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!