A B O U T

...geektechnique.org

geektechnique.org is the (logical?) sequence to mark.is-a-geek.org, which on it's own has been my personal playground for just over a year now. But I started to really dislike this handcoded HTML-look of it all (I'm typing this in VI ;-)). I wanted things to be a little more professional than before. So at least some dynamic content and my old webserver, a SPARCstation2 wasn't capable of that... Anyway, in February 2003 I bought this wonderful SGI Challenge S from an auction-site, for 94 euro. I bought it to run NetBSD, but well, that didn't work out, so then my quest for IRIX began. A little while later I was kindly given an original copy of IRIX for which I'm very grateful. I had IRIX up&running in a weekend, but well, the harddrive crashed soon after(probably the reason it was sold in the first place). Anyway, a little while later, I could get my hands on an unused 9GB SCSI-disk... hey, things started to look good :) ...and the final investment I made was some refurbished 32MB simms, gold-tipped fastpage parity... So the total amount went from 64 to 192MB

So, this little machine just begged to be my personal webserver and things needed to become a little more professional than before. I think I did just that. I was lucky to get the perfect gift for a person like me, my own domainname! A friend of mine from Rotterdam(where I lived before) thought it would be allright as an early birthdaypresent and well, I had domainnames before, but this time it really seems I'm doing something with it! So what is it you will find at geektechnique.org? Just the usual you could find at my old page, projects, lots of pictures of my projects and all the usual ranting about (mostly obsolete) hardware and things connected to that... Anyway, enjoy!

...the hosting

Since it started to look like I would have a neat little webserver, I started to look for a place to put it. Professional co-location was/is out of the question simply because of the costs and I thought it would be a shame to use the SGI only on my capped upload of 128KBit of my cableconnection at home. In the end I co-located the SGI at a friends house where he has an amazing 10mbit up&down.

Here you have a map (courtesy of terradesk.nl) of the city I live in, Groningen.



1, that's where I live (and also where mark.is-a-geek.org is located)
2, the apartmentblock where my server now is located(actually, next door to it)
3, Zernikeborg, university-complex where the GN-IX is located, the Groningen Internet Exchange to which this apartmentblock is connected...

...this is the view from my desk...
the location of my server is in the orange circle





The pic above have been made through the viewfinder of my Canon Zoom 318, why? Well, one reason is my Fuji FinePix1300 doesn't have a zoomlens ;-)

...me

What is there to say? I'm 28 29 30 years old, live in Groningen, which is a wonderful city in the north of Holland. I enjoy myself very much overhere and as a time-consuming hobby I play around with all kinds of hardware and guess what? as a job I sell hardware... :-) If you like my projects or just want to know something about me, don't hesitate to drop me a line(my mailaddress is at the bottom of the page)...



mark (c) 2003, 2004, 2005

mark [at] geektechnique [dot] org