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The Free Universal Construction Kit
51–60 of 96 posts
Re: The Free Universal Construction Kit
#52Very cool. Do two copyright infringements (one on each side of the adapter) cancel each other out? I really like it!
There is some interoperability provision to patents and copyright in European union if I remember correctly but I don't know how broad they are and if they apply to this.
Re: The Free Universal Construction Kit
#53No Construx? I built everything out of those as a kid.
Ditto. My kids are still pretty young, and my old Construx are one of the favorite building toys.
Re: The Free Universal Construction Kit
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least Lego‘s patent on the bricks expired. You can’t make mini figures but bricks shouldn’t be a problem
Indeed Amazon is chock full of shitty Chinese Lego ripoffs. The bricks do indeed fit together but the quality is abysmal.
Some of the Chinese brands have superior quality to LEGO these days.
Re: The Free Universal Construction Kit
#55In case the authors are here, the first sentence contains the bytes e2 80 94 which would be UTF-8 for an em dash, but it has been reinterpreted as 3 bytes using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252#Code_page_layout and shown on the page as —. Further down, there's a lot of similar errors such as a single right quote (U+2019) in K'nex. Firefox seems to have first removed their encoding configuration menu in ve…
> Why shouldn’t we be able to? I have no idea why but my brain immediately interpreted this as a Scottish accent, like ‘shouldnae’. Weird.
… because "â€" and "ae" are visually similar?
Re: The Free Universal Construction Kit
#56I’m disappointed that VEX IQ didn’t make the list of connections. For a System they have a lot of well thought out parts, they need help on the decoration side and smaller gear patterns.
Re: The Free Universal Construction Kit
#57These kits can have extraordinary longevity. I was playing with Lincoln Logs in 1967. Turns out they got started in 1918. Lego bricks have been around since 1945. The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a young age is large.
> The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a young age is large.
I'm not sure that's enough: most kids wouldn't be able to tell a genuine Lego brick from a knock-off.
(Lego famously has insane quality control on their tolerances. But I haven't had any trouble with knock-off bricks so far either.)
Re: The Free Universal Construction Kit
#58In case the authors are here, the first sentence contains the bytes e2 80 94 which would be UTF-8 for an em dash, but it has been reinterpreted as 3 bytes using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252#Code_page_layout and shown on the page as —. Further down, there's a lot of similar errors such as a single right quote (U+2019) in K'nex. Firefox seems to have first removed their encoding configuration menu in ve…
This is probably the case of a bodged migration from one CMS to another. My blog suffered the same, and going through loads of old pages to check and fix them just isn't worth the effort.
The archived version from 2012 is showing the characters correct. So probably some migration like you said.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120319180000/https://fffff.at/...
The website itself has been closed since 2015 according to the front page.
Which also suffers from encoding problems making weird characters show up.
But which was showing the characters the way it should on August 1st 2015 when the site was closing down.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150801234212/http://fffff.at/
Who wants to bet that at some point after the closing of the site, they switched over from a live CMS to a static copy of the site and in the process of doing so things got a little screwed up when exporting data from a MySQL database with the different encoding weirdnesses that can sometimes occur with MySQL and how the db schema was set there.
Re: The Free Universal Construction Kit
#59These kits can have extraordinary longevity. I was playing with Lincoln Logs in 1967. Turns out they got started in 1918. Lego bricks have been around since 1945. The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a young age is large.
> The moat created by seriously delighting your customers at a young age is large. I'm not sure that's enough: most kids wouldn't be able to tell a genuine Lego brick from a knock-off. (Lego famously has insane quality control on their tolerances. But I haven't had any trouble with knock-off bricks so far either.)
I'm sure that Lego still captures virtually all of the revenue in this category, no?
Re: The Free Universal Construction Kit
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mickey mouse is in the public domain, at last!
I think they would have a very strong case that using the mouse on a product is likely to confuse consumers about the origin of the product and therefore infringe on their trademark.
Nah, Disney seems to be genuinely letting it go. Amazon and other sites are flooded with Steamboat Willie merchandise at this point.
In fact I play cornhole competitively, and last year I picked up a set of Steamboat Willie themed bags:
https://www.logiccornhole.com/products/steamboat-willie-colo...