Wouter Groeneveld
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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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2025 Holiday Gift Guide
This post is inspired by Johnny Webber’s 2024 Holiday Gift Guide that serves as a great starting point if you don’t know what to get for your friends & family. Johnny’s list is broad and includes suggestions from tech to food, arts, gaming, books, and even writing material. Making Christmas wish lists…
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Why I Don't Need a Steam Machine
For those of you who are living under a rock, Valve announced three new hardware devices joining their Steam Deck line-up: a new controller, a VR headset, and the GameCube—no wait, GabeCube—no wait, Steam Machine. The shiny little cube is undoubtedly Valve’s (second) attempt to break into the console…
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Migrating From Gitea To Codeberg
After the last week’s Gitea attack debacle, moving all things Git off the VPS became a top priority. In 2022, like many of you, I gave up GitHub and spun up two Gitea instances myself: a private one safely behind bars on the NAS and a public one where all my public GitHub projects were moved to. Three…
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Thumbs Up 👍
Don’t you hate it when that happens? You compose a targeted question, re-iterate the sentence a few times to make sure it is easy to interpret, press send, only to get a thumbs up in response? How should you even interpret that? Is that an ironic sure thing buddy go ahead I’ll revert your changes behind…
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The 1994 IBM PC Invoice
In 1994, my late father-in-law bought a new computer. That then brand new sparkling piece of hardware now is my 31 year old 80486 retro PC. When he gifted it to me in 2020, he also handed over the original invoice, as if the warranty was still valid. Also, who saves a twenty something year old piece…
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Favourites of October 2025
This year’s announcement of autumn, SPIEL Essen, Halloween, and the daylight saving time switch are already officially behind us. 2025 has only two months left: I see people starting heated debates on the upcoming Game of the Year awards and I see people planning their Christmas home decorations—for…
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The Internet Is No Longer A Safe Haven
A couple of days ago, the small server hosting this website was temporarily knocked out by scraping bots. This wasn’t the first time, nor is it the first time I’m seriously considering employing more aggressive countermeasures such as Anubis (see for example the June 2025 summary post). But every time…
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Spiel Essen 2025
A friend convinced me to attend SPIEL Essen this year, the largest board game fair in the world that attracts over two hundred thousand visitors yearly. It’s crazy to have something like this close by. When we humble Belgians read about “the world largest whatever”, we usually say “oh must be in the…
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Is It Worth It To Optimize Images For Your Site?
Yes but it depends on how you define the verb “to optimize”. For any image conversion heavy lifting I rely on the trusty ImageMagick yet I’ve been wondering whether my argument preset is correct: should it be more or less optimized? The problem with questions is that they lead to other questions, such…
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The Crazy Shotguns In Boomer Shooters
Emberheart’s recent Wizordum rekindled my interest in retro-inspired First Person Shooters (FPS) also known as boomer shooters. Some are offended by the term, but I quite like it: it not only denotes the DOOM clones of the early nineties as the boomer generation of FPS gaming but also perfectly defines…
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I Owe Warez For Properly Discovering CRPGs
One of the very first games my father actually bought were the DOS games Raptor and Hocus Pocus. It involved going to an exchange centre to convert Belgian francs to American dollars and sending those bills overseas to Apogee HQ, praying that nothing happened with the envelope. If you were lucky, a month…
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My (Retro) Desk Setup in 2025
A lot has happened since the desk setup post from March 2024—that being I got kicked out of my usual cosy home office upstairs as it was being rebranded into our son’s bedroom. We’ve been trying to fit the office space into the rest of the house by exploring different alternatives: clear a corner of…
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I Made My Own Fountain Pen!
Those of you who know me also know that I love writing with a fountain pen. My late father-in-law had been pushing me for years to buy a small lathe and try my hand at some simple shapes—including a fountain pen barrel, of course. Being quite the capable woodworking autodidact, he taught me how to construct…
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I'm Sorry RSS Subscribers, Ooh I Am For Real
Never meant to make your reader cry, I apologize a trillion times. My baby a drama Hugo don’t like me; she be doin’ things like duplicatin’ them RSS entries. Come from her release page to my server tryna fight me, bringing her breaking changes along; messing up index.xml quite wrong. That’s as far as…
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Favourites of September 2025
Hi again autumn, how have you been? Not well? Well me neither but I’ve been told that’s part of life and we’ve got to accept it and move on. Last month I ran a feature on card games on this blog, producing nine lovely articles ranging from Flemish trick taking traditions to card game mini games and how…
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Name Those Card Games Quiz Three
I couldn’t resist creating a third quiz to complete the trilogy. Did you manage to identify all the card from quiz one and quiz two? Again, congrats! Here’s the solution for quiz two in case you were wondering: (Spoilers) Mage Knight Morels/Fungi Race for the Galaxy Lord of the Rings: The Card Game Grand…
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What Philosophy Tells Us About Card Play
Given the extensive history behind a simple pack of standard playing cards, it should not surprise you that cards can be seen as a mirror of society: that’s essentially why the court cards have kings, queens, and jacks in them. In as early as 1377, Johannes of Rheinfelden wrote De moribus et disciplina…
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Name Those Card Games Quiz Two
Did you manage to identify all the card from quiz one? Congratulations—in that case you won’t mind me revealing the solution. Click on the spoiler text below to reveal the answer: (Spoilers) Dominion: Intrigue Bohnanza Saboteur Duel Jaipur Hero Realms Kingdom Legacy Reforest That was (mostly) easy enough…
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Modern Trick Taking Games: Beyond Whist
If you’re not in the mood for a traditional trick taking session, don’t worry: card and board games have evolved greatly since seventeenth century Whist. After both Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan—two board game pioneers that helped reinvigorate interest in tabletop gaming—the industry slowly but surely…
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Card Game Mini Games In Video Games
That’s a lot of games in one sentence. Tell me, what is better than a card game or a video game? Why yes, a card game inside a video game! These so-called mini games—a game within a game that acts as a gatekeeper or an amusing way to win a buck or two—are becoming more and more common in sprawling RPGs…
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Name Those Card Games Quiz One
Akin to many (retro) (partial) screenshot guessing quizzes out there, here’s my own. The photo below depicts my right hand holding seven mystery cards, each from another card game, and a joker as an aid to partially cover the last mystery card. Can you guess which card belongs to which game? Name those…
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On Having the Patience To Solitaire
Traditionally, the magical realm of trick taking and card gaming in general could only be experienced after gathering three other contestants willing to sit together. In part one of this series on card games, we explored some traditional Flemish variants always played with four—although Jokeren is an…
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A Tribute To Hoyle's Official Book Of Games
In 1989, Sierra On-Line released Volume 1 of their Hoyle: Official Book of Games on MS-DOS, a card game collection where you could play Crazy Eights, Old Maid, Hearts, Gin Rummy, Cribbage, and Klondike Solitaire according to Edmond Hoyle’s rules as recorded in his foundational work Hoyle’s Rules Of Games…
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The Flemish Trick Taking Tradition
Did you know that card games are part of the official intangible heritage list of Flanders (Immaterieel Erfgoed in Vlaanderen)? I didn’t either! A special place on that list is reserved for Wiezen, a variant of Whist, the classic English trick taking game played with a standard deck of 52 cards. The…
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Favourites of August 2025
August 2025 was one of those big life-altering and quite stressful months. We welcomed a second baby and had to keep the eldest busy as daycare was closed the entire month. Not exactly a combination I’d heartily recommend. I tried to keep on writing as a way to cope resulting in a steady flow of posts…
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