Alex Muir

Such is life: You’re about to finish the battlements on your Police Pirate Space Castle and you’re one Lego brick short. Fortunately, you can use any brick produced since 1958. Lego was standardised before the metric system left Europe and a decade before shipping containers would be similarly settled.

Lego is the most environmentally friendly toy on the market. It literally has no end-of-life. It doesn’t break, it doesn’t wear out, and there’s a ready market for it as an alternative to the trash.

Every brick that Lego make is another one in the global stockpile - now 90 bricks for every person on the planet. And despite moulding plastic non-stop since the 1950’s, the price of Lego remains as buoyant as ever - both new and used. I honestly don’t know where all that Lego goes, but we can say that the amount being landfilled is effectively zero.

Think how unique this is among toys with their fleeting licensing deals, brittle and irreparable plastic structures, and zero resale value.

Getting greener

The LEGO Group made a commitment to run its operations on 100% renewable energy by 2020. And it’s on course - in 2013 it invested €400m into a North Sea windfarm which is now 50% operational.

They have also put things in smaller boxes, although boxes are often still about twice the size they need to be. I understand: The size of the box directly equates to the number of hours of tranquility a parent is going to enjoy.

But the company has a problem getting fully green: 90% of carbon emissions lie in its supply chain, and over 30% is from the raw material that goes into Lego bricks: crude oil.

Lego used 68,000 tonnes of plastic pellets in 2013.

The company plans to come up with a sustainable alternative material for bricks by 2030. LEGO bricks are made from a type of plastic called acrylonitrile butadiene styrene or ABS. It can be recycled, but that’s irrelevant because only a complete idiot would recycle Lego.

Any replacement material will have to match some formidable properties:

• Strength. A single 2x2 brick can support 430kg.
• Durability. Lego is indestructible. (Citation: Extensive personal crash testing of various Lego vehicles.) Dedicated research shows that two lego bricks can be joined and separated 37,112 times before they lose their grip to each other.

• Clutch power. This is a critical property that sets Lego apart from its cheap clones (the last Lego patent expired in 1989.) There is a fine tolerance that lets a block be easily joined, remain attached, and then be disassembled without tools.
• Colourfastness. There are 23 colors of lego brick. They shouldn’t fade.

The LEGO Economy

Raw

Lego’s raw material, ABS plastic pellets, cost $3 per kg when bought in huge bulk.

New

Lego increase the value of that raw material by at least 20x when it lands on the shelf. The best value set on a piece-by-piece basis is the Detective’s Office (epic in its own right). It contains 2,262 pieces and weighs 2.6kg. So Lego transform $7.80 worth of pellets into an RRP of $160. New lego costs a minimum of $60 per kg.

Used

Once it’s been built, dismantled, jumbled up chewed and the instructions eaten, it might get put into plastic bags and flogged on eBay. Used Lego, unsorted in bags, sells for $10 to $20 per kg.

Most used sets sell for around 70-80% of their RRP. Some sets become collectible and then sell for a fortune: like the Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon which was $500 new and now sells for $1,500 to $2,000. Or any sort of monorail.

This means that once a Lego brick has been moulded it will never be worth less than 6 times the value of raw material that went into it. This has to be unique among mass market products.

I received an email yesterday from a How a Car Works visitor who helpfully tipped me off that the domain name car.how is available. It’s a fantastic name, and a great fit.

The .how TLD is managed by Google Registry. This list of Google’s TLDs, and the accompanying blurb, looks like it’s lifted been from a 1999 NADAQ list of IPOs. Check out these Web 1.0 gems:

.DAD

Fathers know best - A home for ideas, products, services, and info about fathers and fatherhood.

.FOO

Developers welcome - If you know what “foo” means, you’ll find your web dev, prototyping, and beta sites here.

.MEME

Viral content - The term “meme” connotes the echoing of a cultural idea. This domain houses viral phenomena, from ideas to images to videos.

Unfortunately, and rightly, the car.how domain has been designated as premium by Google, so it costs $620 per year. To be clear, that’s an annual ongoing cost.

I wasn’t aware of this new pricing model for recent top level domains. Up to now domains cost a flat rate per year, so it’s $10 for toys.com and $10 for someobscurenameyoudneverwant.com. There’s a decent argument that this low pricing has led to high levels of domain squatting.

So I can appreciate the logic behind premium pricing set up at the registry level. It discourages domain squatters, and encourages productive usage.

I’m on the fence as to whether it’s worth registering and moving How a Car Works over. If it was a one-off cost I’d do it in a flash, but annualised I’m not sure. I’d be effectively paying rent and I don’t like that one bit. I doubt there will be any SEO benefit, and users might be confused by the unfamiliar format of this name. Plus I’d lose a keyword from the domain because visitors often search terms like how car brakes work.

For now it’s a no - the existing domain is good. And, as ever, I’m fearful of rocking the SEO boat.

I’m just sitting down to lunch at one of my favourite places in Budapest. I’ve come straight from the gym and I probably forgot my wallet on the way out of the apartment. But it doesn’t matter because I have battery and bitcoins on my phone. This restaurant is one of two that accept Bitcoin within a few hundred meters.

This has happened quite a few times in the past month - either not having my wallet or having no cash. Bitcoin enables me to pay for things using my phone - there’s nothing else that does this.

Sure, Apple Pay are working on it. But it’s useless to me in Europe (and my one year old iPhone 5S will never be compatible anyway). And it’s permanently useless to everyone without an Apple device. I don’t have a clue what the standards are - frankly I think we’re likely to see wider adoption of a Facebook Pay solution than Apple Pay (even though it doesn’t exist yet.)

Right now Bitcoin is the only means for over 90% of the world’s population to pay for things using only their mobile phone, and conversely for retailers to accept payments via mobile from the bulk of the population. It’s cross-platform and ready today.

Over the past few days I’ve redesigned this site to be closer to what I actually want - somewhere that encourages me to write, and now also to draw.

On the writing side, I have completely missed my goal of writing every day. It’s OK because I’m super productive, but I need to make more effort to set aside ten minutes each day.

This redesign includes a sketch with each of my posts - this is to encourage me to draw something (draw anything) each day.

I’ve been learning to draw and sketch since July last year, albeit very infrequently, and suddenly in the past month I seem to be able to express my imagination on paper. Most objects are recognisable, and I can shade to create a sense of solidity. There’s a long way to go but I’m pleased that I would no longer say I draw like a four-year old.

When I first started this blog back in 2009 I used Wordpress. Then I changed to an open-source clone of Svbtle called Obtvse. For a time I liked the minimalism of Svbtle, but now it looks boring and characterless to me. I will be recreating the split-pane view of ‘ideas’ and ‘published’ posts.

I’m spending a some time trying out a few new technologies and techniques. Learning Swift has given me a taste for experimentation, and lured me out of my Ruby/Rails/jQuery/SASS comfort zone.

One of the most surprising things is how far behind I feel. I mean, I only learned Ruby around four years ago, and I’ve kept on the leading edge of Rails through turbolinks, the asset pipeline, coffeescript and more.

I have poked at things like Ember and Angular, but ultimately they’ve gone nowhere. Which I’ve come to realised is because I didn’t actually know Javascript - I just knew the very basics. I’ve taken a few weeks to really dive in and learn the core concepts of javascript - scoping, context, prototypal inheritance etc. That’s paid off big-time as I’m now finding it a joy to work with React.

I set out last weekend to make a simple single-page webapp that would generate an origami pattern of any book, which can be cut and folded to make a fake book. It’s mainly an exercise in something other than the database-driven RESTful design which Rails leads me towards.

In the process I’ve discovered that I have no front-end workflow - it’s all been managed by Rails’ asset pipeline. The code is a joy to work with - I’m able to spin up a Node server, proxy requests out to a 3rd party API and all in just a handful of lines of code. I have three javascript files in total for my front and back-end.

While the simplicity is wonderful, I’m lost as to how to even do basics like see my new server-side code without quitting and restarting the node server every time. I don’t know how to work with SASS, how to enjoy Bootstrap’s mixins, or how to minify anything. I’ve discovered that npm is the equivalent of Bundler and now I’m setting off on an investigation of Grunt, Gulp, Live Reload and Yeoman.

I’m also questioning where the autocompletion in VIM is - Xcode has given me a taste for being able to instantly see the properties and methods on an object. I’m off down the rabbit hole…