Wouter Groeneveld
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Week of the Eclair
Last week I arrived home with a delicious pear frangipane pie from the local bakery. The contents of the cardboard pie box didn’t last long, but on top of it, in a corner, a pink round sticker caught my attention: it read WEEK VAN DE ECLAIR (8th Edition). Today marks the last day of that special week…
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The Panini Sticker World Cup Fever Strikes Again
With the 2026 FIFA World Cup well on its way, the Panini sticker fever has been raging through nearby playgrounds and homes alike. The 2026 edition might be a little bit special as it was recently revealed that Panini lost the exclusive rights. After fifty years of faithful partnership, FIFA moves the…
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My Enjoyment From Engagement With Media Deepens As I Grow Older
I am not yet done thinking about nostalgia. In Nostalgia Always Includes a Temporal Context, I claim that we can never fully relive a nostalgic moment from the past precisely because of its temporal context—the past. In this article, I claim that my enjoyment from engaging with media, that in ten or…
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Mechanical Buttons, Not Touchscreens (a Design Mistake)
Or rather, a lack thereof. Why is is that mechanical buttons are being replaced by touchscreens? With every car model refresh, washing machine re-iteration or even new pressure washer model, a button disappears and a small touchscreen-enabled panel appears or grows in size. That’s what I’d call a big…
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The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book
Four years ago, in the article What Happens To My Digital Identity When I Die?, I wrote the following prophetic words: […] Which gets me back to this website. My intentions are to someday publish its contents in the form of a book, which can also be stored at the KBR [Royal Library of Belgium]. This…
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Favourites of May 2026
May was another weird month here in Belgium: the last weeks have been unusually hot. It’s pouring now, but I’m glad that it is as it gives our airconditioning units a few moments of respite. We’ll see what the upcoming summer months will bring. This month is packed with exams, grading, and deliberations…
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Lawyer (Should Have Been a Marine Biologist)
In Tattoorist, a 2026 Flemish TV show, musician and tattoo artist Tijs Vanneste explores six European capitals through the lens of the tattoo world. In the first episode, he meets up with a famous artist from London whilst exploring city’s more sketchy corners (literally and figuratively) with local…
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The Decline Of The Family Computer
During a discussion in the Retronaut podcast episode on Duke Nukem 3D, the podcast hosts and invitees thought back to the first time they came in contact with the Duke. Most of them first played the shareware edition—something that Apogee and 3D Realms made very good use of—on the family computer. Intrigued…
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Bread Baking In Video Games
In September last year, as part of a series on card games, I wrote about card game mini games in video games. It was fun to conduct a little bit of research related to a specific topic in the world of video games. Since you are reading this on Brain Baking, my interest is always piqued when a game allows…
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The Death of the Brick & Mortar Toy Store
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why more and more local stores are going defunct. A short trip downtown makes the destructive nature of Amazon et al. apparent: the city centre is littered with for-sale or for-rent signs, stuck on dirty windows of almost every third building. In 2024, I already…
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Do You Take Ethics Into Account When Buying Video Games?
Something terrible almost happened. I almost bought a ModRetro Chromatic retro handheld device until someone pointed me towards Natalie’s Don’t Buy from ModRetro post who outlined you’re indirectly supporting a war: […] I am against children dying […] Also, there is a evidence that this was done by the…
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Another Triumph For Blogging
In 2021, my Canadian friend Peter Rukavina sent me a sample of his letterpress printing work that also acted as the official membership card of The Pen & Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island where he lives. These virtual fountain pen chats during COVID had me stay up very late but it was all worth it…
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I'm Sorry Dear Journal 18; It's Not Me It's You
I’m sorry dear Journal Number 18 but we have to cut our relationship short. It’s not you. It’s me. No wait. It is you. It’s not me. You left me wanting more. You undercut my ideas by having me adhere to your stupid lines. Your shrunken-down format compared to the previous journals seems to also limit…
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Favourites of April 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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