Today we build… Lego Star Wars #10198: Tantive IV – Part 3
by Adal on February 12, 2012, under Lego
Here’s an update of the building of the Tantive IV. It proceeds at a minifigure’s pace but at least I can “savour” the moment. And most importantly, I procrastinate the task of having to find where to actually put it 
"Split up they should be"
That red piece allows the black plate to tilt in order to obtain an oblique look
The Tantive IV engines!
We are almost done, now I just need to close up the main hull of the ship!
Today we build… Lego Star Wars #10198: Tantive IV – Part 2
by Adal on February 10, 2012, under Lego
Here’s an update of the building of the Corellian Corvette. Some of their designers must be true geniuses to transform spaceships into Lego buildable sets. Unfortunately the pieces themselves seem to be randomly sorted into various bags. So if you don’t sort them first every time you need a piece you have to search for it inside all bags. This becomes a bit of a problem in 1000+ pieces sets… Luckily it seems that in the newer sets each bag contains all the pieces needed to build one part of the set.
Here are some pictures:
Here's the hull
A closeup of the command console
These will eventually become the engines
Today we build… Lego Star Wars #10198: Tantive IV – Part 1
by Adal on February 07, 2012, under Lego
Today we’ll talk about LEGO! And STAR WARS! What more could be said? When I was little I always liked them. I still have some lying around, back in Italy. I fondly remember a Robin Hood (sort of) Castle, a Pirates’ fort and an Italian restaurant (?!). Afterwards, real life kicked in and we both went on separate ways. Years come and go.. and in the meantime, LEGO acquired the Star Wars license! More than ten years since, dozens of spaceships have been released with me being unaware for all this time. I love spaceships. When I was little I always liked to draw spaceships. My eternal amateur game development project focuses on spaceships (ok: space colonization to be exact ). I always said that I should have been born 4-500 years from now. It should be enough time to allow a future me to become a Han Solo knockoff with his merry crew of weird aliens, doing the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs! And besides, if one wants spaceship toys, choices are somewhat limited. Strangely enough, my return from the Dark Age was initiated by my girlfriend who gave me a TIE Defender as a birthday present. This sparked in me again the love for LEGO and made me realize the true reason for which I am working to build a future for myself: to buy all the LEGO sets I can afford!
This is a mission which will see me wasting countless Euros or Pounds (or even Dollars, who knows) across the Europe and the World. Where to start? From the first scene in Star Wars Episode IV; this one:
The pursuit of the Rebel Tantive IV by the Imperial Star Destroyer
The Star Wars saga opened with this iconic scene. Onboard the consular ship, we find Leia and the two droids. The Tantive IV is a “Corellian Corvette”, Corellian being the Manufacturer’s name (yes, there are many! What? You didn’t know?). During the years, Lego has released many Collectors’ Edition of certain sets. The one I have is, however, the normal version. The Collectors’ Rebel Blockade Runner has about 1700 brick. The regular one, “only” 1400. So here the difference is not that much (I think).
This is how it looks life after unpacking:
Not in the picture: a dozen bags with all sort of pieces inside! Ah, pure Lego heaven! Unfortunately, the minifigures were not included in the auction I got it from (hence the lower price). There are those who only collect minifigure for example. And they don’t all have the same value. Lego has included within the Tantive IV an exclusive one, Captain Raymus Antilles (about 8£-10E). Clearly, a Tantive IV Leia is different than a “Battle of Endor” Leia! Of course!
If you need another hint, here’s this guy’s claim to fame:
- ….
Enough talking, let’s start building!
The "hull"
Stay tuned for more exciting Lego adventures!
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….
by Adal on February 02, 2012, under Lego, Life
…Lego released this in 2007:
Lego 10179 UCS Millennium Falcon
Today this is the second biggest Lego set ever produced, with more than 5000 pieces! It’s 86 x 56 x 21 cm. Saying that it is huge doesn’t quite convey the idea. When I was living in Italy, my local shops weren’t exactly “well-stocked”. Old and unwanted sets commonly sit on their shelves forever and they didn’t get everything. Then, the university, work and other factors got me out of the loop. Strangely enough, it was my girlfriend that, by giving me a TIE Defender as a birthday present, reignited the Lego passion.
Fast-forward to the recent past: some months ago I entered for the first time in my life a Lego-branded official shop (the one in Liverpool… One). It was like being in Lego Heaven! Then something caught my attention: the huge box of the Super Star Destroyer! I thought that maybe I could have missed something in the meantime. And well, the rest is history… I found out what they had released in ten years that I never heard of. Collector’s edition of the TIE Advanced? X-Wing? Millennium Falcon? And much more!
And here we come to the actual topic of this post: the Millennium Falcon, which as you surely know can do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs! Isn’t that impressive? Lego released this in 2007. Retail price was about 400 Euros I believe. I actually remember walking by this huge box in a very well-stocked toy shop in Italy and saying “It’s too expensive!”. Little did I know that today this would be worth more than 1500 Euros since it has been discontinued. Yes, that set is now one of the most valuable Lego sets ever! Go and have a look for yourself!
But I want one! What could be done? Well, apparently there are is a whole community of sellers who trade in loose bricks. A common brick can be had for a couple of pennies. Of course the MF has many “weird” bricks that were only made for the “Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon” (UCS MF). And, of course, the sellers there know this fact and some of these bricks can be very expensive. Another problem is that some bricks aren’t present in large quantities so you need to buy 1 from a seller, 3 from another and so on. This becomes a big problem if you factor in all the shipping expenses. Luckily, Lego can sell you some of these rare bricks. All things considered, it will not end up costing as a regular big set on the shelves but it will still be cheaper than the auction prices.
So I’m starting this gargantuan quest by obtaining all the rare pieces first. A couple of days ago I received a box from Lego containing the first 500 rare pieces. Here are a few pictures of the bricks I ordered:
Correllian Engineering Corporation sure could have used more vibrant colors...
The angled one is the best
However some pieces are discontinued and in case you order them from Lego they will just send them the closest one in terms of colours and usage. Such as these two pieces:
Damn you light bluish gray
Now I just need another 4500 pieces and I’m done! Easy!
Then this begs the question: where will I put the damn thing?
Episode VII – Knights of the New Republic
by Adal on January 17, 2012, under Nerd
Today, I noticed a photoshop contest on the Cracked.com website titled “Famous websites: 10 years from now”. Well no one had made a Star Wars themed one, so here it goes, the StarWars.com website 10 years from now (or so I hope):
Please, please let it be true!
Custom C# Gradient Editor in Windows.Forms
by Adal on October 15, 2010, under Coding
I expanded on my previous post about a custom color chooser by creating this gradient editor in Windows.Forms. Here it is:
It exploits the ColorWheel to let you choose a color. By double-clicking on the gradient itself you can add a gradient stop (in the code, look for the Marker class). You can drag it to change its offset. Offset can also be changed with the updown control below. You can delete a marker by pressing the button or the DEL key after having clicked on it. Start and end markers cannot be deleted and are displayed as squares.
You can use it in your projects, just add the needed classes. You can get the gradient object itself either by accessing the GradientBuilder.CurrentColorBlend to get a GDI+ ColorBlend object or by accessing the GradientBuilder.CurrentMarkers to get an array of Marker objects.
Download the sample project here.
Custom color chooser/picker dialog with alpha slider for Windows.Forms in C#
by Adal on October 12, 2010, under Coding
Maybe this custom user control could still be useful to someone. I was developing an application and I needed a color picker that also enabled the user to choose an alpha (transparency) value. I found this control here by Ken Getz that uses a color wheel and a series of slider to input the color. Unfortunately it didn’t have an alpha slider. So I edited and made a few changes. Now it comes with an alpha slider and a textbox displaying the Hex equivalent of the color (in AARRGGBB format).
You can download the sample project here.
Just past the relevant classes in your projects to use it. Here’s a small code snippet that explains how to open the dialog and get the color back
[csharp]
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// Call our custom color dialog
ColorChooser colorChooser = new ColorChooser {Color = panel1.BackColor};
// Display it as modal
colorChooser.ShowDialog();
// User has clicked OK: we can get back the chosen color
panel1.BackColor = colorChooser.Color;
}
[/csharp]
Hope you like it.
Welcome to my blog
by Adal on October 08, 2010, under Life
Just a test post, more coming soon!
