Category: Toys

Air

November 1, 2013

Even though, this morning, I didn’t know they were out today…

And even though, less than half an hour before I told JAF I wasn’t going to get one…

…I bought an iPad Air today 🙂

After a few hours of use, here’s five “why the Air is better than my old iPad 2” observations:

1) It’s much, much faster doing just about anything. Powering on, starting apps, using the internet. This last one surprised me a bit since I figured the slowness was the network lag, but this beast loads webpages and checks email like there’s no tomorrow. In addition, certain games that were sluggish on the iPad 2 are much more playable now.

2) The retina screen is incredible. Of course I’m used to it on my phone, and of course iPads have had retina screens for ages now (since iPad 3), but I had chosen to ignore this since my old iPad didn’t have one 🙂

3) It’s much lighter and much thinner than any previous iPad. This is why they are calling it the ‘air’, and it’s a bit incredible to have an iPad that is both thinner and lighter than my phone. It’s hard to believe tablets could get much thinner than this.

4) It uses all the features of iOS 7. If you are using an iPad 2, certain features of Apples latest OS are disabled. This irked me a bit, since iOS 7 seemed a bit more complete on my phone than on my old iPad. No such problem on the Air.

5) Battery life seems better. I haven’t plugged it in yet. It was 99% out of the box and now after many hours which included downloading a 18GB backup from the cloud, it’s at 78%. Either it’s just flat out better, or my old iPad had an aging battery (which is very possible).

Needless to say despite the fact that I had no plans or expectation to buy this, I’m very happy with my purchase. For a device I use every single day, I think it was a good time for a big upgrade!

Here Comes The Crane Again

September 3, 2013

It was time once again to remove from my shelf a new Lego Technic set. As with all the others I have build in recent years, I’m going to call this set – officially known as a ‘Motorized Excavator’ – another crane:

I bought this oodles ago and I’m going to pretend to forget how shockingly expensive it was. Last birthday I got (yet!) another ‘crane’ set so there were two on my shelf for a while. I knew this guy would take time and attention to build, so earlier this summer I cracked him open. Here’s what was in the box:

Er, that’s not actually everything. That’s what was left after I’d removed 75% of the pieces and the three lengthy instruction manuals 🙂

This kit was a challenging build. In fact it was probably the most complex Technic kit I have ever made, close to the Death Star in terms of frustration. I built it in many phases across several weeks, and one step in particular required two people. KLS helped me then, although not without cursing and teeth-gnashing, and I can’t imagine how it would have been possible to attach the arm to the chassis without at least three hands.

Some under construction shots:

They are the four separate electric motors that power the excavator. Note the required crossing of the wire order. Eventually the above would be connected to the battery pack, which contained IR sensors so the device can be controlled wirelessly.

A very small portion of the incredibly complex gearing that the excavator uses. Four motors each have a separate degree of freedom (as you’ll see in the video) but – amazingly – some of these share gearing. As I was building this many times I wondered how anyone devised this mechanism in the first place, much less in a way it could be built via Lego.

At the time of the above photo, I had spent maybe a half-dozen hours on the kit over a few weeks. I’d say this was about half done at this point.

The finished kit. It is very large (about 60 cm long and 50 cm high in the position shown above) and quite heavy. You can see the battery pack in the back of the cab. Not shown are the two separate remotes. All told the device requires 10 batteries (6 AA and 4 AAA) to work, and unlike some other kits I have there is no manual override to allow for non-powered use.

Here is a video demonstrating the various functions controlled by the motors:

As you may have noticed I made an error switching between remotes manually. I didn’t realize how complete the remote control is!

This was a challenging but very entertaining kit to build, and I was surprised it all worked first go since some of the gearing seemed extremely tight when I was building it. Given the size and complexity, it’s hard to believe Lego will ever top the scale of this kit 🙂

Apotheosis of The Machine Brain

August 10, 2013

It’s 8 pm and I’m sitting on the promenade outside the ~~castle~~ hotel overlooking the Saint Lawrence river. There will be fireworks later; people are everywhere! It will be a fun end to a busy day!

Here’s the very start:

We’d return to this bakery later for bread and pastries for our dinner!

In the morning we caught a bus upriver to the famous Montmorency Falls.

Beautiful! See the bridge over the top? We walked that. The photo above is taken from a steep staircase that leads from the top to the bottom:

Here’s a shot from the lookout to the south side of the falls, visible on the left in the first photo:

We started at the top, took the stairs down, then got to the top again via a rope way!

Here’s me hamming it up in the car:

Growing up in Australia waterfalls are not exactly common and it’s always a treat to visit one. It was a sight definitely worth seeing 🙂

Afterwards, we returned to the city and headed down to old town, at the base of the cliffs on which stands the hotel. Here I met a lovely bird:

Whose hand is that? ONLY MINE!

I petted him and he leaned into my hand. So cute!

We wandered on, and ignorantly walked right past the Canadian Museum of Civilization! Booooooring, we all might think. But stop the presses since a certain poster caught my eye…

What’s this? A froggy museum exhibit on the history of video games in Quebec, Canada? Could it be good? Was it worth $15?!?!?

Yes, my friends, it absolutely was!

The exhibit, which was divided into various eras (Origin, Arcades, 3D etc.) contained over 500 items including a staggering 88 playable consoles and arcade games!

And believe me, whoever curated this exhibit was no slouch to game history and the landmark games from each era.

The above snap shows Barbarian playable on an Amstrad!?! I was in hog heaven as I effortlessly demoed the 1-hit kill move to Jim almost 30 years since I had last played.

I would go on to play PC-Engine, MSX (!!), C-64 and countless other gems, including…

Tempest 2000 on a Jaguar! Jim got in on the action as well:

That’s him playing an Amiga for the first time. The game? Turrican!

Here’s a cute display:

That’s Bubble Bobble demonstrated on 4 different machines. A fifth was playable adjacent to this display.

I also went a bit menerk when I found Thunderforce III playable for Mega Drive. It was as if this exhibit was custom designed for me!

Oh and the relics! They ranged from breathtaking original working Space Invaders Deluxe cocktail cabinets:

To displays of rare game merchandise:

To awesomely nostalgic game packaging:

And to stuff bizarre beyond words:

There was so much to see and play, from Odyssey to iOS and Wii U. Superb beyond my mere words, this exhibit was one memory after another. As I got to this screen on my first man:

In this game:

I knew my visit to the ~~boooooring~~ Museum of Civilization was one I’d probably remember forever 🙂

Oh yes, and later in the day we saw this:

Gotta run! Fireworks 🙂

Robot Claw