Some News Round-Up

If you have been making use of the RSS feeds on the right, you would have read these but just in case, here are a few notable ones:

The comments QnA in the London Toy Fair report is really long, so I did a summary of what caught my eye:

  • The new City marina sets float;
  • Jack Sparrow minifig is different in each POTC set;
  • 2 new Spongebob sets – “some sort of fairground rise and the other a vehicle” – EDIT: It’s 3816-Glove World and 3815-Heroic Heroes as listed on Brickset;
  • SW calendar features “mini models from the entire galaxy and 8 minifigs” – one minifig is a new one described as “one of the figs has not appeared in any of the films, books, cartoons and is unlikely ever to” and “all the figs have appeared before, but one of them is in new clothes, and it’s not a queen Amidala“;
  • 7879 Hoth Echo Base may be a TRU exclusive “no Hoth sets on display, and there isn’t one in the retailers’ catalogue either. Maybe it’ll be a TRU exclusive or something“;
  • The Darth Maul and Savage minifigs have new horn pieces on their heads – “a new soft plastic horn piece, a bit like a washer that goes over the stud, and ends up flush with it. It looked very effective“;
  • HP sets – some speculated minifigs based on Huw’s descriptions:
    • Battle for Hogwarts: “consists of a couple of towers and an entranceway” – Prof Sprouts in tan, HP, Snape, student (in new uniform, so can’t be Neville who is a Gryffindor – he is able to use the Gryffindor sword in the battle remember?)
    • Forbidden Forest: Hagrid, Narcissa (“two-colour hair: mostly brown with lighter brown or blonde highlights round the front edges, which I think is a first for a minifig“), HP, Voldemort (no centaurs!);
    • Knightbus: Purple, and with HP, Ernie & Stan.
    • http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/eskallon1/Eurobricks-Stuff/Harry-Potter/picture_2.png
  • UPDATE on 30 Jan: And no stickers on the new Cars sets. Yippee!

Source: Brickset, FBTB, The Brothers Brick and also the many commentors in Brickset.

Intro to Lego Resource: BrickStore

One really useful tool to track any Lego collection’s value is Brickstore (linked under ‘Lego Resources’ on the right).  Brickstore can be updated offline, and can link to Bricklink to auto-update latest prices, loose piece parts and sets. It is multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS X and Unix) and multilingual (currently english, german, french and dutch).  Only drawback I can think of is that you may need to maintain two databases to properly track sets and loose pieces.

Best to get started while your collection is small… picture below is link to website to download the program.  Have fun inventorising!

Extract from the website on things you can do with BrickStore:

  • Browse and search the BrickLink catalog.
  • Easily create XML files for Mass-Upload and Mass-Update either by parting out sets or by adding individual parts (or both).
  • Download and view any order by order number.
  • Download and view your whole store inventory. An easy way to use this for repricing, is to use the BrickLink Mass-Upload functionality.
  • Easily create and upload Wanted-Lists.
  • Price your items based on the latest price guide information.
  • Create XML data for the BrickLink inventory upload.
  • If you load files which contain items with obsolete item ids you can fix them using the BrickLink catalog change-log (this could be automated with some support from BrickLink).
  • Calculate differences between two documents: you can easily check, if it is possible to build a set given your current inventory.
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