Mark Pospesel (Coding and Other Stuff)
Coding, tech, living abroad, travel, hiking, vintage plastic bricks
6982-1: Explorien Starship, 1996. Large drop-nose spaceship features a detachable rover, two robotic arms, a telescope, twin rockets, sensor dish, three astronauts and a droid. This was the largest LEGO spaceship yet released. My favorite bit is the rover.
… and the next earlier iteration of my resume is so old it lists a fax number! 🤣🤣
My resume is so old, it lists my app.net username! 🤣
Features: Small rocket-propelled car with one astronaut and a walkie-talkie as an accessory.
Thoughts: This little guy is adorable! Very compact build debuts the new space seat, space wing, and rocket thruster parts.
Features: Small needle-nosed plane with dual antennas and one astronaut with a walkie-talkie as an accessory.
Thoughts: This small sleek fighter has thrusters and weapons to spare. First blue astronaut. ❤️ the transparent-red antenna on the nose. Liberal use of the new space wing part.
Features: Small blue and white ship with plenty of lasers. The rear white wings fold down to release an escape pod. One astronaut.
Thoughts: Uses seven of the new space wing pieces. I like the detachable escape pod.
Features: Articulated ground vehicle that launches a small flying wedge. Comes with two astronauts and a video camera/bazooka for an accessory.
Thoughts: Another iteration on the launcher concept. This time with two astronauts, a blue ship, and balloon tires. I like the symmetry between the front ends of the ground vehicle and the spaceship. Bonus points for including a computer terminal on the ground vehicle.
Star Patrol Launcher (1984) vs Space Probe Launcher (1981)
Features: Articulated vehicle that carries a rocket on the trailer. Comes with one astronaut and a video camera/bazooka and a walkie-talkie for accessories.
Thoughts: Third iteration on the mobile rocket launcher concept. Hoses are a nice touch. ❤️ the rocket tip. The rocket is much more robust compared to the 1978 original. Again, nice to see a computer terminal.
Twin hoses for refueling
Mobile Rocket Launchers 1978-84
Features: Jointed ground vehicle with a plethora of wheels and sensor arrays. Rear trailer has doors and roof that open to reveal a computer terminal. Comes with two astronauts.
Thoughts: I ❤️ this mobile lab! First black astronaut. Possibly my new fave. Sort of a cross between Surface Explorer (6880) and Mobile Lab (6901). I love the retro color scheme and all the little details such as the ladders for the astronauts to mount both the cab and trailer.
Front cab with four sensor arrays
Rear lab with computer terminal
Features: Rover, scooter, rocket, and three astronauts all in a robot-shaped base!
Thoughts: Goofy and awesome in a 60′s sci-fi B-movie way. Who wouldn’t want a space base shaped like a top-heavy robot on skates with side beaks and arms on the legs?
Scooter and rover
Cockpit has plenty of computer terminals, room for two astronauts, and storage for two accessories. Plus twin sun roofs!
Features: Base with computers, sensors, opening roof for rocket repairs, rocket, scooter, spaceship and three astronauts.
Thoughts: 💯 This was the refresh of 1980′s Beta-I Command Base (6970). Many interesting parts debuted over the four years between them.
Rocket in the repair bay
Spaceship and scooter. No ground rover this time.
End-on view of the base and twin radar arrays
Inside the base are a pair of computer terminals
Back side view
These eight sets in my opinion form one of the strongest years of Classic Space set releases. Uranium Search Vehicle, Robot Command Center, and Inter-Galactic Command Base are all highlights.
Next: Space 1985!
I love Twitter bots. My favorite used to be the @iaminigomontoya bot that would reply to anyone tweeting the word “inconceivable”. 🤣
I’m also a fan of the @LegoSpaceBot (no real surprise there), which tweets pictures of old LEGO Space sets from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.
These are for the most part exactly the sets that I have been building for my LEGO Space Project for the past two years. So it turns out that I have built and taken photos of most of the sets that @LegoSpaceBot tweets about. I thought it would be fun to make a bot that sort of trolled the @LegoSpaceBot by quote retweeting (almost) every post with my photo of the built set together with a short comment.
After a bit of Googling I decided that I would write and host my bot at Glitch.com. I needed to create a new Twitter account (@LEGOSpaceBotBot) and to sign up for the developer program. Glitch has multiple Twitter bot templates to choose from and lets you get started quickly by “remixing” one of their templates. I started with a template that tweeted random photos, but I also looked at templates that responded to other accounts. I would need both: to be able to search for tweets and to be able to post images.
JavaScript is … interesting. After working in Swift for the past year and a half, it’s quite the change. JS developers: respect.
The basic bot idea was to look at tweets from @LegoSpaceBot, find those which mention specific sets (some posts are of catalog pages), parse out the set number, and check to see whether I have a photo of that set. If it finds a match, then quote retweet that post with the photo and a random message. If no match is found then quote retweet with a different random message.
To avoid having to do too much work, I want it to keep track of the most recent tweet that it has successfully processed. This is written to a simple text file. I also wanted to make sure it only responds to the most recent tweet even if it has been offline for a period of time. (I wanted to make sure it didn’t accidentally respond to @LegoSpaceBot’s entire backlog of 8k+ tweets…)
I started out with an array of 8 phrases that would be chosen randomly to accompany each post. After the same phrase was randomly chosen for the second and third posts, I realized that I needed something a bit more advanced than just simply random. Fortunately, the author of the @LegoSpaceBot already solved this problem and has a good discussion of the issue here. The basic gist is to split the array into two halves and shuffle through one half before shuffling through the other half. That guarantees a minimum distance of N/2 between any repeats. So for my array of 8 phrases, any given phrase would be at least 4 tweets apart. (Obviously I need more phrases.) I adapted my randomizing method from the code here. This solution relies on being able to seed the randomizer, which to my surprise JavaScript.Math does not handle by default! Fortunately there’s an answer for that too and you can add seed functionality by including seedrandom.js from here.
En fin, I hereby present the LEGO Space Build Bot.
Snowy morning at home
Yesterday marked 1.5 years living in Switzerland.
Mountains at Pizol for skiing yesterday afternoon.
