How to Spot a Psychopath

Easy wood polish!

7 November 2009 — dan

Here is how to make a (very) simple wood protectant and polish. I've had occasion to use this stuff a couple of times on things about which I'm working on blog posts [update: this knife, and this knife switch], so I thought I'd do a quick post about it.

1: Get some beeswax. It's easy to find cheap on eBay; beekeepers often seem to cast the stuff into bricks in margarine containers or something, and they usually seem to filter and wash it too.

(I got a couple of big 0.95-kilo bricks of beeswax for less than $AU30 delivered a couple of years ago, but that seller doesn't have anything on offer right now.)

2: Get some ordinary light mineral oil. Those little bottles of clear "all-purpose oil" or "sewing machine oil" you can get from the supermarket will do nicely.

3: Melt the wax and mix in the oil. Beeswax melts at a bit more than 60°C, so you don't need a lot of heat. If it's smoking, it's too hot.

You'll probably want a ratio of about five or six parts oil to one part beeswax, by volume, but there's lots of room for experimentation. To play with the recipe, or if you only need a little polish, you can make it in an old spoon, heated with a small flame or boiling water under the spoon.

This simple polish is non-toxic, food-safe and won't go rancid, and has the same pleasant faint honey smell as the wax. It's easy to vary the consistency from thick and waxy - but not as thick and waxy as straight beeswax, which doesn't really work as a polish by itself - to liquid-at-room-temperature. And it really is the work of a moment to make this stuff.

A little of this polish goes a pretty long way, so you can make as little of the stuff as you actually need - perhaps using only a tiny one-ounce block of beeswax, which are the cheapest eBay options - instead of buying a bucket of commercial polish that you'll never use all of, or a ridiculously overpriced tiny container.

UPDATE: I have now discovered that this stuff also makes perfectly good lip balm.

That's right - it's a floor wax and a dessert topping!

Posted in Handicrafts. 6 Comments »

APPLIED exothermia!

5 November 2009 — dan

When I finally got around to making myself some thermite, which like all right-thinking people I've been meaning to do since about the age of 10, the thing that surprised me was how bright it is. The combustion temperature of standard aluminium/iron-oxide thermite is about the same as the operating temperature of a light-bulb filament, and that's how bright the whole burning mass shines.

Here's a nice video of the process of thermite welding, which has for more than a hundred years been used to join train tracks together.

There are lots of other thermite welding videos on GooTube, though not all of them let you see the aftermath, when they remove the crucible, knock the mould sectors away and shape the still-glowing weld.

People who do this trick frequently clearly get rather blasé about it after a while, and hang around close to the crucible, or even do stuff like lighting cigarettes off the top of it. I don't think that is actually a very good idea, unless you are absolutely 100% bet-your-eyes-on-it certain that there's nothing on, or even under, the crucible that may unexpectedly flash to vapour when heated to these extreme temperatures.

Classically it's water, or even damp stone, that causes thermite to "explode", but many other substances will too. As I've mentioned before, many metals will boil at thermite temperatures, and there are all sorts of other usually-considered-inert substances that also don't play well with thermite.

Like, for instance, asbestos. The molten iron from a thermite reaction may have cooled enough to not even melt an asbestos mat, but if you put a chunk of asbestos in with the thermite, it will definitely melt and quite possibly boil.

(This ought, at least, to render the asbestos harmless. Asbestos is basically just silica in an unusual shape, so if you melt it and then allow it to cool, you get a lump of non-toxic glass.)

Posted in Nerdery, Science. 7 Comments »

Reports of my site's death are greatly exaggerated

31 October 2009 — dan

UPDATE: The problem now, finally, seems to be fixed. Please comment on that post if you're still unable to see dansdata.com. And now, back to the original text of this post.

Some users of the Optus ISP here in Australia are having problems accessing dansdata.com. It's been happening for a while - here are people complaining about it in September, with the later reports only a few days ago.

I think all of the people with this problem have Optus cable Internet (as opposed to DSL or dial-up or satellite or carrier pigeon), though, fortunately, very far from all Optus cable users seem to have the problem. The nature of the problem is pleasingly clear: Dansdata.com has, from their point of view, been completely gone for weeks now, if not months.

Except it's not, of course. I may only put up one new article per decade on dansdata.com, but I have not died or been abducted by Zeta Reticulans or decided to reject technology and return to the land.

In the olden days of the late 1990s, the first diagnostic step when you wanted to see if a site was really down or if the problem was to do with your own Internet connection was to feed the site URL to Babelfish or one of the numerous dodgy proxy sites, and see if they could see it.

Now we've got more elegant solutions, in isitup.org and, if you prefer more verbose URLs, the very-similar-looking downforeveryoneorjustme.com. (I hope those two sites are actually run by different people - they seem, at least, to be on different servers - so they won't often ironically both go down at once.)

Anyway, I'm not certain about the exact nature of these problems, because a few people have e-mailed me about them, but when I ask them for details, they don't reply. I don't get a bounce message, either. This is exactly what you'd expect if some Optus router has decided that www.dansdata.com and mail.dansdata.com and everythingelse.dansdata.com are filthy spam servers all traffic from which is to be subjected to damnatio memoriae.

I've asked my Web hosts, SecureWebs, whether this is anything to do with them. It isn't. Well, it might be, very indirectly, since the server dansdata.com is on has occasionally been blocked on one or another of the many spam-server lists because of real or imagined misdeeds by other sites that share the server or nearby SecureWebs IP addresses. The Optus block could have been caused by that sort of thing, and then accidentally never cancelled. But Blogsome, who host this blog, stack rather more blogs per IP address than SecureWebs do sites, and the worst that's resulted from that to date has been a few days when bit.ly was warning people who clicked links from my Tweets that dansdata.blogsome.com might be bad.

I've also asked Optus, and they replied almost instantly to tell me that they could not replicate the problem, please send soil samples, et cetera.

So we need two things.

One: Some more detailed info about who using Optus can't see my site. This can easily be acquired by means I am about to explain in tedious detail.

Two: Complaints to Optus from the people who can't see my site, including the above info. Send the results to me as well - just posting them as a comment here will do very nicely - but you're much more likely to get action from a giant ISP on a weird problem like this if lots of people report it than if one person aggregates info and forwards it like a petition.

I could keep fiddling around trying to contact the Optus-using complainants from my addresses at other ISPs - I reckon my Optus account ought to be able to reach 'em. And I will. But I'll just point them to this blog post, so now that I've finally gotten around to writing it, so we can all try to figure it out together.

(I freely admit that I've known some people were having this problem for weeks now, but I was hoping the problem would just go away when someone at Optus hit a reset button or finally got rid of zzzzmust_delete_this_by_sep_9_09.cfg.)

The Whirlpool forum thread I mentioned earlier points to an excellent article on the Whirlpool wiki, "Is this site down?". The instructions there pretty much cover what you need to do, plus some other possibly-helpful stuff.

Basically, people who can't see dansdata.com need to ping and traceroute dansdata.com, and see what they get. Optus themselves turn out to have a Web-accessible Looking Glass server and a traceroute one too. Those can see my site, so if you can't, comparing and contrasting their results with your own could be helpful.

The easiest way to ping and traceroute from your computer is via the command line. In Windows, click Start, type "cmd", and in the resultant window just type

ping dansdata.com

and then

tracert dansdata.com

If your local DNS doesn't resolve dansdata.com to anything - "...could not find host dansdata.com", "unable to resolve target system name dansdata.com" - you can try bypassing the DNS and just going straight to the server's IP address, which is 64.85.21.19:

ping 64.85.21.19
tracert 64.85.21.19

(You can just type or paste 64.85.21.19 into your browser address bar to go to the site, by the way, if you actually can get to 64.85.21.19 from where you are. This advanced hacking technique has delivered precious, precious boobies to countless office workers and teenagers toiling under the yoke of sufficiently stupid site-blocking software.)

You can copy-and-paste the results from a Windows command-line window to somewhere else - like a comment and/or complaint message - by selecting the text, to do which you'll probably need to use the cumbersome Edit -> Mark option in the command-line window's lone menu.

If you want to be all fancy and bypass the Mark-ing, you can do this:

ping dansdata.com >>c:\dan_results.txt tracert dansdata.com >>c:\dan_results.txt ping 64.85.21.19 >>c:\dan_results.txt tracert 64.85.21.19 >>c:\dan_results.txt

Presuming you have a C: drive, this will create a text file called dan_results.txt there and append the results of the commands to it, instead of just displaying them in the command-line window.

(If you used a single > instead of >>, each new output would overwrite the contents of the text file, instead of being tacked on at the end.)

Like all hip and happening ISPs, Optus only want you to contact them via some stupid Web form that redirects to a billion-character URL and that could be sending your message to screwyou@example.com for all you know. But with any luck a dozen or so people all suffering from the same disease will cause some action.

Now fly, my pretties! Fly!

Posted in Blogkeeping, Shop talk, Strange Tales. 20 Comments »

More stuff blowing up real good

19 October 2009 — dan

A guy who glories in the name "Spaz" has been producing neat Supreme Commander videos for some time now. He did one for each faction in the game - prominently featuring the nifty extra units of the BlackOps Unleashed Unit Pack mod - and then promised a great big battle at the end, to be released in January this year.

That didn't happen, so I assumed he'd given up on the project. But whaddayaknow, here's the last one!

If you've liked my previous SupCom Eye Candy posts, you'll know to not even sully your brain with the YouTube versions, but go directly to the full AVI downloads. Here's one for the last instalment, and this forum post has umpteen links.

The HD downloads total 294Mb for the first four videos, and 356Mb for the last one all by itself.

Posted in Games, Movies, Nerdery. 4 Comments »

Perhaps the bits are getting lost

19 October 2009 — dan

Oh, ~~Sky Cake~~ Windows. You really are a new toy every day, aren't you?

Readers with unusually long memories may remember that I shamelessly begged for money to buy a new computer. Against all reason, you actually gave me enough to make that possible, just before the end of the last financial year. Said new computer, replete with overclocked Core i7 920 CPU and 6Gb of RAM, has been happily buzzing away next to my desk ever since.

I'm not actually using the new computer yet, though, because I will not permit myself to start screwing around playing Fallout and GTA and such on it until I have actually finished writing a big review about it, like unto the piece I wrote about the Athlon X2 box in 2006, and the other piece I wrote about the Pentium 4 box that preceded it in 2003.

But every time I get back to working on that big review, the PC bang-per-buck goalposts have shifted again. There is, for example, not really much reason for most people to get an LGA 1366 Core i7 machine any more, now that functionally-no-slower, yet cheaper, LGA 1156 CPUs are available. And don't even start me on the graphics-card scene.

So this has turned into the longest PC-to-PC migration project in history, with the new machine being languidly updated with data and applications. It's on all day, but only actually running a BitTorrent and distributed.net client. (I think you can spot the moment in my stats when the new box came on line. Feel free to mess up the numbers by ascribing your own distributed.net work to dan@dansdata.com, too.)

So anyway, the new computer's running Windows Vista SP2 (the 64-bit version, so I'll be able to use all of the 6Gb of memory), and it behaved itself perfectly for weeks on end. As you'd expect it to, of course; Vista was something of an adventure in frustration when it was freshly birthed, all shiny and glistening, but the two service packs have burned away the more impudent of its tentacles.

But then, just the other day, the Vista box decided to stop moving data over its gigabit-Ethernet link to my old computer, the one I'm still using, at the tens of megabytes per second to which I'd become accustomed.

Instead, it's decided to send data at, oh, maybe half a megabyte per second. 1.5Mb/s, tops. Often quite a lot less.

Vista-to-XP network transfer speed problem

That screen grab is of a transfer from the Vista machine to the XP machine, initiated and screenshotted at the Vista end. But speeds are the same if I start a transfer from the XP end.

It sped up to about 200 kilobytes per second after a few minutes. Sometimes, at random moments, it actually managed to sustain a whole couple of megabytes per second for a while. Whoopee.

Copying between all the other devices on the network works exactly as fast as it always did. The Vista box copies files between its own drives very quickly. The laptops get full bandwidth from their wireless adapters, the Vista box copies to the little Thecus N299 at its usual roughly 8Mb/s, and copying from the XP box to anything else on the network is also fine. And, get this, copying from the XP box to the Vista box is fine, too. Full gigabit speed. So this is a one-way problem.

And it's specific to the (Realtek) network adapter on the Vista box's Asus P6T motherboard. When I unplugged the Ethernet cable and plugged a USB wireless adapter into the Vista machine, I got full wireless bandwidth from Vista, via the access point and its own Ethernet hookup, to my XP PC. I presume a PCI Ethernet card or USB Ethernet adapter would work fine, too - though I wouldn't be at all surprised if the slow-transfer disease spread to the new adapter in due course.

I've plugged the Ethernet cable back into the Vista machine's built-in adapter for simplicity, now. Since the BitTorrent client is on the Vista box, this means that if I download something big on the Vista machine and want to move it to the XP one, I can either start it copying long before I want it, or plug a thumb drive into the Vista box, copy the file (at a perfectly normal speed) onto that, then plug the thumb drive into the XP machine.

This problem - or something very like it - was all the rage among Vista's early adopters back in 2007. I think the 2007 version of the problem usually had to with a well-meaning feature in Vista which is supposed to reserve network bandwidth for streaming multimedia content, so if you're watching an HD movie or something over a (suitably speedy) network from a Vista computer, you'll never have any frame-dropping or glitches when seeking, because any other file transfers from that computer will be heavily throttled even when they don't need to be.

This feature apparently often went haywire, especially in the original version of Vista. It either decided to operate all the time whether you were playing video or not, or it operated when the local user of the Vista computer was just playing music, or something, while someone else tried to get a file from his computer over the network. I think there was some kind of Copy Control Crap involvement here, too, but don't quote me.

This was meant to be fixed in SP1, and by all accounts a lot of it was. Vista Service Pack 2 has been out for some time now, and that's what my new computer is running. And as I said, for weeks on end, everything worked fine. I could play even HD movies from the Vista box over the network, A-OK.

Because this problem has such a long history, it's somewhat challenging to dig up information about fixing it on Vista SP2, as opposed to SP1 or the original extra-special Oh Dear God Why Did I Buy Vista v1.0 Edition. An inexpertly-crafted search string will thus turn up tons of people complaining about it back in 2007. The water is further muddied by different versions of the problem, in which copies from Vista to, say, Windows Server 2003 work OK, but copying stuff the other way is very slow and may even time out and die entirely. I don't think my problem is related to those ones, but who frickin' knows.

I have tried many things to fix this problem.

[UPDATE: In the original version of this post I forgot to mention that yes, I'm using a full-permissions administrator account, and yes, Vista's firewall is turned off.]

First up, I tried using a different copying program (like the aforementioned TeraCopy, or Vista's own Robocopy). No good.

I tried opening a DOS prompt (with admin permissions) and typing the voodoo chant "netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable". No good.

I tried Microsoft's automatic "Fix It" doodad for changing this same setting. No good.

I noticed that the Vista PC's hard-drive light is locked on for a couple of solid minutes after startup, even if I close all apps that could be expected to hit the drive. I don't remember whether it did this before the transfer problem. Perhaps it's SuperFetch-related. While I was fiddling with this, I completely disabled Windows Search. No good. Didn't even prevent the drive-flogging on startup.

(Good old lsass.exe was totting up I/O reads and writes at a great rate. I'm unconvinced that it had much to do with the startup disk-flogging, though, since it kept on reading and writing after the drive light had returned to normal occasional flashing.)

I've got Nero installed on the Vista machine; that installs some pointless services that can also hit the disk, so I killed them along with indexing. I also disabled Nero's system-startup tasks using MSConfig. No good.

I power-cycled the cheap and cheerful gigabit switch. No good.

I usually have a VNC view of the new computer's desktop open. I closed that. No good.

(VNC itself is subject to the slow-transfer problem; it updates very noticeably slower now, and of course becomes even more painful if I ignore the new limited bandwidth and force it to a high-bandwidth connection mode, like the "LAN" setting in the UltraVNC viewer.)

I ventured into the registry, and tried setting NetworkThrottlingIndex to FFFFFFFF. Then rebooted. No good.

In a moment of mad optimism, I tried telling Vista to "diagnose and repair" the network connection. It told me I needed to "turn on TCP performance improving settings", so I did. No good.

I turned off Quality of Service for the XP machine's network adapter. No good.

I turned off the same QoS Packet Scheduler and a couple of Link-Layer Topology Discovery doodads on the Vista box's network-adapter properties. No good.

I tried mapping a drive. No good.

I went on a rampage through Task Manager, killing every task that wasn't obviously necessary for Vista's continued operation. AnyDVD, audiodg, Daemon Tools, GoogleCrashHandler, jusched, nTuneService, PunkBuster, UpdateCenterService, Real Temp, PresentationFontCache, nvSCPAPISvr, MSASCui, two copies of nvvsvc.exe, Vuze and the VNC server all bit the dust.

No good.

But then there was SLsvc.exe, a Copy Control Crap process if ever I saw one. I killed it, and... No good.

I fiddled with "Remote Differential Compression". Windows said "Please wait while the features are configured. This might take several minutes", and for once it was not joking. It sat there for quite a while. But then it finished! No good!

I read through this page looking for things I hadn't yet tried. The only new one I found was disabling "Windows Meeting Space". So I did that. No good.

I said, "hang on a minute - why not just connect the XP and Vista boxes with a FireWire cable? That's fast!"

So I did. And although the XP machine was perfectly willing, it didn't work at all, because Microsoft has removed FireWire networking from Windows, as of Vista.

I noticed that Windows Update had a new driver for the motherboard's network adapter, which I hadn't installed with the other updates. So I installed that. No good.

I tried disabling "Large Send Offload" in the Vista machine's network-adapter properties. I even disabled the IPv6 one as well as the two IPv4 ones. No good.

While I was there, I tried disabling the IPv4 and IPv6 versions of TCP and UDP Checksum Offload, and an IPv4 Checksum Offload too. Each of them can be enabled for receiving, transmitting, both, or neither; I fully disabled all of 'em. No good.

I went to Device Manager and uninstalled the network adapter - and selected the "Delete driver software" option - then rebooted so it'd be redetected. No good.

Then I smote my forehead mightily, and tried a new Ethernet cable. I would actually have been slightly irritated if that had worked. It didn't. Actually, it made XP-box-to-Vista-box copies slow, just like Vista-box-to-XP-box ones. Both cables have all four pairs connected - well, unless there's a break in the middle somewhere. I cannot escape the feeling that this is trying to tell me something, but I'm too tired to figure out what it is.

I haven't yet tried starting the Vista box in Safe Mode with Networking, as this page suggests. I haven't tried connecting the two computers with a crossover cable, either. I also haven't yet tried just officially declaring the migration to be complete and starting to use the new box as my main computer.

But dammit, I want to fix this. I've gone too far to turn back now.

Perhaps there's something obvious that I'm missing, here. If any of the three people who've managed to read to the end of this post have any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Posted in Nerdery, Software, Strange Tales. 48 Comments »

They come over 'ere, they take our bird-seed... wait, no they don't

7 October 2009 — dan

I originally thought this blue-eyed cockatoo was, in another triumph of creative bird naming, called a Blue-eyed Cockatoo, but as commenters below point out, it's actually a Little Corella.

It showed up all by itself at the feeding table, and grumpily snapped at the sulphur-crested cockatoos when they tried to get some of the seed. The newcomer is significantly smaller than a sulphur-crested, with a much less impressive crest, but it's bigger - and apparently more bad-tempered - than a galah.

The newcomer was very successful at keeping the usually-boisterous mob of bigger birds away for a few minutes, while it filled up on the mound of sunflower seeds. (I am, as regular readers know, engaged in an ongoing experiment to determine whether wild cockatoos can become obese.) Then it flew away.

It took me a few tries to identify this bird [and then, as I've mentioned, I got it wrong...], because I couldn't find anything resembling it in Birds in Backyards' excellent Bird Finder. The Finder usually leads you quite easily to the right Australian bird - it's my first stop whenever I see a new feathered beastie here in Katoomba. But it didn't work this time.

I thought that meant this wasn't an Australian bird; if it actually had been a Blue-eyed Cockatoo, it would have been a slightly endangered native of the Bismarck Archipelago of New Guinea. That's about 3100 kilometres (1926 miles, 558 leagues, 15,410 furlongs) from this house. As the crow, or cockatoo, flies.

So I figured this one was probably an escaped pet. But since it's actually a Little Corella - the bags under the eyes are quite distinctive, if the crest isn't up - the only odd thing is that I've never seen one at the feeder before. I don't know why I didn't find this bird's page on Birds In Backyards. Perhaps someone forgot to tick the "blue" box in the "colours" part of that database entry, or perhaps I insisted it was finch-shaped, or something.

Posted in Animals, Birds. 15 Comments »

Our fifty outdoor pets

1 October 2009 — dan

If you like watching large decorative birds eating seed, flapping around and squabbling with each other, this is the blog post for you.

As regular readers know, I shovel ever-increasing quantities of seed down the throats of whatever birds deign to visit the table on our deck. Most of the freeloaders that show up are Sulphur-crested Cockatoos (they even outnumber the pigeons!), and I've shot video of them before. But it only now occured to me that I could clamp the camera onto the table and go away.

So that's what I did.

This is before the full afternoon mob showed up, so it's relatively civilised.

Same table, most of the same cockatoos, a little further away.

And now, the afternoon rush!

It gets a bit samey toward the end, there, but I laughed every time another huge beak filled the screen, so I let it roll.

(I swear one of 'em tries to say "cock a doodle doo" at 5:44.)

Posted in Animals, Birds. 10 Comments »

Lego news for the inattentive

22 September 2009 — dan

The original poster of the MetaFilter Space Lego article I mentioned in passing in the last post didn't explicitly mention something, so I suppose I'd better:

Lego are making Space sets again!

More or less.

(I originally started writing this as another comment on the MetaFilter page, but it turned into a whole big thing so I fluffed it up into this blog post. Regular readers may find this a bit repetitive, but there's got to be something on this blog for people who've just stumbled in, looking worried and trying not to make eye contact with the regulars.)

For many years now, Lego have had space... ish sets, like the Life On Mars and Mars Mission series, and the older UFO line.

Now, though, they've got a new Space Police line, which is very close to being good old-fashioned Space Lego.

The first Space Police sets came out a year or three into my own Lego "Dark Age" (the period of time between when a person gets too old for Lego, and when the same person gets old enough to start playing with it again). They were clearly Space sets, just with a few new pieces and a different colour scheme.

(Lego's most ~~offensive~~ striking current colour scheme is on display in the interestingly-Technical-under-the-skin Power Miners line. Lime green and Day-Glo orange, baby!)

Lego entered their own Dark Age shortly after the first Space Police sets. In the 1990s, they spent a lot of time making sets that were difficult to love, because they had lots of special-purpose pieces. They even made "juniorised" sets that were, in essence, Lego for kids that didn't actually want to play with Lego. Those sets contained many complex single pieces that should have been assembled out of several other pieces - see this post for a particularly egregious example.

They're much better now, though. Lego still have a few licensed lines that us oldies usually don't much care for. Personally, I think almost all of their Star Wars sets look awful; I think Star Wars ships just don't look right in Lego, except in the large scale used in the multi-hundred-dollar flagship sets. And then there are the "Bionicle" action-figures-made-from-Lego that also have little appeal to most adult Lego fans - though the skeletons of Bionicle figures are very Technic-y, with many very useful pieces. Technic itself has changed a lot, though not actually for the worse, if you ask me.

But Lego have also gotten back to their roots, and now make plenty of good old-fashioned sets, large and small, full of general-purpose pieces just like in the old days. (Except the packaging is flimsier, with none of the useful old blow-moulded plastic trays; now it's just a box full of plastic bags of pieces.)

There are now many fantastic midrange sets with only a barely higher percentage of specialised pieces than there were 25 years ago. And there are also sets that could have been sneaked into the 1982 catalogue without looking out of place. Look at the #6192 Pirate Building Set, for instance. Lego has an actual two-piece shark now, which looks hilarious with some frickin' lasers on its head but isn't general-purpose at all. There's nothing it can possibly be except a shark with a few connecting studs. But the Pirate Building Set's shark is a cheerful-looking blocky creature made from several separate pieces, in the old style. (See also that set's catalogue-number-adjacent relatives, the Fire Fighter and Castle Building Sets.)

If that's the kind of Lego you like - or just the kind you want to buy for your kid - then you can ignore the licensed stuff and just get the new-old-style sets. You don't even have to buy sets you don't much want just because they contain pieces you need for the model of your dreams: There's an auction site just for Lego full of enterprising dealers who part out sets and sell the pieces separately. So you can, for instance, buy a few yards of the new chunky track pieces, and the sprockets to drive them, surprisingly cheaply.

I also harbour a great affection for the current "pocket money" sets, that give you just a minifig and a smattering of accessories. A better way to inexpensively start to tease other grown-ups out of their own Dark Ages has not yet been discovered.

There's this cop and his dog, this street trader, this brand-new Space Police officer, this garbage man, this builder, this fireman, this street cleaner (with one of those uncommon rubbery brushes), this kayaker, this God-bearded (Shark!) wizard, this knight, this mailbox robot, this troll, and this little spaceship. (Note that the pre-2009 sets are no longer likely to be available at your local department-store-with-a-Lego-section.)