Brain Baking 4 days ago

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 by those two words, I started thinking: what’s a family computer? It’s certainly not Nintendo’s Famicom even though that indeed correctly abbreviates the words. No, the computer wasn’t a console you’d hook onto your television set: it was a separate piece of furniture placed somewhere centrally in the house for all family members to access. More importantly, it was the only computer in the house. That thought bears repeating: the only computational machine with a central processing unit, dedicated memory, expansion slots, and a (very) heavy monitor in the house. How many computers do you have lying around in yours now? We have 2 personal laptops, 1 old but still functioning one, 2 work laptops not owned by us, and 3 retro PCs: that’s eight in total—but none of those could be called a family computer. I don’t want my wife to touch my MacBook: she has her own where she can make a mess on. Joey doesn’t share foo—ahem, laptops. In the early nineties, my dad bought our first family computer: a super modern 80486 with 40 Mhz that back then cost (more than twice the amount of what my father in law paid for his in 1994 ). Taking inflation into account, that’s more than . Needless to say, it was a huge investment and every little bit of usage was squeezed out of it in the following years. I even remember my dad driving to Brussels to fetch it, presumably because in our neighbourhood there was no-one making a similar offer? That 486 became the family computer: it was used by everyone. My eldest sister and I were small kids and my youngest sister was still a toddler so more than playing edutainment DOS games initially didn’t happen. When the Pentium arrived and the Voodoo 3Dfx cards came along, my dad couldn’t resist upgrading. He even got into overclocking (and blew up one of our graphics cards along the way). I started showing even more interest in that mesmerising beige machine. When I moved on to high school and got my Christian confirmation, my parents bought me my very own computer. Finally I could mess around without fearing the loss of important bookkeeping files and other things I wasn’t allowed to touch on the family computer downstairs. That must have been in 1997 or 1998: the beginning of the end of the family computer. Why ask to play on the family computer when I have my own? I still did because my dad’s PC was more powerful and he liked to keep it upgraded. I initially couldn’t play early 3D platformers (e.g. PlayStation ports like Pandemonium!) because a Voodoo card was expensive and we only had one. As years flew by during that period of extremely rapid hardware invention, that difference disappeared. The family computer became my dad’s computer. My sisters got their own desktop PCs. In other words, computing individualism became affordable. The family PC in the kitchen or living room moved out to the private study. In In Defense of the Family Computer , Niklas Barning predicts that with prices of RAM and general hardware going up again, the family computer might return. He writes: Back in the day, a computer was something so special and expensive that you only had one, and it was set up in a way that everyone had access to it. Dropping easily qualifies as “special and expensive”. But buying a new MacBook with 344686 TB RAM and 3482354 M4 CPUs only costs you nowadays. When turning our attention to cars, you can see the same evolution: the single family car got turned into mom’s car and dad’s car (or even the son/daughter’s car) appeared on the driveway as well. Another victory for capitalism and individualism—I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out their relationship. Or how about the single family TV that gradually leaked to children’s (and parent’s) bedrooms and now is so pervasive that small children like ours know that you can watch anything on a phone? I have mixed feelings about the history of the family computer. It is thanks to that machine that I now am what I am, but it is also thanks to its decline that I retreated more often than not to my room to game, program, or do other naughty computery stuff. The social aspect that sparked conversation died along with it. Or at least moved to ICQ and then MSN . By Wouter Groeneveld on 26 May 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 weeks ago

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 me to bake crusty baked goods. The idea to dig into the topic of bread baking in the many virtual gaming worlds came to fruition when I played Bug Fables in 2021. As I wrote in the review: As a professional baker myself, I especially adored the baking honeybee in the Golden Outpost, that exclusively sells flour, which you can use to bake tarts, doughnuts, croissants, glazed honey treats, cupcakes, and more. Discovering new recipes was a great distraction—albeit an expensive one, if an expensive ingredient was turned into a mistake, healing one measly HP and TP (“team points”, or mana, just like in Paper Mario). The local bakery in Bug Fables, trying out new recipes. Bug Fables is a love letter to Paper Mario where the lovely toad Zess T. cooks up jummy stuff for Mario to recover heart and flower points—but Zess T. doesn’t specialise in (bread) baking: she’s a chef that whips up as much spaghetti as cupcakes. You can have Zess combine cake mix with inky sauce to bake a choco cake. Eathing the cake will replenish 5 HP and 15 FP, but alas there are no bread-like recipes present in the game. How about a recipe in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ? The closest thing I can think of is throwing a carrot into the fire that yields a carrot cake . Bug Fables still wins, where the baker—with proper baker’s hat—can be seen popping dough into the oven using a pizza peel. In Breath of the Wild , the cooking/baking process is the same: throw stuff into the cauldron, do a happy dance, and poof. How about farm simulation games like Stardew Valley and its inspiration Harvest Moon ? In the former you can cook (indeed, not “bake”) a crusty baguette in the kitchen using wheat flour. There are a lot of recipes that require wheat flour such as pizza, muffins, and pies. In many iterations of the latter, such as the GBA’s Friends of a Mineral Town , you can buy bread in the store and use it as an ingredient to whip up raisin or curry bread, jam buns, or even a cheese fondue . Weirdly enough, you can buy flour that’s required for baking an apple pie, noodles, and (pan)cakes but you can’t bake bread with it. Many RPG Codex members dug up computer role playing games where you can bake bread . The list includes the Ultima games (VII, Online 1 , …), EverQuest , Arx Fatalis , The Elder Scrolls games ( Skyrim ), … In Morrowind , you can grind store-bought bread in a mortar and pestle to turn it into a restore health potion, but there exist survival mods such as Morrowind Crafting that introduce cooking. Still no dedicated bread oven, though. The Ultima VII baker: I am the baker here in Britain and I make the sweetest bread thou has ever tasted. In 2018, James Davenport wrote about the rise of video game bread for PC Gamer, focusing on the early presence of bread in games. But the presence of bread doesn’t automatically mean the crusty goodness can be baked yourself. The article does mention World of Warcraft —the MMORPG as another subgenre of games where crafting and thus cooking is a big part of the meta game. Still no dedicated bread oven, though. In Level 5’s Fantasy Life you can become a cook who masters their skill using three mini-games inside the kitchen: the frying pan, the cutting board, and the oven. Baking is done in front of the oven, not the pan, effectively splitting how ingredients are converted into an edible end product. Except that there’s nothing to consume as it’s not that kind of game. Also, I can’t seem to find bread-specific cooking recipes from the game : only the classic apple pie that requires Faraway Wheat. I’m waiting to play the game until I eventually buy a Switch 2 so I’ll report back when I know more. Some Rune Factory games seem to approach bread baking the same way. Maybe complex roguelike games offer a more realistic way to produce bread? According to the Dwarf Fortress wiki you can bake bread: “You can use flour or sugar milled from plants to either bake bread or make candy”. The Dwarven Cuisine mod adds more variations that even require making dough that then can be turned into bread by baking it. This is the only example I could find of a video game that introduces a “kneading” step before baking! Different types of Dwarven bread to be baked in the Dwarf Fortress mod A surprising entry popped up during my research: The Sims . In the Get To Work expansion of the fourth instalment, you can have your sims engage in some serious cookery/bakery activities . It’s not just bread but also bread sticks, bagels, whole wheat loaves, potato bread, and even a sourdough loaf! As a huge fan of sourdough, I guess The Sims 4 wins this one. And then there’s Bakery Simulator that takes virtual bread baking to a whole new level. Even the reviews say mixed . Get it, mixed? As in mixing dough? No? OK then. Other dedicated cooking simulation games include Lemon Cake , a game I discovered thanks to Kat Thompson’s article on virtual armchair baking for Bon Appétit that looks like a cosy variant of the frantic multiplayer Overcooked! series. EuroGamer’s YouTube video “5 Brilliant Games About Bread (that you probably never even knew existed)” showcases how the physics-based game on bread called I Am Bread redefines bread slice stickiness. It might not enable you to bake a lovely loaf of bread, but a game where you are the slice and have to slather yourself with savoury spreads deserves a special mention: Let me know if I missed a game that features getting your hands dirty with dough and oven. I have to run; writing this post made me hungry. I especially enjoyed Lauren and Lloyd Sommerer’s 2001 essay entitled I Want To Bake Bread on Ultima Online .  ↩︎ Related topics: / bread baking / video games / By Wouter Groeneveld on 22 May 2026.  Reply via email . I especially enjoyed Lauren and Lloyd Sommerer’s 2001 essay entitled I Want To Bake Bread on Ultima Online .  ↩︎

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Brain Baking 1 weeks ago

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 wrote about the challenges of buying games locally , but now that we have two kids, I think about this more often. Yes, it’s annoying for myself, but no, it’s not a big deal: physical editions of rarer Nintendo Switch games or retro video games aren’t available locally anyway. But what about buying the kids a simple box of LEGO? Even that’s not possible anymore. And to me, that’s very sad. When my wife was little, her parents would take her out to the centre on Christmas eve where she could choose a little present for herself. None of the toy shops she used to frequent with her folks back in the day are still in business. None of them. So we can’t offer the same thing to our kids: we’d have to drive further—to a bigger supermarket with a toy region, or to a chain store. And to me, that’s very sad. The evolution of types of stores in our local city centre from small, independent, and varied to big names and nothing but shoes, boutique clothing, or counterfeit made-in-China watches is a curious phenomena. That got me thinking: In which stores was I a (regular) customer, what kind of toy did I buy there, and which of these businesses are still selling stuff today? The only photo I could find of a Christiaensen store (in Brussels) by Jeugdsentiment. The local Game Mania store in May 2009, a year before it closed down. That Chinese restaurant? It got replaced by an Indian one before being replaced by... a for-sale sign. There are two remarkable exceptions to this bleakness: comic book store Wonderland and board game specialist Oberonn . Both stores are not a part of some bigger holding and both stores stem from my youth and are still alive and kicking. In fact, they used to compete: in high school I used to buy new Magic: The Gathering (MtG) booster packs from the opened box at the counter top in Wonderland while Oberonn even sold singles in binders. The last time I visited Wonderland I learned they stopped selling MtG as not to clash with Oberonn . Local Christian youth association shop De Banier not only sells outfits but also creative trinkets for crafting and has a small board game selection. Strange, as that’s only 30 metres away from Oberonn —and usually a bit less expensive. They still exist but they recently meddled with their opening hours, shortening the time span. Hopefully that’s not a bad sign… We bought many of our favourite games there and my wife always finds some kind of jewellery making toolkit in there as well. I hope one day a Pipoos store finds its way to Hasselt as well. We thought the one in Maastricht was gone but it seems that they simply moved instead. The photo was taken from a Google Maps history in time save point: I didn’t know it was possible to go back in time using Street View!  ↩︎ Related topics: / hasselt / By Wouter Groeneveld on 18 May 2026.  Reply via email . Christiaensen : a Belgian toy store chain from the seventies and eighties that got bought out by the Dutch Blokker: see the Jeugdsentiment nostalgia: Christiaensen post. I bought Stratego Legends there when I was 16. Bart Smit : a Dutch toy store chain that got bankrupt and bought by Intertoys/Maxitoys. The Christiaensen store got converted into a Bart Smit that now is yet another empty building. I bought too many Nintendo GB(A)/(3)DS games there and was a regular for over a decade. Every time we went shopping, I just had to drop in and see what’s on sale: they would regularly slash prices so you had to be quick. At one time, there were three Bart Smit stores in Hasselt. I even remember being gifted the MegaDrive cart Toejam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron by my grandparents somewhere in the nineties. Whether you fancied a video game or a LEGO box, Bart Smit was the go-to solution for almost every Flemish/Dutch kid. That building now is yet another boring clothes store. DreamLand : another toy store chain with venerable Belgian roots owned by Colruyt group that briefly had a fancy underground store near a new parking lot not even five years ago. Of course it had to go. I bought The Quest for El Dorado and other board games there, and I think we also bought baby toys for our daughter there. The bigger store about away from us recently also closed down. The store chain is still alive as is their webshop, but for how long… There’s still a DreamLand nearby but no longer in the centre. Free Record Shop : a Dutch retailer that primarily sold music CDs and boomed during the nineties. The one in Sint-Truiden also had a second hand selection that included GBA/DS games. Good times… Free Record Shop was declared bankrupt in 2013. I bought several albums and every good handheld game I could there. Fnac : a French retail chain with a long history that never made it to our city: we used to drop by when visiting Leuven. They usually are more expensive than the above alternatives. In 2020 they finally opened a shop in Hasselt. Since a month, it’s for rent. Yup. I bought a few puzzle games, picture books, and audio CDs there. Broux : a renowned local model building specialist my late father in law loved. I think by now you can guess its fate. I’m not big into the hobby but tagged along once and got myself some kind of fighter jet. I never finished it. Game Mania : the local Game Stop that used to have more than 30 stores across Belgium. I loved its early location at the outskirts of our village, conveniently placed close to a road I passed when cycling home from high school. I convinced my sister to help finance the silver GameCube plus Wind Waker and Super Mario Sunshine . Best purchase ever. They usually were (at least) pricier than supermarket/online competitors but I didn’t care and just wanted to support them. This is also where I got my original Paper Mario 2 edition for the painful full price of (that was even more painful in 2004). I guess that didn’t work out: yet another bankruptcy. The local Game Mania store moved buildings twice before being gone in 2024 1 . The photo was taken from a Google Maps history in time save point: I didn’t know it was possible to go back in time using Street View!  ↩︎

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Brain Baking 2 weeks ago

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 US most likely through bad information from AI. We’ve also seen this month that AI companies like Open AI and Anthropic are largly entangled in the US empire’s war machine. You know another that exclusively mixes AI and weapons? Anduril. Anduril’s co-founder is Palmer Luckey who is the creater of ModRetro. ModRetro has release a Game Boy Color FPGA emulator, the Chromatic. More toxic and very questionable evidence is provided by Natalie. But how could I have known all this? I accidentally discovered the existence of the Chromatic through a YouTube video on modern retro-inspired handhelds (that include my own Analogue Pocket). I was shocked to discover this—not only because of Luckey’s actions, but also because of how easy it is to willingly or unwillingly ignore all this and buy a Chromatic anyway. This begs the question: should we be actively researching the ethics behind every product we want to buy? I think the answer to that is yes in theory . In practice, as Roy Baumeister taught us about the working of willpower, pouring energy into this means having less energy in reserve for other more pressing urgent matters happening in your immediate vicinity such as your family. In practice, thoroughly researching something—especially ethics which isn’t as easy to find as technical features—requires willpower I don’t always have available in abundance. This is where the government should step up by providing regulations to prevent such shady products from entering the market in the first place. We all know how that turned out… Do you ever wonder why the ethically sound chocolate bars are put in lower shelves (or entire different aisles) while the cheap and established brands promote their bars all over the place? Whoops, slave labour still exists, did you know you’re supporting it through the purchase of a stupid chocolate bar? Why are the organic locally-grown apples put somewhere else besides next to the other apples? No wait, why are the other apples there in the first place? Sadly enough there are ample publicly leaked examples of ethically questionable behaviour by video game developers; some of which I only found out after playing their game. A few examples then: The most obvious example without a doubt is Activision Blizzard’s many abuses of their employees. They lost nearly billion in market value thanks to a discrimination lawsuit . More lawsuits two years later were “settled” (read: bribed). The stock prices tanked and Microsoft bought them, resulting in a huge payday for the exact executives that were under fire. That’s irony for you. Some developers are very vocal on social media about their extreme-right, transphobic, and/or homophobic beliefs. I don’t know what goes on in their stupid heads as this obviously damages your reputation and game sales. At least, you’d think. Apparently, it doesn’t damage them enough? Voidpoint, the makers of Ion Fury , are one example of this . It’s so sad to read as I really enjoyed that game and feel very conflicted about it now. The lead developer of Pizza Tower apparently left an offensive joke in some private Discord channel that was of course screenshotted and much later discovered by (or explicitly sent into?) the angry Reddit mob. He later apologised, but I wonder: is this a case of extremism on the defensive side? Is this a recurring theme in the indie development scene because the teams are small and their edgy jokes that mean no harm that otherwise would be filtered out by a huge HR department are easily misinterpreted? Or not? There are more examples to be found but you get the gist. The problem is not limited to video games. I was recently shopping around for a new terminal emulator after growing tired of iTerm2’s blatant genAI feature adoption. Apparently, the developer of Kitty adopts a toxic stance telling some of their users to “go soak your head” if he disagrees with their statement. I do understand that it’s tiresome to reject silly feature request after request but that doesn’t mean you have to resort to an aggressive stance. But again, how would you know? I didn’t until I found out about that in some random blog post. Should I uninstall Kitty now? Or what about JK Rowling’s crazy public transphobia outings? What if you read about that in the news after you read all the Harry Potter books and loved them? Would you burn them and vow to never read or watch related material? Or just shrug? Another question might be this: does the maker’s preference for vices instead of virtues affect my opinion on the made product? I love Pizza Tower —it’s in my Top 25 Games of All Time although that might be recency bias talking here. I’m typing this on a MacBook instead of a Framework laptop. God knows how the materials of this Apple laptop are mined (and will that differ from another one?). We buy lots of stuff that carries the label “made in PRC” that might or might not be ethically bad. It’s all just one big question mark. Why are so many companies opaque about their ethics? (I think the answer begins with the letters C-A-P-I…) There should be a community-based filter for this. And there is, it’s called “asking around”, but that method is far from perfect. I wish companies would be more open about their ethics—and not in a meaningless code of conduct letter written by the legal department. Perhaps then the honesty and peer pressure around it might enforce them to behave. Related topics: / ethics / By Wouter Groeneveld on 14 May 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 2 weeks ago

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. I met Peter through other blogger friends present in another weird random Zoom call I jumped into on a whim that turned out to be first Dutch Obsidian knowledge sharing meetup. Virtual friends of friends are obviously also my virtual friends. In other words, it was a true Triumph For Blogging ! Since then, almost five years have passed, but in true blogging fashion, we’ve kept up with each other’s lives through RSS and email. When Peter blogged that he was coming to Belgium—to Liège to be exact, which is only half an hour from where we live—it’s as if the blogging gods decided it was time we finally met in person. Peter & I in Bistro Mentin in Liège. I can’t possibly express in words how it felt to finally meet someone in person for the first time—someone you somehow know quite intimately. You know their hobbies, you’ve peeked into their garden, kitchen, and living room, you know what they like to listen to and read, you know their grief and grievances with their local government. You know what EV they’re driving and why, you know their professional history, their parental struggles, and their preference for all things tangible. You know they recently broke their elbow, how they recovered, you know about their cycling trips, and most of all: when their first daffodil appeared in their garden . The weirdest thing is the fact that they know all these things about me as well. Except for the daffodil: that was more than a month ago, if I recall correctly. We immediately started chatting about all of the above without even a hint of initial social awkwardness that is customary when chatting with a complete stranger. After all, Peter is anything but a stranger. Perhaps only a “physical one”? As Peter mentioned in his blog —he beat me to it, so with his permission I stole the photo Lisa took of us—It was indeed lovely to finally meet in person. Another Triumph For Blogging! Related topics: / blogging / By Wouter Groeneveld on 10 May 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 3 weeks ago

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 the potential of the ideas I want to store inside you. The more pages I fill, the more dread I feel; having to juggle the fountain pen and the thick but little book trying to get something down without having it turn into unreadable scribblings. And it often did turn into scribblings: scribblings I didn’t want to re-read meaning my ability to combine and ruminate diminishes as well. Journal Number 17 and 16 before that performed their duty flawlessly. Why do you keep resisting my pen? And where is your flap at the back of the journal that allows me to store stamps and torn-out notes temporarily transferred from other papers? Yes I know, it’s cool to be able to literally tie a knot with the leather straps to close you. But you know what, I prefer the quicker elastic bands. You’re supposed to be a notebook. That means you’re supposed to reduce friction, not increase it. Number 19 (left) that's succeeding the failing Number 18 (right). I didn’t want to say goodbye. I hate having to leave the blank pages inside you blank. I can’t bear the thought. In addition, you’re already immortalized in a photo next to the handmade fountain pen . But because of your persistent rebellion, I failed to journal for months and months, leaving me ashamed and frustrated. My wife finally convinced me to permanently close you. I feel so relieved. So yes, it’s not me. It’s you. Since your retirement, I’ve been writing more. Can you believe that I actually re-inked three fountain pens? Even my pens were suffering inside a drawer somewhere, waiting and wanting to be touched again. For your successor, I reverted to the well-known blank Leuchtterm notebook, even though the paper quality can be better . I’m happy now. I can feel my thoughts flowing, I can catch the flowing thoughts, and I can let them compost and rework them. I am thinking about stickers. I pasted a few scribblings of the daughter in there. Number 19 is big enough to handle all this without having to resort to drastic measures involving a scissor. The ink doesn’t do unexpected things. I can rest my hands where they should rest instead of having to wrestle with you because you always had the knack to close while I was still writing. Goodbye, Number 18. In the coming months, we’ll briefly reconvene for your official digitisation—at least, the one-third that’s reluctantly filled. Then, you can join the other retirees in the class-covered cabinet. I have learned my lesson. Fuck ruled pages. Related topics: / journaling / By Wouter Groeneveld on 7 May 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 3 weeks ago

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 month that you should enjoy while it lasts as in June the season is usually over, and we already ate some fresh French artichokes. It’s getting warmer but not as scorching as some of the coming months (although given the start of this month, that remains to be seen). But most of all: the end of May usually indicates the beginning of the exam period, which for me as an examiner instead of student is always interesting. Let’s light a candle and pray for not too many LLM-only submissions. Previous month: March 2026 . A miracle happened: I made some time to get back into gaming—and writing about games. In May, we’re finally digging into UFO 50 , in chronological order. If we play one a week we might finish in May 2027… So far, the first entry already is a home run. Related topics: / metapost / By Wouter Groeneveld on 3 May 2026.  Reply via email . I finally got to the Kirby spin-offs on the Game Boy: Kirby’s Pinball Land , Kirby’s Block Ball , and Kirby’s Star Stacker . They’re all really good! But then Robert and a GOG discount pushed me to finally try out The Drifter . What a thrill. I loved every minute of it. If you like gritty pixelated adventure games, you can’t miss this. After being turned off by the bad technical performance of Ruffy and the Riverside on the Nintendo Switch, I switched gears to other games. I picked it up and finished it. It’s an OK N64-inspired collect-a-thon that should be enjoyed on PC instead. Speaking of Robert, his /concerts slash page is very cool: it contains scans of all concert tickets he ever went to. Kenneth Reitz tells us to separate our identity from our work/projects , otherwise bad things happen (via Roy Tang ). Stefano Marinelli explains why he loves FreeBSD . The Power To Serve conveys such as strong message, its almost convincing me to jump ship! Until I read about the laptop gap . This year huh. Zakhary Kaplan stole the GBC logo from a ROM and made a cool web logo from it. Cal Newport’s In Defense of Thinking hits yet another nail on the head. Forrest’s essay On Pulling The Master Sword links Link’s (ha!) N64 behaviour to our capitalistic world. It’s a very long essay but well worth your time if you can stomach a game rant, some swearing, and philosophical questions about life and society. Drakenvlieg manages to pull more students into literature using journaling (in Dutch). Juhis shares his favourite two-player board games . Hive (pocket) is on the list! Chris Smith rates the movies he watched . I’m always interested in the rating systems other people employ when they do something like this. I liked blinry’s Do It Yourself soft drinks experiment. Translucent coke looks weird! Night’s Ham Stock examines the ending story of SKALD the video game I played in 2024 . It was great but I couldn’t make sense of the ending. Now I still can’t… Kain Klarden’s Gex Trilogy review saved me from throwing money at Limited Run Games. Again. It Fits On A Floppy is a strong manifesto for small software that more developers should read and take heart. Eli (Oatmeal) re-iterates something very important: “choose to truly care about something.” But then he goes much further. I need to re-read this a couple of times and let it sink in. It was also Eli who pointed out the existence of picoSYNTH . Richard Moss, the author known for The Secret History of Mac Gaming , is writing a book on Age of Empires ! Ruben Schade’s enthusiasm for the Commodore 64 knows no boundaries. The newly released C64 Ultimate looks very enticing, but where to put all these things? Amelia’s little blog website/host got hammered by AI bots . It’s yet another infuriating story but the visualisation part is very cool. There’s an interesting upcoming documentary on Clojure the programming language that might be worth checking out. https://www.codingfont.com/ is a cool way to help pick a monospaced editing font. I’m using JetBrains Mono for now. Did you know Windows was released for the Game Boy: I didn’t know palm rejection was a thing on Linux/KDE . The Underkeep Steam demo looks very promising; something to keep close tabs on! I don’t know what this is, but Listography looks like a lot of fun. I happen to like lists so I should be liking this. Isowulf is a very cool isometric perspective Wolfenstein 3D mod . You can build retro games using WebAssembly with https://wasm4.org/ I love the GoodEnough guestbook that even used to print the drawn images on thermal paper! Thomas Lehmann, the designer of one of my favourite card games ever Race for the Galaxy , took the deck building genre for another spin. The result is Dark Pact . Needless to say, it’s on my list.

Gaming Culture Clojure

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

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 over the edge, the result is backlog that grows (much) more rapidly compared to my ability to play and finish games. OK fine at this point I’m just looking for a scapegoat. Perhaps a mirror will do. A friend who dropped by recently exclaimed “wow you have a lot of Switch games” when he saw these red little plastic covers sitting flush on the shelves (the ones visible in the desk setup 2025 post ). What everyone seems to forget is that your digital game library isn’t showcased in your house—and even if it would, you probably wouldn’t have the space. Compared to your Steam/GOG/eShop/whatever library, those three little shelves are nothing. I’ve written many times before why I prefer buying and playing physical games so go read that if you’d like to know why these red plastic cases make their way into our house. One of the side effects of buying physical objects is the tactile ability to inspect what’s in the box. On the bottom of the side of each case, a small logo identifies the publisher. Most of these publishers still want to minimise costs when it comes to printing, resulting in a disappointingly white inlay with nothing more to do for the gamer than to pull out the cartridge itself and close the case. But that’s not how it used to be back in the day when thick instruction booklets were a part of the gaming experience. These joyful little extras are not dead yet, you just have to go looking for them. In that light, here’s a short review of physical Nintendo Switch publishers and the joyful little extras they (do not) provide. A look at the inside of various Switch cases. Top left: Diablo III (white). Top right: Axiom Verge 1+2 (LRG numbered). Bottom left: Darkest Dungeon (art). Bottom right: Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap with a soundtrack sampler. What are the review criteria? Nintendo doesn’t seem to care that much about their physical game releases and I’m afraid it’s going to get even worse for the Switch 2, but at least their first-party releases are still being printed. The inlay usually is some kind of artwork that’s just OK, and in rare instances like the Metroid Dread one, it acts as a reversible cover. No booklets. No extra’s. 2 out of 5 Blounts—Mediocre. Blizzard, Gearbox, Inti Creates (JPN), Aspyr Let’s just group these and make quick work of them: these publishers don’t even want to waste ink by printing the back of the front cover. The result is a blinding white that greets you as soon as you open up the case. What a disappointment. Still better than a digital-only release, I guess. 1 out of 5 Blounts—Bad. A Hodgepodge labelled as ‘Most Others’ Most others (MergeGames, Capcom JPN, PocketTrap, Marvelous, Konami, Nightdive Studios, Digital Eclipse, DotEmu) follow Nintendo’s practice by printing art in the inlay but not providing anything else, although Capcom’s Turtles release includes a 2-page booklet instructing the player how the game works. That “booklet” is barely worth a look though. I did receive stickers in iam8bit’s Eastward but there was nothing printed on the inside. CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher III (The GOTY edition) came with a poster but also nothing printed inside. 2 out of 5 Blounts—Mediocre. The three games I bought on ( Into The Breach , UFO 50 , Crow Country ) are filled to the brim with goodies! Opening up the case, these things almost fall out, instantly providing a childlike joy. Exploring the extra swag is not only fun but also relevant: Crow Country ’s poster also functions as a handy map of the game’s amusement park. I’m keen on buying more from them and love their other stuff as well. I wish I bought the UFO 50 companion guide. 5 out of 5 Blounts—Amazing. Two Fangamer Switch editions: UFO 50 (left) and Crow Country (right) including many extra's such as a cool looking poster and stickers. Limited Run Games Ah, here comes the controversy. Limited Run Games (or LRG) is the most popular physical game publisher that without a doubt manages to onboard the biggest fish (think DOOM , any Nightdive game, anything emulated and brushed up with their Carbon engine such as Gex or Tomba! , Shantae , …). But they’ve also been accused of lousy cash grabbing, intentionally driving up the second hand market price of their games, re-releasing “final” editions that a year later turn out not to be final, and wonky “remasters” with lots of missing features/bugs. If I could, I would avoid them, but unfortunately LRG is often the only way to buy and play physically. Their numbered releases include a collectable card I don’t care for and their instruction booklets vary in quality and quantity. Still, excluding the shipping and tax costs, for a standard edition is not too much, and at least their contracts allow me to effectively own some of my games. I wish there was less emphasis on the commercial aspect of limited market availability. Hence my FOMO: it has happened before that I regretted not buying a game before their pre-orders closed. Currently, most second-hand LRG copies go for . 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. Super Rare Games This is the London-based LRG alternative: they’re smaller and focus more on indie games, but make no mistake: they also number their releases, revealing they too very much rely on your brain telling you need to collect the whole set. They also produce collector’s editions which I don’t care for. I bought Wargroove 1+2 second hand for way too much ( ) and received stickers and lots of little and bigger art cards. I did notice their games are available longer after the print run window of opportunity, giving your FOMO mind a few moments of respite. 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. Headup Games My copy of Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap as pictured in the first photo is published by Headup Games. It comes with a lovely little dragon key ring, an art booklet, a reversible cover, and even a soundtrack sampler mini-CD. That’s the first one that includes other digital media (a CD-ROM) besides the Switch cartrdige. The cart sticker itself is also a nice nod to SEGA’s original Master System release. Hopefully all other Headup publications come with goodies like this. 4 out of 5 Blounts—Great. Related topics: / nintendo switch / collecting / By Wouter Groeneveld on 30 April 2026.  Reply via email . Is the inlay (the back of the front cover paper) printed? Is this some kind of artwork or a proper reversible cover? Is there a booklet present? Is this just a 2-pager explaining the basics of the controls or a sizeable one with backstory and art? Are there any extra’s ? Stickers, a key ring, a poster that hopefully serves as a map instead of an ad for their other games?

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

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 rebuying original Xbox 360 hardware expecting to be propelled back into his childhood: I spent $236.74 to go back to 2006, to my old room, with the Easy Mac and the Diet Cherry Coke and the perfect lighting. I wanted to boot up the old 360 again, feel the smoothness of that perfectly curved controller in my hands while I navigated that glorious Blades user interface. I wanted to feel that little hit of dopamine whenever that green-and-gray badge popped up for unlocking an achievement or whenever a friend logged in or whatever. It worked. For a while. But then the effect started to wear off. Even more desperate methods were employed to try and relive those golden past moments, but after the 100th time of reliving it, the soft edges disappeared and even the best memories got blurry. It’s funny what our minds do: recreate past events by putting together piece by piece—often in the wrong order, or by picking the wrong piece. We don’t replay the exact past event in our heads: we re-create it, including a big margin for error. I’ve been reading Alex Custodio’s Who Are You? Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform where Custodio argues that the GBA is not just the GBA—that is, the piece of hardware that you hold in your hand with a Game Pak cartridge. Instead, it is the GBA, the cart, Nintendo’s story, the players, the modding community, and also something very important: the unique time period in which all of this unfolds. Trying to recreate sweet childhood memories of a robust Nintendo handheld clutched in hands, fighting for the best spot outside with indirect sunlight, will always end in disappointment. It’s no longer that time . Friends no longer show up with their Link Cables. Some software no longer works. Regardless of whether you did: the world has moved on. Any modern retro-inspired Nintendo knock-off handheld is now capable of rendering more than four shades of grey. A screen that lights up apparently is a thing. The electrical devices we love to carry around now apparently are focused on locking us in and stealing our privacy instead of just doing one thing and doing it right. My dad often says that every era has its own charm. My response to that usually is frustration: frustration of being unable to get out of the current stressful time and frustration of being unable to go back to that time when things were still joyful and I was still oblivious to the meaning and effects of capitalism on this world. I often want to flee from the current situation and world I’m stuck in, and the number one place I want to flee to is that place this younger fellow inhabited: Hello there, Younger Self. Watcha Doing? Doesn’t he look happy? Game Boy pouch nearby, four spare AA batteries and a Turtles II: Back from the Sewers cartrdige no doubt inside, he found the easiest way to ignore his sisters and parents: flip that switch, hear *PLING*, and just play. Ever since I got a Game Boy, we were best friends. The above photo is taken somewhere in Spain on a summer holiday where I met locals on the poolside that were curious as to what I was playing. We didn’t understand each other. But we did. We did. Donde esta Link Cable? Mortal Kombat? Si? and to my sisters, foolish enough to engage in the act of swimming: Hey! No splashing here! I’ve been exploring falling block puzzle games on the GB that I might have missed in my youth such as Yoshi’s Cookie . Even though I miss the physical flip switch, I nowadays play these on my Analogue Pocket for obvious reasons: my eyes aren’t what they used to be, and that backlit screen estate and resolution is just amazing. No perfect childhood memory recreation here but I would be lying if I wrote “I don’t care at all”. Otherwise I would just play a few of them on an emulator on my laptop—or just completely ignore the GB library. In a way, I too nearly spent to relive my childhood: the Pocket is ridiculously expensive, especially if you take shipping to Europe into account. Additionally, the Pocket requires physical carts: which poor soul still scours flea markets for GB carts when any GB(C)(A) ROM can be downloaded in a whim? But in 2026, I can’t really play Yoshi’s Cookie the way Nintendo intended it to be played in 1993. I don’t have any friends who still own Game Boy cartridges, let alone a Link Cable. Yoshi’s Cookie ’s single player mode is dull: the game begs for a local competitive play. That time window has passed: the temporal context has changed drastically. I have fond memories of afternoon GB sessions with friends, but I’m afraid they will stay just that: a memory. A nostalgic one with the potential of being frustrating if I don’t force myself to look at the now and into the future instead of only at the past. More similar fond memories include blindly swapping Game Boy carts with a random local kid’s mom in the hope of getting a new Kirby game without having to ask my parents for it, exchanging fruit with American strangers at night in bed with my DS Lite by visiting their Animal Crossing: Wild World village, playing Mario Kart DS/7 with a (3)DS during lunch break with colleagues, … If everybody—especially time—has moved on, then why haven’t I? Why do I call myself a retro gamer? I do play new games now and then but let’s not fool ourselves: every single one of these “new” titles is either a remaster/remake or a game that heavily draws from its nostalgic ancestors. The ones I love the most are the pixelated gritty ones with gameplay mechanics firmly rooted into the past seasoned with a bit of modern ease-of-use features, and that last one has a practical reason since as a parent of young kids I’m often pressed for time. Custodio’s Who Are You and Forrest’s commentary on nostalgia made me realise a few things. First, I am not alone in longing to go back to a simpler time when things weren’t enshittified as badly as they are now and when we weren’t yet made aware of how dark this world can be. Second, the temporal aspect that plays a critical role in all this, disabling the ability to perfectly reenact a happy memory, acts as a pressing reminder for me: that I more often need to look to the here and now. Yesterday afternoon, our family made a short trip to a nearby town looking for a nice place to walk. Our eldest of course discovered a playground in the process. In twenty years, her childlike joy in discovering ants, playgrounds, waving at strangers, and blowing dandelion seeds into the air will become just like my current nostalgic yearning. We brought along her tricycle and a passerby smiled and said to us Enjoy It! Undoubtedly, most people who throw heartwarming smiles were young parents once. I guess they mean we should “capture the moment” because before you know it, the moment is gone? But how do you enjoy the moment when you’re exhausted (there’s that word again), the toddler won’t shut up for a single second, the youngest is yelling again because he lost his pacifier, at home more chores like sweeping, mopping, cooking, folding clothes, … are only piling up? These current hectic and stressful moments now will become nostalgic moments later. Without a doubt, my wife and I will look back as these moments and sigh: wasn’t it great when they were little and only uttered oh and ah! instead of shut up dad, I’m not doing that ? Without a doubt, our mind will have filtered out the most stressful and depressing moments. We’ll have blissfully forgotten these. Just as I now blissfully forgot the many frustrating moments of a boy and teenager living with their parents and sisters, not truly being free. I do not regret moving out as soon as I could. If I had the choice to go back in time with some of my current wisdom still intact, I would deliberately Enjoy It more often. Caress the durable grey plastic shell. Slide in and out the carts a few more times just to hear that unique clicking sound again. Bug my friends way more about bringing their GB and Link Cables. A growing body of research on nostalgia identifies two major types: reflective nostalgia and restorative nostalgia . The former is the kind you are grateful for, the bittersweet moments you’ve enriched your live with. The latter is the desperate and longing part that increases the feeling of loss. I might just be on the wrong side of nostalgia. Attempts to relive that nostalgic moment—and thus moving from reflective to restorative—always end in a failure. The games I play together with the DOS Game Club are another example of this effect: Jazz Jackrabbit suddenly feels like a cheap Sonic rip-off that mechanically barely holds together, while back in 1994 it was the most mesmerising thing I ever saw on my granddad’s 486. Fortunately the soundtrack still slaps, but perhaps that’s probably because of how auditory stimuli recreate these nostalgic moments differently? In addition to trying to escape the bigger responsibility and wanting to go back to that ignorance-is-a-bliss state of mind, my second biggest reason for being nostalgic is mourning the loss of my previous selves. I often go back to the past to try and understand the current me but perhaps that’s more a bad than a good thing. Some of the things a past version of myself liked or did no longer fits with my current self. I don’t fully understand the reasoning behind this yet, but I hope I will. In the meantime, I’ve added a few nostalgic-oriented works on my reading list to gain a bigger insight into how all this theoretically is supposed to work. Perhaps then I can start to save myself from my past self. Related topics: / nostalgia / By Wouter Groeneveld on 27 April 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

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 I switched the demon for the apple. I’ve been on an apple diet for so long now, I can barely remember the tux. What is it you say? Oh, it’s openSUSE now. Sure, you’re a chameleon, you can take on any colour you’d like. Great to see it’s still green. I like green. How’s YaST doing these days? ? What’s that, no more ? That’s cool, it looks like you’ve made some progress! Let’s make a screenshot the proper nerdy way and do some in a terminal! Oh, that’s no longer cool? ? So first and then that command? Let’s try that: openSUSE Tumbleweed running on the HP work laptop. My last experience with the Linux desktop was indeed about twenty years ago. Since 2012, I’ve been a macOS user. I’m no longer proud of it: I miss Linux and I think macOS is boring and full of bloat . Yet the rise of the Apple silicon made me buy another one in 2020, which is still the one I’m using right now. The hardware is amazing, the screen is amazing, and the weight and fanless features are amazing. But I still miss customisation features—the ability to truly make the desktop mine—and I stopped updating the OS as a protest to ever increasing bloatware. This laptop is still running Sonoma which is bad enough as it is. I have no intentions to go out and buy another machine any time soon; this one’s still doing fine; but I did start to wonder. What if… I got a ThinkPad and installed Linux back onto it? Would the hardware match the high standards I’m accustomed to now? Would I still be able to make my way around the OS? I ran GNOME 2 and KDE 3 (and then got nerdy with Fvwm). I compiled my own Linux 2.6 kernel patches back when that was brand new. I have no idea what’s happening now. That’s not to say that I don’t touch Linux: I use it daily to host this website, to run the NAS at home, and in virtual containers. But that’s not the Linux Desktop Experience . My main motivation for moving away from Linux was my frustration with endless configuration and compilation. Back in the day, hibernate didn’t just work out of the box, the fan speed had to be configured depending on the type of the laptop, nVidia drivers were a pain (still are), etc. Work and life started getting in the way: I no longer had endless seas of time on my hand to go nuts with Gentoo. With two young kids, that times has dwindled even more, so NixOS or even Arch is out of the question. Being fed up with the crappy Windows 11 installation on my work laptop, I wiped that partition and remembered my old friend The European Chameleon. So here I am, testing the waters yet again. Thanks to Valve, Lutris is amazing . KDE Plasma feels mature (even though some configuration settings seem sluggish). I don’t want to dive into the rabbit hole of AwesomeWM (but I do). I don’t want to try and live without systemd or have to hurt my brain about X11 vs Wayland. I want the thing to “just work”. I want my chameleon to be an apple. A proper one, like a “back in the day” apple one. I haven’t had the time to give openSUSE a proper trail. I’m mainly fighting my muscle memory with versus that strange location which is somewhat diminished by Toshy that then doesn’t work well in combination with my Emacs configuration. What I did notice is that hibernation/suspend is still ugly: if I close the lid for a night without putting the laptop in true hibernate mode (with its dedicated swap partition), the battery drain is ridiculous, especially coming from a MacBook Air that I just jam shut and open up again a hundred times a day. This made me realise I will probably have to give up on the hardware quality part if my next laptop is going to be a non-Apple one. Which I don’t really want to? Seb and I discussed which laptop to get when ours would break down. The Framework is an obvious one as are the System76 ones that specifically support Linux. Alex White’s everyday carry post made me realise the build quality of these is average at best. It’s going to be a painful experience migrating from that. I know Kev is happy with his Framework , but I’m not yet fully convinced. The fact that this HP EliteBook 6 G1a 16 work laptop’s screen and overall build quality is terrible is not helping either. The touchpad palm detection experience is horrible on KDE. Let’s first give the chameleon another chance to see if on an OS level I could live without macOS and my usual mac-exclusive power tools. The ones I’ll miss the most might be Alfred and DEVONthink . My recent migration to do-everything-in-Emacs does make the transition a lot easier. I also moved from iTerm2 to Ghostty last year and am now trying out Kitty with the Fish shell. My RSS feed now lives inside my FreshRSS server making me less dependent on NetNewsWire. Software-wise, I’m getting there. I’m sure I’ll get there. But what about hardware-wise? Related topics: / linux / By Wouter Groeneveld on 22 April 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

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—and in most cases, much longer—routes. It turns out that these symbols never represent the same distance. When I meet my friend from another province, we usually go hiking somewhere near his home. There, the weirdly shaped signs are nowhere to be seen. Instead, the remarkably clear numbered “knooppunten” (nodes) let you plan your own route. It’s in fact exactly like the bigger blue node signs we’re accustomed to when biking ( https://www.fietsknooppunt.be/ becomes https://www.wandelknooppunt.be/ ). Last year, I noticed our province finally adapting the same system: also features a virtual map where you can select which numbered nodes to follow. Finally some consistency! Except that of course the existing plaques didn’t move. Instead, various governmental instances only added signs to the poles. The confusing heterogeneity was back with a vengeance. We found out that the best way to battle this is to simply ignore all the rest and follow the “standardised” numbered nodes from . Last week we were on another short trip just to get out of the house. Unfortunately, the misery of having small kids seems to follow you around if you take them with you. It also makes packing for just a few nights a literal and figurative nightmare, but I digress. On Another Short Hike (the hopefully to be announced video game sequel), we encountered this very insightful pole depicting the same junction-style number system: Hiking Node 58 in the province of Antwerpen. And god knows what else. I mean, really? Let’s tackle them from top to bottom: Biggest plaque on top; node 58 with directions to node 69, 89, 57, and 51. Remember, these numbers are local as well, so the 69 here won’t be the 69 say 20 kilometres away. We also encountered a big map highlighting these numbers so it’s fairly easy to follow these. If you’ve got a smartphone, you can always look up which direction to go. Second from the top; yellow/green with a black arrow to the left: a very local Mol Om sign indicating the long distance path created by the local walking club to celebrate the municipality of Mol. The site discusses its funny history of pragmatism that might cause trouble: Trail markers at that time did not always make it a habit to request permission from the landowner or manager before marking the trails. That practice, combined with mistrust, led to conflicts more often than it does today. Sabotage by scratching out or removing markers was commonplace at Mol-Om, to such an extent that for the first official trail walk [1974] the Mol Sports Council would only apply the markers the day before each event, for fear that they would otherwise disappear too quickly again. The sign was (and still is) very obtuse: we only found out about it now by looking up what “Mol Om” means. No indication of it on local maps either. I presume their clandestine markings turned tolerable predate the numbered nodes. Third from the top; a Santiago de Compostella pilgrim route. The iconic yellow scallop with blue background, Camino De Santiago . The Flemish Compostella Society lists all pilgrim routes going trough Belgium; the one we found is part of the Via Monastica ( ). I’m fascinated by these routes. If the kids are old enough… Who knows. Fourth from the top; an orange arrow to the right: who knows? This is not part of the usual symbols indicating hiking paths like the orange circle and blue diamonds on the right side of the same pole. The other, fatter arrow, of course with the same orange colour, going the other direction, is possibly another route? The way to the restrooms? The last one that looks like a triangle with legs: an initiative of Sport Vlaanderen , a governmental instance promoting walking as a sport. Why they couldn’t reconcile with the numbered node network of beats me. Maybe they were first? No geocaches to be found along the way but plenty of hidden boxes that used to be there. I’ll save some meat for another post. Meatwhile , let’s get hiking . Related topics: / hiking / signs / By Wouter Groeneveld on 19 April 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

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 that button: every shot was one less on the film roll and added to the cost. Hence my oldest setup—the 486 in my dad’s makeshift office that also served as the washing machine room—is lost forever. My parents got me a sturdy but boring looking IKEA desk I’ve been using extensively up until 2015. My room looked more or less the same once that piece of furniture got in up until I moved out. Here’s a picture of my then brand new flatron CRT that’s showcasing Smash Bros. Melee (I played on the GameCube through a PCI TV card): My 'workspace' in 2006. Note the white DS Lite in the background, putting this photo somewhere after June 2006. There are more photos of my gaming setup from 2002-2007 in case you’re interested. I once built a virtual tour of my room in the form of an HTML imagemap website but that too is lost in time meaning there’s nothing much to see on the photo now, except for a sliver of a blue DELL laptop I used for more serious university work. I wish I kept that keyboard around though, it was surprisingly comfortable. Not as cool as Microsoft’s Natural Keyboard Elite , but still! At some point in time, I was also dumb enough to sell the Wavebird and all GameCube games. What was I thinking… I moved out in 2008 and rented a cheap flat for three years to save up on money before my wife & I bought our first home. Again, my meticulous archival work proves to be not that meticulous after all: I can’t find a single photo of that apartment, except for the empty rooms just before I got in. The IKEA desk moved to the living room as I didn’t own a TV. On the other hand, it probably wasn’t worth saving, as workspace denotes some work had to be done there. I was a software development consultant back then and worked at the client’s offices. Those were long hours and long commutes meaning nothing much was done at home. Here’s an unremarkable at best picture of what that typical office space looked like in those years: My office workspace in 2008 with a corporate HP laptop plugged into a then already older CRT from a client. Yes, that on the lower right is my wallet. I believe it still is now. When we bought a house and started living together, we had a spare room to throw in everything we couldn’t find a good spot for. This included my cheap bookcase and the very same IKEA desk: My workspace in 2013. I can't recall any work has been done there at all. The Monkey Island poster I already had hanging on the wall a year before I left my parents’ place; it’s still with me now as you’ll see in the later pics. I can’t believe any work has been done at all in that “office”: I was still a consultant and working from home was a big no-no. That meant the space was largely unused, which is a shame, because now that I look back at it, it looks cosy, especially with that chicken hug stuffed in the lower left of the bookcase! I started to resent the commutes. I quit my job and we sold and bought another house where we still live in as I type this. One of the three bedrooms became my “office”—I’ll still use quotes here as again nothing much was done there. I didn’t like locking myself in that room upstairs as my wife was downstairs watching TV. The Nintendo Switch was my big savour 1 : a hybrid handheld system that I could play on the couch! My workspace in 2014. Left: that same IKEA desk survived yet another move. This photo was taken right after we moved in, hence the lack of decorations. Right: in the living room/kitchen, were most of my writing was done. Again, this post is far from impressive compared to Franck’s cool setups. Most of my writing and thinking happened on the kitchen table. In 2012-2013 I bought a MacBook Air and since then loved inventing a makeshift workspace wherever. Working from home still was the big exception. After four years I quit my job again to rejoin academia and pursue a PhD. That meant the way I worked radically shifted: more individually, and more from home. On top of that, in 2020, a thing called COVID happened, where we suddenly were forced to work from home. Just like many others, I finally started taking the home workspace environment seriously. I already published the result in the 2021 retro desktop setup post: My 2020 workspace featuring a 486 machine, a beige Win98 tower, a WinXP one, and on the far right, the 'work horse' MacBook and second screen. If you look closely enough, you’ll notice the same skylight as the leftmost photo in 2014. I jammed as much retro hardware as I could find in that tiny room, binning the IKEA desk (R.I.P.) and buying more IKEA stuff (Linnmon). In 2020, after eight years of faithful service, the old MacBook Air got replaced by the one I’m typing this on (on the far right). Thankfully, the Monkey Island posters survived. There are more photos of this setup in the linked post. For the first time in my life, I felt truly happy in my home workspace. It became my sanctuary: me, surrounded by old junk. And then our daughter started poisoning the place with baby toys: The other side of the retro room: Billy bookshelves and baby toys. At least I managed to fend off most of the toys and eventually, when she got older, we managed to contain her junk within her room or below stairs. Until the second kid came along and kicked me out. Our house looks big but really isn’t, so we renovated to create more space. Still, my workspace became his bedroom, so I had to move to the old living room : My workspace in 2025, with a bigger window overlooking the front garden and street. Later that year I properly fixed the cable work, relayed another Ethernet cable, and started thinking about how I could restore my retro hardware. Unfortunately, only the 486 is on display right now, and that one hasn’t been touched in almost a year due to busy parenthood. At least now there was room for another IKEA case that can hold more board games than the previous one could in the hallway (that of course got claimed by the kids). I prepare my lessons here and like the bigger window but do miss the previous workspace. Hardware-wise, nothing much changed, except for a mechanical keyboard . Perhaps I should throw in a retro TV to hook up the SNES. I don’t know. Since becoming a parent, this stuff matters less but I miss it more, it’s hard to explain. As for gaming, most of it is done on the couch with the Analogue Pocket, Switch, or just with the MacBook on my lap. So far for having a dedicated workspace… As a bonus photo, here’s the current state of the above workspace at the time of writing: The current state of the 2025 workspace. Whoops... Yeah, I know… That’s a mild exaggeration as I was already a big GB(A) and DS fanboy. It did rejuvenate my interest in handheld gaming.  ↩︎ Related topics: / setup / By Wouter Groeneveld on 14 April 2026.  Reply via email . That’s a mild exaggeration as I was already a big GB(A) and DS fanboy. It did rejuvenate my interest in handheld gaming.  ↩︎

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

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 is going on and what is becoming of one of my prime professional fields: software engineering, I read and read and read. And then I read and read and read. And then I became disappointed and depressed. I see colleagues jumping the gun, others being more prudent. I see industry discovering there’s yet another buck to be made. I see students forgoing learning at all. I wanted to try to form my own judgement of genAI in its modern form by looking at it from four different viewpoints: that of the software engineer, that of the teacher, that of the creativity researcher, and that of the concerned civilian living in this capitalist world.. References can be found at the end of this article. Does anyone remember Dan North’s Programming is not a craft post from 2011? I do, and I often think about it. With the advent of genAI, North’s port might be even more polarising: Well, congrats to you, you’ve won the lottery: here’s a tool that immediately can add customer value. If you don’t care about the inner code quality, you can have genAI generate (slop) code faster than you can think. If you love the impact of software itself, you’ll love Claude Code et al. Are you perhaps an enterprise software engineer? In that case you’ll be able to scaffold and generate CRUD crap even faster, hooray! But wait a minute. You obviously won’t take true ownership of this code: you’ll want to impress your clients with the results, but keep the lid closed at all times. The less ownership and feeling of responsibility, the easier it comes to completely let go of all the breaks and just accept any future changes without code reviewing at all. People who are now claiming they will keep themselves in the loop as an architectural reviewer don’t need to lie to themselves. After the nth time pressing the green button, and as the technology further evolves, you’ll wind up eventually accepting the slop anyway. Verification burnout will pop up next: because it’s not your own code you’re attempting to so carefully review, it actually takes more instead of less effort, increasing your stress level instead of reducing it! Does the code quality really matter if all clients see is the end product? As a gamer, I just want the game to run smoothly, I don’t care about the spaghetti. Or do I? I do, implicitly—the more spaghetti, the less smoothly it’ll run. The more holes, the more soft locks and crashes. So programming might or might not be a craft, but as Cal Newport and Robert M. Pirsig say: the concept of Quality is important! Maybe it’s time to become a goose farmer instead. The only thing left for you to do is to move to a depressing quality control position instead of crafting something yourself. No more “I built this”, but “I managed its orchestration”. Depending on how you view this, It’s either a promotion or demotion. I tend to agree with the latter. Why? Because we humans are the Homo Faber , the ones who like to control their fate and environment with the use of tools. Yes, genAI certainly is a tool, but it’s a tool that takes away all other tools. Instead of kneading dough by hand, feeling it, knowing when to ferment and when to bake, we’re forced to oversee the industrial Wonder Bread production process. Instead of manipulating leather to create a pair of shoes, we’re being employed by Nike to watch shoes being made by machines. This somehow reminds me of David Graeber’s bullshit jobs where useless paper pushing is prevalent but also called a “revolution” when it comes to a professional purpose. I beg to differ. Humans want to make things. They want to be proud of the things they made. The fact that the open source community rejects this slop code is a telling sign: if you’re programming in the open, your peers who also think highly of software development will keep you in check. But when it’s “for (enterprise) work”, we don’t care, generate away, I’m not the true owner anyway. If programming is a craft, then the recently leaked Claude Code CLI source code will be a big joke to you, where constructs are endlessly repeated, and spaghetti is topped up with more spaghetti. Code that is being generated doesn’t even seem to be made to be (re)read: how then, are we expecting to maintain it, or guarantee its security? By letting the agent maintain it and guarantee its security, I can hear you say? What is there left to say? I’ve already asserted that genAI tools are worse than Stack Overflow . Sure, mindless copy-pasting has long existed before this AI storm, but not on this scale. GenAI is able to provide a working solution to an assignment faster than I can come op with the assignment itself. Suddenly, all our traditional evaluation systems and grading workflows became useless: scoring high on a checklist is just a matter of pasting the requirements into Claude. We try to adapt by requiring oral defences, having students explain what they did and why, and asking them to walk us through a small imaginative change. The result is a spectacular fall in grades from previous years: they are just not able (1) to explain the code they did not make but generated and (2) to make small adjustments as they skipped the hard part: the learning and understanding. Yet in the hallways, I hear lots of students bragging to each other about how they let ChatGPT do their homework. Congrats. We’ll see each other again in September for your second try. We often forget something else very important: peer pressure . About a year ago, on the train I overheard a few girls on their way to a university lecture chatting about their homework. One of them complained: “I put in all that hard work, but all the others are just using ChatGPT to do it. Next time, I’m not doing all that, I’m also just using AI, that’s not fair!”. I should have gotten up to congratulate her: the only one actively learning is the one putting in the hard work! There is no shortcut to becoming proficient. There is only hard work. Sure, the more you prompt your way through your curriculum, the more proficient you’ll become with the tool, but ask yourself: did you learn what you wanted to learn or did you learn to prompt? When I was an undergraduate, I used to fill A4 pages with summaries of courses to help me study. Just before the exams, I could quickly glance over these pages to remembers the core concepts. Some students sold their summaries to others. Now, genAI can generate summaries for you. But smart students will know this will only fool yourself: the purpose of the summaries is to make them : to study and gradually fill the pages. Not to acquire a summary. The journey is the destination. When my summaries were done, I could just as well throw them away: they were just a tool to help with the hard work. Yet it’s next to impossible to explain this to a student who only sees how easy it is to jump to an outcome by leveraging AI. Maybe legislation will help here? (Not really; see below) In case all this is not clear: students are becoming dumber yet the programming projects they hand in are becoming better than ever. As the inventor of the framework presented in The Creative Programmer , I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the seven domains and how genAI fits in these. In The Creative Programmer , I present seven distinct but heavily intertwined themes that define the way we are creative when we solve a programming problem: I might be overly focusing on the negative here and have to recognise the possible advantages of having genAI as a tool available in our creative toolbox—but only when we learn to yield it properly and with moderation, which is not exactly what we are doing lately, is it. In an interesting systematic literature review (2025) with lots of references to other academic material if that’s what you’re looking for, Holzner et al. conclude with: […] human-GenAI collaboration shows small but consistent gains in creative output across tasks and contexts. However, collaboration with GenAI reduces the diversity of ideas, indicating a risk of creative outputs that could become more homogeneous. More same-ness; exactly what we need when it comes to creativity, right? The more we use genAI, the more creatively we will be able to prompt, but the less creative we will be in actually applying a solution to the problem. We no longer create: we generate. We know that genAI will do everything in its power to keep you locked within that chat box. Its tendency to talk to your mouth, agree with your statements, and serve you whatever you want to hear creates biases and dependencies. It’s not unlike a drug that slowly but surely diminished your critical thinking, and thus, creativity. This is where the true nature of humans are unfolded: when it comes to earning something for themselves, ethics suddenly becomes a very malleable subject. On the morality, ethics, and privacy, everyone agrees that genAI is what Ron Gilbert calls a train wreck . This bears no further explanation from me: Microsoft slurped all GitHub repositories dry without taking any licenses into account, the book that I painstakingly produced in almost two years was ingested OpenAI’s systems in about two seconds, … Yet at the same time, everyone also consistently ignores all these topics in favour of their own self-interest. Why, I wonder? Everyone knows they should eat less meat. Yet almost nobody does. Everyone knows Microsoft (and probably other big tech companies) power genocide yet the adoption rate of Windows as an OS is still 95%. Why? Everyone knows the climate is going to shits yet we happily turn the other way and take the plane on a weekend trip to sip some wine and do some shopping in Italy. As Gretea Thunberg said: knowing is not enough . For GenAI, similar patterns emerge. We know it’s bad for us, yet we happily close our eyes and use it anyway. Why, I wonder? The power of a drug, the pull, the ease at which something can be done without breaking too much sweat? Here’s a possible answer I suggested before: because humans are inherently lazy. As long as Belgian supermarkets keep on stocking apples from New Zealand and Belgium, most people won’t care and just pick up whatever. As long as we keep handing out company cars and making infrastructure geared towards car drivers, most people will be driving to work instead of biking. A possible answer to the problem then might be governmental legislation to protect people living in a society from making the wrong choices. And I’m 100% sure that will work! Yet legislation is always (1) either happening way too late; or (2) minimised or manipulated by the people who wield the power because they have bought out key politicians to prevent laws like this from happening. Hence my depression. In the case of GenAI, a technology that evolves at lightning speed and is taking the world by storm, legislation will be way too late. To prove my point, in an attempt to modernise, many Belgian governmental instances already “embraced” the technology and made many blunders in doing so. The EU is currently evaluating the options. Meanwhile, the San Francisco bros are laughing. Prompt engineering is the most degenerative thing that ever happened to engineering . It’s a capitalist’s way to minimise the cost of the human. Yet I don’t see genAI disappearing any time soon. Companies and decision makers smelled the green and won’t let go. I don’t understand how capitalism works, but I know it’s been growing in power ever since we centralised cane sugar plantations with the help of slavery. GenAI is evidently yet another product of capitalism. The companies I’ve worked for wanted more and more profit each year: even though they were sometimes satisfied with last year’s profit, the target for the next year was always increased no matter what. GenAI is already responsible for thousands of layoffs in an attempt to even more aggressively push profit up. To what end, I wonder? Why? To our own detriment. It seems that our cognition is for sale, and the sale has already been made. You know what they say: no returns are accepted. Peer pressure to use genAI on the job is already prevalent as it “gets things done faster”, so quite logically also brings in money faster. Let’s worry about durability and maintenance later, shall we. Also, I’ve seen colleagues fall into the trap of obsessive agent babysitting. Whether at work, on the lunch break, or in the very late evenings: you’ve got to keep those agents spinning! Squeeze the maximum out of your tokens because they squeeze the maximum out of you. There goes our work-life balance, coming from the tools that are supposed to take over our work so we can focus more on the life part. So as long as I remain in a position to be able to choose whether I can put in the work myself for my (hobby) programming projects, I will. As long as I am in a position to bike instead of drive, to be a vegetarian instead of meat-eater, or in short, to be a concerned civilian, I will. And so should you. Even though that won’t stop this devolution from happening at all. Sure I will occasionally consult Gemini et al. to ask it a specific question regarding a broken config file that has me scratching my head. But I treat these queries as specialised internet searchers, not as a way to evade the hard work completely. I’ve become Albert Camus’s pessimist. I’m genuinely afraid of how our kids will turn out if we don’t act quickly to save our youth. Yet I won’t stop being an activist. Reading List I’d rather link to personal blog posts instead of academic publications here as we’re dealing with something that impacts us on a personal level and by the time the relevant 2026 studies are published, the landscape will have changed yet again. The following folks expressed their experience and opinion on genAI: Related topics: / genai / By Wouter Groeneveld on 8 April 2026.  Reply via email . Technical Knowledge—if we don’t have any knowledge, we won’t have the creative ability to combine them. Guess what; GenAI is actively deskilling us. The more you generate, the less you actively learn, harming your creative ability to solve problems. Creativity requires a rich mental toolbox to draw from. By prompting, you’re not exactly filling that toolbox. Communication–I see both a good and a bad thing here: if your colleagues aren’t immediately available, rubber ducking with an AI agent might help identifying that problem. On the other hand, it’s also awfully easy to stay locked inside that comfortable genAI chatbox. Why ask anyone when it talks to your mouth? Constraints—If you manage to constraint yourself (ha!) to only ask AI for 10 possible ways to approach a problem you don’t know how to approach without having it solve the problem for you , this might help you learn how to approach certain heavily constrained environments. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to just have it generate the solution as well, rendering a possible learning path useless. Critical Thinking—The more we use genAI, the less critical we are and the more likely we are accepting whatever comes out of it. Validating the the source material outside of that chatbox suddenly requires a lot of willpower. I’ve even heard people changing their entire preferred technology stack to something more popular because genAI is better at it. That’s very sad. Curiosity—Judge for yourself. What does reliance on genAI tell you about your curiosity to discover other things? Creative state of Mind—without Cal Newport’s “Deep Work”, there won’t be an “aha!” moment. The 90% transpiration, 10% inspiration is suddenly turned on its head: Claude is the one sweating for us, even at night, while all we do is press the green button and write “LGTM!”. Maybe we should take the time to read Newport’s new book Slow Productivity . Creative Techniques—GenAI itself as a technique might belong in this section; but the question is; are we the one yielding the tool or is the tool yielding us? Nolan Lawsom; How I use AI agents to write code . A clear conflicted state: it’s okay to generate away at work, but “I also don’t use AI for my open-source work, because it just feels… ick. The code is ‘mine’ in some sense, but ultimately, I don’t feel true ownership over it, because I didn’t write it”. John Allsopp: The Structure of Engineering Revolutions Dave Gauer; A programmer’s loss of social identity Cory Zue; Software got weird Doug Belshaw; Claude’s Constitution and the trap of corporate AI ethics Tom Hall; Towards a Slow Code Manifesto Rishi Baldawa; The Reviewer Isn’t the Bottleneck Information/superhighway.net; On The Need For Understanding Antoine Leblanc; Chatbot psychosis (Mastodon) “this is the main reason why i believe that chatbot addiction / chatbot psychosis is a LOT more widespread than we realise: people with a clear understanding of the ethical issues try claude once, it does a thing correctly enough, they get one-shot, and they start posting like if sephiroth was on linked-in, ethical concerns be damned. it keeps happening.” Exactly. Sean Boots; Generative AI vegetarianism Simon Willison; Perhaps not Boring Technology after all Sophie from Localghost; Stop Generating Start Thinking Micaheal Harley; AI Stance Lauren Woolsey; AI Sucks And You Shouldn’t Use It Ron Gilbert; My Dinner With AI Matthew Lamont; Generative AI is an Evil Technology Arne Brasseur; The AI Divide (Mastodon) Zach Manson; CoPilot Edited an Ad Into My PR Michael Taggart; I Used AI. It Worked. I Hated It. Bob Nystrom; The Value of Things . GenAI can have utility but not meaning. Jonny; Dismantling Claude Code source (Mastodon) . Another train wreck, as expected. Cal Newport; In Defense of Thining Hamilton Greene; Why I’m moving from F# to C# Senator Bernie Sanders vs. Claude (YouTube) Joel Chrono; Not having to work would be nice (but not like this)

Career AI C#

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

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 way here through that one. Below is a list of remakes and remasters announced and/or released since April 2024: Guess what, Nightdive is still running the show here: At this point I don’t even know where to start! Monster Bash HD is still being worked on (I hope?). Did I miss something? Let me know! Related topics: / games / dos / engines / By Wouter Groeneveld on 5 April 2026.  Reply via email . Little Big Adventure : Twinsen’s Quest released in November 2024 is a complete graphical overhaul of the original. Not a remake but still noteworthy; Gobliins 6 is a sequel to a 34 year old DOS game ! Star Wars: Dark Forces got a remaster ; Although not a DOS game, Outlaws got the remaster treament as well Oh, and yes, DOOM I + II is another masterpiece ; As is the Heretic + Hexen package ; As did Blood as Refreshed Supply (again?). BioMenace : Remastered by the same devs that did the Duke Nukem 1 & 2 remasters on Evercade. I enjoyed it, it’s good! A Halloween Harry -inspired top-down 3D version is currently being made that only shares the name & style of the original—luckily, not the crappy level design. Ubisoft remastered the original Rayman ( 30th Anniversary Edition ) but it wasn’t met with much success. They changed the included GBA music—that’s what SEGA would have done, right? I found a Masters of Magic remake (2022) on Steam that’s been met with some positive reception. I didn’t play the original so can’t say how faithfully it’s related to the DOS version. Blizzard also decided to cash in with the Warcraft I+II remaster bundle . I was mostly a Wacraft III person so I can’t comment on this. Someone did a Wacky Wheels HD Remake on ? Wow! Best approach this carefully, it looks to have its own technical problems.

Bash Gaming

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

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 . I am just two levels short of finishing Gobliins 6 before deciding to throw in the towel. Thanks to the increased amount of moon logic presence, the entire adventure was more frustrating than relaxing. As a big Gobliins fan, I have to admit: the game left me a bit disappointed. It’s all right; I’ll just replay Gob3 again. As it left me wanting more, I went back to the original Gobliiins game that I somehow missed as back in the day my dad bought Gobliins 2 and we just continued with 3 without looking back. It’s still worth exploring but very basic and the presence of the life bar is a very strange (and bad!) design choice that fortunately was abandoned in the sequels. I charged the Analogue Pocket and hope to get in some good ol’ Game Boy (Color) games in the coming month. I read a depressing amount of personal genAI tales; more than enough to fill another blog post. I’ll try to keep these out of here as much as possible. My wife bumped into an hacker called Un Kyu Lee crafting his own micro journal hardware. The result looks very cool, including hinge to hang on the door as a physical reminder: I’d rather keep on journaling with my fountain pens, but still, very cool! Related topics: / metapost / By Wouter Groeneveld on 1 April 2026.  Reply via email . Michael vibe-code-ported an X11 window manager into Wayland ; an interesting Claude experiment to see how agentic development works. Greg Newman hosted the Emacs Blog Post Carnival 2025-07 on writing experiences and summarised the participating links. Lots of little gems in there. Rijksmuseum writes about the discovery of the new Rembrandt painting . Well, “new”—it’s been in private collection for years and only recently resurfaced. Peter Bridger shares his experience in the retro happening SWAG February 2026 . I wish we had something similar nearby! Chuck Jordan shares SimCity vibes . As one of the original programmers involved in the projects, he would know. (Via The Virtual Moose ) The 1MB Club has an interesting (older) article I read last month: consider disabling HTTPS auto redirects . I can’t remember why I turned this back on: I want my old WinXP machine to be able to reach as well without the extra TLS overhead. Funny though: they mention “You can freely view this website on both HTTPS and HTTP.”. I remove the in the protocol, press , and get redirected. Whoops. PolyWolf has been thinking about blazing fast static site generators . This is a goldmine as I have a wild idea to write my own generator in Clojure. When the exhaustion and brain fog go away, that is. According to Rishi Baldawa the reviewer isn’t the bottleneck . This one’s a bit AI flavoured, so beware if you’re coming down with an AI cold. (I know I have. Handkerchiefs full.) Marcin Wichary’s keyboard grandmastery again shines through in his Apple Fn endgame article . I wish his keyboard book wasn’t sold out. Wordsmith writes about the underrated simplicity of the original Harvest Moon (1996) video game. Dale Mellor defends sing a dynamically-produced blog site which is a nice change given the static site generator craziness. I’m still on Hugo and have little need for the points he brings up, but still, some others might. Tazjin tries out Guix as a Nixer . I was eyeing on Guix as a budding Lisp fanboy, but both options still can’t seem to fit in my head. I’ll let it stew for a little while longer. Homo Ludditus announces distro hopping time . The conclusion? “The madhouse could be a valid destination. But I’m still looking for better alternatives.” So far for 2026 as the year of the Linux desktop huh. The Digital Antiquarian writes about the year of peak Might & Magic , when New World Computing still was on top of the world. Here’s an interesting thought experiment by Andrey Listopadov: What if structural editing was a mistake? In this 2020 post by Vincent Bernat, photos of a bunch of cool vintage PC expansion cards are shared in conjunction with timeperiod-correct software that made great use of them. Gabor Torok switched to KDE Plasma , an interesting read because we both switched to OSX because of resons and are trying to crawl out of the Apple hole. I don’t know if I’m quite ready yet. Did you know there’s a relation between knitting and programming ? Abbey Perini does. Mykal Machon shares some insightful guiding principles to lead a fuller life. Judging by the principles, I don’t think Mykal has any young kids. I’m using this as a checklist to find out if I missed essential albums: Hip Hop Golden Age’s Top 40 Hip Hop Albums of 1998 . Here’s another GitHub “awesome” list; this time public APIs . Could be useful. Already used for my courses. It doesn’t hurt to link to the 2007 Slow Code manifesto . FontCrafter is a cool way to generate a real font based on your handwriting. WireTap is an open source Ngrok alternative. The Stump Window Manager is the only WM (except the obvious EXWM) I could find that’s written in Common Lisp. I should look into Ulauncher if I ever want to make the switch to Linux to replace Alfred. Christoph Frick shares a cool GitHub Gist showcasing you can write your AwesomeWM config in Fennel instead of Lua. Yazi looks like an Emacs Dired inside a shell?

Writing Clojure Lua Gaming Hardware

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

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 across macOS & Linux. When the default changed I’ll provide more information; otherwise see the previous post as linked above. Some more tools that have been adapted that don’t belong in one of the above categories: A prediction for this post in 2027: all tools have been replaced with Emacs. All silliness aside; Emacs is the best thing that happened to me in the last couple of months. Related topics: / lists / app defaults / By Wouter Groeneveld on 29 March 2026.  Reply via email . Backup system : Still Restic, but I added Syncthing into the loop to get that 1-2-3 backup number higher. I still have to buy a fire-proof safe (or sync it off-site). Bookmarks and Read It Later systems : Still Alfred & Obsidian. Experimenting with Org-mode and org-capture; hoping to migrate this category to Emacs as well. Browser : Still Firefox. Calendar and contacts : Still Self-hosted Radicale. Chat : Mainly Signal now thanks to bullying friends into using it . Cloud File Storage : lol, good one. Coding environment : For light and quick scripting, Sublime Text Emacs! Otherwise, any of the dedicated tools from the JetBrains folks. and can only do so much; it’s dreadful in Java. Image editor : Still ImageMagick + GIMP. Mail : Apple Mail for macOS for brainbaking Mu4e in Emacs! and Microsoft Outlook for work Apple Mail for the work Exchange server. I didn’t want to mix but since Mu cleared up Mail, that’s much better than Outlook. Music : Still Navidrome. Notes : Still pen & paper but I need to remind myself to take up that pen more often. Password Management : Still KeePassXC. Photo Management : Still PhotoPrism. I considered replacing it but I barely use it; it’s just a photo dump place for now. Podcasts : I find myself using the Apple Podcast app more often than in 2023. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing—it will be if I want to migrate to Linux. Presentations : Haven’t found the need for one. RSS : Still NetNewsWire but since last year it’s backed by a FreshRSS server making cross-platform reading much better. Android client app used is Randrop now, so that’s new. Spreadsheets : For student grading, Google Sheets or Excel if I have to share it with colleagues . My new institution is pro Teams & Office 365. Yay. Text Editor : I’m typing this Markdown post in Sublime Text Emacs. Word Processing : Still Pandoc if needed. Terminal : emulator: iTerm2 Ghostty, but evaluating Kitty as well (I hated how the iTerm2 devs shoved AI shit in there); shell: Zsh migrated to Fish two days ago! The built-in command line option autocomplete capabilities are amazing. Guess what: more and more I’m using eshell and Emacs. Karabiner Elements to remap some keys (see the explanation ) I tried out Martha as a Finder alternative. It’s OK but I’d rather dig into Dired (Emacs)—especially if I see the popularity of tools like that just steal Dired features. I replaced quite a few coreutils CLI commands with their modern counterparts: now is , now is , now is , now is , and can be used to enhance shell search history but Fish eliminated that need. AltTab for macOS replaces the default window switcher. The default didn’t play nice with new Emacs frames and I like the mini screenshot.

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

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 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 was deemed the silly fool who buys stuff and supports artists. Yet at the same time, we all bemoan the fact that creative individuals are losing their job due to the rise of generative AI. To that I say: maybe that’s our own fault for not properly compensating these people in the first place? Please compensate the work you appreciate. Showing appreciation is not enough to bring food to the table. If you get paid for the work you are doing each month, don’t you think it’s only logical that these people also get paid? Where do you think that money should be coming from? It’s weird to still encounter that much reluctance to support makers in 2026. Most Brain Baking readers will (hopefully) find this obvious, and this article won’t have a big impact on the reasoning of my colleagues, but it doesn’t hurt to re-iterate this, so I’ll mention it again: please compensate the work you appreciate. Below are a few remarks I heard every time I bring up this topic (related to music & software in general). I’m not buying music albums, I’m not as rich as you are. Even though the person meant this as a joke, the underlying message was: “I don’t want to spend that much money on music/a creative product”. I buy one to two albums each month and on Bandcamp artists can decide for themselves how much to charge. You don’t have to spare for this, but you are paying for three streaming services? Right. See also: You Shouldn’t Use Spotify . I can share the Spotify subscription with my sister to make it even cheaper. Did you know a thing called libraries exist where you can, you know, lend stuff, including CDs? Did you know that once you buy a digital album, you can do whatever the hell you want with it, including, you know, lending it to your sister? But those artists already have millions, no way I’m giving them more. This is a tougher nut to crack indeed. Michael Jackson is dead (remember, 2Pac isn’t), so where does that money end up? Even when he was still alive, supporting an artist who already has eight figure numbers on their account might be harder to justify. I’d say you should prioritise buying and supporting smaller (indie/local) groups. Maybe in this case you can also turn to the second hand market and at least support your local music shop that way. I only like popular pop music and they already earn more than enough. Consider the previous example; for instance Jackson’s album Bad . It wasn’t only Michael who was involved in the creation of that particular album you like. So all these people don’t deserve to have a meal. Consider this: if everybody thought like you, would that artist still be rich—or Dy Tryin (got it? 50 Cent? No?)? Micro$oft is bad. You’re right. Today, you should boycott Microsoft —but there used to be a time where they weren’t evil and helped propel software (and its development) into the modern age. If nobody bought MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, if no OEM deal was ever made to package Win95/98 with your new beige Compaq tower, maybe the contemporary software landscape looked a lot bleaker. What does this teach us? Compensate the work you appreciate only if it’s ethically sound 1 . You can’t find all these things on Bandcamp. Right again, but the remaining can be found on plenty of other platforms such as Apple Music. This is not an excuse to neglect compensating the artist. But thirty percent is pinched off by Apple! Yes. That means seventy percent remains for the artist. And if you don’t buy anything but stream or download music, a hundred percent of zero remains for the artist. I’ll leave that calculation up to you as an exercise in critical thinking. I used to buy CDs in stores but don’t anymore these stores are gone. Unfortunately, most brick and mortar stores are struggling, indeed. Perhaps also because most people sopped buying music and just download and/or stream stuff instead? The last thing I bought wasn’t good. I’m sorry to hear. Did you also consider that buying the bad thing might put the creator in a financial situation where they can produce something else that potentially might be better—with your help, that is? Bigger creative projects that take months or years require funding beforehand. I presume you are aware of the disadvantages of being funded by venture capital. I’m not paying anything for free software. Open source does not equal free in the sense that the people that created these packages don’t deserve to eat. Supporting a project sends an important signal to its maintainers: the thing you are doing is relevant, please continue doing so. Sending an appreciative letter also helps but doesn’t pay bills, and since we’re living in an increasingly bill-paying society, many expert developers simply quit working on free software. What do you think all those “donate” buttons are for? I only buy hardware, not software. I’ll be sure to tell my software engineering friends and colleagues to retrain into hardware engineers as soon as possible. I’m not using paid service x because free Google service y exists. You’re still paying, buddy. Just not with money, but perhaps with something that is worth even more than the green currently in your wallet. It’s called your personal data. Going to a music gig already costs an arm and a leg, no way I’m also buying the album. What kind of an argument is this? So you like the band enough to drop for a concert but you’re against paying for music just to make a statement? Next time simply stay home and instead buy the album, that’s 80% cheaper and you can listen to it again and again. I don’t have room to collect CDs. Who said anything about collecting? Then buy them digitally. At this point, we’re just arguing for the sake of arguing… I think it’s strange that many people still completely ignore all these arguments for compensating artists. These arguments alone are pretty useless: it’s not the awareness that’s the problem. Most illegal downloaders or lazy Spotify users are well-aware of the ethical concerns and financial consequences. Knowing is not enough to get people to act. Most people have heard of global warning and know we’re slowly but surely destroying the earth, yet we happily keep on driving cars, eating meat, flying planes. If you know what does move people, please let me know. Can you appreciate work that is not ethical? Sure you can; there are plenty of cool looking video games made by extreme right-thinking dickheads. Whether or not to support those dickheads is up to you.  ↩︎ By Wouter Groeneveld on 24 March 2026.  Reply via email . Can you appreciate work that is not ethical? Sure you can; there are plenty of cool looking video games made by extreme right-thinking dickheads. Whether or not to support those dickheads is up to you.  ↩︎

Culture

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

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 case that wasn’t crystal clear, here’s a common way we employ our Yogurtia: to make yoghurt. Shocking, given the name, right? There are plenty of mundane looking kitchen appliances out there that can “make yoghurt” so why should you import a Japanese device instead? While researching yoghurt making machines, we often encounter contraptions you can put multiple small containers in that will be heated to 40 degrees Celcius for eight to twelve hours. Once it’s done, you pull out the containers and voilà: your very own yoghurt pots. The Yogurtia doesn’t do this. Instead, there’s one giant contiainer where you pour in milk and remnants of your previous yoghurt. That means you can make much more in one go—but that also means you can more easily put in other stuff. The biggest reason for buying the Yogurtia is the capability to precisely configure the temperature and time it needs to ferment. Most basic yoghurt makers just come with an on/off switch. We can set it to 60 degrees instead of the usual 40 if we want to more easily ferment other stuff. Preparing breakfast with a freshly made yoghurt container thanks to the Yogurtia maker. Perhaps I should elaborate on the “other stuff”. While the Yogurtia obviously markets itself in the west towards yoghurt lovers, the real purpose of this neat little contraption is to make amazake and nattō . I’ve had great success with the former. To make amazake, you’ll need to grow a specific mold on rice first called koji . Activating that koji is done at 60 degrees which is too hot for most small fermentation chambers/yoghurt makers. I produce koji-fied rice in my fridge-hacked inoculation room . A rice cooker that can be properly configured might be another option, but cheaper machines often have trouble maintaining the temperature, requiring you to add some cold water. If the temperature is too high, the koji will be killed off, resulting in a less sweet beverage as the mold is responsible for breaking down the carbs of the rice into simple sugars. In a previous employer’s cantine, I was known as the amazake guy. I brought the smelly stuff to work for interested colleages to try it out and enthuse them to get started on fermenting stuff themselves. The result was met with mixed success: most people said yuck! , I got the label “the amazake guy”, and one time I forgot to take the canister out of the fridge at work. Or maybe the order is reversed here, that would certainly make more sense. I tried once more with spamming everyone to go out and buy Sandor Katz’ The Art of Fermentation bible. Then I tried bringing pickled stuff to work. More yuck! and what strange colour does that radish have? The one thing I didn’t try, which I’m making up for by writing this satisfied customer review, is convincing them to buy a Yogurtia. Maybe I should have done that instead. In Belgium, yoghurt is one of the few “fresh” fermented products almost everyone eats regularly (we’ll ignore cheese; sausages; wine; olives; and yes, even chocolate ; …. for now). Did you know you can use a spoonful of sourdough starter to jump-start the yoghurt making process? Did you know you can jump-start the bread rising process by using a spoonful of yoghurt? Food for thoug—no, a new blog post. A+++. Would buy again. (And did buy again. Never connect a Japanese electronic device that assumes directly to the European power grid of . Ouch. That plastic did melt good.) Related topics: / fermentation / By Wouter Groeneveld on 20 March 2026.  Reply via email .

Electronics Hardware

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

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 to for a few key reasons: (1) having less time and patience, and (2) my quality bar has been raised significantly compared to my youth when I had to make due with less. For me, that means the act of simply finishing a game is already a big step towards meeting that bar. Getting enthused by the thought of replaying it is an even bigger sign of quality. Do you replay a game as part of a yearly tradition? I know folks who do yearly runs of Jazz Jackrabbit: Holiday Hare to soak up the Christmas holiday atmosphere at the end of the year. I guess we can categorise games you play just to get in a holiday mood as an exception: these Jazz episodes can hardly be called qualitative. What does replaying a game actually mean in context of never-ending games such as roguelikes, city builders, and MMORPGs? I have played endless hours of Zeus: Master of Olympus and completed countless Mephisto Diablo II hell runs hoping to farm some good necromancer gear. I spent hours and hours shaking fruit trees and visiting other’s villages in Animal Crossing: Wild World to try and pay off my loan without properly “restarting” by creating a new savegame. As an interesting exercise, I analysed the top 25 games listed in my Top 100 (the A and S tier) and counted them by my replay rate. Replayed 5+ times : Commandos 2 , Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow , Super Mario World , Animal Crossing: Wild World , Sonic 3 , Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield , Zeus: Master of Olympus , Wizardry 8 , Baldur’s Gate II . Replayed 3-5 times : Goblins Quest 3 , Age of Empires II , The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past , Wario Land 3 , Monkey Island 2 . Replayed 1-2 times : Tactics Ogre: Reborn , The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker , Super Metroid , Duke Nukem 3D , Paper Mario 2 , Deus Ex . Yet to replay : Hollow Knight , Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga , Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones , Pizza Tower . What are the games that have yet to be replayed doing in that tier list? Good question! A few reasons I can come up with: recency bias ( Hollow Knight , Pizza Tower ) & what I’d like to call “RPG fatigue” ( Superstar Saga ): replaying a (j)RPG is a massive undertaking that often requires too much commitment compared to playing something shiny and new. Superstar Saga is “only” 20 hours long which is 10 hours shorter than Hollow Knight so my reasoning doesn’t really stand here, but it surely is the reason why I wouldn’t attempt to do yet another run-through of Baldur’s Gate II any time soon. Or touch v3, for that matter. It might be interesting to calculate the correlation between the game length and my willingness to replay a game but we’d then have to take the “old playthroughs” out of the equation. Looking at Baldur’s Gate II again, these replays were done when I was young and didn’t have anything else to do. Shadows of Amn and the expansion Throne of Bhaal together require almost 90 hours to finish which would simply be impossible now. My bias towards shorter games now might affect how I evaluate the quality of a game. The longer it gets, the faster I’m fatigued by it, even though it can be very engaging. I don’t think my attention span shortened: it’s just that I can only dedicate a few hours a day for hobby projects, including gaming. There are reasons not to replay a game, even if you think it’s exceptional. For instance, you probably don’t want to immediately replay a story-driven narrative game you just finished since the story is still in your head. Another example I can think of is that you love the game’s atmosphere and general gameplay but hate the boss encounters. Hollow Knight fits that bill for me: while the bosses were amazing, I do not want to slog through that “git gud” fest again any time soon. There are reasons to replay a game over and over again, even if you think it’s crap. For instance, just to pass the time with nothing more but your phone, you might be seduced to play a Bejeweled -like that’s addictive and just gets you going, even though you hate it. Maybe the point I am trying to get across makes less sense than it did when I started writing this… What do others have to say about replayability? Dan Kline thinks that without replayability, your game is boring . Why would replayability be a core aspect of a game? I can think of 2 reasons off the top of my head. First, all the prominent games of history are replayable. Sports, chess, board games, children’s games, are all at their core replayable concepts. Second, rulesets that create interesting choices (another frequent game definition) seems to require replayability. This is an interesting point. Replayability is the fallout of interesting choices. If the choices aren’t replayable, then they, by definition, weren’t interesting enough to explore. If you can predict the outcome of all possible rule permutations, then you aren’t playing a game. The rules are trivial. I’m not sure if this is true for all possible cases. Replaying adventure games usually means retracing your exact steps, making the exact same choices the game expects you to make to progress. And yet I’ve replayed Monkey Island 2 more than three times because I love the atmosphere. I know most puzzles by heart but I don’t care. And contrary to a chess session, finishing Monkey Island 2 now is exactly like finishing it 20 years ago; there are no branching paths or other ways to finish it that theoretically increase its replayability factor. As discussed in this tilde.net thread on replayability , many folks consider games to be replayable if there are branching paths you can explore in another playthrough. And while that’s a very obvious approach, by that same approach Monkey Island 2 would not be replayable at all. Yet I replay it. Often. Also, simply the presence of branching paths does not automatically mean it’s a high quality game. Aki-Petteri Meskanen names the engaging and charming world as a reason to revisit a game . Besides that, co-op play is also a big reason to reinstall to a previously completed game. That’s the reason why Raven Shield and even Commandos 2 score so high on my list: my best memories of these games stem from local networked play sessions with a friend despite already having finished the single player campaign several times. My willingness to replay a game is an indicator for quality. That personal statement has less to do with the theoretical definition of replayability and more with my own recent experiences with video games. Also, as I mentioned, sometimes I’m simply not willing to (re)invest the time, even though the first playthrough was a superb experience. I don’t think I will ever replay Hollow Knight , but as James Bond says: never say never again! All that being said, I think this idea can be expanded to re-watching movies and re-listening to audio albums as well! Related topics: / games / By Wouter Groeneveld on 15 March 2026.  Reply via email .

Entertainment C# Gaming

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

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 : Downloading the gcc cross-compiler for s390x through the ftp.belnet.be mirror. Note the then very new Windows XP Olive theme. For some reason, that screenshot must have been relevant, as I found it uploaded as part of my UnionVault.NET museum from 2002. Nowadays, such a download speed can officially be scoffed at as being slower than a snarky snail. Yet in 2000-2002, that was lightning-fast. Perspectives change. In Belgium, telecom company Belgacom introduced ADSL in 1999, significantly boosting our digital lives. No longer did I have to hang up the ISDN line when chatting over ICQ when mom wanted to do a quick phone call to grandma to ask about next week’s party. No longer did we have to listen to squeaky sounds and wait and wait and wait… for an image or file to appear. The future was here! For our family, the future was here a smidge earlier than the average Flemish family as my dad worked very close to the source. He was one of the Belgacom employees responsible for testing out various early ADSL modems at home, so our dialup method changed frequently. I do remember that we too were blessed with “The Frog”: the Alcatel ‘Stingray’ ADSL SpeedTouch USB Modem that looked like a frog or ray, depending on who you’d ask: The first iteration of the Alcatel SpeedTouch modem. That lovely shape was capable of handling at most downstream but our cables/ISP was not ready to handle that just yet. In September 2002, Belgacom announced they would further increased the ADSL bandwidth : Snelheidsverhoging: alle Belgacom ADSL-abonnementen. De maximum downstreamsnelheid bedroeg sinds de lancering 750 Kbit/s (ADSL GO) en 1Mbit/s (ADSL Plus-Pro-Office-Premium). Door de bijkomende investeringen en netwerkaanpassingen van Belgacom zal de meerderheid van de klanten pieksnelheden kunnen halen tot . Deze werkzaamheden zullen vermoedelijk voltooid zijn in het eerste kwartaal van 2003. Three whoppin’ megabits (not bytes) per second! Can you imagine that? I guess you can given the current average download speeds of… Wait, let me check speedtest.net … or, in other words, 93 times faster than the bleeding-edge 2003 speeds 1 . Try streaming your favourite YouTube video with a few megabits per second. YouTube didn’t exist until two years later (2005). Perspectives change. In that statement they mention they have 400k customers. Given the widespread adoption of internet in Belgium, that number can be safely multiplied by ten nowadays. The Skynet ISP that was bought up by Belgacom and hosted our very first personal homes under provided a monthly limit of . According to Belgacom in that same announcement, only a tiny portion of their users effectively hit that limit. Nowadays, everyone is accustomed to “stream whatever, whenever! YOLO!”. Back then, speeds were “high”, but we still had to be mindful of the stuff we downloaded each month, especially when wading through newsgroups looking for shady new releases Perspectives change. I wonder if my dad kept a list of the routing hardware we burned through in those late nineties/early noughties. All I can recall is that it was a lot . Since he was employed by the national telecom company that only really was (and still is) rivalled by a single other company—Telenet—we never tried the alternative. Nowadays, multiple “shadow” ISPs exist like Orange, Mobile Vikings, and Scarlet that hire the Proximus cable network. Proximus is the rebranding and full privatisation of Belgacom that was the rebranding of the institute RTT ( Regie voor Telegraaf en Telefoon —or, as my dad would call it, Rap Terug Thuis ). Unfortunately, the Web Archive never crawled all homes and I neglected to backup whatever my dad uploaded on there so our stuff is forever gone. I regret taking only a single screenshot of my download speed, so I cannot repeat this enough: archive your stuff ! That’s also the oldest screenshot of my machine/OS I have; the other desktop screenshots are from 2004+. This blog post is just an excuse to get that image under the moniker. According to meter.net historical speed tests results , only five years ago, for Belgium, that average was . Does this mean that in five years it’ll be on average ? That’s more than a CD-ROM in less than a second. Perspectives change. In twenty more years, nobody will remember what a CD-ROM even is.  ↩︎ Related topics: / adsl / screenshots / By Wouter Groeneveld on 11 March 2026.  Reply via email . According to meter.net historical speed tests results , only five years ago, for Belgium, that average was . Does this mean that in five years it’ll be on average ? That’s more than a CD-ROM in less than a second. Perspectives change. In twenty more years, nobody will remember what a CD-ROM even is.  ↩︎

Hardware C# History Technology

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