Wouter Groeneveld
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Favourites of March 2026
It’s May! What happened? This weekend was unusually hot! What happened? Everyone knows but no-one admits or cares… Anyway, welcome to another month of 2026. I like May. It’s got a lot of national holidays. It signals the start of lots of great local food: strawberries in abundance, a strong asparagus…
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A Short Review Of Physical Nintendo Switch Publishers
My Nintendo Switch game collection is starting to get sizeable. That probably means I should stop buying but the limited nature of these physical print runs works exactly as these publishers intend: I’m developing a Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). Coupled with my friend Joel who seems to always push people…
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Nostalgia Always Includes a Temporal Context
Last year, Forrest wrote a long and thoughtful commentary on the mysterium called nostalgia. In a desperate attempt to recreate the experience of playing The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the first time, he spent $236.74 rebuying original Xbox 360 hardware expecting to be propelled back into his childhood…
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Hello Again, SuSE Linux
It’s good to see you again, old friend. It’s been a while. Twenty-three years, you say? How come we managed to drift apart that far? I know, I know, I betrayed you. But my room was cold at night and Gentoo offered me the ability to keep on compiling. And then I betrayed GNU/Linux for FreeBSD. And then…
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The Strange Heterogeneity of Hiking Signs Part II
In 2022, I wrote about our encounter with the strange heterogeneity of hiking signs during A Short Hike (that’s also a video game but not the thing we were doing). The photo shared then depicted a signpost with arrows on top of specific shapes (i.e. a blue diamond, a yellow cross, …) identifying different…
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My Workspaces
This post is inspired by Franck Sauer’s My Workspaces. I love Franck’s setup and background story behind each photo. I’ve been meaning to write this for months but postponed the search for old desktop setup photos because I wasn’t sure where to start. Back in the nineties, we didn’t brainlessly press…
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A Commentary On GenAI Inspected Through Different Lenses
The amount of concerning reports related to generative AI is rising at an alrming rate, yet all we do is make ourselves more dependent on the brand new technology. Why? It’s not just that we’re lazy—we are!—there are many more variables involved. As part of my quest to try and understand what the heck…
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Remakes And Remasters Of Old DOS Games: A Small 2026 Update
It’s been two years since the Remakes And Remasters Of Old DOS Games article. Nostalgia still sells handsomely thus our favourite remaster studios (hello Night Dive) are cranking out hit after hit. It’s time for a small 2026 update. I’ve also updated the original article just in case you might find your…
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Favourites of March 2026
Our daughter turned three. We’re beyond exhausted but a ripgrep search in this repository yields five more instances of the word exhausted in combination of parenting so I’ll shut up. I guess we also celebrate that after three years of pure chaos, we’re… still alive? Previous month: February 2026. Games…
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App Defaults In March 2026
It’s been almost three years since sharing my toolkit defaults (2023). High time to report an update. There’s a second reason to post this now: I’ve been trying to get back into the Linux groove (more on that later), so I’m hoping to either change the defaults below in the near future or streamline them…
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Please Compensate The Work You Appreciate
The other day, I had a casual conversation with colleagues about buying music. Nobody gave a rat’s ass; they all just either downloaded the .mp3 files or used Spotify. Most conversations on this topic end like this so I expected the response from more than a few individuals, but not from everyone. I…
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A Satisfied Customer Review Of The Yogurtia
And now for something completely different. For years, we’ve been happy users of the Yogurtia, a Japanese “fermented food maker”. That alone should sound enticing enough to warrant this small review! What’s a fermented food maker? I’m glad you ask. It’s a maker for food to ferment. Next question. In…
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The Best Indicator For Quality In a Video Game Is My Willingness To Replay It
Here’s a thought: the best indicator for quality in a video game is my willingness to first finish and then replay it. How many games have you replayed once? Or even twice? Or how about simply finishing it in the first place. I catch myself giving up on games that tend to drag on much faster than I used…
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25 Years Of ADSL Speed
Twenty-five years ago, I captured a screenshot of my FTP client showcasing the download of a SuSE Linux gcc compilation package at the dazzling rate of 439,36 KB/sec: Downloading the gcc cross-compiler for s390x through the ftp.belnet.be mirror. Note the then very new Windows XP Olive theme. For some…
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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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