Wouter Groeneveld
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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 …
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published
-
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…
Published