Brickley's
Words

Another new crane. Built in a couple of hours using only parts from set 8288, read more about it here.

Well OK it’s really an old bridge but I only just got around to taking photos. It’s a cable-stayed bridge loosely based on the Batman Bridge near Launceston Tasmania. Read all the info here.

February 7th 2009. After a fairly mild summer Melbourne was in the middle of a heat wave, and that Saturday pushed the mercury past 46C in the city, the hottest day on record. It was of course a day of total fire ban, with strong unpredictable winds, and during the day there were reports of several large bushfires around Melbourne’s outer suburbs. The full toll wasn’t known to most though, until the next day. With fires still burning, people were already counting the cost. The final toll would not be known for many days.
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This is probably my longest lasting MOC project to date. Back in 2001, I realised that the 6 speeds of the LEGO train controller driving a standard 9V motor produced the first 6 overtones, ie: the notes available to most valve-less brass instruments. I didn’t do anything more on it until yesterday, when for some obscure reason I decided to finish the project.

So here it is for your enjoyment (or otherwise).

Well it’s been a while, with no bug reports! I guess that means it’s working great for everyone 🙂

So I decided to implement a new feature that someone once asked for – pair kerning. Pair kerning adjusts the space between some character pairs to make them look better, for example L & W, which generally look too wide apart if the default spacing is used.

The kerning information is stored in the font file, and txt2dat now uses it to make the text look better. Note that it only applies horizontal kerning because

• txt2dat doesn’t support multiple lines
• FreeType doesn’t support vertical kerning

Anyway, check it out. The first example is without kerning, the second is with it.

Oh, and you can download txt2dat here.

LW without kerning

LW with kerning