A computer programmer in Berlin by day, in the evenings Jannis Hermanns is a dad who helps his son build with legos. Little boys love wheels, no matter what they’re made of, so junior surely was duly impressed with the "GMC Vandura" and an off-road Segway his dad put together with colourful plastic bricks and a skilled hand. But while putting finishing flourishes on those classic “roll models,” dad “suddenly got the urge” to recreate with legos one of the first plastic boxes he’d ever played with as a youngster – the classic "Apple Macintosh".

If building a chunky miniature gaming computer with knobby little pieces of ABS sounds as easy as ABC – as Hermanns might have thought if he’d been a plastics converter rather than a computer programmer – it’s not. Even ordering enough grey bricks proved a challenge, so he had to use white. The rest of the challenges would boggle the minds of most hobby builders. For the equally ambitious but less technically minded, Lego has a digital design programme downloadable at http://ldd.lego.com. “It's very basic,” says the programmer. For those who find that too basic, Lego has a host of other hardware challenges – all in plastic.