Sorry for the long gap in posting. Like many people, I find my life gets all turned around and upside-down at some point in mid-December each year, only to finally sort itself out sometime in January. Between holiday activities and sickness, I just haven’t had a chance to blog in weeks. But I’ll try to do a better job in the new year.
Category: News
Interview with LEGO CEO
I know this was posted a couple of weeks ago but I only just now saw it for the first time. There’s an interview on TODAYonline with Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, the CEO of LEGO, around his recent trip to Singapore. He touches on a very important point for LEGO fans – is LEGO going to be obsolete like a typewriter, or a booming industry like books? Both have been challenged by newer technologies and media, but the typewriter industry is dead while books are selling better than ever. Can LEGO pull it off? What do you think?
Online Pick A Brick At Last!
Ever since LEGO started offering bulk parts online through the Shop-At-Home service, fans have been hoping they would come out with an online Pick-A-Brick where we could specify a quantity and color of brick to order. They’ve finally done it! The new LEGO.com Factory Pick A Brick service allows you to select bricks by type or color and enter the quantity that you want. They have all the same parts that you can use in the LEGO Digital Designer program.
Mindstorms NXT Firmware to be Open Source
LEGO has announced that the new version of Mindstorms will have open source firmware! This is very exciting news for anyone who likes to hack on robotics. While people reverse-engineered the original Mindstorms to come up with an alternative firmware called LegOS (which was renamed to BrickOS at the request of LEGO’s legal department), this time around LEGO is supporting software hacking from the get-go.
Hot Mindstorms NXT News from MacWorld
At MacWorld I was talking to the LEGO Education (Dacta) guy there and he told me some interesting things about Mindstorms NXT that I hadn’t heard anywhere else.
Mindstorms strikes again
A little over a week ago I finally got around to ordering a LEGO Mindstorms set for the first time. I’ve been a LEGO fan for years but never got around to trying Mindstorms, LEGO’s robotics kit that has been around since 1998. One big reason was that I usually buy LEGO in increments of $10-100 at a time, not the $200 that the Mindstorms Robotics Invention System would have cost. When I did get around to buying it, I chose the educational version from LEGO Education (aka Pitsco aka Dacta). I got the ROBO Technology Set for $159 which should arrive in a few days.