(Very off-topic for this blog, but I figured the audience would appreciate it more than that of my personal blog.)

I've always been a big fan of LEGOs, but recently I've started to descend (ascend?) the slippery slope towards a LEGO fanatic. It's certainly blossoming as a major hobby.

I think part of what has expanded my interest recently is the discovery of ways to combine my passion for LEGOs with my love of computers. Aside from the obvious eBay auctions and fansites, there are some great utilitarian sites for LEGO enthusiasts. Peeron inventories parts, sets, and instructions. Parts Catalog lets you inventory your LEGO pieces much better than a simple spreadsheet.

The real time-waster, though, is MLCAD (Mike's LEGO CAD) which is part of the LDraw standard. LDraw is actually an old DOS-based CAD program that has been built-upon over the years. MLCAD is a Windows app that gives you all of the LEGO parts in a rather nice interface, where you can build sets. There's a lot of features I haven't tried yet, and other utilities to play with (e.g., POV-Ray for rendering).

Last night I test drove MLCAD by creating a simple Truck model (317-1) using instructions from Peeron. It took me about 90 minutes to create. The resultant file is actually just plain text:


0 Untitled
0 Name: Truck (317-1).ldr
0 Author: MLCad
0 Unofficial Model
0 ROTATION CENTER 0 0 0 1 "Custom"
0 ROTATION CONFIG 0 0
1 4 -30 -32 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3023.DAT
1 4 10 -32 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3023.DAT
1 7 -10 -32 -70 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3020.DAT
1 0 -40 -32 30 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3021.DAT
1 0 -40 -32 150 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3021.DAT
1 0 20 -32 150 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3021.DAT
1 0 20 -32 30 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3021.DAT
1 0 -50 -32 90 0 0 -1 0 1 0 1 0 0 3020.DAT
1 0 30 -32 90 0 0 -1 0 1 0 1 0 0 3020.DAT
0 STEP

That's just the first step; there are seven total. I also exported it as an image; there are many options for export including step-by-step images, parts list, etc. Again, I've only glazed through it, but I hope I'll be able to delve more into this in the future.

www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/008679.php

Out of context, it's hilarious. If you follow the links to the research project, it makes a bit more sense. But it's still funny.

Two neat Notepad tricks I came across in the past few weeks:

1.The first is really a bug, but it's still neat. Originally seen on Bink.nu:

- Enter "andy ask for water" (without the quotation marks) in a new text file.
- Save and close Notepad
- Reopen the file and it'll be converted from ANSI to Unicode.

The original post says any 4-3-3-5 combo works, but that's not entirely true. It does appear that the first character of the first and second words need to be the same, but I didn't try all 26 combinations, or much else from there.


2.The second comes from Lifehacker:

- Enter ".LOG" (without the quotation marks) on the first line of a new text file, and then some text on the next line.
- Save and close Notepad
- Reopen the file. A timestamp plus CRLF will be appended to the end of the file. Enter some more text, save and close Notepad. Reopen, repeat.

An interesting journalling trick, which might be useful in some scripting situations (write .LOG to the first line of the file and then not worry about writing timestamps for each log entry [assuming the file is opened, a log entry is written and then the log is closed again]).

While working on setting up servers in a new DMZ today I came across some good tools from Microsoft for gathering information on network port usage. It seems they've been around for years, so this might be old news to others.

PortQry Command Line Port Scanner Version 2.0

Description of the Portqry.exe command-line utility

New features and functionality in PortQry version 2.0

Port Reporter