempt Lego Tumbler.  Whereas last time I was able to spent all day every day for a week working on the model, at the moment I only have evenings available to me, so it’s a little slower in coming together.  That said, the progress this evening has been really encouraging and it’s already looking better than the previous version.

I have also been taking plenty of photos, partly for my own reference and geekiness, and partly because I got a lot of comments on YouTube of people asking me how it all worked, and since I’ve not seen anyone else do anything like this on anywhere near the same level of technical accuracy I felt it might be useful to someone!  I’ll try to include some photos in this post, but I’ll be putting them up on a central gallery too, so take a look there if you’re interested. (more…)

The last few days I have been doing a lot of thinking.  Not about philosophy, or theology, or relationships, or anything that one might ordinarily spend a lot of time thinking about.  Oh no, I’ve got to be different.  I’ve been thinking about how to create suspension systems in Lego Technic.

Some of you may remember that a while back I spent a week creating a Lego ‘Tumbler’ (from the film Batman Begins), with working suspension and steering.  That was a technical challenge, but I managed to pull it off eventually.  I even made a couple of videos of the progress.  Since then it’s sat quietly on top of the unit in the lounge, silently gathering dust and being generally forgotten.  Until recently I couldn’t bear it any longer, and just had to start thinking about the next version.  Yes, not satisfied with a Lego Tumbler that has working suspension and steering, now I want to put motors in it too.

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