Archive for the ‘Breaktime’ Category

LEGO Mindstorms NXT Alpha Rex building instructions / plan

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

[caption id="attachment_1343" align="alignright" width="242" caption="LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 Alpha Rex"][/caption] I bought the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 recently and was a bit disappointed to find that it didn't come with printed instructions to build Alpha Rex - the robot on the box art. I searched for the instructions all over the ...

Religion-free state education in the UK

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

We recently returned to the UK with two young children from a financially cavalier extended 'babymoon' in Malaysia. Part of the impetus to move back again was my reluctance to put my children through the Malaysian state education system which emphasises racist division and religious practice, though possibly not in ...

Look Ma, no files! Portable object persistence

Friday, August 19th, 2011

Originally posted at JavaProgrammingForums.com Where can I store my application data? I see a lot of people starting threads because they're struggling to persist (often) a little bit of data from one run of their Java application to the next. The offered solutions are often some kind of jiggery-pokery involving java.io.File. Not ...

LEGO Mindstorms RCX cable rot / decay

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Some of the LEGO I have in the house must be 30 years old. It's as good as the day it was first unwrapped. I have to admit to being disappointed when one of my two RCXes stopped responding to the IR tower. I was pleased the other one was ...

BrickOS on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

BrickOS was an integral part of some work I did many years ago and I've been trying to dig the code up recently. It seems as though it fell out of the Ubuntu repositories some time ago (in as legos before the name change), so I'm currently installing the source ...