Yes, I’ve got the Lego out again.  Unlike last time I have work to do during the day, so my building is restricted to free evenings, so progress is a little slower.  Still, nothing like a good challenge.  The project this time round is a vehicle of some sort, probably a sports car or similar.  The reason for the uncertainty is that the main goal is to experiment with a combination of suspension and an active drivetrain.  I experimented a while back with ways of getting a 4×4 drive system in place, but that proved too complicated given the bricks I have, so this time I’m going for the front wheels doing the steering and the rear wheels being connected to the engine, and with all four wheels having some form of suspension, albeit limited travel.

Today I started work on the front of the car, trying to get a setup capable of steering and suspension in a small space (I want to leave space for the engine in the front too).  In the end I stole an idea from another model, and used the front suspension and steering system almost straight out of the instruction booklet.  The next problem was working out how to connect that solidly to a subframe and not have it get in the way of the drivetrain.

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My friend Phill recently bought a new mobile phone.  Apparently it’s shiny.  Last Christmas I bought my wife a new mobile phone.  It too is shiny.  My own mobile phone, on the other hand, was shiny and new in 2005, and is now considerably less shiny than it used to be thanks to my keys rubbing a lot of the silver off the bottom of the casing.  No wonder, then, that I felt a few pangs of jealousy this week.

Unfortunately I just can’t justify buying myself a new phone, since my Motorola L6 does actually work fine.  So rather than get depressed about the situation I decided to have another go at revitalising my phone and getting the most out of it.  A little research got me Opera Mini 4.2, which is a sleek and feature-filled web browser for my phone.  Not only is it infinitely nicer to look at and use than the built-in one, it’s also miles faster thanks to a proxy compression that Opera provides – basically every web page my phone requests is sent via the Opear server, compressed until it’s tiny and then sent to my phone, which speeds up download times considerably.  The result is that my phone is now capable of checking e-mails and looking at web pages without a century passing between pages.

Then I started downloading yet more stuff.   (more…)