Welcome to the open source version of my brain

Hi! My name is Anthony Liekens, I'm a scientist, a hacker, a geek and a dad. Below, you can find some of my many projects.

I don't have an hyperactive imagination... I just happen to live in an underactive universe

Projects

DIY electric vehicles

From time to time, I need a new project that allows me to educate myself in a completely new area of skills. As a complete newbie in mechanical construction, I wanted to build my own little electric vehicle and learn about welding, electronics, car building and maintenance, building a transmission and mounting electric motors on some wheels. We have successfully converted a cheap go kart to run on batteries and an electric motor. You can find movies and construction pictures of the kart on our electric kart blog. Up next, I'm going to convert a Ligier JS6 -- a small 25 year old 45kph car that runs on a motorbike engine -- to electric.

Do you want to see the ISS fly by over your house?

Ever wanted to watch the International Space Station fly through the night sky over your own house? Keep your calendar up to date with upcoming visible flybys, in two simple steps, with a websitelet that I wrote, at lookup.liekens.net.

Can I build a DIY biology lab?

I'm wondering. And this time, it's about biology and molecular genetics. At home.

I want to build my own molecular genetics laboratory to do some elementary genetics experiments, such as genetic marker discovery and detection, and a little bit of (environmentally safe) genetic engineering, in my garage. In order to get to this point, I'm wondering whether it would indeed be possible to build such a lab on a small scale, small budget, in my own home.

Learn more on my I haz lab blog.

punthoofdpuntbe

Graag heet ik je welkom op de web site van Punthoofd, punt hoofdpunt be, waar hij de interessante hoofdpunten uit het nieuws van het moment bij elkaar zoekt.

Want dat is nu net de specialiteit van Punthoofd. Hij is een geautomatiseerde journalist. Hij sprokkelt regelmatig al het nieuws bij elkaar van een heel pak online nieuwsbronnen. In al die data gaat hij dan op zoek naar gerelateerde berichten, en stopt deze bij elkaar. Bezoekers krijgen op zijn web site in een oogopslag een overzicht van het belangrijkste en heetste nieuws.

http://punthoofd.be is a Flemish news aggregator, a nice little project that fulfills my never ending craving for (localized) current news.

www.vlaamswoordenboek.be

Mijn laatste nieuwe persoonlijke projectje is een Web 2.0 gestyled Vlaams woordenboek, gebaseerd op de ideeën achter de Engelstalige Urban Dictionary. Iedereen die dat wil kan op de web site nieuwe Vlaamse woorden toevoegen, stemmen op definities en definities van andere gebruikers op de web site van commentaren voorzien. Dagelijks verkiezen we ook een Vlaams woord van de dag. Er staan al meer dan 5000 definities van Vlaamse woorden in het woordenboek, maar dat kan met uw hulp mogelijk nog veel verder worden uitgebreid. Neem dus zeker een kijkje!

www.vlaamswoordenboek.be is an open Flemish online dictionary that I have built as my first project written in Ruby on Rails. The web site and its description are inherently not in English ...

Pregolia, an online academic community

Pregolia is my start-up social networking service for people in academics. Registered users of Pregolia can build a library of conferences and journals of their interest, connect to colleagues, and look for recommended events and publications using Pregolia's data mining.

My upcoming deadlines Here's a cool demo of what Pregolia can do and what you can also have on your web site if you sign up with Pregolia: The following is a list of upcoming conferences that I am interested in.

Data mining of musical profiles

A musical tag cloud is a textual depiction of a music listener's profile and his musical preferences, by visualizing the collection of common tags for a user's top artists. Based on the data from musical social networking service Last.fm, we can automatically generate such tag clouds. Here's a preliminary data mining analysis of a large sample of such tag clouds. Here's my tag cloud:

90s  alternative  alternative rock  ambient  belgium  breaks  chillout  club  dance  electronic  electronica  goa  house  idm  indie  industrial  psytrance  rock  seen live  techno  trance  trip-hop

Hack your own analog binary wall clock

Check out the analog wall clock that I have converted into an analog binary clock, and lots more about binary numbers and time (true binary time).

An analog binary clock!

Lego steam engine

My Lego steam engine that works on vacuum cleaner power