This chess set by Brandon Griffith is symple incredible. The guy is going to make one for each episode of the Star Wars Saga. This one is for “A New Hope” – Episode 4. I’d love to build one of those ! Please Lego make it happen !

Since 1999, Lego has released over 100 different Star Wars Mini figures. To give Star Wars Lego justice, I decided to build three different Chess sets, one for each original episode. This is the first of the series. Star Wars: A New Hope Lego Chess.

My goals with the individual chess pieces is to:
1. Is durable enough to play the game with.
2. Present a piece that closely represents a scene form the movie. My favorites are “Obi-wan and the tractor beam” & “Greedo”

The chess board:
1. Built strong enough to carry with out breaking
2. The playing area easily removes from the rest of the board to reveal compartments to store the pieces.
3. The detailing on the side on the board utilizes a lot of SNOT (Studs Not On Tops) techniques. This a technique that came out of the Adult Lego community.

Other Facts:
1. The chess board is built on a base of layered Lego plates.
2. Weighs 25lbs.
3. the Minifigs were the most expensive part on the chess set.

It’s true that sometimes when you think about all the intel google gets on your lives it’s scary – hopefully they don’t really care about your lives themselves and only want the advertisement money.

If this hadn’t been a blitz game there’s no way this trick would have worked! Gotta love the human factor when taking a bet. Pressure totally can make stupid plans work !

Play online chess

Holidays are over, back to real life and soon-to-be Mobile World Congress, I’ll be booth AV38A (F-Secure) throughout the whole week, come say hello !

Was quite happy with this blitz game, seems like I’m getting it again!

Play chess online

Just had an amazing 48hrs in Mexico City. First time in Southern America I was really amazed by the architecture and the history around here. While I had very little time I still manage to take 2 hours walk in the city center, going from one cathedral to a museum or to amazing old building.
Next time I’ll try to take a few days to see the pyramids and really spend some time in the museums, really feel frustrated for only having scratched the surface of this city.
One note for later – in Mexico 3G is on the 800Mhz band, so if u come from Europe make sure you have a quad-band phone…

Had an excellent time this morning with Georges at the “Ménagerie” of the “Jardin des Plantes“. Cool stuff there including monkeys, orang-outang, big tortoises,leopards and even my favorite : a couple of Sloth ! gotta love those !
The meal of the epic pigs (below) was also quite something.

… for this summer at least. I’m just back from a week in Honfleur where we had an excellent time (although the weather wasn’t really up to my expectations).
We experiences two splendid and intimate hotels, “La petite folie” and “Le clos Bourdet” and a few restaurants such as “l’Absinthe”, “Sa.Qua.Na” and “le Bistrot des Artistes”…
Top achievement of the week : we managed to buy 6 bottles of cider “François David”, probably the best ever and exclusively retailed at “Les Vapeur”’s restaurant in Trouville.

As summer is going to be pretty busy, I just took 2 weeks in Cyprus with family as summer holidays and although it disabled me from attending E3 (which looked to be back to its amazing self) we had an amazing time.
First we were in a beautiful hotel named Almyra near Pafos which was definitely a “baby-ready hotel” where everything was done to prevent any baby-related headache by a super-nice staff leaving us with just the trouble of enjoying fun time with baby at the pool and at the sea-side. and If u’re looking for the best venu for your next holidays with a little baby coming alone, this is probably the place to go, and early june weather is also the best time of the year!


I did a couple of dives but apparently heavy fishing and misuse of dynamite as a way to knock fishes out did some heavy harm to the sea life, making it *really* scarce (only a couple lizard-fish, scorpion-fish, caterpillars, one huge hermit crab, literally 2 corals on the whole island… – click on the pics below if you don’t see the fish in the pictures, some are really hiding within their environment), yet if you’re in underwater architecture (caves, and beautifully carved landscapes) and wreck you’ll definitely enjoy the crystal clear seas of Cyprus. The Cydive team made it a very pleasant experience though.


Anyway end of vacations and back to work now it’s time to catch up with 2 weeks of tech news and more Steek Mobile fun!

I wanted to subscribe a FTTB or FTTH offering – as I was investigating potential solutions I discovered that Neuilly was not connected yet… but some ISPs still were willing to sell me a Very High Bandwidth connection! After investigating I discovered that those crooks (Darty and Numericable) make a difference between the Very High Bandwidth offering which can be limited to 30Mb when no fiber is connected and the real offer with Fiber that goes up to 100M and gives a 50M Uplink speed (which is imho where the real interest is enabling new use cases such as giving live to my Steekr network drive account).
So be careful, their marketing is really aimed at deceiving you !
Note : Numericable is the more transparent here, as you can see at least they write in plain letters that bandwidth is being “up to 30Mb” – Darty makes no such mention on their site and you have to read the Terms and Conditions to get it – how lame…