About Metku

Me (Japala) and my brother were thinking of registering a domain. This was in February 2001. We didn't have any special purpose ready for it, just to get domain for fun. The second part was a lot harder. What should we call it? Finding a suitable domain name sounds easy but when you start checking if they are available you get disappointed. Like taking a dictionary and going through it name by name; taken, taken, taken etc.

metku

Metku is a Finnish synonym to words like gag, joke, trick. We even asked our Russian co-workers to check that it didn't mean anything "rude" in Russia.

.net

This was a easy choice. Here in Finland we can't get .fi -domain because we are not a registered group of people or a firm. com sounds like too commercial. By using .net we can expand to include other kinds of pages under our own domain etc.

MetkuMods

Aah, my favourite subject. I often find people mistaking and thinking there is some guy called Metku who is doing these mods. The idea of adding these hardware modifications to metku.net was founded few months later when we registered the domain. I had made few mods already but they were hosted on my other account on another site. When I moved my personal pages to metku.net I moved those mods at the same time. This is the way MetkuMods were created.

All of the mods there are made by me, Jani 'Japala' Pönkkö. Both of my brothers help me out every now and then. Thank you Caspar and Melvana. First I tried to make mods that you could make with stuff that you have there, in your home. Mods that are cheap and easy to make. Big pictures and not so much text. The idea still works although not everybody have these integrated circuits, plexis and leds at hand.

I had to translate some of my mods to English after the GlowPad mod. Even with big pictures and all there is still use for those few words. At this point the visitor count just went thought the roof. Before that metku.net got like 300-500 visits per day. One day I saw a number over 50000. That is a lot. Thanks to my wife Stina for proof-reading my writings.

MetkuMods have been on frontpage in many big sites like HardOCP, Virtual-hideout, Muropaketti and Slashdot. I like to thank these sites and everybody who like to think that these mod have something in value and should be linked. I never even hoped that this could grow to be so big thing but glad to see that there is still room for some creative modding ;)

Where is this all happening

In the Internet of course. Where geographically? In Raahe, Finland.

28.12.2001 ©Japala