Author: Timo Geusch

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I’ve been using a 2009 cheesegrater Mac Pro for quite a while now. I bought it used quite a while ago - around 2013 if I remember correctly - and it’s been serving as my main photo/video/general programming workhorse, although the latter tasks have been taken over mostly by a Linux machine housed in the infamous NZXT H1 case. It’s been upgraded a lot during its life - now has the latest 6 core Xeon these machines support including the upgrade to 2010 firmware, USB 3.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

As I mentioned in my post from a few months ago, I had received the temporary fix in the form of the nylon screws and nuts from NZXT. At that point in time, NZXT’s customer support was not able to tell me when to expect the “real” fix, namely the updated PCIe riser. I ended up contacting them again towards the end of July to see what the status was and apparently, my request had somehow fallen through the cracks.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

In Emacs, I usually end up enabling the same set of minor modes when I use one of my “writing modes”, namely modes like markdown-mode and org-mode. Enabling a single minor mode automatically is generally pretty easy via the appropriate mode hook, but enabling more than one minor mode requires one more level of indirection. Of course it does, because everything in computer science requires one more level of indirection :).

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I’m by no means an Emacs org-mode power user - in fact, anything but - but I do use org-mode a lot for note taking and also when I need an outliner to try and arrange ideas in a suitable manner. It excels at both, and usually does what I need including exporting to HTML. Exporting to HTML covers about 90% of my use cases. As much as I’d like to, LaTeX does not feature in my needs, but I needed to export an org-mode file for use with Microsoft Word.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

I’m in the middle of a server redo - right now, I’m setting up a replacement server for my trusty Dell T30, plus it was time to give this web server a new home. When I started the migration from my old WordPress site to the new static site, the static site was running on a small 1 core / 1GB RAM cloud server at Vultr. That had enough oomph for testing and for the last couple of months.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

Not much to update since the last post on this topic, I’m still waiting for the updated PCIe riser. Although I do have to admit that based on the latest video from Gamers Nexus on this saga, I’m not holding my breath. With the current shipping issues I’ll give it another month or so and see if I get any PCIe riser before making a decision if I write off this case and rebuild the machine in a different SFF case.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

First, I’m very much a “very occasional” gamer so I’m usually not the target audience for most gaming related accessories and parts. I did however want to rebuild my rather large grey box Linux/Windows workstation into something more compact with a watercooler for the CPU. The NZXT H1 seemed at that point to be a really good match for my requirements and had received good reviews. One was duly ordered, together with a Mini-ITX motherboard and somehow, a better graphics card also snuck on the shopping list.

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

Another one for my computer science reading list for this year. I do try to work my way through at least one classic computer science book annually and picked up Let Over Lambda a few weeks ago. Colour one of the cats not impressed, but then again she’s got more free time than I do and probably already read it. Not massively impressed by yet another old book

Timo Geusch from The Lone C++ Coder's Blog

Good programmers are supposed to be lazy, right? The way I interpret this statement - because none of the software engineers who I know could be considered lazy - is that we like to automate repetitive tasks. You know, tasks like checking if you’ve made any changes to your blog and then building the blog and deploying the changes automatically. Which is what I’ve done, and in this post I’ll show you my minimalist setup to do so.