about
this site
First of all, this is the playground of mark hoekstra (that’s me) and it’s one of my goals to keep it as personal as I can. You will find mostly home made content here, stuff I do on my kitchen table and then some.
About site-independancy or such, well, it doesn’t come more independent than this. It’s my own site on my own server with my own, home made projects on it. In the past I have been experimenting with banners and such, trying to get something of a kick-back for costs I make on all this, but I either do something terribly wrong or I don’t know what’s going on, cause it’s a penny business as it seems and I’d rather be flipping burgers for that kind of money than changing my personal site into a commercial christmastree… In the end I decided to take down all the ads, I mean, you got to do it right or not at all, right? ^_^
the design
After years of DIY on the design (also with help from friends), it was time to do this a little more professional and I gave another friend of mine, Iris, the daunting task to design a new logo for me (if you like her work, Weez is her company and she’s specialized in logos!) I think she did a splendid job! To give you an idea what it means or how to look at it:
You could see it as a little man with wings. Then, when you try to look at it in three dimensions, it’s an open ball with balls rolling to your side. That stands for open source, my way of giving information and my belief all tech should be open. Then you could also look at the wings as eyes, which is a nice follow-up since the previous logo was a skull ^_~ As a coincedence (this was not meant by the designer) there’s the number eight which on it’s own means a whole lot of good things. And as a last one (also not meant), you could see it as a Pac Man, eating it’s way up… ^_^
As a template, I took the textpattern-template serene as a base, changed a whole lot to it and I added a nifty navigation which got described as being a fake-dock with minimalistic vector-graphics... I couldn’t have said it better. The icons in the navigation come from the truly unique IRIX, the UNIX which runs on Silicon Graphics-machines and since this site started out on a wonderful SGI Challenge S (which at one point was a killermachine), it seemed the right thing to do. Also because IRIX already had scalable vector-icons long before OS X existed and even longer before Vista had it planned (or did they already remove this feature also?).
To be totally correct on this one, I got the icons out of an iconpack for Gnome (I use Gnome on Gentoo on my workstation) but that iconpack got inspired by IRIX... ;-)
mark hoekstra
What is there to say? I’m the guy responsible for all the content on this website, next to that, I happen to be the biggest sponsor of this site too. I have a passion for tech, but I guess you already figured that much. Most of the times I get described as professional hobbyist, maker or hardware hacker. I guess it’s all quite accurate. I have a strong idealism about tech and everything connected to that. I truly believe all tech should be open, soft- and hardware, to make this world a better place. You could look at this site as my contribution in reaching that goal and I truly hope I can contribute to that for a long time to come.
photo credit: Nadya Peek
I’m 33 years old and I live in Groningen, The Netherlands together with the cutest cat in the universe, Bates. I’ve got a part-time job at a local OEM/computer manufacturer as a sales-engineer. That job pays my rent (and sometimes even my energy bill!). Next to that I’m a blogger / editor at BRiGHT, techlifestyle magazine and website.
bates checking up on some compiler output
click to go to the corresponding picture on flickr
you can contact me by mail:
mark [at] geektechnique [dot] org
(I’m extremely busy most of the time, so even though I try to respond to every mail I get, it sometimes can take a while.)
and/or you can find me in/at/on or near:
involved in:
and in dutch:
- Moois Magazine (the best dutch weblog of 2007 according to the dutch bloggies)
the hosting
With all the DIY-projects on this site, I guess it fits the bill that I do my own hosting as well. This site started in a closet at one certain day, from there on it went from a wonderful SGI Challenge S at a friends house to an Athlon1200 (which was nice when I got slashdotted because of this…) to my current dedicated, privately owned (not rented or such) server and it’s placed in a datacenter, like it should.
click on the thumbnail to go to the corresponding picture on Flickr
the old about-page can be found here
permalinks:
markhoekstra.geektechnique.org
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