Have been working hard this week on kremermakelaars.nl. And managed to finish it right before the end of this year. The old website was one of those left overs from the early 90′s. The only thing missing was a spinning @ sign. But i think i managed to give it a nice visual boost. For the back-end i created s nice CMS to manage all objects and page content. The whole thing is build with ZF, Mysql, and some javascript libraries.

The customer is happy. I’m happy. Now it’s time for some fun!

So that’s all for 2009. I wish everybody a good and happy new year.

A few months ago i got stranded on adda’s website. This stuff looks so interesting. But thinking about building my own gives me sweaty hands. I love to build computers from scratch. But building a motherboard… i don’t see me doing that anytime soon. Even though i have null knowledge of the subject. I decided to give it shot anyway. And ordered the Russian Tube Clock. It arrived pretty fast. But occupied some closet space for at least 3 weeks. I however managed to push my self into building this thing. So here goes.

When you unpack the whole thing and lay it out on a table it looks pretty impressive. And at this point i got the feeling i would never get this to work. But thank god for the internet. I quickly found some nice hand held guides to guide me through it.

I will not bother you with all specifics. because i can’t :) And for that you should read here and here Or just order the kit and give it a shot. it’s great. So after burning my self i managed to get the first set of components mounted properly on top of the PCB.

The only problem i encountered (and it spoiled most of the project) was the soldering iron. Which was a mess to start of with. And it was way to big for this delicate work. The result was my soldering didn’t look that proper as you can see in the image below.

The hardest part was to get the tube mounted correctly. One end of the tube is a spring of wires that need to be attached to a jack on the smaller PCB. It’s a time consuming and tedious job to do. But i think i managed. Although not all wires are as straight as they should have been.

It finally starts to look like something. After hooking it up to some power and running some tests. I was ready to build the outer casing.

The outer casing is a simple design. Done in Plexiglas. It looks simple. But it was a struggle to get the thing assembled.

After my struggle with the casing i switched the tube on. And was greeted by a nice blue/greenish color and a beep. The color is a bit different from what is shown on the main site. But that has something to do with the tubes i read. The brightness is adjustable so that’s no problem. As you can see i still miss one time delimiter. And the menu is still not function 100%. But the clock works. And i can set the alarm.

I had so much fun building this thing. that i ordered a new soldering iron. And will be doing a new attempt soon!

This post is a recap of a post i made earlier this month. Normally i would leave it as it is. But i wasn’t really happy with the outcome. And it didn’t really reflect the current situation. So here goes.

As the technological challenge in my current day to day job started to decline. I started to think this was not the right position for me. So i decided it was time to search for something new. And at that time i could not find anything interesting that didn’t include relocating my self to an other part of this world. This left me with a hard choice to make. But i left AddMissions anyway. With a good feeling though. I had have a great year there. Now was just time for a change.

All that was about two months ago. And for the past time i have been doing some freelance projects to pay my bills. And although i enjoyed the time working from home. I feel it is time again to go and search for a new opportunity. I learned a lot from the past two months but freelance work is not something i tend to do full time. I need people around me. Even though i don’t talk that much while i work :)

I have some things cooking at the moment. Let’s see what the new year has to offer.

Having a hard time getting to sleep tonight. And was browsing my domain list. when i realized i still have this very short domain name that is just sitting there collecting dust. And since these URl shortener services are so hot lately i decided to roll my own.

So three hours, a bit of code and a short domain name later i present : 0x.vc (it’s shorter) It’s probably still full of holes and prone to XSS attacks. So be careful!

The URL shortening service is offline!