Ian's Corner project overview

BRIGID is our lastest baby. BRIGID is a global plan to secure Belgium's energy supply for many decades to come.

Out of common interest, we are monitoring Belgium's energy policy since 2012, and we were not happy. In fact, we are flabbergasted by the evolving situation. Add to this the air pollution problem which is worstening continuously. And more recently, there's these alarming climate reports, and we start to feel the consequences of climate change. So, time to step in and do some research: any mad hatter can analyse the crap out of the situation, but what's the solution?

After a brief career as an engineering student in the nuclear industry in the late 70's, we decided way back then that the nuclear business is a field to keep far from. Neglecting the fact that nuclear power plants are providing cheap and reliable electricity to the country for many decades. Head in the sand. We plee guilty.

Much to our dismay, however, our recent study work revealed two important conclusions:

* we need nuclear energy on a rather massive scale to stay relevant as a society,

* we need to implement nuclear energy production and its use in a totally different way as was done up to this point in time.

Hence this project: http://www.brigid.be... and we're fully back into the nuclear game.

BRIGID is so disrupting that nobody will take it seriously. Until we're proven correct. We will receive a statue in 2030.

We love music. We love listening, and playing.



Lutherie Leuven is a violin workshop. Founded in 2007, smack in the middle of the financial crisis, we just went ahead. From a customer point of view, we wanted to do significantly better than your general musical instrument store.

We focussed on bowed instruments from the very start. Lutherie Leuven provides a proper solution for every aspect of bowed instrumentation. We keep far way from any other instrument type, to stay focussed. We selected bowed instruments, because of the nature of the techniques: essentially hand made, bows and bowed instruments are very fragile, they require a lot of specialised maintenance, set up, and adjustments. This way, we managed to steadily grow in a market that was devastated by Far East competition, and lately by e-commerce.

With a clear focus on bowed instruments and bows, we also wanted to do better than the existing luthiers. So we went back to school, and learned to play and build. And we started applying high-tech solutions to ancient problems.

In our 12 year existence, we have witnessed literally thousands of children grow into violinist, cellists and bass players, using our instruments, which are generally acknowledged by the music teachers to be motivating rather than demotivating. In order to achive that, we have invested huge amounts of money, and setup time to build a rental fleet that provides a proper solution for every demand.

Using our electronics experience, we also grew into the Benelux reference for the maintenance of electrical violins and cellos. We have a fully equipped electronics lab for doing repairs.



Since 2016, we also started an extensive research on oil varnishes. We found that the technique of making oil varnishes is basically forgotten, as production has been moved to the Far East. Just could not let that happen. So, we went back to school, and we fully equipped a chemical lab to prepare oils, resins, colouring dyes, grounds and varnishes. At this time, we have a library of dozens of reconstructed oil vanishes. And on top of that: a recipe to make recipes...

http://www.lutherie-leuven.be

We love computers. They're really wonderfull things, that make life so much easier. Couldn't do without them.

But we loathe the way they are used these days. So we are UNIX adepts, and hate all the rest, and for really, really good reasons. But let's not get into that. Although we would like to be refunded by some of the suppliers for all the hours of productive work we lost using their crappy software.

You cannot begin to image how inefficient and buggy todays computers are. Having designed and build several types of custom and RISC processor chips and computers, we know we can do a lot better. We learned a lot cooperating with these guys:

https://www.arm.com

So we build propriatary networks, using really small computers, and really small setups. Instead of going faster and bigger all the time, we go smaller and leaner all the time, and make our software more efficient by constant redesign, which is feasible, precisely because it's small and efficient. Less power, less noise, more reliable, more secure. We obtain amazing results using this strategy.

We also build our own propriatary software, that we need to keep running our ventures with absolutely no external ICT costs. Uptimes: years! Eat that.

We design web sites and web applications. Our own, of course, and occasionally for other organisations. We are absolute astonished by how far web developers deviated from the original idea behind web site technology. Although the internet is problable on the same level of importance as the discovery of fire, the inventon of wheels and coffee, its misuse is gigantic.

So we have another approach: simple, static sites in native code. Just information. Clean. Minimum bandwidth. Snappy. For your benefit, not for us. No cookies, no traps.

Again, we went back to school, virtually this time. W3schools is an example of how it should be done:

https://www.w3schools.com

Heroes of the internet! Thank you.

One learns a lot running a business. One can teach economics far better if one is running a real business. This is especially true when running an international business from a complicated country like Belgium.

Ian's Corner therefore is able to support KULeuven University providing teaching materials for primary and secondary schools.

Everybody uses GPS, and Europe decided to build their own competing system. We spent a good deal of effort here, until we bailed out for political reasons.

CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) is a peculiar modulation technique that allows to transmit data over a communication link, while being burried in the noise. It has an inherent protection against detection and againts demodulation.

We have done extensive research on silicon compliers for digital signal processing, and more recently on SRAM designs.

Using our silicon compilers, we have developed chips for software radio implementation of modems for satellite comms, wireline comms, and WiFi.