About Gambort

I'm a builder with a short attention span and a lot of virtual bricks. I'm probably most known as a train builder and was involved in the creation of LEGO set 10183 but I do a lot of other stuff too. I'm also a member of the LDraw SteerCo and a webmaster for the site.

Posts by Gambort

It’s a wonderful mess

Once again Peer Kreuger (mahjqa) has sent us a technic guest blog. Thanks again to Peer.

Some of our readers may already be familiar with LEGO Great Ball contraptions or GBCs for short. It’s a collaborative project where each participant builds a single maching with one purpose; to receive balls and move them to the next machine. When you get a couple of them, you can link them together to form a loop, and get one giant moving factory. Want to know more about that? Look here.

Then there’s folks who build selfcontained units, like Sqiddster has done. This is his third attempt, and it’s densely packed with all kinds of mechanisms. Don’t read this, watch the video instead.

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Registration Open for Bricks by the Bay 2011, March 25th-27th

Announcing a LEGO convention for those in the ~~southern~~Western parts of the USA.

Registration is now open for the second annual Bricks by the Bay, taking place March 25th – 27th at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Last year’s convention was agreed to be a great success by all who attended, and this year’s takes place at a new venue with over twice the space! Also, this is the same weekend originally planned for Brickfest 2011 (now cancelled) so if you had planned to attend Brickfest, consider making a trip to California instead. Registration is capped at 400 attendees and almost 100 have already signed up, so register now to secure your badge. Early registration discount offered until February 25th.

For more info check out the Bricks by the Bay site. There is also a call for presentations; if you’re interested in hosting a talk, break-out session, or special activity, contact Paul Sinasohn here.

I’m too busy to post

I really like this spaceship. Usually I have issues with busy spaceships but not this one. This one I like. Thanks Don Wilson (thepaleman9).

Space Lounge 000

Mike Yoder (yoder42) made a small LEGO webcomic. There’s a lot of great action, and especially great models. Anyone else get an 80s or early 90s vibe here?

A warning about flickr groups

Warning! This post is not about LEGO bricks but about the community on flickr. If you have no interest in the flickr LEGO community then please just ignore it.

I went to visit one of my LEGO flickr groups the other day (Jan 29) only to find the above message. I’d got through a couple of minutes of before so I was a little bit suspicious. Inspection of my group list showed that LEGO 16+ had vanished from there too. Apparently it had spontaneously disappeared.

As the creator and an administrator of the group I was first in line to hear about it if something had gone wrong. I’d heard nothing. Over the following six days I’ve pieced together what happened. In LEGO 16+ we had a thread for leaks. All discussion in the group was only available to members of the list and one of those members had reported this thread to TLG. They had taken their usual action (lawyerly email) to flickr and Yahoo! (who are directly responsible for these issues) had decided to simply delete the entire group. Not the thread, not the links but the entire group.

I’ll note that I didn’t hear this from flickr but had to piece it together myself (with help). Immediately upon discovering the issue I contacted flickr about it. They finally got back to me today (six days later) with the following:

Hello gambort,

Thank you for contacting Flickr Member Support.

In joining Flickr, our members agree to abide by the Yahoo!
Terms of Service and the Flickr Community Guidelines:

http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne
http://www.flickr.com/terms.gne

Your group was brought to our attention through Report
Abuse. Upon review, we determined that your content and/or
behavior was in violation and your account was terminated.

Thank you again for contacting us. If you have any other
questions, please feel free to reply to this email.

Regards,
Flickr staff

which is extremely helpful. Having heard various horror stories about Yahoo!’s attitude to its users I’d already anticipated this response and was, sadly, not surprised. Incidentally the guidelines basically says that if Yahoo! don’t like what you do they can do what they like. This is standard but most sites choose to explain things.

So what has this got to do with you?

Well firstly if you were interested in what went on in LEGO 16+ you might want to know what happened to it. It’s gone but we’ve moved to AFOL 16+. NB. you must be 16 or over to join this group and it does contain bad language, bad taste and other things some people don’t like.

Secondly, if you run or actively participate in a flickr group you should be very wary of this. If you allow or actively encourage leaks there is a chance the entire group could be deleted. It’s totally unreasonable but Yahoo! have a reputation for behaving in just this way. You might also want to be careful reporting people.

Consider it a lesson learnt the hard way by me so you don’t have to. Yahoo! do not care about you, your group, or anything you have done. Make sure you have a backup in place for any vital discussion and try to back up your flickr photostream.

EDIT: I realise my original post doesn’t make my issue entirely clear here. The loss of LEGO 16+ was a minor irritation as it wasn’t really a resource so much as a discussion forum. It had been replaced by a functional equivalent within hours. The loss of some of my other groups (eg. LEGO Techniques) would be far more tragic and I’ll be making sure it’s unlikely (certainty is impossible given Yahoo!s arbitrariness) to keep it off the radar. I recommend others do the same. Yahoo! do not care.

Well Polished LEGO

Karwik has created a beautiful rendition of Drzymała’s wagon with a wonderful backdrop of trees. His use of colour and texture in the otherwise plain wagon is truly masterful and the trees are almost certainly the best I’ve seen. I would be utterly remiss if I didn’t post this.

Heaps of good LEGO stuff

Has it been international LEGO building weekend or something? I’ve got a whole stack of new and great models popping up in my flickr stream today and I’m not really sure why. So you get a roundup post of Aurore&Aube, Soren Roberts, Anthony Sava, Pete Reid and zachmoe.

Mars + Octan + LEGO = Racing

Not content with bringing us cool LEGO sets, Mark Stafford (lego_nabii) also continues to bring us cool MOCs. Another for the LUGNUTs challenge.

The Martian Polar Pavonis Rally takes place annually (a Martian year is 687 days) between Schmit Ice Base at the Southern pole and the MSA Research station at Pavonis Mons, near the Martian equator. The race is a martian tradition commemorating the emergency transport of oxygen to the base in the first years of settlement.

Octan Racing

Firas Abu-Jaber provides a very tasty entry to the latest LUGNUTS challenge. Firas uses a great mixture of techniques to get his shapes right and captures the spirit of a Dakar rally beautifully.

Planet of the squid

I don’t think I need to say much about Dave Shaddix‘s latest.

Brickvention 2011 roundup

As I mentioned in my last post I spent last weekend (14th to 16th) enjoying myself at Brickvention 2011. This year is was significantly larger than last year with 140 AFOLs attended and 8000 people through the door on public day. In order to deal with an increasing number of attendees (last year there were 3000 through the door) the event had moved to a bigger venue but with a three-fold increase in attendance it simply wasn’t enough. Sadly many people had to wait two hours to get in and some were turned away at the end of the day. The event seems to be approaching the size of some of the smaller European and US fests.

But I suspect our readers aren’t too interested in statistics compared to pictures. After giving attendees a weekend to get their pictures up there are now a bunch of photos up on flickr (check the BV pool and BV 2011 pool or appropriate tags).

My absolute favourites were the steampunk ship Hyperion (top) by Darren Reid and the Sydney club’s Western display (bottom). Much to my chagrin I spent most of the public days building and didn’t get to see many of the smaller models but I did get a quick moment to wander around and check out the bigger models so can also recommend Ross Crawford‘s crane (right), Kevin Hall‘s Drachenberg castle, Ryan McNaught‘s The Love Boat (left) and Hogwart’s school (left) by David Scalone. But there was numerous other great models around the place.

I certainly look forward to Brickvention 2012 whenever and wherever it may be. If you’re in the region this event just gets bigger and better each year so do come along. And many, many, many thanks to the organisers. They put in a lot of effort and ran a very tight ship.

David Cook has posted timelapse photos of the start of public day

LEGO Ararat in 1972

I’ve just returned from Brickvention 2011 where I had an absolutely awesome time. I’m waiting for more photographs to appear on flickr before I give a proper roundup but there were some excellent LEGO models there.

In the interim I’ll write something about what Mike Pianta (scruffulous) and I displayed: a diorama based on the (presently flooded in) town of Ararat in Victoria, Australia as it was in the year 1972.

Mike and I started planning this about three months before the event. Our goals were ‘simple’: keep the level of accuracy and detail high, include a large curved track, and work off the grid as much as possible. Not the easiest set of goals but not impossible. I feel like we did manage to achieve them.

However we had one further problem: Mike lives in Melbourne (where the exhibition is) and I live 1800km away in Brisbane. Which meant my contributions also had to be modular enough to survive a plane trip. This was OK until, just days before I was due to go, my city was flooded leaving me wondering if I’d ever make it out.

To cut a long story short I did make it and I got very lucky with the baggage handlers who helped my models survive largely intact. Phew! Anyway, that’s probably all you want to hear about it here. If you have any further questions ask here or on flickr.

And as for the floods: my friends and family are all fine, my girlfriend got stuck on holidays for an extra three days by a flooded road and the city is a mess. Luckily the loss of life in Brisbane was very low but some nearby towns were destroyed by an ‘inland tsunami’ which killed many. Still, compared to those in Rio state we got off lightly.

EDIT: Mike now has videos.