Wouter Groeneveld
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A Note On Shelling In Emacs
As you no doubt know by now, we Emacs users have the Teenage Mutant Ninja Power. Expert usage of a Heroes in a Hard Shell is no exception. Pizza Time! All silliness aside, the plethora of options available to the Emacs user when it comes to executing shell commands in “terminals”—real or fake—can be…
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Favourites of February 2026
A sudden burst of Japanese cherry flowers sparkling in the sun brings much-needed lightheartedness into our late February lives. Before we know it, the garden will be littered with these little pink petals, and the very short blossom season will be behind us. Our cherry tree always had the tendency of…
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An Album For Every Year Of My Life
Inspired by Tom’s One Album for Every Year of Life compilation, Robert created his own list. It’s been a while since I last published a list related to music so here’s my own that should contain 40 items. This was a much more challenging exercise than I initially thought. It took me almost an entire…
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Managing Multiple Development Ecosystem Installs
In the past year, I occasionally required another Java Development Kit besides the usual one defined in $JAVA_HOME to build certain modules against older versions and certain modules against bleeding edge versions. In the Java world, that’s rather trivial thanks to IntelliJ’s project settings: you can…
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Never Blow Up Your Bridges
Ten years ago, I first met my now colleague who then acted as the internship guide for a couple of graduate students that had their first taste of the industry at my previous (previous) employer. We only had brief contact: I was supposed to guide the interns from the industry side, and he was supposed…
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A Note On Presenting Code in Emacs
The other day, I decided it was finally time. It was finally time to open Emacs to demonstrate certain code functionalities in class. The result was predictable: it caused further confusion among already confused students. The root cause wasn’t switching out a familiar WebStorm-like environment for an…
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Why Parenting Is Similar To JavaScript Development
Here’s a crazy thought: to me, parenting feels very similar to programming in JavaScript. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am. If you’re an old fart that’s been coding stuff in JavaScript since its inception, you’ll undoubtedly be familiar with Douglas Crockford’s bibles, or to be more…
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A Note on File History in Emacs
Once you start digging beyond the surface, you discover that an ancient piece of text editing software called Emacs was light years ahead of its time. It already contained a clipboard history (kill-ring) and automatic saves/backups decades before contemporary editors took a half-baked stab at mimicking…
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Creating Buttons To Remember Things
My wife recently bought a device to scratch her creative crafting itch: a button press. At first, I dismissed it as yet another thing requiring space in her increasingly messy atelier. I don’t know how we manage to do it but we seem to be experts in gathering things that gather things themselves: dust…
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Favourites of January 2026
The end of the start of another year has ended. So now all there is left to do is to look forward to the end of the next month, starting effective immediately, and of course ending after the end of the end we are going to look forward to. Quite the end-eavour. I guess I’ll end these ramblings by ending…
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Banning Syntax Highlighting Steroids
I’ve always flip-flopped between so-called “light” and “dark” modes when it comes to code editors. A 2004 screenshot of a random C file opened in GVim proves I was an realy adopter of dark mode, although I never really liked the contemporary Dracula themes when they first appeared. Sure, it was cool…
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Apple Ruined My Mechanical Keyboard Experience (A NuPhy Halo75 Review)
My trusty external Apple Magic Keyboard disappeared into a drawer somewhere in the summer of 2024. It has never left that drawer until a few weeks ago, when I was so fed up with my inability to type correctly on the new mechanical keyboard that I decided it was time to go back to the Apple roots. The…
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Keiji Yamagishi's Retro-Active Was Last Year's Most Played Album
Fans of retro games will no doubt recognise the name: the Japanese video game composer and programmer Keiji Yamagishi is famous for his work on Ninja Gaiden and many other great (S)NES soundtracks during from tenure at Tecmo. Yamagishi-san moved on to produce his own chiptune music together with Brave…
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Another Major Bike Service
Last month I handed in my bike for another major repair service. It was sorely needed: a slight push on the pedals caused the chain to drop a gear, the front light wiring was broken since forever, and shifting in general always required two good clicks on the handlebar instead of just one. This year…
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Customizing The Emacs Email Experience With Mu4e
You all knew this was coming. After thinking about my email workflow I had to put it to practice. The grand plan was to force myself to learn more about Emacs by doing email in it with the added advantage of freeing up Mac Mail to manage my Exchange work emails there. Anything is better than staring…
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Favourites of December (And a Short 2025 Recap)
A late happy new year to everyone! I almost forgot to publish last month’s favourite (blog) posts, and since last month was the last one of 2025, let’s do a short recap as well. Previous month’s recap: November 2025. Last year was another eventful year. Browse the full 2025 Brain Baking archive for more…
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Thinking about email workflows
This Emacs thing is getting out of hand and eating away all my free time. Now I know what they mean with the saying “diving into a rabbit hole” (and never seeing the bottom of it). We’re at 1k lines of Elisp code and I still add items to the TODO list that don’t work well enough on a daily basis. For…
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2025 In Board Games
This post is the board game counterpart of the previous 2025 In Video Games end of year note. There hasn’t been a Board Game Shelf Analysis post in 2025 for some reason so I can’t point you to recent photos of my collection. Because of two very young kids our board game time has been reduced to almost…
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2025 In Video Games
It’s that time of the year—the time to publish the yearly notes summarizing playtime statistics and providing a personal opinion on recent and vintage Game Of The Year (GOTY) contestants. In 2023, Pizza Tower and Tactics Ogre: Reborn were examples of superb recent games that even made it to the Top 100…
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I Changed Jobs (Again)
After two years of being back in the (enterprise) software engineering industry, I’m back out. In January 2024, I wrote a long post about leaving academia; why I couldn’t get a foot in the door; why I probably didn’t try hard enough; and my fears of losing touch with practice. Well guess what. I’m back…
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Getting Emacs And MacOS To Play Nice
What a nightmare. Yet another reason (previously the never-ending flow of bloat) to switch back from MacOS to a proper *Nix environment. I thought installing an old editor would be as simple as issuing a single “fetch me that package, will you” command. But I was so very wrong. Expect more of these …
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Properly Preparing Tea While Shaving An Emacs Yak
Hey wow I’m typing this from Emacs! For the first time in more than a decade I decided to see if my beloved Sublime Text could be superseded with software that’s more than twice as old. It’s day four so far, and I’ve been nothing but confused in trying to get it up and running to my tastes, but the journey…
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Mariage Frères Tea Reviews
It’s been almost five years since I wrote about tea. We just Refreshed our Supplies (get it?) and feel the need to store my thoughts on the various Mariage Frères (MF) teas we’ve bought over the years. I’ve been a faithful fan ever since drinking a Mariage Frères teabag on a team building session somewhere…
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Pascale De Backer Likes Playing On The Game Gear
After pointing out yesterday that Sinterklaas likes the Game Boy, I feel I need to make it up to Sega. It wasn’t that difficult to come up with a counterargument that’s also part of the Flemish canon. In F.C. De Kampioenen (“The Champions”), a long running Flemish sitcom about misunderstandings and misadventures…
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Sinterklaas Likes Playing On The Game Boy
Today marks the yearly departure of Sinterklaas who, together with his faithful friend Zwarte Piet, makes his way back to sunny Spain—by horse and steamboat, of course. The festivities on the sixth of December are not to celebrate his departure but to celebrate the name day of Saint Nicholas, patron…
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Favourites of November 2025
The more holiday seasons I see coming and going, the less enthused I am by the forced celebration that tastes an awful lot like capitalism. I put up my gift guide anyway, just in case anyone is willing to buy me that dough mixer, otherwise I’ll have to do it in January as an early expense for the upcoming…
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Using Energy Prediction To Better Plan Cron Jobs
Since the Belgian government mandated the use of digitized smart energy meters we’ve been more carefully monitoring our daily energy demand. Before, we’d simply chuck all the dishes in the machine and program it to run at night: no more noise when we’re around. But now, consuming energy at night is costing…
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Rendering Your Java Code Less Error Prone
Error Prone is Yet Another Programming Cog invented by Google to improve their Java build system. I’ve used the multi-language PMD static code analyser before (don’t shoot the messenger!), but Error Prone takes it a step further: it hooks itself into your build system, converting programming errors as…
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Is Collecting Physical Games Worth It? (Part IV)
I bought some more expensive looking Nintendo switch game cartridges. I blame Joel’s convincing who manages to bypass my already weak resistance to these kinds of messages. This, combined with a diminishing amount of time available to put into gaming, results into my physical backlog being larger than…
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