It’s been a year since the last post on this weblog. A year is a long time. The world has changed in many ways, and technology has advanced in just as many, but completely different ways. I have also progressed, in the sense that I’ve been exploring and learning about lots of new things in the world of electronics, software, and physical computing.

Some things have solidified, such as my main laptop, which is still the same as three years ago (an 11″ MBA), because the shiny big fast one went to my daughter Myra, who has a far bigger need for that sort of hardware – for her photography and video work. Another solidifying trend has been my touch typing, which is now at the point where I do so 95% of the time (editing code still makes me go for the hunt-and-peck mode, occasionally).

Other things have stagnated, such as most notably the work on writing The Jee Book. There are pages and pages with words and images on my laptop, but I don’t like them one bit, and will not publish these as it is today. There is not enough direction, passion, focus, and fun in those draft pages. It would diminish the excitement and joy this deserves.

I’ve given a few presentations and workshops in the past year, but nothing of substance has come out of it all with respect to the JeeLabs site(s). My goal for this month is to get back into higher gear in public. Writing has always been very fulfilling and its own reward for me – I’m looking forward to finding my voice on the web again, in some form or other.

Now the hard part… I could use your help.

A year in solitary confinement (just kidding!) has made it harder for me to understand what you’d like most from JeeLabs. Just to get this clear: I don’t think I can restart the daily schedule of the weblog, as it was up to a year ago. This isn’t only about the effort and energy involved, or the lack of material, but the fact that the resulting stream-of-conscience website that it leads to is a bit hard to navigate through. Also, the resulting collection of articles is really not very practical as a resource – there are too many bits and pieces of information in there which are outdated and at times even misleading by now.

What sort of topics would you wish to see covered? My own interests still tend to gravitate towards long-lasting autonomous wireless sensor nodes. What frequency and size of posts / articles do you like? Should the topics be spread out broadly, or rather focus on some very specific problems? How simple or deep-diving should the information be? Do you want more science and maths, or rather some detailed construction plans? Do you prefer a personal and conversational style (such as this), or more a factual information source?

As always, I will make my own independent choices, but I promise to listen carefully and respectfully to each and every comment you send my way (email to jc@wippler.nl).

It’s that time of year again: 1st of July, and time for me to take a break.

Just as last year, this is going to be my last post on this JeeLabs weblog post for a while – two months to be exact. This isn’t so much about going on holiday (nothing planned yet, other than a few short trips) as it is about performing an internal reset.

The past year has been mostly about taking a new direction in software (by which I mean Node.js and the Dive Into JeeNodes series) – not the embedded Arduino stuff), and about exploring numerous electronics and software topics – a.k.a. Physical Computing.

Speaking of which, yesterday’s post was a good example of what I hope to keep up for a long time to come: introducing electronics and mixing it with embedded microcontrollers to show just how easy it is to tie the two fields together, and to keep on enticing everyone who comes across this weblog to explore, learn, tinker, and play with this stuff. It’s all very low-cost, it’s wide open to make tons of new ideas happen, and there is an immense body of knowledge, experience, and open source software + hardware available to anyone with some spare time, a healthy dose of curiosity, and an internet connection.

There’s a lot to be done beyond what I’ve been dabbling in here at JeeLabs. The field of wireless communication has only just started for the home and the hobbyist. There’s an explosion going on w.r.t. small affordable Linux boards, which take Physical Computing to totally new levels of capability. And there is a huge need to find easy and enticing entry paths into all this, if you ask me. The more there is to learn, the more we need to come up with ways to help people “find their way in”. The RoboCup 2013 event (which will be over by the time you read this) has shown that there is a great opportunity to expose kids of all ages to technology. From hundreds of cheering cardboard FanBots all the way to amazing self-organizing teams of autonomous “Middle Size League” football-playing robots.

The future has only just begun. What an amazing times we live in!

Second bit of news is that it’s time to kick off a summer sale in the web shop once again. And as in previous years, the following discount is for existing JeeLabs supporters, i.e. it can only be requested if you have ordered products from JeeLabs in the past:

And while I’m at it, let me list all the key dates for this period, here at JeeLabs:

• July 1st – weblog paused and summer sale kicks off
• July 31st – sale ends at midnight, 0:00 CEST time
• September 1st – daily weblog resumes

Due to the fine efforts by Martyn Judd & Co., the shop will remain open throughout the summer break, with fulfilment continuing as before from the UK Center in Cambridge. The staff level will be somewhat reduced during August, but we will nevertheless attempt to keep up the regular flow of sending your packages promptly.

There is also a summer sale at Modern Device, but note that since the shops are separate and independent entities, we cannot extend the same offer across the shops. Please check the shop you have purchased from in the past to see what’s on sale.

If you’re looking for geek stuff to do this summer: check out the chronological index of this weblog, maybe there is something that interests you, somewhere in those past 1,364 posts?

Anyway: thank you for all the interest, comments, discussions, tips, and appreciative emails – I’m honoured by everything that’s happening around JeeLabs and looking forward to lots of new ideas, developments, sharing, and products – starting again on September 1st.

Have a nice summer (or winter, on the southern hemisphere)!

Psst, did you know? We’re getting together…

Here’s the location, right next to the railway station:

If you prefer to come by car, set your driving directions for Kamillehof in Houten to find a parking spot (or use the parking garage on the other side of the railway). Note that there is essentially only one way to get there:

Any attempt to drive differently will probably lead you to a bicycle path or one-way street…

Bring your pet projects (not the pets, please), bring your curiosity, and bring your energy. Let’s have some techie fun, eh?

As if one event is not enough – here’s a reminder for another one coming up soon:

This the next one in a series of bi-annual meetings, from people in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, and beyond – this time in Kaiserslautern @ the Fraunhofer institute.

See the wiki for further details. Don’t forget to register if you wish to attend.

As I see it, Electro:camp is more focused on electricity metering and monitoring, whereas JeeDay – which has yet to define itself, clearly – will be more of a “maker/hacker” style event with focus on DIY home projects, low-power wireless, and electronics as a hobby.

A year has passed, and it’s time for a get-together again, in Leuven, Belgium this time:

What is it?

Elektro:camp is a place where geeks meet to talk about smart metering, smart homes, smart grids, and smart ideas. Everything in and around the house related to electricity and electronics, really. Oh, and software.

This is a “barcamp” so there’s no fixed agenda: we make it up as we go, and we all present our ideas and discuss the ideas of others. Trust me, if things go as they did last time, then we’ll be scrambling to find enough time to go through everything that pops up.

Wanna have lots of fun with a bunch of geeks? Wanna show what you’re working on? Wanna present some new ideas? Wanna meet up in person? Be there!

It’s at the Faculty of Engineering this time, and since it’s all done as volunteer effort, please register soon if you’re considering joining us. For questions and other info, please contact Bart Van Der Meerssche.

Looking forward to meet some of you in a couple of weeks!

How does this sequence continue?

    GG TW TK SG .. .. 

Answer:

    MT CY

Get it? Think country codes…

And those last two (Malta & Cyprus) bring the total to 50 countries where JeeLabs Shop has delivered products. Woohoo! Thank you John & Andreas for reaching that milestone – welcome to the expanding community of JeeLabs experimenters!

(and thank you Martyn, for spotting this factoid)

Now that we’re on this topic anyway: the shop has just been upgraded to accommodate the new 21% VAT tax requirements in the Netherlands, effective as of October 1st. Death and taxes, as they say… the two inevitabilities in life!

After two years of total stability, we’ve had to raise the price on some items, to match costs and keep those ever-changing US$ exchange rates in check, but the good news is that all the major items such as JeeNodes, RBBB’s, and USB BUBs remain at the same level as before. This is where (modest) economies of scale start to kick in, so we’re not changing one bit of what has been working out so well.

Another point I’d like to single out here, is that Martyn and Rohan Judd have been doing a truly phenomenal job of steering a major shop transition over the summer into a pretty smoothly-running operation again – as it’s now all done from the UK. With a tip-of-the-hat to you fella’s, for making this happen in the best imaginable way – cheers!

There is more change cooking, but for the moment the only change you will see is that the shop’s email is now coming from order_assistance at jeelabs dot org. This address is from now on also the best place to get in touch, to make sure no message goes by unseen. Whether it is an inquiry about packages, questions about delivery times or problems with the supplied goods, we’ll take care of it. Yes, including me – I’m not going anywhere :-)

Oh, and then there’s that second disruption I mentioned a few days ago: the Café + Wiki at https://jeelabs.net/ have now been replaced by the new Redmine 2 system. The original wiki and doc pages can still be reached at “oldred.jeelabs.net”. For now.

Note that the forum is not affected. It’ll be switched over to Redmine later this year.

There are a couple of disruptions imminent regarding the JeeLabs web sites:

• First one is a VAT increase in the Netherlands, starting October 1st. This will affect the shop.

• Second one is the switch from Redmine 1 to Redmine 2, this will affect the café (docs and wiki).

• Third one is a transition / migration from Drupal to Redmine – this will affect the forum.

Let me assure you that I hate each of the above changes at least as much as you do. Probably more.

But there’s no way around it. The VAT increase from 19% to 21% is a legal requirement, of course, so it’s both necessary and needs to happen on a specific date. A few days from now, that is. More news on that coming.

The switch from Redmine 1 to Redmine 2 was also inevitable, in the long run. I’m quite happy with Redmine as a system, but the current 1.0.1 setup has been out for two years, and I haven’t ever been able to easily update it. Yuck, yuck, yuck. In the end, the only way out was to wait for a solid 2.x release series, which also happens to come with a far better upgrade mechanism.

But instead of doing some sort of 1.x -> 2.x conversion for a range of projects in Redmine 1 (some public, but also several private ones), I’ve decided to just start over. With the help of a couple of people (thank you Steve, thank you Myra), just about all the main content of the café has now been transferred (converted, in fact).

Except the API documentation – this hasn’t been migrated, because I’ve decided been convinced that maintaining API documentation in Doxygen is a far better long-term solution (thanks Jasper). So instead of setting up wiki pages for that, all the JeeLabs libraries can now be extended with comments for Doxygen to generate nice docs from – which I intend to publish as part of the new “JeeLabs.net” site (for now, you can generate the JeeLib docs yourself, again thanks to Jasper’s check-ins).

The new Redmine website has been around for some time now (at redtry.jeelabs.org), but largely unexposed.

On October 1st, I’m going to take the plunge, and replace the current https://jeelabs.net/ site with the new one. This will probably break most URLs out there.

(Did I mention how much I hate these changes?)

Note: to avoid losing essential info, the current site will be moved to “oldred.jeelabs.net”, for reference. So if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can prefix the url with “oldred.” and try again.

The fact is, that I’ve not made enough progress in the current situation for some time now, and the only way to get there is to break everything first, and then quickly try to repair the most harmful damage. Evolution just doesn’t cut it for me in a case like this, apparently.

Apart from the URL breakage, there are some additional horrid consequences:

• To participate (submitting bugs, editing wiki pages, etc), you will need to register as new user again. To make matters even worse, I’m not enabling auto-registration to keep spammers at bay. So new registrations will not be instant.

  (Did I mention that I hate spammers even more than these disruptive changes?)

  Please use the same user name for registration as on the forum (I’ll explain why in a moment).

• I’m dropping Markdown as wiki formatting language, and switching to Textile. This format comes from the Ruby world and is considerably better supported by Redmine (which is implemented using Ruby On Rails). The good news is that Textile formatting is very similar to Markdown for simple things, and much better at supporting more complex features (such as tables, colours, and even CSS styles).

The third disruption is probably going to cause the most frowning and cursing, but it too is becoming inevitable. Some time later this year, the forum will be migrated to Redmine as well. One reason is practical, in that Drupal admin is too much of a burden (for the three of us sharing the burden: thank you Martyn, thank you Steve again). And since I’m not going to start using it for more tasks here anyway, it really bothers me to have to keep a VM running with 1 GB RAM allocated to it.

This is the reason why registration on the new Redmine site should be done with your existing forum name, where possible: it’ll become a forum as well, once that third big switch is flipped.

But there are also advantages to this forum migration. A major one of them is the nice integration we gain by having forums, issues, source code browsing, and wiki pages all in the same system. Something I’ve always been looking for, and frankly Redmine 2 has been moving in the right direction for some time now.

And lastly, note that “forum.jeelabs.net” will keep a copy of all the forum discussions, so those URLs will in fact not break – that forum will merely become read-only (preferably using a static copy, if I can figure out how).

Anyway. Major disruptions. I hope you’ll bear with me as this takes place, and that you’re willing to help out and pinpoint any problematic and painful spots this leads to. First there is trouble, then we can fix it. There’s no way back – so let’s at least try and make the way forward as effective as possible.

Once the big trouble spots have been identified and resolved, I can move forward on the documentation side of things again (hardware as well as software). That too has been long overdue. Jeelabs deserves better. Open source deserves better. And you deserve better from me. A lot better.

Now the good news: the new Redmine setup (currently at redtry.jeelabs.org) has recently been given a major makeover (thank you David), bringing it close in style to the daily weblog. Same logo, same fonts, same looks.

The best news though, I’m sure you’ll agree, is that the daily weblog isn’t going to change!

Short post, with big consequences for me…

As you might have noticed, the Jeelabs Shop has been kept open and operational during the summer break. The reason for this, is that Martyn and Rohan Judd have set up what is now essentially a fantastic fullfilment service for JeeLabs.

As a result, this welcome message on the shop’s home page is now more or less permanent:

The limit for free shipping has beeen raised somewhat, due to the higher cost of shipping to “mainland” Europe from the UK. The other major change is that you need to use the indicated email address to make sure your message reaches me and all people involved.

Note that I am out of the loop for day-to-day order processing, but not out of the loop in any other way!

There will be more changes, most of them probably behind the scenes, as we work out all the details of doing business this way. As far as the shop is concerned, the orders are still placed in the Netherlands, and I remain as before fully responsible and accountable for everything that happens – both good and bad. VAT processing (and VAT exemption for EU-based business outside the Netherlands) will also remain exactly as before.

I am quite confident that this change will allow me to spend more time on the R&D side of things regarding all current and future JeeLabs projects.

Which, dear reader, is – and remains – my main motivation for doing all this, of course.

Onwards!

Tada! I’m really proud to be able to present the JeeLabs new-and-official “look” to you!

Here is the new logo for JeeLabs – nicely distinctive and with a little wink towards battery-powered electronics:

As you can see, this has been incorporated into the weblog, as header and as “favicon”.

I hope you like it.

The proportions and font used for the “JeeLabs” text in the header above are still work-in-progress. In fact, I just used the Trebuchet MS font with smallcaps for now, because it sort of resembles the letters in the logo. If you have tips or suggestions for this, let me know…

One more announcement tomorrow, then “regular” JeeLabs posts will resume – promise!

Ok, time to sign off for the summer break. This weblog will be off the air until September 1st – same as last year.

But unlike last year, the shop will stay open during the break: Martyn and Rohan Judd will be taking over all JeeLabs shop duties from the UK this summer. We’re making a range of preparations to get everything going smoothly, but please note that there will be some “reduced availability” issues during this time – i.e. a few more items out of stock than usual, and occasional delays while trying to prepare packages and get things out the door.

It’s been yet another truly fascinating year here. Somewhat fewer new products out the door than I would have wanted, but also quite a bit more work behind the scenes to make sure this all remains focused on fooling around with physical computing, wireless networking, and ultra-low power computing. And even though there has been another unplanned break early this year, things are actually starting to work out a lot better these days. As I’ve learned after over 1000 posts, the trick is to stay ahead of the weblog by a comfortably large margin, instead of having the daily publishing schedule dictate how to spend my time and my energy. This summer break will give me an excellent opportunity to relax, re-focus, and then re-launch into the next yearly cycle – IOW: onwards!

Until then, I’ll leave you with a view of one of the more chaotic corners of the JeeLabs work area:

If physical computing – or even just technology in general – is your thing, then maybe some of these past 1075 posts will encourage you to follow your passion, nurture your curiosity, cherish your fascination, challenge your boundaries, and … be creative! Because there is infinite fun in creating and in learning from what others create.

To be continued in September. Have a wonderful time!

Note – Please send all questions about the shop, payments, and shipping to email address order_assistance at jeelabs dot org during the summer break – that way it will reach both the people handling the shop and me. Note also that I will be reading email only once a week during this period.

As you may have seen in a number of discussions on the forum (such as this one), things are still in flux w.r.t. documentation of software / libraries / hardware coming out of JeeLabs.

I’ve been agonizing for ages about this. It’s a recurring theme and it drives me up the wall about once a year.

Like with so many things, ya’ can’t get very high (or far) if you keep changing shoulders to stand on…

The good news is that the wait is over. All documentation and collaborative editing is going to be done with Redmine, the same system which has been driving the Café for some time now. But a few things will change:

• Redmine has now evolved to version 2.0.3, and I’ll be using subversion to easily track updates
• page formatting will switch from Markdown to Textile plus Redmine’s own extensions
• anyone can register to participate, but the process involves an administrator (goodbye, spammers)
• the system supports generating PDF’s, so we can have good web docs and good paper-like docs
• better support for page hierarchies and automatic page lists, i.e. more high-level structure

Also, I found an excellent theme for the wiki, which gives the whole thing a clean look and nice layout. Like so:

Clean, minimal, and compatible with all modern browsers, as far as I can tell.

But this isn’t about good looks at all, really. That’s just an enabler, to finally make it worthwhile to pour tons and tons of my time into this.

And now that I have your attention…

The above has been set up, but it’s very, very early days. Things may get (slightly) worse before they get better – i.e. I’m not going to do much more maintenance on the current Café pages at https://jeelabs.net/ – neither the hardware pages, nor the software documentation, nor any of the other wiki pages or user-contributed info.

The reason to announce this here anyway, is that I want to make a really serious effort to get it right. I would like Physical Computing software and hardware such as from JeeLabs to be maximally fun to explore, easy to get acquainted with, fully open to adopt and tweak, and truly, truly, truly effective and practical. No fluff, no nonsense, but a rich resource which improves over time.

I love writing (heck, 1000+ posts ought to have made that clear by now) and as I said, I’m willing to pour lots of time and effort into this. But I can’t do it alone. You can help by telling me what sort of info you need, where you’re coming from, what style and structure would work well for you, and you can help point out the errors, the gaps, the omissions, the mistakes… or anything you don’t agree with and consider substantial enough to bring up.

You can of course also help a lot more than that, by participating in this initiative to get a really good collaborative documentation site going (I’m willing to beg on my knees, bribe you in some innocent way, or pile up the compliments if that helps). Everybody is busy, but I think there is value in trying to coordinate efforts like this.

To put it all in perspective: this new documentation site is not “my” site (other than providing the infrastruture). Even though I’ll probably be one of the main contributors, it’s not anyone’s site, in that nothing on it should be written in first-person form. No I’s and me’s to wonder about who said what. It needs to become everyone’s site, a live knowledge base, with full and honest attribution to everyone who volunteers to get involved.

Let’s get the focus on audience right. Let’s get the structure right. And let’s get the content right. In that order.

Here’s the bad news (yeah, I know, should normally have started off with this) …

No spotlights on this endeavor for the next three months. No fame. No riches. Only blood, sweat, and tears.

This weblog post will remain the only one to draw attention to this documentation challenge. I’m inviting you to participate and help shape things. I hope some of you will find a suitable amount of time, right now or later on.

Note that I haven’t mentioned “code” until now. That’s not because code is irrelevant. On the contrary – part of this work will be to write new code, redo things done so far, and if possible even to “lead by example”. The same goes for technical documentation and for tutorials which can go far beyond just telling what the code does. And for automatically generated documentation from comments or other text files. It all has a place.

But it’s easy to get swamped by it all – as I’ve been for so long – and never reach a practical point. Best thing for me to do now, is to try and pick a single direction for documentation and run with it. You’re welcome to tie your own interests and efforts into this – I’m sure we can figure out ways to make things work nicely together.

One last point – this isn’t really limited to software or hardware from JeeLabs. To me, this whole Jeelabs thing is just an umbrella to go off and play with “Computing Stuff tied to the Physical World”, wherever that leads to. I use this as basis to try and stay focused (hah!) and keep aiming in a somewhat coherent (hah again!) direction.

Wanna help make the above happen? Email me some thoughts and I’ll set up editor access for you.

It’s that warm summer time of year again – at least on this hemisphere…

Time to kick off a new discount month in the JeeLabs web shop …

During the month of June, everyone who has previously purchased something from the JeeLabs shop (i.e. before June 1st 2012) can use discount code “JEE2012GO” to get 12% off all items.

And while I’m at it, let me list some other important dates for this period, here at JeeLabs:

• June 1st – summer sale kicks off with this post

• June 30th – sale ends at midnight, 0:00 CEST time

• July 1st – weblog is suspended during the summer

• July 15th – shop enters “summer fulfillment mode”

• August 16th – shop resumes normal operation

• August 31st – daily weblog resumes

Most of these are more or less the same as in the past years. The 2-month summer hiatus on the daily weblog gives me time to recharge and put things in perspective, and gives you some time off to enjoy other activities :)

The summer fulfillment mode is new. I’m currently making arrangements to keep the shop open this time, by having new orders and support handled by someone else. More details will follow once everything is in place.

Anyway – now you know what’s coming as far as JeeLabs and yours truly is concerned for the summer period.

Happy 2012. We each have roughly 5,000 waking hours ahead of us in 2012. Let’s use ’em – slowly and wisely.

As my contribution to slowing down, I’d like to encourage everyone interested in Computing Stuff tied to the Physical World to deepen your understanding and broaden your experience. So allow me to introduce a little tinkering kit, for those of you who are into ATmega’s and wireless stuff – the JeeNode Block:

This is a recent experiment to fool around with the JeeNode form factor, as a way to create a little self-contained unit which needs no wires to operate. I’m using these blocks to try things out on my desktop (you know, the real physical one), without turning it into a huge spaghetti bowl of power supply wires, USB cables, and test hookups.

It’s basically just a JeeNode, but with a different layout (and RFM12B’s “INT” pin reallocated from PD2 to PB0):

It’s exactly the right size to support simple low-cost 5×7 cm prototyping boards (lets not call ’em “shields”, ok?):

The three headers at the bottom are: 8 digital I/O pins, 4 power pins, and 6 analog I/O pins. The two headers at the top are JeeNode ports 1 and 2. There’s a reset button, an LED, and an FTDI header for uploading new code. The 3x AA battery pack will power the whole thing at 3.6 .. 4.5 V, depending on the type of batteries used. There’s a regulator on board to run at 3.3V, as with all the other JeeNode variants.

Note that this is not a product in the shop. It’s just an exploration by yours truly. And it’s also a one-time offer:

As special encouragement to “start 2012 by tinkering”, I’ll add a JeeNode Block PCB and a prototype board for free to the first three dozen or so people who order a JeeNode from the shop and ask for it. You can then simply re-use all the JeeNode parts for this board (except for the JeeNode’s PCB), since everything is more or less the same. A few missing components will also be included: extra headers, an LED, and the reset button. To take advantage of this offer, select “JeeNode w/ extra Block” from the pop-up list on the order page. Note: this offer is limited to at most one Block per person.

If you come up with a neat project for the JeeNode Block, I encourage you to share your invention on the forum.

Happy 2012. With 5000 hours to discover your passion, extend your knowledge, and unleash your creativity.

The JeeLabs shop has always been based on the Shopify service (which I won’t recommend for European shops, because they haven’t got a clue about VAT). It looks nice, and I guess I fell for it before understanding all the implications. So Shopify it is, as far as JeeLabs is concerned. I’ve worked my way around VAT by simply refunding and issuing a VAT-exempt invoice where needed.

Anyway, it turns out that there is now a “customer login” option, which I activated a few days ago. What that means is that whenever you shop at JeeLabs, you now get a choice when checking out your order:

What that really means, is that you won’t have to re-enter your shipping details over and over again if you decide to come back for more. And judging from the info in Shopify, that’s about a third of all JeeLabs customers. I am very proud of that fact BTW, because in my view a return customer is someone who is genuinely satisfied with what he/she got the first time around. It feels good to be able to follow up.

If you don’t want to leave this sort of info on the Shopify servers, please keep in mind that the only difference is that you get to pick a password for re-using what you’ll need to enter anyway.

In case you’re worried that this information is going to be used (by me or anyone else), for anything but order fulfillment: don’t be. I’m probably far more extreme in my position than you on privacy. I do not track personal details. The internet is a nightmare in that respect as it is. I Really Do Not Track, nor keep logs, nor “forget” to remove logs. I don’t do Google Analytics. I don’t have the Shopify “stats” option. I don’t “visualize” web accesses. All I keep are recent activity logs of my own servers, to be able to figure out problems when needed.

Life’s too short for lots of things – and that includes feeding ego’s and spying on people, IMO :)

But that doesn’t mean you have to suffer and re-enter the same info over and over in the JeeLabs shop, eh?

Looks like I’ll be participating in this year’s Elektro:Camp (updated link) coming November 4th and 5th. Not sure what it’s all about and how it’s set up – I’ve never been to a “barcamp-style” meeting – but it seems like a good place to be for anyone in the area and interested in hacking on their energy consumption and automation systems at home:

If you’re into this sort of thing, consider joining. It’s bound to be fun, and it’ll be great to meet up in person :)

(Groningen brings up lots of memories, I grew up there – most of my primary school time anyway)

Soooo… see you there?

Ok, here we go again…

1. The JeeLabs online shop will be closed from July 16 to August 15, 2011.

2. The JeeLabs daily weblog will be on hold from July 1st to August 31st.

3. Sale!

Each order will be checked, if I can’t figure it out I’ll contact you by email (this may add to the delay).

Update – Similar conditions now also apply for JeeLabs products in the Modern Device – same discount code!

If you’ve been following this weblog, then you may have noticed that things have been quiet around here…

There are a couple of reasons for this. The first one which triggered it all, was an unfortunate – but ordinary – flu, which swept me off my feet for a couple of days, and then sapped all my energy for a few more. I’m sorry about that, and I’m happy that this is all behind me now.

But there’s more to it than that.

In the beginning, I often had a queue of over a week of weblog posts pending and ready to go out on a daily basis. At that time, the weblog was working out exactly as planned: as a way to report on my adventures in the fascinating land of Physical Computing…

However, over 730 posts later, that buffer has been steadily decreasing, and I’ve often been forced to write a weblog post on the day before its publication. Sometimes this was ready only minutes before the deadline. No fun, and in the past month or two, this ended up happening more and more often. The reporting task became a recurring “what shall I write about today?” challenge. Somewhere along the way, the adventure got lost.

And finally, there’s the web shop, which has taken off much faster than I expected and anticipated. In a way, that’s good: a well-running shop means it provides funding for everything else – from keeping that shop going to being able to start new projects and work on fun stuff. Which is the point of JeeLabs after all.

Except… I’ve been swamped. It’s been a while since I’ve actually been able to “start new projects and work on fun stuff”. And some products added to the shop haven’t gotten the attention they need and deserve, such as writing more software examples and documentation to make things interesting, useful, and practical for everyone. Not to mention some stock problems (there are still a few right now).

One solution would be to “scale up”, i.e. to invest in larger amounts of stock and bring in more people to help with production, packaging, and sales. That’s probably what most people would do when presented with such an incredible “business opportunity”, right?

Ah, but there’s the rub… you see, my goal is not to create a large business and become the boss of something “big”.

Let me tell you a story I heard many years ago…

There’s this guy somewhere on a island, sitting under a tree. He takes a little branch, and patiently carves it into a magnificent little flute. He loves making his flutes, and does it all day long, day in day out. His family and friends enjoy what he’s doing, and everyone’s happy. Then, one day, a visitor comes along and sees him sitting there under his tree, amidst his branches and flutes. He walks over and says: “Wow, that’s amazing what you do. You ought to make lots of flutes, I think you could sell tons of them!”

The guy shrugs, and continues with his flute.

The visitor goes on: “Imagine how much money you could make, and how rich and famous you could become. Man, you could teach others to make these flutes, set up a factory, hire a workforce, and rake in the money! You’d be free to do anything you like. Wouldn’t that be incredible? Now tell me, if you were rich, what would you really like to do most of all?”

The guy looks up and says: “Me? Oh, nothing, just sit under a tree and make flutes.”

I’m not saying I’m exactly like that guy. But close. I want to spend my days exploring new things. And for a while, it’s been happening less and less.

Don’t get me wrong. I do want to share. I do want to encourage others to explore and learn more about all sorts of new and fun technologies. And I do want to continue with Open Source Hardware and Software. The mix of software, hardware, and electronics is absolutely fascinating and oh so worth sharing, and I love to be able to encourage people in those directions. But I don’t want to let the weblog or the shop run my life. My life is not about business, revenues, power, or even success. Heck, it probably wouldn’t be, even if I tried ;)

Just for the record: JeeLabs is not going away. On the contrary, I intend to find a way which makes sure that it will last and stay around for many years to come. I want to keep the weblog, as a source of unique posts with 100% original content. I want to keep the web shop going with kits and products which help anyone interested in Physical Computing to try things out, experiment, explore, and learn about it all.

But I need to take care of the inner fire and energy source which drives me. And that requires time to concentrate and the liberty to run off in lots of directions. I’m back into a bit of that right now, and it’s doing wonders for me.

There will be only a few more posts on the weblog this month. I’ll respond to emails and forum posts as before, and I’m committed to keep the shop running in a responsible way, with proper support and doing my best to maintain sufficient stock levels to keep everything listed available for people who want it. In fact, I expect this activity to increase, as more and more larger projects are starting up and several workshops are currently under way. But my focus will be on streamlining things, so I can recover that precious time I need for the longer term health of everything at JeeLabs, including myself.

Take care, and please don’t let the radio silence on this weblog affect your plans and activities. There are lots of old posts to go through which might interest you, just use the search box or go through any of the archived months at the bottom of this page.

When I figure out how to best take this all forward, you’ll be the first to know.

PS. Thanks for all kind emails and encouragements. It makes a very real difference.

I’ve started adding some more info to the new “JeeLabs Café” wiki at https://jeelabs.net/.

First change is that all products (boards, plugs, etc) now include at least these four files:

• jlpcb-<NNN>.pdf – the schematic as a PDF page
• jlpcb-<NNN>.sch – the schematic as EAGLE schematic (binary data)
• jlpcb-<NNN>.png – the board traces as a PNG image
• jlpcb-<NNN>.brd – the board design as EAGLE board (binary data)

The files are listed at the bottom of each page mentioned on the Hardware list (a read-only sub-area of the Café).

I’ve also started adding pointers to relevant weblog posts on these product pages. For example, the end of the JeeNode page now looks like this:

The other addition, is that I’m going to start adding pages focused around specific topics, acting as quick indexes into the weblog. The “stream of conscience” timeline that makes up the daily weblog is probably fine if you’ve been following along for some time and tend to read or skim most new pages fairly regularly. But for anyone stumbling upon this jeelabs.org site out of the blue, I suspect that this site is really nearly impenetrable by now.

I don’t intend to the change the style and approach of the daily weblog, because it really is sort of a diary of my adventures through Physical Computing, finding my way around as a maker, and getting to grips with atoms. With all the ups, downs, exciting advances, and dead ends that I happen to bump into at JeeLabs.

But for task-specific and topic-specific access, it makes more sense to have an index to locate specific posts and perhaps annotate them a bit if the weblog entry is incomplete or obsolete by now.

Here’s the new Easy Electrons page on the Café to kick this off:

This new Easy Electrons index page is mentioned on the main Projects page.

The main page of the Café is still a bit crude, but there are a couple of automatically-generated pages worth visiting to find your way around in the Café, eh, I mean wiki:

• the main wiki site map – a.k.a. “Index by title” in the sidebar
• the main wiki recent changes – a.k.a. “Index by date” in the sidebar
• the hardware area site map – a.k.a. “Index by title” in the sidebar
• the hardware area recent changes – a.k.a. “Index by date” in the sidebar

Note also that the short URLs printed on all the pcb’s and on the package labels have been adjusted to point to pages in the Café. So when you type jeelabs.org/jn4 into your web browser, you’ll see a page which tells you that it’s a JeeNode v4, provides some info about it, and mentions that there is now a newer version.

I haven’t filled in all the older versions with full details yet, but for all current products, that two-letter-plus-a-digit code will always get you to the latest information in the Café.

Is everything perfect today? No… not by a long shot. But I hope this’ll let us move in that direction.

Two small changes here at JeeLabs. Well, small for you, if I did my homework properly…

First, the https://jeelabs.org/ domain has been migrated to the new server, now that the new internet link appears to be stable.

This change should be mostly transparent. Same content, same format, same “content provider” as before, everything has been transferred as is.

The server and the internet link are quite a bit faster than before. Both are currently under 10% utilized, and should be able to handle growth as needed. The extra speed is particularly noticeable in the search box at the bottom right of this weblog:

The second small change is that “Jee Labs” will be called “JeeLabs” from now on. It’s official. No more white space. Eight bits closer to world domination :)

I’ve been wanting to get away from the two separate words for some time now, one reason being that a single InterCapped name is more googleable – and this server migration seemed like a good time to make the switch.

So better get used to it, this is the name of the new-yet-unchanged home:

This was a fairly elaborate site migration for me, and now both jeelabs.net and jeelabs.org are done. I’ve got a few other changes ahead of me before the rented server (located in Nürnberg, Germany) can be taken offline. But that will have less impact and should be easy to finish in the months ahead.

Onwards!

This is a weblog post I never wanted to write…

If you’ve been waiting for stuff you’ve ordered from the JeeLabs shop in the past weeks, and it hasn’t arrived yet, then I have some really bad news for you: don’t expect anything the rest of this year…

I’m hitting the emergency stop button:

The two big issues in the past two weeks were mentioned in a recent post, and they are both of the kind I can (learn to) deal with: fluctuations in demand and fluctuations in supply, along with occasional shipping anomalies. It’s frustrating for everyone involved when this doesn’t work out well, but hey – been there done that, from both sides of the table now.

Trouble is, I’m now running afoul on a third hurdle: a couple of days ago, I strained my lower back. The trip to Braunschweig may have made it worse, unfortunately, although I had hoped these few days off would cure it. It’s most probably stress related, even though I consider myself an expert in stress avoidance. You see, normally I’m the guy who overcomes any type of setback, no matter what happens and no matter what the stress levels are. And having run a marathon 4 years ago, I have not the slightest inclination in the world to keep some mundane injury from letting me do what I love doing so much these days, i.e. taking JeeLabs further.

Except that now, I’m forced to pull all the stops on the shop. Continuing as is at this stage would be sheer folly.

There are currently some 70 back-orders. I will continue to send out packages as soon as new components come in. But given the delays of several of my orders, one of them pending for almost two months now, it’s no longer realistic to expect anything soon. The busiest delivery season of the year, a totally snowed-in infrastructure across all of Europe and beyond … it all doesn’t make the situation any better.

If you’ve been waiting for some time, please email me if you wish to cancel / get a refund and I’ll take care of it.

I’m not going to attempt to make a prediction for the next few weeks. My guess would be as good as yours. I can only wait, try and find out more about the actual status, and prepare to get things going again as quickly and smoothly as possible once everything returns back to normal.

Meanwhile, I’ve got some silly muscles to tend to… but that’s actually the easy and most predictable part!

Cheers,
– Jean-Claude

With over 2,500 units produced to date, it’s safe to call the JeeNode (Kit + USB + JeeLink) a success. A runaway success in fact, in my opinion.

Great, but…

This isn’t purely good news, alas. The demand for JeeLabs products has been increasing so much lately, that I’ve run into serious supply problems in the shop these past few weeks. I can assure you that I’m extremely unhappy with that state of affairs – and the pain isn’t over yet, with some parts taking weeks longer than expected to reach me. This shortage might last into January 2011 for items such as the Ether Card.

So it’s a bit awkward to talk about “success” at a time when there are still 50 back-orders in the shop (down from 90…), with probably quite a few people frustrated by the slow delivery times. A postal strike next week in the Netherlands and the extra delays due to the busy Christmas season are clearly not going to help one bit.

Summary: the JeeNode design has been working out very nicely, but my ability to make it properly available is lagging far behind. My only way out is to “get larger quantities – sooner”. Which is exactly what I’ve been doing lately, in collaboration with Modern Device, who have started carrying more and more JeeLabs products for the US and nearby regions. We’re both scaling up, while trying not to drive ourselves off the cliff…

The current “crunch” is with headers, with 10,000 of them waiting in customs (again) and holding up just about everything, and with Ether Cards, RTC Plugs, and 2×16 LCD displays. That last one is holding up the Wireless Starter Packs as well.

In principle, all packages are sent out when complete, or nearly so in some cases. I cannot speed up things, although I keep looking for alternative suppliers. If you would prefer to get two partial shipments (no extra cost), please get in touch. I will of course also honor any cancellation, if you decide that you’ve had enough of this.

Please bear with me as I try to get over these growing pains. I apologize for all the delays and inconvenience this is causing. As new deliveries are coming in, I am continuously going through my backlog to fullfill as many pending requests as possible.

JeeLabs is leaving the dark ages behind… into the light!

Yesterday, the fiber-optic cable was finally delivered. It’s that long box in the middle with the wiggly split:

Roll-out by Glashart, modem installed bij NKM, support bij Lijbrandt. It took three months between bringing that orange fiber-optic cable into the house to getting hooked up to internet with it!

This is offered as a Triple play service, of which I’ll only be using the internet connection and a telephone line (yeah, voice-over-wire still exists!).

The internet connection is not too shabby – here’s the “low-end” version I ended up with:

To be honest, I couldn’t care less about the download speed. Been happy ever since ADSL passed the 4 Mbit/sec mark (the rest is marketing, same as the CPU GHz “game”, and the top speed of a car, if you ask me).

The key reason to do this was to increase the upload bandwidth, which was 1 Mbit/sec – until now.

So finally I can announce the new web server for the JeeLabs Café:

Say hello to… jeelabs.net

I’ve been maintaining the docs in both places for a couple of months now. But as of today, cafe.jeelabs.net will be deprecated. I’ll gradually adjust all the bits there to redirect to the new server. The old URLs will continue to work for at least another 6 months, but no guarantees after that.

So what’s the deal with the new Café site, eh?

Well, it’s powered by Redmine and has a lot more features than the old site, which is just some static pages:

• A wiki – with all the info from the old site, organized in a similar way, but now more people can join and participate. There’s already a nice section of contributed pages – see the interesting projects page. The wiki supports Markdown format, and attachments (which can be used as inline images).

• An issue tracker, to better keep track of bugs, feature requests, and source code changes.

• A forums section, which may replace the current Talk forums. I haven’t decided, the feature set is quite different. Main issue holding me back for now, is the lack of a simple spam filtering mechanism.

• A respository browser for all the source code maintained at JeeLabs. This is a very nice and powerful interface to subversion, with full access to change logs, older versions, and source code differences. This replaces the jeelabs.org hack I had set up a while back.

Redmine has a number of other features which I haven’t enabled at this point. One of the things to note, is that it manages several different projects, including some private ones which aren’t even listed until you log in with the proper access rights.

Speaking of logins: all the info in the Café is public and browsable by anyone visitng the site. To submit bug reports or feature requests, however, you will need to register and log in. The process is simple an automated, with a quick check via email. To contribute on the wiki, I need to raise your access level to “Editor” – this is not automatic (to avoid spamming), so please contact me if you would like to add your own pages to the wiki or help maintain and extend pages already on there.

The main page of the new Café is at https://jeelabs.net/projects/cafe/wiki and here’s what it looks like:

There’s a separate Hardware sub-project in the Café with all the “official” documentation about hardware from JeeLabs. This is where you will find descriptions, detailed specs, connection diagrams, schematics, CAD files, and pointers to relevant posts on this daily weblog. An example:

Ok, enough screen shots. Back to work!

I’ve got two announcements to make:

1. Jee Labs will be closed from July 14th through August 14th

No new posts will be published on the weblog, and no orders in the shop will be processed or sent out during one month, starting on Wednesday “Bastille Day”.

2. Special discount during the entire month of June

Just got back from a couple of very relaxing days in Paris.

Here’s a quick impression of the 1680’s Comédie-Française (on the right):

We went there to see a nice French theater piece. And although I’m not even remotely as culturally enlightened as such a remark might suggest, I did have a great time.

Normal transmissions to resume tomorrow…

Here’s my little thank you for everyone who has supported Jee Labs in 2009 – in one way or another …

No need to hurry, January has 31 days. I’m away now, will reply and send out discount codes on Monday.

This year has been a very exciting year for me. Hardware, software, hacking, coding… I’ve been having an absolutely fantastic time – and I hope you enjoyed reading about some of these adventures.

Before the year ends, I want to apologize for the mess highlight the delightful variety of pages this has led to.

Below are quick snapshots of the headers of different areas reached through this main navigation bar:

First, there is the daily weblog, with over 350 posts in WordPress and new posts added with MarsEdit:

Next the documentation area, which looks the same, but is managed by an app called VoodooPad:

The open source code is maintained in a subversion repository, and can be browsed online using ViewVC:

The discussion forums are managed by WordPress’ little bulletin-board cousin, bbPress:

The project-oriented wiki is handled by a product I’ve had some involvement in, called ProjectForum:

And lastly, the Jee Labs web shop is hosted at Shopify (a bit weak on int’l features and progress, alas):

Six areas, and almost as many very different presentation styles! Most stuff runs on remote servers, the rest is a copy of what’s on my machine. A substantial portion relies on open source, but some bits use strictly commercial software.

I wish I had the time (and the skills) to turn all of these into a single consistent presentation, but I don’t…

To me, the current state of Jee Labs is a pretty good illustration of where we stand with computing at the end of this first decade of the 21st century: amazing things are possible with incredibly modest means, but it’s essentially one huge mish-mash of completely different trends, strung together with this duct-tape we’ve called the web.

Anyway – so much for technology.

See you in 2010! May it bring you lots of friendship, wisdom, and creativity to make this world a better place.

Update 2010-04-05 : this particular wiki setup is no longer being used.

I recently ran out of the silvery electrostatic bags I’ve been using to package JeeNode kits and other stuff. So for the next batch, I decided to use bags which are biodegradable. They have a funny soft feeling to them and are actually much more flexible:

These bags come with a “Farnell” ad printed on them (the supplier of these bags) – so be it…

If you order stuff from the Jee Labs shop, you may also receive stuff packaged in small clear plastic zip-lock bags. That’s because I have them lying around anyway – they are re-used from the extension cables, which I received in packages of 1-per-bag, whereas they are sent out as 5-per-bag. Since the harm of having “consumed” these plastic bags has already been done, might as well re-use them a second time…

FWIW, I feel pretty bad about adding so much packaging to a world full of junk already. And being involved in quite a bit of transportation of all this stuff, both by getting it here and by getting it out as packages to lots of people. Atoms ain’t bits – that’s for sure!

All I can say is that I save up and batch my orders as much as possible, and use as little and as light packaging as I think I can get away with.

Looks like the days of innocence are over for this weblog:

Not to worry (it’s all filtered out automatically), but I still have to scan that stuff once in a while to make sure there are no false positives.

Oh well, I s’pose it comes with the territory…

It’s September 2009, ten months after I started on my “Computing stuff tied to the physical world” adventure. Arduino, RepRap, modding, trying to fit stuff together, software in a chip – my, my, I never thought it’d be that much fun!

Here’s a part that came out of an old CD-ROM drive:

What does (did) it do? Is it human? Hmmm.

Whatever it is, this thing pretty much sums up all the geek stuff I’ve stumbled upon in these past months. Weird. Designed. Fun. Mass produced. Functional. Useless on its own. And still mostly a male thing ;)

But this isn’t just about what happened so far. The fun really is the excitement of entering a new future, best described by the motto “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” – see the Maker’s Bill of Rights.

I’ve only started to scratch the surface of all this. It’s fascinating how many people are latching on in the same way – across all ages and all continents. With websites such as instructables springing up to collect and share the huge variety of “DIY” projects and hacks. Boundless creativity, for and by everyone.

Today is also the day I’d like to declare the Jee Labs Shop officially “open”. There are only a few “items for sale” to use marketing-speak. My main reason for doing this is that I want to create real stuff – and a shop with products is in a sense as real as it gets. You can buy things there if you want to get going quickly with stuff I’ve been working on, or you can make it all yourself using the information on my weblog. Everything is 100% open source, meaning that all the documentation is available for you to use / adapt / refine / extend in any way you like.

I owe my inspiration to the countless people who share and discuss their work and ideas openly on the web. The daily Jee Labs weblog is my attempt to give something back in return. It’s a drop in the ocean, but hey it appears to be appreciated :)

And I owe much my motivation to your comments on the weblog + forum and in particular to those of you who have bought stuff from the new shop. You know who you are, and you’ve made my day each and every time. Thank you for your vote of confidence!

As a token of my appreciation, everyone who has posted on the weblog or forum and everyone who has ordered from Jee Labs in the past can get a 20% discount on new orders. I don’t want to send around unsolicited emails to everyone, so please send an email to jcw <at> equi4.com to get a discount code which can be used in the web shop until September 30th.

Ok. Back to designing, soldering, hacking, coding, sharing, and posting. Enjoy!

This is to announce that I’m suspending this weblog for a month to take some time off. No new posts in the coming weeks, but you are of course welcome to browse around in everything that’s been posted so far.

This is my 217th post, i.e. over 7 months of daily posting about all sorts of embedded and wireless fun stuff since this weblog was started. A lot of different topics have been covered, from getting the wireless radio to work, via a couple of excursions into robotics, to the latest reflow developments here. I hope you’ve enjoyed all this as much as I’ve enjoyed diving in and writing about it all. I’m sure there’s a lot more fun waiting down the road, and am looking forward to get back to this after the summer.

Here’s my very latest progress on the new JeeLink. I don’t have all the parts yet, so this isn’t a complete unit, but you can see where it’s all going:

As you can see, there are a couple of solder bridges, i.e. too much paste. But the “big” chips both do appear to have lined up quite nicely and the simple parts are all fine. All I need to do is get the solder paste amounts down next time. Man, this stuff sure is tiny.

Enjoy, and watch out for those soldering fumes! ;)

There have been some changes to this weblog since it was moved to another server a few days ago. The navigation links at the top of each page now work better, for one.

Another change is that I’ve started setting up some more documentation pages, and am integrating them into this website. Here’s what you get when you click on the “DOCS” link now:

I would have loved to get some really nifty sidebar navigation in there, but for now there are simply two mechanisms to help you out: first of all there are quite a few links between pages – this is automatic, and hence very convenient for me: wherever text appears which matches a page in the documentation, that text will be linked. The other navigation feature is the “page index” link at the bottom of each page. It’s not very sophisticated, but hopefully workable for now.

Keep in mind that searching in the weblog will not find anything in the documentation pages – these are internally two completely different systems.

Needless to say perhaps, but these documentation pages are still at an early stage. They will be filled-in, extended, and updated for some time to come.

For your information: I’ll be off-line from July 15th through August 15th. It’s that time of year for me to let go and re-charge again, far away from gadgets, internets, and computer screens. Because everything has its place, including the real world.

The intention is to have the new JeeNode v3 kits and boards available before then, but it really depends on whether the latest design works properly. I hope to find out in roughly a week.

The shop will stay on-line, but please be aware that if you order anything there will be no packages sent out during that period. Right now, the shop is still in basic start-up mode. No more, no less. With a bit of luck, I can still send out some new kits before my leave.

Ok, back to some fun stuff. Here’s a mystery JeeNode …

See if you can guess what the different pieces are and what all this is for. Two hints: the chip on the right is transparent (it hasn’t been hooked up yet), and there’s a solar cell still waiting to be connected to the top and bottom leftmost two JeePlug pins.

The mystery will be solved in tomorrow’s post.

Right on the heels of yesterday’s shop announcement, I’ve now also set up a site for discussion about everything related to the Jee Labs:

talk.jeelabs.net

Again, a very basic design with with only a limited set of features in the form of a new bulletin board called bbPress – from the makers of WordPress:

If this turns out to be a convenient and effective setting for discussions, I will remove the jeelabs mailing list at Google Groups again. With apologies to everyone who already signed up there.

To summarize, there are now three different sites for the Jee Labs, using the new domain names:

• jeelabs.org – the daily news weblog – aliases www.jeelabs.org and jeelabs.org
• shop.jeelabs.com – to get kits, boards, etc – aliases www.jeelabs.com and jeelabs.com
• talk.jeelabs.net – forums for discussion – aliases www.jeelabs.net and jeelabs.net

So much for the world domination side of things – now I can put on my lab coat again and get on with it.

I’ve decided to switch to a real top-level internet domain name for this weblog, and am moving this entire site over to its new location:

www.jeelabs.org

Did you notice the extra “s”? Did ya? Did ya?

Actually, the weblog home is at http://jeelabs.org/ to be pedantically precise – but you can pick whichever URL you prefer, since you’ll automatically be redirected to the right place. Both names have been permanently tied together – inasmuch as permanent means anything on internet, that is.

The “jeelab.equi4.com” URL (no “s”, see?) will continue to work as a redirect to the new location, at least for a while so everyone can gradually adjust all bookmarks.

This change will be instant because it’s entirely virtual. This is merely a naming issue.

I’ve also adjusted the name of this blog. The “Jee Labs” plural form feels right for various reasons. Several people were in fact referring to this weblog in that way already.

Had a wonderful time in Barecelona, admiring Gaudi’s fantastic architecture such as the roof of “La Pedrera”:

You might not have noticed my absence since the daily Jee Labs weblog updates went on as usual, based on posts which were prepared in advance.

Anyway, it’s good to be back …

Today is my birthday. Regular broadcasts resuming tomorrow.

That’s me, a couple of decades back, around the time when the PDP-8 came out. No chips, no personal computers, no Internet, no Google, no mobile technology.

All prerequisites for the JeeNode :)

This blog has reached its one hundredth post – whee!

If you follow this weblog regularly, you may have noticed that there is now one post per day, day-in-day-out and always at 0:01 CET. This is not because my working days and hours are so regular – far from it – or necessarily always late, but because this self-imposed daily schedule helps me stay focused.

It’s all supported by a bit of automation in WordPress – I simply try to keep a handful of posts scheduled “in the pipeline”, so that these writings aren’t driven by some sort of daily deadline panic. On some days I have nothing to say – and I don’t – while on others I’m pleased to find that I can touch on a couple of topics, some of which are hopefully of interest to you, dear reader.

Speaking of whom… it’s always nice to hear from you. I’d love to read about what interests you in this “Computing Stuff Tied to the Physical World” as the title of this weblog says, as well as your suggestions on how to further improve this weblog.

So much for the intermezzo on this first day of spring (for the northern hemisphere that is). Tomorrow’s post will resume with a photo, graphic, or sketch – as always.

Enjoy your reading!

PS. FYI, I recently added a bit more background info about me on the About page.

I’ve “moved” this blog to http://jeelab.equi4.com/ – but it’s all smoke and mirrors really: underneath, it still redirects to the http://jeelab.wordpress.com/ site which continues to host these pages just as before.

Update – I’ve also changed the blog title to match the domain name. Less confusion. See the about page for further details.

This weblog was moved from RapidWeaver (which doesn’t scale, sigh) to a hosted one using WordPress. Right now, I’m now using MarsEdit to manage this blog.

All older entries have been moved over, but not all links and source code listings have properly made it across the transition. The original blog is still archived here.