Slashdot Mirror
New York City, LEGO Style
Obiwan Kenobi writes "I know we've done LEGO links to death, but The Brick Apple is in a class all by itself. Between the 5 foot tall Empire State Building, the 50,000 piece Greenwich village or perhaps the best of all: the World Trade Center, from which this quote was taken: 'Actually, sticking together all those little 1x1 and 1x2 pieces would get VERY tedious, and after a while they would really hurt my thumbs. Each floor had over 500 little 1x1 and 1x2 pieces.' Wow."
This was in the new movie Elf. Will Ferrel decorated Macy's with a lego NYC (among other things) in honor of Santa's visit.
Empire State Building
World Trade Center
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
First, there's copyright and common-carrier issues. If you cache pages, you become responsible for their content. Google is realizing this as they get served for DMCA removal requests.
Second, it's not something a 'ping' will help. It's usually a db / apache tuning issue, where there's too many connections. The server's alive, it just can't connect to the db, or there aren't enough apache processes. To find these types of errors, you'd have to read the responses and grep for errors. This becomes non-trivial, and more often than not, more trouble than its worth given (1).
--
Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
But what I've always wanted was legos that could be remote controlled. :)
Aha, but you can. At least, you can if you are willing to build a bit. As part of my CSE X86 series at my undergrad hell-hole, we had to merge forces with all engineering disciplines and build lego robots, controlled through the parallel port. It's actually not as difficult as you would think, and the pinouts are quite freely available. Of course, you'll need a language with low-level hardware access, and an OS without an abstraction layer that will thwart your code.
Besides that, the rest is reasonably simple - you build the control box, hook the sucker up to your lego creation via an umbilical cord of wires, and viola - you're running via a wire.
Now, running R/C would be even easier. However, most standard servos that I know of (e.g. Futaba, JR, Hi-Tec) from flying R/C planes aren't likely to be what you're looking for. Rather, you can get high-performance servos for some extra dough, but hey, if it's what you want to do, then go for it.
My personal recommendation on a radio? The Futaba 4-channel digital radio (model number escapes me right now). It's awesome, and you can do flaperons / etc with it, so if you ever want to do R/C flying with fixed-wing craft, you'll be in good shape.
Hope this helps a bit -