Brief adventures in playing DVDs on Android from a PC drive ►

◄ Time for a state of the tech address

Posted a while back on Facebook, like other occasional short things that would otherwise be blogged here. AutoAssembly 2014 (it's a UK Transformers and science fiction convention) was on 8th-10th August in Birmingham and I went along for a second year, mainly to catch up with people I otherwise only talk to online and clear out a bunch of less interesting toys whilst bunging the proceeds to this year's convention charity.

But I picked up some stuff too.

Clockwise from the bottom left: various postcards, Livio etched metal "print" of Prime with matrix, James Roberts annotated script of More Than Meets The Eye #22, issue of Lou Scannon by Kris Carter, the Reflections convention comic, Transformers 30th birthday card with art by Sprite, an iGear Sharkticon, copies of Kris's "Lower Ranks" TF fan comics charity book, Swerve's beermats, "Afterburner", TFCon FansProject Columpio (aka Dinobot Sludge), convention pass, Keith's Fantasy Club Badbat (aka Ratbat) / B-Box & Birdbomber (aka Beastbox and Squalktalk), keyring, MasterMind Creations Leo Dux (aka Predacon Razorclaw).

Not pictured are a Nick Roche print of the Lost Light crew holo-avatars which has since been framed. Also not pictured are any official Transformers... the Afterburner (the orange Tron cycle) is a knock-off I found in a junkers box and the rest are third party stuff.

To elaborate on that a bit, Transformers is unusual as a comics/toys/etc franchise in that there are a lot of fans with engineering or CAD backgrounds linking up with others with the ability and resources to get original designs produced as figures. It's quite big business now, especially selling to Asian markets. They're mostly based on characters that are someone else's IP but what Hasbro controls are trademarks and its own designs; whilst I've no doubt the company could make things difficult for folk producing and selling this stuff, in the West at least, by avoiding names and logos and exact likenesses general conclusion is they're legally in the clear.

A couple of links if anyone has an interest:

http://www.wikialpha.org/wiki/Third_party_Transformer
http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/transformers-3rd-party-discussion/

And for the Red Dwarf fans:

https://twitter.com/NickRoche/status/500030151061954560

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