While this can’t be the first time LEGO and indie hit Minecraft have been mentioned in the same breath, I think it’s the first time they’ve really been mixed to this degree. Mojang, the developer of the multi-million-selling mining and adventuring game has put up a project on LEGO’s CUUSOO site, which allows people to submit LEGO projects and get royalties from them if they’re selected for production.

As a player of Minecraft, I can actually see some utility in this, in addition to the fact that it’s just plain cool and a good fit. Minecraft’s blocks are a regular size and these blocks could actually be used to plan out the fabulous palaces and apparati we all have planned for our little worlds. I’d also love a Creeper minifig.

In order for this to be reviewed by LEGO, the design needs 10,000 votes. Right now there are actually two projects, one submitted by Mojang and one by a fan. The former has about 4000 votes and the latter has almost 6000, so they could both use your support if you’re interested in this at all. You can sign in with Facebook or get an account at the site, which is actually quite neat.

Perhaps this was the project Minecraft lead dev Notch was moving on to?

Lego (or LEGO if you’re adamant about trademarks) has just dipped another toe into electronic gaming with their clever “Life Of George” iOS title. The game uses 144 pieces and a piece of cardboard covered in a dotted pattern. The game is simple: George shows you a picture from his travels and asks you to recreate it using Legos. You have to dig around in your box of pieces to recreate the image and then take a picture of it on the Playmat. Using a brick recognition system from Eye-Cue, the game awards you points for speed and accuracy.

The game is oddly addicting and great for kids. The pieces are bit small so it’s aimed at ages 12 and up but it’s also a great way to build teamwork with one player – maybe a parent – calling out the pieces and the other player putting the object together.

The game marks Lego’s further attempts at capitalizing on its strong lead in children’s toys into new markets. The impetus for Life Of George is based on the success of the Lego series of video games (Lego Harry Potter, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego My Dinner With Andre) as well as its quiet but apparently popular Lego Universe, a brick-based MMO. By adding a casual game like Life of George, with it’s candy-coated graphics and clever gameplay, you grab the kids who may not want to bring their entire Lego collection to Grandma’s but still want to play with their blocks. As a parent, I find that the game is also helpful in teaching counting and hand-eye coordination as you need to find blocks as quickly as possible and then smoosh them together.

Naysayers will note that George does not offer much in the way of imaginative play and I’d agree. But, as we all know, making the thing on the Lego box is often far more exciting than making another “car” using the big green board and a bunch of bricks. There’s a reason behemoths like the 1200-piece Millennium Falcon exists: people love to build things with Lego, but they don’t always want to be structural engineers.

To be clear, Life Of George is a casual game in the vein of Cut The Rope or Angry Birds. You play it for a while, maybe forget about it, maybe dump all of the pieces into the main Lego box down the line. However, at $29 plus a free iOS download (a price I suspect will go down over time) it’s a fun way to interact with your Lego using electronics.

Herr George has a Facebook page and his game is available on October 1st.

What happens when a geek winds up in Legoland? He has loads of unfiltered fun, that’s what.

“WTF? I should have kept this for my personal blog. This has got nothing to do with technology, and this blog is called TechCrunch for crying out loud. A report and pictures about a visit to a theme park have absolutely no place here on this blog. I wasted a couple of minutes of your life, and your time is valuable. You can, and perhaps should, unsubscribe from and never visit TechCrunch, ever again.”

Ok, now that we got that out of the way, on to the fun stuff!

I was in Denmark this week for the Next Aarhus ‘Beautiful Mistakes’ conference and exhibitions. I had a great time, as you can tell from my report about the trip. I did something awful, though.

At the third day of the event, there was a separate conference for school teachers about the next wave of technology for kids, at the Billund Center in – you guessed it – (tiny) Billund. As I wasn’t actually speaking at the event, I managed to sneak out of the conference room, and walked a mile down the street, passing the original Lego factory, which is conveniently located right next to Denmark’s second busiest airport, Billund Airport, as well the Legoland Hotel.

My destination: theme park Legoland Billund, a popular tourist attraction originally opened in 1968.

No disrespect to the Next Aarhus organizers who kindly invited me to the event, but it was by far the highlight of my trip. And not just because it made me feel like a kid again.

I even got on some rides, garnering wary looks from parents in waiting lines as I was pretty much the only adult in the park with no kids in tow – one carrying around a laptop bag, no less. Ah well, I thought, I’m used to making painful sacrifices for my work here at TechCrunch.

Here’s an elevated, 360-degree and slightly sped up video overview of the Legoland Billund park:

Quite a view, right? I can’t even imagine how many bricks are used for all this.

And here’s a small selection of the pictures I took:

You can quite literally spend hours gazing at the many fantastic creations, big or small, hop on fun rides, grab food, or visit some of the movies and exhibitions in the designated areas. I promised myself to come back here when my son, who is now only 5 months old, grows a few years older. If you have kids, or you would love to feel like a kid again too, I encourage you to see if there’s a Legoland park near you (spoiler: there are parks in Denmark, Germany, UK and California, US).

Here’s the video of a Lego submarine surrounded by (real) sharks, batoids and plenty of other fish:

Bonus points if you can name all the fish you see in the video.

On to the real highlight of my visit to Legoland, which was beyond any shred of doubt the 420 square-metre Star Wars display area in Miniland, which is at the heart of the park.

As a self-confessed Star Wars fan, the level of detail that went into the minitiature depiction of several of the movies’ most famous scenes genuinely astounded me. I took quite a few pictures, but they don’t really don’t do enough justice to the fantastic work that went into this.

Do you remember all the scenes from the films (and The Clone Wars animated series)?

Bonus: a slideshow featuring all the pictures embedded above:

While I may have created some sweet spaceships in my days constructing LEGO, I never guessed how serious people would get with their blocky creations. Guns, computer cases, even a Tetris-playing device and a robotic hand. So I shouldn’t be surprised that someone has created a CNC mill with their Mindstorms NXT set.

It looks a little bit shaky, I have to say, so I doubt we’re reaching micrometer precision, but a few stabilizing blocks and it’d be more than sufficient for creating the occasional figurine or 20-sided die.

Incredibly, this isn’t actually the first CNC mill to be made from LEGO — by a long shot. In fact, the CNC tag at the LEGO Mindstorms community has several, going back to March of 2008 (there’s even video). There’s even an egg-decorating device using CNC principles. Sure, why not?

[via Make]

For many people, building with Legos brings back fond memories. For Mike Schropp, the memories are still being built. Schropp loves Legos, often incorporating them into technology. For his latest project, Schropp built a 12-core PC tucked into a custom made case he designed using some 2,000 black Lego bricks. The finished product is not only awesome looking, but also energy efficient.

Schropp was interested in building a machine that could contribute some of its computing power to a community grid, helping crunch data to solve medical challenges. He originally intended to build a machine from scratch, but thought adding a fourth computer to his home seemed excessive.

Instead, Schropp challenged himself to optimize and speed up his existing setup by combining the best of his machines into one super box. He hoped to spend no more than $2,000 on parts, and to build a machine that could process 100,000 “points” per day towards the World Community Grid. Since the machine was intended to crunch around the clock, energy efficiency was of particular significance in the design process.

With help from his collection of Lego bricks, Schropp turned three computers into one. The finished product contains a trio of CPUs, coolers, motherboards, SSDs, DDR3 memory and eight fans. The unit runs on only one power supply, which Schropp modified to power all three systems. Schropp designed the Lego case to allow for as much airflow as possible between the CPUs and motherboards.

Through the new, giant box, Schropp’s ‘folding farm’ contributes to humanitarian and medical research using less power than the sum of three boxes running independently.

The three-in-one box consumes approximately 670 watts of power to crunch about 135,000 points per day, as compared to just one of Schropp’s old workstations PCs, which used 350 watts to crunch close to 10,000 points per day. Even so, the power supply is greater than what the system needs, in anticipation of adding another level in the future.

Photos via Mike Schropp’s Total Geekdom

May the 5th be with you! Yeah, I’m a day late on this one but it’s still worth your time. In fact, it’s totally more watchable than the real prequels.

We first posted about Lego guns back in January and now they’re back and these guns actually fire. That’s right – not only do they completely ignore the pacifist notion that Lego is for creative, constructive play but now you can actually fudge stuff up!

The guns shoot rubber bands and the like, so it’s not like you’re going to go save the world or anything, but conceptually they’re very cool and very well put-together. The creator, PrototypeNo97, is going to try to make a new gun every week for your edification, so keep your eyes on his YouTube page.

via NowhereElse

Sure you can build little houses and stuff with Lego, but can you build a sniper rifle? Lego for Adults author Martin Martin Hüdepohl wants to show you how in his book Badass Lego Guns. This video teaser shows some of the amazing shooting creations that actually work and are made entirely of LEGO Technic parts.

via Make

However, the Birds family has not yet completed, the “Gaint Red bird” is still work in progress. Also i want to get more Lime color bricks to build more Pigs.

Will the pain never end?

via Ubergizmo

Ha, this is pretty funny. It’s “Lego Black Ops,” fan-made video showing everyone’s favorite building block toys totally destroying each other, Black Ops-style. It’s worth your time if you like silly stuff, which I assume you do.

Mark your calendars: I had something nice to say in a post involving Black Ops.

Oh, Friday. Why do you suck so much? I look forward to you all week and then you finally get here, you take forever to end. Thank the almighty Internet Gods that there’s such mind-numbing videos as this stop motion LEGO thing to pass the time.

In 1998 Lego introduced the MINDSTORMS product line. The NXT is a brick-shaped computer that can take in sensory input, control motors and most importantly in this case, play back sounds. The NXT-606 drum machine is based on this unit and I must say it sounds pretty good. You can even get a set yourself and build your own.

You can get more information and the free software here.

Features:

• Monophonic sample based drum machine
• 24 percussion and Fx sounds
• Sampling rate: 8Khz
• memory: 96 measures
• control: 2 rotation sensor +NXT buttons
• hacked loud speaker to mono output: jack 6,35mm
• Editor: NXT-G
• Real time operation

Main page:

• Mode: edit/loop4/loop8/…/loop96
• Play: play/stop
• Save and copy
• Measure: 1 to 96
• Tempo: 20 to 200
• Swing: 0 to 9
• Humanisation: not achieved

Edit page:

• Graphic pattern editor
• Selected step: 1 to 16
• Sound: 1 to 24
• Velocity: 0/25/50/100%

[via Synthtopia]

Rest assured though, that if you begin to lose your geek cred by obtaining this beauty, you could always mount this other LEGO  beauty on top of it to KEEP IT REALZ.

More items in this photo gallery, too.

[Via Trendhunter]

If you watch the video though, you might notice that the robot seems to be having some difficulty getting past level one. The robot certainly has a long way to go before it can catch up to the Rubik’s Cube and Sudoku solvers, but it’s a neat concept nonetheless.

This project requires a little more skill then most; you have to be able to manufacture a PCB and program a microcontroller. This could be problematic if you don’t already have the necessary gear, so that $40 might not seem such a bad idea. The person who created this project on Instructables did a far better job explaining it then I can, so head on over there and check it out. I’d do one myself, but my camera doesn’t support IR.