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Writing

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Brain Baking 1 weeks ago

Thinking about email workflows

This Emacs thing is getting out of hand and eating away all my free time. Now I know what they mean with the saying “diving into a rabbit hole” (and never seeing the bottom of it). We’re at 1k lines of Elisp code and I still add items to the list that don’t work well enough on a daily basis. For some weird reason, I decided to try my hand at using Emacs as an email client as well. Anyway, we can save those boring technical details for another post you can safely skip then, but for now, let’s stick with the philosophical implications of messing with my email schedule and/or habits. I’ve had some dirty habits that I thought kicked the bucket way back in 2021 when I threw out everything Google-related . Except that I didn’t throw out much—I just started doing something else. My Google & GMail account still lives but now primarily serves as yet another spam address. But I forgot to clean up and process the archive! I had another account lying around ( ) that I stopped using in 2013-ish but I forgot to clean up and process those archives as well! The Google Takeout as backup I saved, but the original ones I didn’t delete, meaning my data was still out there. Whoops. The question is: what to do with a bunch of very old emails? Do you save them all? Locally or centrally? Which ones? I had to think about this because the Emacs package I use—excellent Dutch software called mu4e —works with IMAP. I still rocked POP3 so I moved to IMAP. But in IMAP, you synchronize between client and server, meaning most stuff stays on the server which I don’t like. Why keep an IMAP folder in there just accumulating junk to wire up and down? And should I dump my GMail archive in there as well? Since moving from GMail ( and then Protonmail ), my preferred mail client has been Apple Mail. I want a proper application for working with email, not a webapp, and I don’t want any email near my smartphone (so I don’t really care about syncing that much, which is why I stayed with POP). Nothing is stopping you from creating a folder “On My Mac” and moving stuff in there instead of pressing the Archive button—in that way, the email disappears from the server. But then it ends up in a proprietary database format. Now, it’s all just flat text files syncing with and auto-backed up with various stuff. But perhaps you still want a semi-permanent archive folder to sync just in case? I’m a zero inbox kind of guy: once the mail has been dealt with, it needs to go: That means my folders look like this: Why isn’t inside the folder? Because that’s outside IMAP sync zone. is there in case I need something synced, but it’s rarely used and I plan to delete it in the coming months. will serve as the semi-saved “ongoing thing but don’t need to deal with right now but can’t get rid of just yet” folder. But what about ? That’s simple: I set up rules that automatically move emails to that folder to only occasionally glance at. For example, our daughter’s preschool loves to send at least four days a week titled “NEW MESSAGE IN PARENT PLATFORM!!!!!ONE!!11”. Ah, and yes, that Limited Run Games mailing list? *Cough*. Yeah, that one that I shouldn’t be looking at. In it goes: at least it’s not staring at me in . Now about that (local) archive. Why keep emails around? Several reasons: That being said, I am an opponent of blindfully preserving everything “just in case”. You don’t need that email invoice if you have the invoice stored. You don’t need that project mail if the project was done and buried five years ago. You don’t need those superficial “sure I’ll be there” appointment emails once the event is over. I hate it when people say Just Save Everything, Dude, It’s GMail! . To me, that sounds like I’m Too Lazy To Filter, Dude! Where’s My Stuff? —although that’s also a perfectly valid strategy. But then again, that might just be me. How do you deal with your emails? What’s your grand archival plan? Send me a mail and let me know! If it’s interesting enough I’ll promise to keep it indefinitely. Related topics: / email / emacs / By Wouter Groeneveld on 7 January 2026. Reply via email . Is it spam? Move to junk & have your filter learn from it. Is it a short thing that you can answer (if needed) and forget about? Delete. Is it informational/an invite/whatever that you can move to a calendar? Do it & delete. Is it an invoice/whatever where you can save the attach into the DEVONThink inbox? Do it & delete. Is it a receipt without attach? Print as PDF and treat as above. Is it an email from family full of photos of last Saturday’s party? Save them all to your NAS where Photoprism can find them & delete. Is it from an ongoing project that you still need to keep as evidence just in case? Move to the “projects” folder. Is it an exciting email from friends, co-bloggers, et al.? Answer & archive to save. I can’t say goodbye to them. Several conversations with my late father-in-law and other deceased where I honestly don’t have the courage to trash them permanently. They were meaningful to me. Same as above, I guess, except for these people are still alive? I like keeping emails from lovely folks around. They might still have a practical use. Since all mails are indexed by , I can quickly whip up a search and find stuff not stored elsewhere. It should, though.

DevOps

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Brain Baking 1 weeks ago

2025 In Board Games

This post is the board game counterpart of the previous 2025 In Video Games end of year note. There hasn’t been a Board Game Shelf Analysis post in 2025 for some reason so I can’t point you to recent photos of my collection. Because of two very young kids our board game time has been reduced to almost nothing, but nonetheless, I/we’ve managed to squeeze in about 150 plays. That’s even better than last year! Here’s a collage of all board games I played in 2025 along with the amount of plays on the bottom right of each cover, ranked from most played to least: Board game plays in the last year: 150 plays. A few side notes. For some weird reason, the play count is not accurate. For example, BGG records I’ve played Regicide four times, which is correct. Still, the BG Stats app refuses to print out a nice yearly overview with accurate numbers. Also, note that most games that are heavily played (on the top) are short games . That’s for a very good reason! Mage Knight, a notoriously long-winded one, was played exactly once to see how stuff works. I guess that means there’s a lot of room for more joyful gaming and I don’t need to spend more money to reap those benefits! Since getting together becomes more difficult with a crying toddler and baby, squeezing in quick solo (card) games became the norm: Kingdom Legacy (10 plays), Reforest (9), Conservas (8) are all examples of those that can be played on the coach. Yet I’m still proud that we played some more heavy hitters like SETI (5) and… wait… Great Western Trail (2)? Ok fine, SETI is the only bigger game that appeared once in a while. Compared to 2024 , the “one-off” plays weren’t that dramatic. It still fills one third of the above image but we replayed more games than we did test new ones and that’s a good thing. the H-index for 2025 was 5, which I could have gamed by playing one more round of French Quarter. Here’s the BGG Plays tool graph: Visualizing plays logged on BoardGameGeek including a 10x10 challenge highlight. The tail end isn’t as long as in 2024 and I managed to colour in almost all die in the 10x10 challenge rectangle! If you watch closely you’ll see that most of these die are one-sided meaning a solo play session. Games like Conservas and Kingdom Legacy are very quick and quite casual which plays (ha!) in their favour of returning to the table (or couch) the next evening. There haven’t been any big campaign games like last year’s Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion—thank god for that. Dorfromantik Sakura that I picked up in SPIEL Essen this year is strictly speaking campaign-based but very light to the touch and we enjoy it quite a lot. We’re very close to unlocking box 3 and it’s possible to start multiple campaigns for other friend groups. As was the case last year, 6/159 or 3.7% of the plays were three-player or higher sessions. That’s marginally better than last year’s 2%. I’ve come to accept that buying games that are only great with three or more will never end up in our shelf as they’ll barely see the daylight. Hopefully a friend reading this will buy Cosmic Encounter and invite me over. So which of these plays were new plays—or to put it differently: which of the games are my “new” 2025 GOTY games? I’ll once again split this between games I played but don’t own: And the games we enjoyed the most and also own: The jury is still out on Mage Knight (will probably love this), Great Western Trail, Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition and all the other low play ones. We like Sky Team a lot but if you play it too often or play multiple sessions in rapid succession it can become boring. It’s very clear for me: SETI is my GOTY. It feels weird not to own it but it would be silly to buy it as one of my regular co-players owns it. Games I didn’t care for and will probably be looking to sell: Click A Tree (first play was disappointing), Cascadia: Rolling Hills (a mediocre roll-and-write), Let’s Go! To Japan (not mine but it didn’t click for me even though the art is great), Ora et Labora (an old friend that became a big long slog), and Conservas (it’s very good but once you finish the campaign and know how it works it’s dull). It seems that we did buy quite a few roll and write games : Dinosaur Island is very cool, Rajas of the Ganges is good but not great, and I had high hopes for French Quarter as the designer is the one who invented previous year’s GOTY Three Sisters. For me, I don’t think any other roll and write will ever beat that game. I’m looking forward to receiving the wonderfully weird Dark Venture skirmish game, unwrapping Spirit Island and Earthborne Rangers, and buying The Fate of the Fellowship! Related topics: / boardgames / lists / yearnote / By Wouter Groeneveld on 3 January 2026. Reply via email . 💖 SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence —clearly the Euro game of the year, what a banger. A must play. 💖 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Trick Taking Game —what can I say, I love trick taking games . 💖 The Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition —a classic in a gigantic box that plays itself. It was the first time this year I played a proper Burgundy game. 💖 Dorfromantik Sakura —We have yet to discover most of what the game has to offer and already like it a lot. 💖 Reforest —Last year I nominated Forest Shuffle but perhaps I even like this nature-themed card placement game more.

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Brain Baking 2 weeks ago

2025 In Video Games

It’s that time of the year—the time to publish the yearly notes summarizing playtime statistics and providing a personal opinion on recent and vintage Game Of The Year (GOTY) contestants. In 2023 , Pizza Tower and Tactics Ogre: Reborn were examples of superb recent games that even made it to the Top 100 List , while DUSK and Plants vs. Zombies scored high in the vintage list (both also on the Top 100). In 2024 , Skald and the Paper Mario remake were the great ones, but the most memorable experience was no doubt playing Ultima Underworld for the first time together for the DOS Game Club. For 2025, the amount of games recorded on my retro gaming site remains the same as the previous year—27—but this year I also started occasionally reviewing board games that I replay at least ten times. Here’s this year’s collage of the games I (re)played this year in chronological order: A collage of the 2025 GOTY contestants. I have yet to write a review for Shotgun King so let’s keep that one out. It’s a small indie roguelike that’s fun but doesn’t have a lot to offer. Also, since this post is called 2025 in Video Games , let’s ignore the board games for now and keep that for a future post where I summarise my Board Game Geek statistics. Some more useless stats, based on user input from How Long To Beat (HLTB): Last year, about 50% of my gaming time took place on the Switch. That’s dropped to 40%. Or has it? Remove the six board games and you’ve got 52% so nope, I’m still primarily a Nintendo (handheld) gamer. I have a bunch of cartridges waiting to be played and I believe even a few cases still in shrink wrap (yeah I know), so for the coming year, that’s not likely to change either. I don’t need a Switch 2 just yet. For more details on those divisions by platform, I again reused last year’s script to generate a graph summarizing the platforms and calculates an average score (rated on 5, see about the rating system ) for each platform: A bar chart of (average) scores per platform. Most mediocre plays game from platforms where I was hunting down card games for my feature write-up on card games back in September. Filtering all games that are scored as either great (4/5) or amazing (5/5), we end with the following lists, where I further cherry-picked the best of the best: The Recent GOTY list: Couch “recent” cough . Yeah, again—I know. What can I say, I’m a retro gamer, and the “new games” I play are usually repurposed old ones, go figure. This seems to be especially apparent this year. Those Nightdive Studios boomer shooter remakes are beyond awesome, you’ve got to try them! The Vintage GOTY list: I found 2024 to be a meagre year for me when it comes to “the great ones”—because I don’t play many of those within the year of release. I have the same feeling for this year, looking back at the play log. There are many great games I highly enjoyed such as Wonder Boy with the awesome art and music and ability to switch back and forth between retro and remastered version, or Hoyle Card Games , the PC classic that’s hard to beat when it comes to trumping the trump. I love Celeste and Castlevania Dominus Collection but those were replays of games I know by heart, so I’m ruling them out. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere. And then there’s Inscryption . What a game. No, what an experience that was! I was on the edge of my seat almost every single in-game minute. I played it in January (read my thoughts but beware of the spoilers) and didn’t encounter a game that challenged my expectations that much ever since. There’s no need for a debate or a voting round: Inscryption is my “Game of the Other Year”. It’s in the Top100 . As for the GOTY of 2025-ish; that’s got to be one of the Nightdive remakes. Both Blood: Refreshed Supply and the Outlaws remaster have been released recently and I haven’t yet had the change to touch either of them. If I had, I think Blood might have been the winner as that’s the only Build Engine game I never truly played back in the nineties. Screw it. DOOM + DOOM II is my GOTY. Just the music alone: And that’s from the new Legacy of Rust expansion. I’ll leave the discovery of Andrew Hulshult’s DOOM riffs up to you. Obviously, DOOM + DOOM II (2024) kicked out and replaced DOOM (1993) in the Top100. Cheers to 2026. My hopes are high for opening that shrink wrap. Related topics: / games / goty / lists / yearnote / By Wouter Groeneveld on 30 December 2025. Reply via email . total #games: 27 total hours: 175.8 average hours: 6.51 average a day: 0.5 longest game: 28.0 hours; ‘Castlevania Dominus Collection’ shortest game: 0.0 hours; Hoyle Card Games 2002 Divison by platform: Platform: pc (5/27) Platform: ds (3/27) Platform: boardgames (6/27) Platform: gameboycolor (1/27) Platform: switch (11/27) Platform: snes (1/27) 💖 Guncho (pc; 2024) 💖 Shogun Showdown (switch; 2023) 💖 Rise Of The Triad: Ludicrous Edition (switch; 2023) 💖 Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (switch; 2024) 💖 DOOM + DOOM II (pc; 2024) 💖 Castlevania Dominus Collection (switch; 2024) 💖 Hoyle Card Games 2002 (pc; 2002) 💖 Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap (switch; 2017) 💖 Tangle Tower (switch; 2019) 💖 Celeste (switch; 2018) 💖 Inscryption (switch; 2021)

Rust

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Brain Baking 2 weeks ago

I Changed Jobs (Again)

After two years of being back in the (enterprise) software engineering industry, I’m back out. In January 2024, I wrote a long post about leaving academia ; why I couldn’t get a foot in the door; why I probably didn’t try hard enough; and my fears of losing touch with practice. Well guess what. I’m back into education. I wouldn’t dare to call it academia though: I’m now a lecturer at a local university college, where I teach applied computer science. While the institution is quite active in conducting (applied) research, I’m not a part of it. Contrary to my last job in education, where I divided my time between 50% teaching and 50% research, this time, my job is 100% teaching. It feels weird to write about my professional journey the last two years. In September 2023, I received my PhD in Engineering Technology and was in constant dubio state whether to try and stick around or return to my roots—the software engineering industry. My long practical experience turned out to be a blessing for the students but a curse for any tenure track: not enough papers published, not enough cool looking venues to stick on the CV. So I left. I wanted a bit more freedom and I started freelancing under my own company. At my first client, I was a tech lead and Go programmer. Go was fun until got the better of me, but the problem wasn’t Go, it was enterprise IT, mismanagement, over-ambitiousness, and of course, Kubernetes. I forgot why I turned to education in the first place. I regretted leaving academia and felt I made the wrong choice. About a year later, an ex-colleague called and asked if I was in need of a new job. I wasn’t, and yet I was. I joined their startup and the lack of meetings and ability to write code for a change felt like a breath of fresh air. Eight months later, we had a second kid. Everything changed—again. While we hoped for the best, the baby turned out to be as troublesome as the first: 24/7 crying (ourselves included), excessively puking sour milk, forgoing sleeping, … We’re this close ( gestures wildly ) to a mental breakdown. Then the eldest got ill and had to go to the hospital. Then my wife got ill and had to go to the hospital. I’m still waiting on my turn, I guess it’s only a matter of time. Needless to say, my professional aspirations took a deep dive. I tried to do my best to keep up with everything, both at home and at work, but had the feeling that I was failing at both. Something had to give. Even though my client was still satisfied with my work, I quit. The kids were the tipping point, but that wasn’t the only reason: the startup environment didn’t exactly provide ample opportunities to coach/teach others, which was something that I sorely missed even though I didn’t realise this in the beginning. Finding another client with more concrete coaching/teaching opportunities would have been an option but it wouldn’t suddenly provide breathing room. I’m currently replacing someone who went the other way and he had a 70% teaching assignment. In the coming semester, There’s 30% more waiting for me. Meanwhile, I can assist my wife in helping with the baby. There are of course other benefits from working in education, such as having all school holidays off, which is both a blessing (we’re screwed otherwise) and a curse (yay more kids-time instead of me-time). That also means I’m in the process of closing down my own business. Most people will no doubt declare me crazy: from freelancing in IT to a government contract with fixed pay scales in (IT) education—that’s quite a hefty downgrade, financially speaking. Or is it? I tried examining these differences before . We of course did our calculations to see if it would be a possibility. Still, it feels a bit like a failure, having to close the books on Brain Baking BV 1 . Higher education institutions don’t like working with freelance teachers and this time I hope I’m in there for the long(er) run. I could of course still do something officially “on the side” but who am I kidding? This article should have been published days ago but didn’t because of pees in pants, screams at night and over-tiredness of both parents. The things I’m teaching now are not very familiar to me: Laravel & Filament, Vue, React Native. They’re notably front-end oriented and much more practical than I’m used to but meanwhile I’m learning and I’m helping others to learn. I’ve already been able to enthuse a few students by showing them some debugging tools, shortcuts, and other things on the side, but I’m not fooling myself: like in every schooling environment, there are plenty of students less than willing to swallow what you have to say. That’s another major thing I have to learn: to be content. To do enough. To convince myself I don’t need to do more. I’ve stopped racing along with colleagues that are willing to fight to climb some kind of invisible ladder long ago. At least, I think I did: sometimes I still feel a sudden stab of jealousy when I hear they got tenured as a professor or managed to do x or y. At this very moment, managing to crawl in and out of bed will do. BV is the Belgian equivalent to LLC. ↩︎ Related topics: / jobs / By Wouter Groeneveld on 25 December 2025. Reply via email . BV is the Belgian equivalent to LLC. ↩︎

JavaScript

Php

Career

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Brain Baking 3 weeks ago

Getting Emacs And MacOS To Play Nice

What a nightmare. Yet another reason (previously the never-ending flow of bloat ) to switch back from MacOS to a proper *Nix environment. I thought installing an old editor would be as simple as issuing a single “fetch me that package, will you” command. But I was so very wrong. Expect more of these “Emacs Journey” posts in-between the regular ones. Apologies if they’re completely useless to you: I need to have this on record. First: there are multiple Emacs-es out there, which one do you want? There’s Aquamacs , the vanilla Emacs ( ) which you should avoid if you want Doom or Spacemacs, and a few more that are listed in the Doom Emacs Getting Started Guide . refused to compile and the official package is not on v30 yet. Others do not provide —confusingly, there’s two binaries: the you run inside a terminal as a non-GUI editor, and the GUI one. Ultimately, this worked (and natively compiled): But then you’re stuck with a symlink as an app which Alfred refuses to recognize. On top of that, the Pro Way (TM) to start Emacs is to spawn clients and have a daemon running in the background. Since I want to experiment and make use of the feature that enables me to load different configs, I created a custom launch agent for this called (my Emacs config collection is to be called bakemacs ): that baby and off we go. The second part, starting a client, is a shell script that Automator wrapped into a “native MacOS Application” to fool Alfred et al.: I learned the hard way that you can make use of in case the client can’t find the daemon in case something killed it. Or someone. Yes, you. Me? Stop pressing ! This sends a terminate command from the client to the daemon who owns it and kills that one as well. Just delete the frame instead. Since I can’t remember all that and the Q pressing is an old habit that Dies Hard (TM), just rewire the key: And then your spell checker breaks: : Searching for program: No such file or directory, . Of course a path issue. There are several options here, I went with Yet Another Package that spawns a shell and steals its so I can mange it externally: Are we there yet? No. The application icon is butt-ugly and slightly bigger than the others. Go to https://macosicons.com/ , search for “emacs”, get yourself a nice one, press “Get Info” on your Automator-generated app, replace that icon, replace the one from the Homebrew Cellar as well, and finally kill more MacOS stuff with fire: Some Emacs builds feature the icon with Homebrew build flags but this doesn’t fix our requirement to use , not . Are we there yet? No. Throw in a bunch of smooth sailing scroll commands that make Emacs a bit more trackpad-friendly: Are we there yet? That depends. Would you like to keep the icon in the dock? In that case, we’re still screwed as Mac thinks the client is another app and convincing it otherwise or using tricks like setting doesn’t seem to work. At this point, I got tired of fighting and gave up. For me, (Alfred) + (finding “Bakemacs”) and jamming enter is good enough. I guess I’ll also create an alias called to quickly whip up a client from a terminal, although I’ve heard you should be running terminals and browsers and Emacs inside Emacs. Scrolling still is a bit annoying because the point keeps on chugging along, making it for a less than optimally smooth experience. At least I managed to get image zooming via pinch zoom on a trackpad working—take that, Sublime! Related topics: / emacs / macos / By Wouter Groeneveld on 20 December 2025. Reply via email .

Tutorial

Open Source

Shell

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Brain Baking 4 weeks ago

Properly Preparing Tea While Shaving An Emacs Yak

Hey wow I’m typing this from Emacs! For the first time in more than a decade I decided to see if my beloved Sublime Text could be superseded with software that’s more than twice as old. It’s day four so far, and I’ve been nothing but confused in trying to get it up and running to my tastes, but the journey has kept me on my toes. I’ve disabled Evil mode for now, I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. But I digress. Tea. Right. Wait, the compilation window is acting weird, but I think I just killed that buffer and replaced its contents with this one so now I see two Markdown files in two separate windows while I should have ed instead. I have no idea what I’m doing! Wait, press —no, —and make it serve files instead. But I digress. Tea. Right. It’s actually not that difficult to properly prepare a cup, except that it is. Most people I know are coffee drinkers, and most coffee drinkers I know—which is most people I know, mostly—completely hate drinking green tea. That’s because of two things: one; its caffeine kick does nothing compared to the brown beans, and two; it’s bitter! To make matters worse, most of the teas I order in cafe—caf, wait what? Oh. Evaluate . é. é. Ok, let’s continue—cafés are atrocious. Not just because of the cheap tea bags sold for a ridiculous amount of money, but because cooking water is poured on it, regardless of the kind of tea. Why are these words so weirdly wrapped? Give me a minute, that’s not right. Nothing can’t fix, right? But that completely breaks my treemacs package so I’ll have to resort to visual line mode but not in that package… Won’t be a minute, stay with me! Okay, that’s better. Where was I? How many words we’re at? Unknown? What kind of a powerline are you supposed to be if you don’t show me that? Won’t be a minute, stay with me! Is that ? Looks like it? But I digress. Tea. Right. I listed lots of green teas in my —wait, wouldn’t it be cool if I could get an auto-completed list of potential links within this Hugo blog post project, only while in Markdown mode? I think I’ll need Corfu for that, and possibly also Cape.el ? After hours of fruitlessly shaving that yak, my friend Gemini spewed out something that I understood but was in no position to replicate given my pitiful knowledge of Elisp: But boy that’s handy after binding it to ! Look at this: my previous tea reviews . Ka-boom and it’s there! The hardcore tinkering is already paying off, this already proves to be a more productive writing environment than Sublime. Don’t tell HQ. Looks like I do have to re-type the Projectile run/compile command every time I close Emacs though. Is adding a the Emacs way to store these settings? I guess? But why does it take at least three seconds to load the Brain Baking project? Because it’s using Lisp to find all files instead of using something like or , of course. There, , fixed. Where were we? Tea? Green? I don’t remember. Don’t pour boiling hot water on top of these leaves! Instead, use eighty degrees Celsius at most, preferably even a bit cooler. Another tip: don’t steep for too long. Count a few Mississippi’s, but don’t do it the Ross way. Hang on a minute, I think I’m confused again: isn’t the projectile command map shortcut, it’s the built-in project one! That means that local file isn’t needed anyway. won’t be enough across restarts though, so I guess we’ll be bringing in yet another package: . Two hours later, my humble idea of saving compile command history still doesn’t work: projectile saves it as a hashset, not list, that savehist can’t serialize. Adding custom hooks to convert data types fails as the trigger order of events gets me confused even more. This yak suddenly got much, much bigger. At least I managed to implement pinch zooming on images. Which, now that I try it again, is broken? Oh. I think I need another cup of tea. Related topics: / tea / emacs / By Wouter Groeneveld on 17 December 2025. Reply via email .

Open Source

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Mariage Frères Tea Reviews

It’s been almost five years since I wrote about tea. We just Refreshed our Supplies ( get it? ) and feel the need to store my thoughts on the various Mariage Frères (MF) teas we’ve bought over the years. I’ve been a faithful fan ever since drinking a Mariage Frères teabag on a team building session somewhere in 2012. Call me a snob, and while Palais des Thés and Whittard are generally a great choice as well, most MF teas are simply better. I even went to Paris and London just to get a new batch of MF tea. Their webshop was non-existent—it still is crappy now but functional. As they ship from France, shipping to Belgium usually is . No worries though, add a couple of hundred grams and you’ll hit the free shipping quota in no-time. Ouch. This post was inspired by Seb’s tea reviews post . Seb employs Day of the Tentacle Hoagies to score the teas. Since my retro gaming codex uses Goblins 3 Blounts , it seemed appropriate to apply here as well. Consider this my personal Steepster database . The following list is a reconstruction of purchase histories from my notebooks: Bloomfield Darjeeling A spring first flush tea labelled SFTGFOP1 : Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. Don’t worry if your initial reaction to that is Huh? : it’s a tea grading term denoting this is one of the highest qualities Dajeerling tea you can get, with the worst being labelled as D : Dust. That’s what inside a regular tea bag. Schol . I love this Bloomfield. It’s the best Darjeeling I ever gulped down. It’s also one of the most expensive coming in at around per (in 2022, that was !). It’s subtle, not bitter if you steep it too long, has a lovely golden colour, can be re-steeped, and does not hit as hard as longer fermented black teas. 5 out of 5 Blounts—Amazing. Namring Royal Upper I’m a big fan of Darjeeling tea: here’s another high quality variant from one of the oldest and largest tea estates in the Indian city. I love to think it looks as picturesque as this Wikipedia plantation photo , but in reality, it will no doubt be a lot of hard work to carefully pluck the best Orange Pekoe leaves each season. We bought Namring to see if Bloomfield could be beaten. It couldn’t—the difference is negligible and this one is even more expensive. Still great, though. 4 out of 5 Blounts—Great. Earl Grey Provence This must have been the first typical black Mariage Frères canister I’ve ever bought. I chanced upon it whilst Christmas shopping in a new cooking shop in my home town that’s unfortunately long gone now. Earl Grey Provence is what it says it is: it’s Earl Grey tea with a dose of Provence: lavender. My wife thinks it smells like bath water when I prepare a cup, but I don’t care. The combination is perfect, and the smell is more intense than the taste. It’s not the highest quality/biggest leaves black tea they selected for this mix but it’s not expensive either. If you like your Grey Earl -y (ha!) in the morning, try adding some lavender. Ingenious. 5 out of 5 Blounts—Amazing. Roi Des Earl Grey We must have bought kilos of Early Grey Provence , so to spice things up, last year I bought another Earl Grey variant: the king of the Earl Greys. Well… not so much. It’s good, but the typical citrus-y flavour comes on a bit too strong in this one, since there’s nothing else in it. I’ll consider buying it again once in a while but it won’t beat Provence. 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. Chaï Chandernagor Like I told you, I’m a sucker for Indian tea when it comes to black ones, and “chaï” is not an exception. The term is usually used in the west (or at least here?) to describe spiced black tea where adding a dollop of milk is maybe perhaps a little bit allowed. This mix doesn’t just have cloves but some ginger and other stuff as well. Unfortunately, the black tea as a base is of relatively low quality and quite fine-grained. I’ll admit: I prefer Palais des Thés’ simpler but more robust Chaï— not the Imperial one with the red pepper but the one with just cloves. 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. Chaï Parisien Another variant of spiced black tea with mellow fruity notes that come across as too mellow to me. If I want to drink a spiced black tea, I want to feel the kicker, not try to get the tongue tingled with “mellow fruity notes”. This one wasn’t what I expect of a “chaï”. 2 out of 5 Blounts—Mediocre. A selection of the typical black Mariage Frères tea canisters from our cupboard. The first MF tea I ever tasted and the one that got me hooked. It’s a pure Japanese sencha tea grown near the foot of the Fuji-Yama mountain with that typical grassy flavour. The dried leaves even are long and small, reminiscent of dried grass. It’s easy to screw up a batch by using too hot water or letting it steep for too long. It’s been a while since we bought it because we’re venturing into other flavours right now, but you can’t go wrong with this if you’re looking for a clean well-rounded tea to drink all day. Sencha is the most popular tea in Japan. If prepared well, the result is an appealingly looking greenish liquid. If overdone or prepared with too hot water, it’ll yellow. 4 out of 5 Blounts—Great. Tamaryokucha A grassy variant of the above that edges to the too grassy side for me. Weird, as tamaryokucha is usually considered milder than typical sencha tea. I cleaned out the tin today: we bought it over six years ago and I threw out almost half of it. Not because it’s bad, but because you’ve got to be in the right mood to drink this and there are others that somehow find their way into the tea strainer before it. Maybe try out Fuji-Yama first? The term Ryokucha literally translates to “green tea” and is the parent category of sencha (steamed) and other pan-fried green teas. It’s again unoxidized hence its bright green hue. Mental note: I should explore more Japanese teas. 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. Thai Mountain (rebranded to Royal Thai Tea) According to MF, “A gourmet tea that whisks us away to the heart of Asia”. The tea leaves are hand-rolled into tiny balls that slowly open as it steeps, unleashing round milky flavours. It’s hard to describe and not very cheap but you only need a few “balls” and it can be re-steeped multiple times. It’s unique enough to warrant a spot in your tea cabinet, although I’m unsure about its staying qualities. It was gifted to me and I have yet to buy a new batch, but I welcomed the occasional Thai Mountain cup during the day. 4 out of 5 Blounts—Great. Not necessarily to be categorized as “pure”. Another typical Japanese green tea mixed with roasted rice. I have yet to drink this one but bought it because the last genmai cha I got from the Portland Japanese Garden was amazing, although that one also contained a bit of matcha. To be rated soon! Marco Polo Vert This is MF’s flagship tea that’s available as black, green, blue (yeah don’t ask), and white teas. It’s got a balanced flowery and fruity taste that leans towards vanilla—literally and figuratively. The tea is a good entry point towards more flowery/sweet-ish green teas—it’s their flagship for a reason—if that is what you’re after. After we finished our supply, I don’t think I’m inclined to buy more. 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. A beautiful limited edition canister served for a beautiful price (at this point of writing a dazzling per ) but worth it if you’re a true tea believer. The green tea selected for this delicate infusion of plum blossoms is great and the fruity tones are not overwhelming. It’s simply a superb fruity green tea. Too bad that stupid canister and the limited availability drives up the price. 5 out of 5 Blounts—Amazing. Sakura 2000 One of the first fruity MF green teas that we tried and we keep reaching for. Personally, I’d prefer Ume, but given the big price difference and the fact that my wife prefers cherry blossom over plum blossom, we always buy a package of Sakura when ordering online. The flavour is perhaps a bit too much and after years of drinking it, it can get a bit repetitive, but if you don’t know what fruity tea to get and your budget is limited, make it this one. 4 out of 5 Blounts—Great. Sweet Shanghaï A rather heavily perfumed tea with hints and notes of a bit of everything, from rose leaves to exotic fruits. I liked it a lot at first, but the more I drank it, the less enthusiastic I became. I’d rather have a single dominating flavour than a sweet Shanghaï explosion. Still, I wouldn’t say no to it. It’s on par with Marco Polo, I guess. 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. Vert Amande I used to be very into almonds. I still like a good chunk of marzipan during the local Sinterklaas festivities, but it should stay outside my tea, thank you very much. Almond scented tea tends to become almond water with traces of tea, and this one is no exception. 1 out of 5 Blounts—Bad. Jasmin Imperial “‘The King of Jasmine Teas’ is made with very rare green tea.”, as stated by MF. As jasmine green tea fans, We tried three different jasmine flavours, and this one hits the sweet spot, although the differences are perhaps too small. The added difficulty is that we stocked these three teas at different times so couldn’t do a direct comparison. Feel free to pick whatever you desire, but a jasmine green tea should always be part of your default tea attire. 4 out of 5 Blounts—Great. Grand Jasmin Beauty Brown-silver dried green tea buds/leaves that result in a golden liquid which can be easily confused by Darjeeling tea. It’s still jasmine, only at per , a bit too expensive to notice the biggest difference in flavour. I’m sure objectively speaking it’s got a slight edge over Jasmin Imperial. 4 out of 5 Blounts—Great. Jasmin Monkey King Green tea from Hunan scented with jasmine flowers. More gray-greenish than the jasmine teas above. We found this one to be the least impressive jasmine tea—I think? It’s been a while, this year we only stocked Jasmin Imperial. As far as I can remember, it was still good. 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. I was curious about pure white tea but now I’m not any more. It’s just not for me: it tastes like… nothing? White tea is very delicate, and perhaps my Earl Grey Provence and spiced Chaï got my taste buds confused. The leaves are beautiful, and however I try to prepare it, I just don’t like it. I’d rather not drink it. 1 out of 5 Blounts—Bad. Pavillon De Laque Same problem as Paï Mu Tan but slightly less so due to the added fragrances of mild spices. The blue flowers lend it a nice and colourful touch but for us it’s not a saving grace. I guess we’re just not white tea people. The fact that this tea is the most expensive in this entire list— per —doesn’t make it better. I kind of feel cheated. 2 out of 5 Blounts—Mediocre. White Rhapsody Just when I thought “okay let’s skip all white teas from now on”, my mother-in-law gifts me a canister of White Rhapsody. I read the label—scented white tea—and moan. Still, I politely accept the gift, put on the kettle, and take a sip. Holy shit! This tea is amazing! I don’t know what MF did to make this work, or perhaps it’s because we drink a lot of flowery green tea, but I love the combination of what they call “summery nuances evoking peach, apricot and fig”. Highly recommended. I was distraught when I learned it was out of stock when I placed a new order last week. 5 out of 5 Blounts—Amazing. Rouge Pleine Lune This one’s a rooibos tea mostly flavoured with almonds. And despite my last remark about almonds in teas, this time, the combination seems to mostly work. I’m not a huge rooibos expert and only occasionally drink it plain. We’ve had this one in a back shelf for years and I recently decided to give it another go. It’s not half bad but I wouldn’t be inclined to order more. 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. Pu-erh Suprême Curious to fermented pu-erh teas, I ordered my first one last week. I just had a cup and must have done something wrong: it was surprisingly bland. Perhaps it needs more heat, I treated it like green tea. I’ll give it a few more goes before putting up a rating. To be rated soon! Related topics: / tea / By Wouter Groeneveld on 11 December 2025. Reply via email .

Writing

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Pascale De Backer Likes Playing On The Game Gear

After pointing out yesterday that Sinterklaas likes the Game Boy , I feel I need to make it up to Sega. It wasn’t that difficult to come up with a counterargument that’s also part of the Flemish canon . In F.C. De Kampioenen (“The Champions”), a long running Flemish sitcom about misunderstandings and misadventures of a lowly ranked football team, Pascale De Backer—the ex-wife of the ex-trainer of the club that runs the café that is not of René 1 —has been pictured playing the Game Gear: Pascale playing Sonic on the Game Gear. Copyright VRT 2001. Pascale is playing the mobile version of Sonic in season 12, episode 2 called Stoelendans (dancing chairs I guess?). For exactly ten seconds, we hear the iconic theme song of Sonic playing and the ploing jumping sound as she presses the buttons, before throwing the thing aside and calling her daughter. She’s alone that evening and having a hard time adjusting after her daughter and son-in-law just moved out. Bieke, her daughter, is fed up with Pascale constant checking up on her. This is different from Sinterklaas playing the Game Boy for a few key reasons. First, Sinterklaas is having fun, while Pascale is just seeking a distraction and doesn’t know what to do with herself. Second, Sinterklaas, being the saint of the children, is an authority when it comes to toys, while Pascale is just a lonely café owner. Yet De Kampioenen , with more than twenty seasons, is one of the most watched Flemish TV shows of all time, and loved by virtually everyone—even the ones who saw the unfortunate downfall after season eight or so. The strangest part of this very short Game Gear appearance is that episode 2 of season 12 originally aired in 2001—the launch year of the Game Boy Advance. The GBA got to us Europeans in the late summer of 2001, and season 2 aired the 15th December 2001. Why didn’t they have Pascale play Mario Advance ? At first, I couldn’t trace the exact episode in which the above scene takes place. Being the handheld game nerd that I am, I remembered the Game Gear scene, but I misremembered the period. I went looking for it in seasons five, six, and seven because my mind reconstructed the scene as a time period correct one, when the Game Gear was in full motion. Considered it ever was in motion at all. Dang it, I did it again, sorry Sega. Perhaps the crew asked Danni Heylen who portrayed Pascale to bring a handheld device. “We’re gonna do a scene in which you’re lonely and bored, bring an electronic device to play on the couch so our viewers can place the feeling”. If she brought a Game Boy—any Game Boy would do here—she certainly wouldn’t be bored. Ah dang it, again!? The Game Gear was discontinued in 1997, only six years after its initial release. Four years later, it pops up in F.C. De Kampioenen . It turns out to be next to impossible to find local historical sales data to see when the popularity of the Game Gear dipped into obscureness here in Belgium. I do remember Sega being stronger than initially suspected: we had a Mega Drive instead of a SNES and a buddy did own the Game Gear. Me and my sisters didn’t: we went the Game Boy—and later, Color—route. The suspected reasons for that? A couple: Yes, it’s got colours, but that’s basically it. Technically, the Game Gear was essentially a shrunken down Sega Master System, which was impressive considering the Game Boy couldn’t even emulate the NES until the 1998 Color revision came by. So why does Pascale like hers so much? The still image I captured might evoke “liking” but the scene in motion does not do a very good job at convincing potential buyers. For that, we’ll need Sinterklaas. Mijn Gedacht . For the international reader enticed by this piece of excellent writing, here’s one of my favourite episodes of the TV show called Doping available on YouTube. ↩︎ Related topics: / game gear / flemish culture / tv shows / By Wouter Groeneveld on 7 December 2025. Reply via email . The overabundance of Game Boy games available back then (on school playgrounds, during vacation trips, in shops, …) The GB’s 4 batteries lasted for 20 hours. The GG’s 6 batteries for nearly 4. The GG initially sold for —that’s almost nowadays. The GB? The Pocket revision released in 1996 started at . That’s less than half the price! Who are you going to Link Cable Play Tetris and Mortal Kombat with if you were the poor soul with rich parents that got you a Game Gear for Christmas? For the international reader enticed by this piece of excellent writing, here’s one of my favourite episodes of the TV show called Doping available on YouTube. ↩︎

Television

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Sinterklaas Likes Playing On The Game Boy

Today marks the yearly departure of Sinterklaas who, together with his faithful friend Zwarte Piet , makes his way back to sunny Spain—by horse and steamboat, of course. The festivities on the sixth of December are not to celebrate his departure but to celebrate the name day of Saint Nicholas, patron saint of the children, on which Sinterklaas is based. For those of you outside of Europe thinking “Hey, Sinterklaas sounds a lot like our Santa Claus”, well guess what: Sinterklaas was here first and your Santa is just a poor imitation. In The Netherlands and Belgium, Sinterklaas is a very popular tradition, where during the run up to today, even from half of November, children can put an empty shoe somewhere near the mantelpiece in the hope of the Sint (“the saint”) and Piet visiting the house (via the roof and said mantelpiece) to drop some candy in the children’s shoes. This is usually a combination of marzipan, onze-lieve-vrouw guimauves (harder marshmellows shaped like Mary), nic-nac letterkoekjes , speculaas ( spiced cookies ), and of course various chocolate figures. The popularity of Sinterklaas inevitably also means TV shows, live shows, specialized pop-up shops, school parties, and more. In the early nineties, the then Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep (BRT) broadcaster hosted two seasons of the Dag Sinterklaas show featuring Jan Decleir as the Sint, Frans Van der Aa as Zwarte Piet, and Bart Peeters as the innocent visitor asking nosy questions on how the duo operates. Like many Flemish eighties/nineties kids, Dag Sinterklaas is permanently burned into my brain as part of my youth. The episode called Speelgoed (toys) from the second season is especially memorable for me, as we catch the Goedheiligen Man (The Good Saint) playing… on a Game Boy! Jan Decleir as Sinterklaas, trying to figure out a shoot-em-up on the Game Boy. Copyright BRT, 1993. In the episode, Sinterklaas is annoyed by the beeps and boops coming from Zwarte Piet’s Game Boy. Piet is usually portrayed as a (too) playful character that likes to fool around instead of doing the serious stuff such as reading the Spanish newspapers and updating the Dakenkaart (rooftop chart) needed to navigate the rooftops when dropping off presents. While Bart visits, Sinterklaas showcases that “simple toys” are much more enjoyable. He encourages them to play with dusty old dolls and a toll. Eventually, Piet and Bart make it outside whilst playing horse, only to catch the Sint grabbing Piet’s Game Boy to figure out for himself what these so-called compinuter spelletjes (computer games) are about. Hilarious. Of course, that was the perfect advert for Nintendo’s handheld, especially considering the upcoming Christmas holiday period. In 1993, lots of amazing Game Boy games were released, including Link’s Awakening , Kirby’s Pinball Land , Duck Tales 2 , Turtles III: Radical Rescue , and Tetris 2 . It would be next to impossible to go after the Flemish sales data of the machine to try and prove a correlation, but if the Sint likes playing on the Game Boy, and the Sint is thé person that gets to decide what kids can play with, then why bother getting your kid a Game Gear, right? Sorry, Sega. Perhaps I even got a Game Boy game thrown down the chimney, I can’t remember. All I can remember is the chocolate, marzipan, and VHS tapes of Disney movies. I have searched high and low for a Dutch Club Nintendo Magazine that contains a message from the Sint and came up empty, but Volume 2 Issue 6 in 1990 contained a lovely letter from Santa Mario: A partial of a Christmas letter from Mario in the Dutch Club Nintendo Magazine, 1990. Copyright Nintendo. Replace the goofy Christmas hat with the mijter (mitra) of Sinterklaas, add a staff, and we’re there. Dag Sinterklaas is undeniably a local cult hit. The DVDs are nowhere to be found, and the few copies surfacing the local second hand )e)markets go for outrageous prices. Cherishing our copy, this year is the first year we watched the episodes together with our daughter. She doesn’t have the patience to sit through some of the longer ones but it’s a giant nostalgic injection seeing Jan and Frans back in action. BRT—now VRT; Flemish instead of Belgian—aired the series every single year until 2018. In 2019, because of the ageing image quality (and probably the emerging woke culture), twenty new episodes were produced. However, in my view, Wim Opbrouck never managed to truly capture the Sint’s spirit like Jan did, and Jonas Van Thielen as Zwarte Piet is just not as funny as Frans. So we’ll be stuck in Dag Sinterklaas 1992-1993 mode for the next eight or so year, until our kids realize the big ruse. And even then. I will be keeping up the tradition. Related topics: / gameboy / sinterklaas / By Wouter Groeneveld on 6 December 2025. Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Favourites of November 2025

The more holiday seasons I see coming and going, the less enthused I am by the forced celebration that tastes an awful lot like capitalism. I put up my gift guide anyway, just in case anyone is willing to buy me that dough mixer, otherwise I’ll have to do it in January as an early expense for the upcoming year. Thanks in advance! There isn’t a lot of mental space left to prepare for celebrations anyway, with the second kid giving us an equally hard time as the first. Anyway. Welcome, last month of the year, I guess. The first one who plays Last Christmas is out . Previous month: September 2025 . Not really. None, to be very precise. But I did buy yet another one: Mara van der Lugt’s Hopeful Pessimism , which sounded like it was written for me. I expect equally great and miserable things from this work. I’ve only had the time to write the review for Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition (ROTT) that I ended up buying for the Nintendo Switch thanks to Limited Run Games’ stock overflow. It felt wonderfully weird to be playing a 1994 DOS cult classic on the Switch. And yes, the Ludicrous Edition is ludicrous . I finally made it past the third map! I’m still feeling the retro shooter vibe and bought the Turok Trilogy on a whim after learning it was also done by Nightdive Studios. Another smaller game I played in-between the ROTT sessions was Shotgun King that somehow manages to combine chess with shotguns, and very successfully so. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a bare bones roguelike, difficult as hell, and therefore not really my forte. I have yet to unlock all the shotguns. Don’t buy the game on MacOS: GOG ended up refunding my purchase because it kept on crashing in the introduction cutscene. The Switch edition is fine. Slightly game related: my wife sent me this YouTube video where Ghostfeeder explains how he uses the Game Boy to make music that I think is worth sharing here: Related topics: / metapost / By Wouter Groeneveld on 3 December 2025. Reply via email . Charlie Theel put up a post called Philosophy and Board Games on Player Elimination where I learned about Mara’s Hopeful Pessimism . On a slightly more morbid topic, Wesley thought about How Websites Die and shared his notes. Lina’s map of the internet functions as a beautiful pixelated website map that inspires me to do something similar. Kelson Vibber reviews web browsers . The sad state of Mozilla made me look elsewhere, and I’m currently using both Firefox and Vivaldi. According to Hypercombogamer the Game Boy Advance is Nintendo’s Most Underrated Handheld . I don’t know if I agree, but I do agree that both the GBA and its huge library are awesome. Eurogamer regularly criticises Microsoft and their dumb Xbox moves. The last piece was the ridiculous Game Pass advent . Matt Bee’s retro gaming site is loaded with cool looking game badges that act as links to small opinion pieces. It’s a fun guessing game as I’m not familiar with some of the pixel art. Astrid Poot writes about lessons learned about making and happiness . Making is the route to creativity. Making is balance. Alyssa Rosenzweig proves that AAA gaming on Asahi Linux is totally possible. Patrick Dubroy has thoughts on ways to do applied research . His conclusion? Aim for practical utility first, by “building something that addresses an actual need that you have”. Eat your own dog shit, publish later? Here’s another way to block LLM crawlers without JavaScript by Uggla. Wolfgang Ziegler programs on the Game Boy using Turbo Rascal , something I hadn’t encountered before. Wes Fenlon wrote a lengthy document over at PC Gamer on how to design a metroidvania map . Jan Ouwens claims there are no good Java code formatters out there. Seb shared A Road to Common Lisp after I spotted his cool “warning: made with Lisp” badge. A lot of ideas are taking form, to be continued… Speaking of Lisp: Colin Woodbury is drawn to Lisp because of its simplicity and beauty. Robert Lützner wrote an honest report on the duality of being a parent . As a parent myself, I found myself sobbing and nodding in agreement as I read the piece. Michael Klamerus shares his thoughts on Crystal Caves HD . The added chiptune music just feels misplaced in my opinion. I’m looking forward to the Bio Menace remaster as well! Felienne Hermans criticizes the AI Delta Plan (in Dutch). We should stop proclaiming build, build, build! as the slogan of the future and start thinking about reduce & re-use. Hamilton shares his 2025 programming language tier list . The funny thing is that number one on the list suddenly got replaced by a more conventional alternative. I don’t agree with his reasoning at all (spoiler: it contains AI), but it’s an interesting read nonetheless. Mikko Saari published his 2025 edition of the top 100 board game list a little earlier this year. There are a bunch of interesting changes in the top 10! SETI also pops up quite high on my list, but I haven’t had the chance to create it yet. If you live near The Netherlands, consider visiting The Home Computer Museum . They also have a ton of retro magazines lying around to flip through! Wait, there’s a Heroes of Might & Magic card game? That box looks huge! (So does the backing price…) Death Code is an entirely self-hosted web application that utilizes Shamir’s Secret Sharing to share secrets after you die. tttool is a reverse-engineering effort to inspect how the Tip Toi educational pens work. I was somehow featured at https://twostopbits.com/ and now I know why: it’s Hacker News for retro nerds. Apparently things like WhatsApp bridges for Matrix exist, which got me thinking: can I run bridges for WhatsApp and Signal to merge all messaging into The One Ring ? Emulate Windows 95 right in the browser . Crazy to see what you can do nowadays with WASM/JS/Whatever. It looks like LDtk is the best 2D game map editor ever created. Wild Weasel created a retro looking Golf video game shrine in their little corner of the internet, and the result is lovely. I should really start playing my GBC Mario Golf cart.

Books

JavaScript

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Using Energy Prediction To Better Plan Cron Jobs

Since the Belgian government mandated the use of digitized smart energy meters we’ve been more carefully monitoring our daily energy demand. Before, we’d simply chuck all the dishes in the machine and program it to run at night: no more noise when we’re around. But now, consuming energy at night is costing us much more. The trick is to take as little as possible from the grid, but also put as little as possible back. In short, consume (or store) energy when our solar panels produce it. That dishwasher will have to run at noon instead. The same principle applies to running demanding software: CPU or GPU-intensive tasks consume an awful amount of energy, so why run them when there’s less energy available locally, thus paying more? Traditionally, these kinds of background jobs are always scheduled at night using a simple cron expression like that says “At 03:00 AM, kick things in gear”. But we can do better. At 03:00 AM, our solar panels are asleep too. Why not run the job when the sun is shining? Probably because you don’t want to interfere with the heavy load of your software system during the day thanks to your end users. It’s usually not a good idea to start generating PDF files en masse , clogging up all available threads, severely slowing down the handling of incoming HTTP requests. But there’s still a big margin to improve the planning of the job: instead of saying “At 03:00 AM exactly ”, why can’t we say “Between 01:00 AM and 07:00 AM”? That’s still before the big HTTP rush, and in the early morning, chances are there’s more cheap energy available to you. Cooking up a simple version of this for home use is easy with the help of Home Assistant. The following historical graph shows our typical energy demand during the last week (dreadful Belgian weather included): Home Assistant history of P1 Energy Meter Demand from 24 Nov to 28 Nov. Care to guess what these spikes represent? Evenings. Turning on the stove, the oven, the lights, the TV obviously creates a big spike in energy consumption, and at the same time, the moon replacing the sun results in us taking instead of giving from the energy grid. This is the reason the government charges more then: if everybody creates spikes at the same time, there’s much more pressure on the general grid. But I can’t bake my fries at noon when I’m work and we aren’t supposed to watch TV when we’re working from home… That data is available through the Home Assistant API: . Use an authorization header with a Bearer token created in your Home Assistant profile. If you collect this for a few weeks and average the results you can make an estimated guess when demand will be going up or down. If you want things to get a bit more fancy, you can use the EMHASS Home Assistant plug-in that includes a power production forecast module. This thing uses machine learning and other APIs such as https://solcast.com/ that predicts solar power—or weather in general: the better the weather, the more power available to burn through (given you’ve got solar panels installed). EMHASS also internalizes your power consumption habits. Combined, its prediction model can help to better plan your jobs when energy demand is low and availability is high. You don’t need Home Assistant to do this, but the software does help smooth things over with centralized access to data using a streamlined API. Our energy consumption and generation is measured using HomeWizard’s P1 Meter that plugs into our provider’s digital meter and sends the data over to Home Assistant. That’s cool if you are running software in your own basement, but will hardly do on a bigger scale. Instead of monitoring your own energy usage, you can rely on grid data from the providers. In Europe, the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) provides APIs to access power statistics based on your region—including a day-ahead forecast! In USA, there’s the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) providing the equivalent, also including a forecast, depending on the state. ENTSO-E returns a day-ahead pricing model while EIA returns consumption in megawatthours, but both statistics can be used for the same thing: to better plan that cron job. And that’s exactly what we at JobRunr managed to do. JobRunr is an open-source Java library for easy asynchronous background job scheduling that I’ve had the pleasure to work on the last year. Using JobRunr, planning a job with a cron expression is trivial: But we don’t want that thing to trigger at 3 AM, remember? Instead, we want it to trigger between an interval, when the energy prices are at their lowest, meaning when the CPU-intensive job will produce the least amount of CO2 . In JobRunr v8, we introduced the concept of Carbon Aware Job Processing that uses energy prediction of the aforementioned APIs to better plan your cron jobs. The configuration for this is ridiculously easy: (1) tell JobRunr which region you’re in, (2) adjust that cron. Done. Instead of , use : this means “plan at somewhere between an hour before 3 AM to four hours later than 3 AM, when the lowest amount of CO2 will be generated”. That string is not a valid cron expression but a custom extension on it we invented to minimize configuration. Behind the scene, JobRunr will look up the energy forecasts for your region and plan the job according to your specified time range. There are other ways to plan jobs (e.g. fire-and-forget, providing s instaed of a cron, …), but you get the gist. JobRunr’s dashboard can be consulted to inspect when the job is due for processing. Since the scheduled picks can sometimes be confusing—why did it plan this at 6 AM and not at 7?—the dashboard also visualizes the predictions. In the following screenshot, you can see being planned at 15:00 PM, with an initial interval between 09:39 and 17:39 (GMT+2): The JobRunr dashboard: a pending job, to be processed on Mon Jul 07 2025 at 15:00 PM. There’s also a practical guide that helps you get started if you’re interested in fooling around with the system. The idea here is simple: postpone firing up that CPU to the moments with more sunshine, when energy is more readily available, and when less CO2 will be generated 1 . If you’re living in Europe/Belgium, you’re probably already trying to optimize the energy consumption in your household the exact same way because of the digital meters. Why not applying this principle on a grander scale? Amazon offers EC2 Spot Instances to “optimize compute usage” which is also marketed as more sustainable, but this is not the same thing. Shifting your cloud workout to a Spot Instance will use “spare energy” that was already being generated. JobRunr, and hopefully soon other software that optimized jobs based on energy availability, plans using marginal changes. In theory, the decision can determine the fuel resource as high spikes force high-emission plants to burn more fuel. In always-on infrastructure, spare compute capacity is sold as the Spot product—there’s no marginal change. The environmental impact of planning your job to align with low grid carbon intensity is much higher—in a good way—compared to shifting cloud instance types from on-demand/reserved to Spot. Still, it’s better than nothing, I guess. If the recent outages of these big cloud providers have taught us anything, it’s that on-premise self-hosting is not dead yet. If you happen to be rocking Java, give JobRunr a try. And if you’re not, we challenge you to implement something similar and make the world a better place! You probably already noticed that in this article I’ve interchanged carbon intensity with energy availability. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but for the purpose of Carbon Aware Job Processing, we assume a strong relationship between the electricity price and CO2 emissions. ↩︎ Related topics: / java / By Wouter Groeneveld on 28 November 2025. Reply via email . You probably already noticed that in this article I’ve interchanged carbon intensity with energy availability. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but for the purpose of Carbon Aware Job Processing, we assume a strong relationship between the electricity price and CO2 emissions. ↩︎

DevOps

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Rendering Your Java Code Less Error Prone

Error Prone is Yet Another Programming Cog invented by Google to improve their Java build system. I’ve used the multi-language PMD static code analyser before (don’t shoot the messenger!), but Error Prone takes it a step further: it hooks itself into your build system, converting programming errors as compile-time errors. Great, right, detecting errors earlier, without having to kick an external process like PMD into gear? Until you’re forced to deal with hundreds of errors after enabling it: sure. Expect a world of hurt when your intention is to switch to Error Prone just to improve code linting, especially for big existing code bases. Luckily, there’s a way to gradually tighten the screw: first let it generate a bunch of warnings and only when you’ve tackled most of them, turn on Error! Halt! mode. When using Gradle with multiple subprojects, things get a bit more convoluted. This mainly serves as a recollection of things that finally worked—feeling of relief included. The root file: The first time you enable it, you’ll notice a lot of nonsensical errors popping up: that’s what that is for. We currently have the following errors disabled: Error Prone’s powerful extendability resulted in Uber picking up where Google left off by releasing NullAway , a plug-in that does annotation-based null checking fully supporting the JSpecify standard . That is, it checks for stupid stuff like: JSpecify is a good attempt at unifying these annotations—last time I checked, IntelliJ suggested auto-importing them from five different packages—but the biggest problem is that you’ll have to dutifully annotate where needed yourself. There are OpenRewrite JSpecify recipes available to automatically add them but that won’t even cover 20% of the cases, as when it comes to manual if null checks and the use of , NullAway is just too stupid to understand what your intentions are. NullAway assumes non-null by default. This is important, because in Java object terminology, everything is nullable by default. You won’t need to add a lot of annotations, but adding has a significant ripple effect: if that’s nullable, then the object calling this object might also be, which means I should add this annotation here and here and here and here and here and… Uh oh. After 100 compile errors, Gradle gives up. I fixed 100 errors, recompiled, and 100 more appeared. This fun exercise lasted almost an entire day until I was the one giving up. The potential commit touched hundreds of files and added more bloat to an already bloated (it’s Java, remember) code base I’ve ever seen. Needless to say, we’re currently evaluating our options here. I’ve also had quite a bit of trouble picking the right combination of plug-ins for Gradle to get this thing working. In case you’d like to give it a go, extend the above configuration with: You have to point NullAway to the base package path ( ) otherwise it can’t do its thing. Note the configuration: we had a lot of POJOs with private constructors that set fields to while they actually cannot be null because of serialisation frameworks like Jackson/Gson. Annotate these with and NullAway will ignore them. If you thought fixing all Error Prone errors was painful, wait until you enable NullAway. Every single statement needs its annotation. OpenRewrite can help, but up to a point, as for more complicated assignments you’ll need to decide for yourself what to do. Not that the exercise didn’t bear any fruit. I’ve spotted more than a few potential mistakes we made in our code base this way, and it’s fun to try and minimize nullability. The best option of course is to rewrite the whole thing in Kotlin and forget about the suffix. All puns aside, I can see how Error Prone and its plug-ins can help catch bugs earlier, but it’s going to come at a cost: that of added annotation bloat. You probably don’t want to globally disable too many errors so is also going to pop up much more often. A difficult team decision to make indeed. Related topics: / java / By Wouter Groeneveld on 25 November 2025. Reply via email . —that’s a Google-specific one? I don’t even agree with this thing being here… —we’d rather have on every line next to each other —we can’t update to JDK9 just yet —we’re never going to run into this issue —good luck with fixing that if you heavily rely on reflection

Kotlin

Tutorial

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Is Collecting Physical Games Worth It? (Part IV)

I bought some more expensive looking Nintendo switch game cartridges. I blame Joel ’s convincing who manages to bypass my already weak resistance to these kinds of messages. This, combined with a diminishing amount of time available to put into gaming, results into my physical backlog being larger than ever before. It’s been three years since I wrote part III and I have more thoughts so here we go. Perhaps read Part I , Part II , and Part III first. Let’s talk about pricing. In part III, I wrote: […] I’m beginning to wonder whether or not I should give up this ridiculousness. Instead, I could buy three games instead of one, and send the money where it belongs: the developers. […] There’s no denying that the price point of a physical game is much higher than that of a digital one. In general, digital versions cost about less—without taking the frequent sales into account that for some reason never happens for physical counterparts. In part III, I discovered that including taxes, physical games cost about times more! Outrageous! Or is it? It’s not! Wait, what? I decided to keep part IV a positive one and have changed my mind since complaining about the price. The higher price comes with a few advantages, hear me out. First, if something is more expensive, it takes more of a deliberate action to buy it. You don’t blindly press the add to cart and check out buttons: you first contemplate whether it’s worth it. Is this game really something I’m willing to pour time into? Should I really get this version considering my backlog already has three too long jRPGs on it? Instead of buying three games on sale in the eShop, you can only buy one so you better make that choice count. Also, precisely because of that deliberate action, I find that actually playing and finishing these games is easier. If you’ve paid that much for a game, you better pour that time into it, otherwise it’s money wasted. Chances are much lower of buying a total bust as you’ll be more thoroughly researching instead of recklessly buying. In the end, I end up enjoying these games more because I feel the need to spend more time with them. And that’s a good thing. Third, that price has never really gone up. A typical Limited Run Game costs —including shipping and taxes, that’s almost . Sixty is the about same amount I paid for a brand new copy of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in 2004 and it is about the same amount I paid for a brand new copy of the 2024 Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door remake on the Switch last year. When taking inflation into account , that should have been instead, an increase of . Observe the following graph depicting a very imprecise history of video game pricing from 1985 (NES) to now. The blue top line is the actual value adjusted for inflation, the red bottom line is the sticker price. Video Games Price History Chart 1985 - 2024. Yes, in the early nineties, cartridge gaming was expensive, although there were many exceptions. Most Mega Drive carts we bought were new and on sale, never reaching or their Belgian Francs equivalent. We transitioned to pirating PC games when those N64 carts became even more expensive. But the biggest takeaway from that graph is the flatline from 2000-ish to just before 2023: relatively speaking, the full price of a physical video game has been stable for more than twenty years. That means for a console game 1 and for the GB(A)/(3)DS counterpart acts as my golden reference point. Convenient then, that limited physical edition releases of Switch games also aim for that range if you include shipping and taxes. This is the reason why I will be totally fine by paying the “full price” for Hollow Knight: Silksong when the digital counterpart is only . Ridiculously cheap, by the way, as this is a slap in the face for other indie studios that struggle to get attention, but that’s an entirely different matter. Sixty “bucks”—can I say bucks when I’m in the Euro zone?—is perfectly reasonable to put down in exchange for deliberate action. Deliberate action that finally got me to sit down and finish the Rise of the Triad: The Dark War campaign while back in 1994 I didn’t even make it to the fourth level of the shareware episode, even though I admired the game. If you still find that hard to stomach, consider this: that Steam copy of your game can be retracted at any time. You’re basically just loaning it even though you’ve paid for it. This has happened before and will happen again. Meanwhile, I can sit back, relax, and laugh, clinging onto all my physical stuff that slowly but surely takes over the house, like a Creature of the Night . Even though that might be a slight exaggeration, there’s another graph that we can easily imagine if we think about value over time as an investment. I know it sounds ridiculous to think of buying games as an investment, and it is, even though many collectors treat it as such. There will be a point when Nintendo Switch games will no longer be produced, and it doesn’t take more than a few months for a price to go up according to websites like pricecharting.com . That is, this graph is the opposite of the above one: your Limited Run Game copy will become more sought after, but the devaluation of money will keep that investment more or less constant—depending on the game, amount of copies, et cetera. Meanwhile, your digital copy will be worth nada simply because you can’t get rid of it as you never really owned it in the first place. To conclude, I wrote another thousand words to confirm what I already said in part II four years ago: Physical games are usually more expensive. And that’s an advantage. Why? Because the more money I spent on a game, the more conscious the decision will be. Oh well. At least the graph is a nice touch, isn’t it? I’m going to pretend Sony PS1/PS2 games and the mass copying of CD-ROMs wasn’t a thing here. ↩︎ Related topics: / games / collecting / By Wouter Groeneveld on 21 November 2025. Reply via email . I’m going to pretend Sony PS1/PS2 games and the mass copying of CD-ROMs wasn’t a thing here. ↩︎

Writing

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

2025 Holiday Gift Guide

This post is inspired by Johnny Webber’s 2024 Holiday Gift Guide that serves as a great starting point if you don’t know what to get for your friends & family. Johnny’s list is broad and includes suggestions from tech to food, arts, gaming, books, and even writing material. Making Christmas wish lists seems to become harder and harder as I get older and already have way too much stuff. When we are young, without access to a disposable income, the holiday period somehow felt more exciting. Flipping through toy store ad leaflets, whipping out scissors to cut and paste the things that drew our attention onto a separate colourful piece of paper for Santa to take a good look at. I want this one , and don’t you dare to buy me that cheap alternative! We try to cut our way through the few ads that still land in our mailbox but it doesn’t feel the same any more—a part of the genuine childlike excitement is gone for good. It took me a while to come up with six items that made it to my list. Like Johnny, I’m only recommending things I like. Here’s a collage representing that list: The 2025 Holiday Gift Guide: six suggestions. First, the UFO 50 Nintendo Switch game—specifically the physical version published by Fangamer.eu , obviously. There’s still a lot on my wish list, so any of the following is great as well: Streets of Rage 4 Anniversary Edition , Unicorn Overlord , The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom , Monster Boy & The Cursed Kingdom . If you happen to come across a copy of Powerslave Exhumed by Limited Run Games that’s been out of print for a while, that would be very nice too. If you have no idea but want to make sure it’s a good game, check out my Top 100 suggestions . Second, a gift coupon to spent at our local book store GRIM . Although my wife reminded me that we still have two coupons lying around that need to be used. I tried to come up with a concrete book title but my wanted list is a mess and I just bought six books that I haven’t touched yet. Feel free to add your own favourite entry. Third, Sailor’s Manyo Ume fountain pen ink: a dark red/brown colour with a unique sheen (see the Mountain of Ink review ). Or add a tint of Pilot Irushizuku ink, but I’ve never tried Sailor’s before and don’t have a colour that matches this range. Hopefully this will entice me to get back into writing on paper more which is a hobby I’ve been neglecting too much lately. Fourth, the Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship board game. I mentioned in the SPIEL Essen post that I wanted to grab a copy but ultimately left it for the Christmas list, so here it is. Two equally chunky alternatives might be Tea Garden or Creature Caravan . If you’re looking for a lighter game, perhaps check out my modern trick taking suggestions instead. Fifth, Manet’s Bundle Of Asparagus . The original one, please. Enlist the Ocean’s Eleven crew and send them to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, Germany. Or, if they happen to be busy, order a high quality reproduction, through for example Wahoo Art . I’m unsure about the working conditions and ethical beliefs of that system as I just stumbled on it, but if that’s not an option, just a nice print will do. We’ll have a resin coating added later that makes it look like the real thing. Ever since reading about the painting in Alain de Botton’s Art As Therapy , I’ve wanted to hang a copy in the kitchen. Plus, we’re very fond of asparagus. Lastly, a heavy duty dough mixer, or more specifically, the Italian made Famag Grilletta IM5S . These spiral mixers are not cheap and come in at around so just a donation towards it will suffice. I’ve been kneading by hand for twelve years but with the kids and our increased bread consumption rate it’s getting harder to keep up. Plus, the Grilletta that kneads any dough to windowpane without blinking twice will finally enable me to make smooth buttery dough and up the hydration in the more rustic recipes. The IM5S—contrary to the IM5 model without the S—can be tilted to remove the bowl and more easily clean it. Still unsure? My archives tell me the following things made it to previous Christmas wish lists: Happy holidays! Related topics: / Christmas / By Wouter Groeneveld on 19 November 2025. Reply via email . WoodWick candles Random Magic: The Gathering boosters An Apple Magic Keyboard I never got and eventually bought myself An authentic Belgian waffle iron (you can’t live without this if you’re living in Belgium) The book Sourdough by Robin Sloan The cookbook Marie Plukt De Dag More Switch games like The Witcher 3 , Dragon Quest XI , and Metroid Dread A GameCube HDMI adapter A lovely pen roll to protect your precious fountain pens on the go A soldering iron

Entertainment

Books

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Why I Don't Need a Steam Machine

For those of you who are living under a rock, Valve announced three new hardware devices joining their Steam Deck line-up: a new controller, a VR headset, and the GameCube—no wait, GabeCube—no wait, Steam Machine. The shiny little cube is undoubtedly Valve’s (second) attempt to break into the console market. This time, it might just work. The hardware is ready to arrive in at your living room spring next year. The biggest question is: will it arrive at our living room? Reading all the hype has certainly enthused me (e.g. Brendon’s The Steam Machine is the Future , PC Gamer’s Valve is all over ARM , Eurogamer’s Steam Machine preview , ResetEra’s Steam Hardware thread ); especially the part where the Machine is just a PC that happens to be tailored towards console gaming. According to Valve, you can install anything you want on it—it’s just SteamOS just like your trusty Deck, meaning you can boot into KDE and totally do your thing. Except that this shiny little cube is six times as powerful. I’m sure Digital Foundry will validate that next year. Valve's newly announced Steam Machine: a mysterious looking sleek black box. However, this post isn’t about specs, expectations, or dreams: it’s about tempering my own enthusiasm. I’d like to tell myself why I don’t really need a Steam Machine. The following list will hopefully make it easier to say no when the buy buttons become available. So you see, I don’t really need a Steam Machine… Fuck it, I’m getting one. Related topics: / steam / games / By Wouter Groeneveld on 16 November 2025. Reply via email . You’re a retro gamer. You don’t need the power of six Steam Decks. To do what, run DOSBox? Your TV doesn’t support 4K . Again, no need for those 4K 60 FPS. You generally dislike AAA games. With The Steam Machine, you might be able to finally properly run DOOM Eternal and all of the Assassin’s Creed games. That you don’t like playing. You don’t have time to play games anyway. Ouch, that hurts but it’s not untrue. The TV will be occupied anyway. The Steam Machine is not a Switch: you can’t switch to handheld mode. When are you going to play on the Machine if the TV is being used to watch your wife’s favourite shows? You already have too many gaming related hardware pieces. That’ll mean you’ll have to divide your time by an even bigger number to devote an equal amount to playing them. There’s no room for yet another nondescript box under the TV. See above: why don’t you first try to do something with that SNES Mini and PlayStation Mini besides letting it collect dust? You’re a physical gamer. This is Steam. There will be no insertion of cartridges, no blowing of carts, and no staring at game collections on a shelf. It’s Steam, not Good Old Games. Sure it can run GOG games but the Machine is primarily designed to run Steam. You avoid purchasing from Steam like the plague, yet you’re willing to buy a Machine dedicated to it? Are you crazy? The last time you booted Steam was over a year ago. Don’t tell me you’re suddenly interested in running the platform on a dedicated machine. You don’t have time to fiddle with configuration. Button and trackpad mappings to get the controls just right enough to play strategy games designed to be played with keyboard and mouse will only leave you frustrated. Your MacBook can emulate Windows games just fine. You recently bought CrossOver and played Wizordum and older Windows 98/XP stuff on it. It even runs Against The Storm flawlessly. No need for Proton or whatever. In two years, you’ll upgrade your M1 to an M4+: there’s the power upgrade. If CrossOver is struggling to run that particular game you so badly want to play, it’ll be buttery smooth in a few years. You’re going to do the laptop upgrade anyway regardless of the Steam Machine. You already have a huge gaming backlog. Thanks to your buddy Joel you bought too many physical Switch games that are still waiting to be touched. Are you really ready to open up another can of worms? You dislike a digital backlog. It’s easy to have hundreds of games on there: see your GOG purchases. Why don’t you try to count the ones that you actually played, let alone finished. You’re not going to use the Machine to run office software. Your laptop and other retro machines are good enough at handling that task. What are you really going to do with this cube besides gaming? Those cool looking indie games will be released for Switch in due time anyway. Remember Pizza Tower ? It’s out on Switch now. Remember to buy the cart on Fangamer, together with the Anton Blast one. It’s rumoured to cost more than . Save that money for a Switch 2 if the games are starting to become interesting to justify that upgrade, as currently, they’re not. Also, see the backlog point above. All HDMI ports both on the TV and your external monitors are occupied . Unless you’re willing to constantly switch cables, you’ll need to invest in a HDMI switch. Another . You can’t buy this without buying the Steam Controller. That’s easily another you already spent buying the Mobapad controller for your Switch as a replacement for the semi-broken Joy Cons. You can’t buy this as an expense on the company. You’re closing down the company, remember. (More on that later) The cool looking LED and programmable front display don’t justify an expensive purchase. After the initial excitement wears off, the LED will become annoying and you’ll simply turn it off.

Hardware

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

Migrating From Gitea To Codeberg

After the last week’s Gitea attack debacle , moving all things Git off the VPS became a top priority. In 2022, like many of you, I gave up GitHub and spun up two Gitea instances myself: a private one safely behind bars on the NAS and a public one where all my public GitHub projects were moved to. Three years later, I think it’s time to move again. Gitea was forked into Forgejo a few years ago because of yet another licensing drama but I just couldn’t be bothered by keeping everything up to date. So I didn’t. And then Gitea started acting annoying: artifact folders weren’t properly cleaned up even though I encouraged it to do so in the configuration up to the point that the files clogged up the entire disk. The result was crashes of nearly everything as there wasn’t even a few bytes space left to append to logs in . And then bots started scraping the hell out of the commit endpoints. Anyway, I liked Gitea/Forgejo’s ease of use, so migrating everything off-site to Codeberg seemed like the most obvious solution. I’ve been wanting to go back to a coding community for a while now. if you host your own Gitea instance, you isolate yourself from the rest of the open source world. Collaboration still is the easiest on GitHub as simply everyone is hanging out there but I’d rather stop coding entirely than feed Microsoft’s AI. Give Up GitHub, folks. The steps involving the migration were surprisingly easy and fast to execute: Congratulations, you’re now the proud owner of Codeberg repositories. From here, we now have to decide what to do with the old Gitea instance. Do you want to simply kill it? Do you want to mirror your repositories? Or temporarily forward using the same URLs? Since I don’t want to keep it around forever and wanted to stop it immediately, but not yet break all URLs, I rewrote the Nginx location to a redirect: This does redirect https://codeberg.org/wouterg/brainbaking to the new correct location https://codeberg.org/wouterg/brainbaking , but it does not fix that will not follow redirects by default. You can proxy the entire thing and add more headers to fix that, or tell Git to follow redirects instead, or just change the remote URL and be done with it: . I figured not a lot of folks have cloned copies of my repositories on their hard drives—and if you do, you’d probably go looking online for the correct version and remove/reclone the entire thing. Next, it is time to kill the Gitea instance: (and ). Set a reminder in your calender to remove the redirect and clean up your VPS in a month or two, just to be sure. I should have enough backups in case things go wrong but you never know. The final piece of the puzzle is a financial one. Codeberg is a non-profit organisation that relies entirely on donations to keep things spinning, and I reckon they also need resources to fight those pesky AI crawlers (they’re also using Anubis, by the way). Consider donating or even becoming an active member that also allows you to vote when strategic decisions are being made. Go library programmers, don’t forget to double-check your import paths. So-called “vanity imports” ease friction here as you can set up a redirect from there. should still work. I rely on vangen to generate simple HTML pages for import paths. In the future, I’d rather move these paths to to avoid cluttering up Hugo’s folder. By Wouter Groeneveld on 13 November 2025. Reply via email . Create a Codeberg account. Generate a temporary access token on your to-be-defunct Gitea instance: see https://docs.gitea.com/development/api-usage for the exact command. For each repository to migrate: click on your profile, and instead of creating a new blank repository, select “from migration” or go to URL https://codeberg.org/repo/migrate . Select Gitea, fill in the Git endpoint and access token and press migrate . Optionally, also migrate LFS/Wikis/issues/whatever by checking the appropriate boxes. Re-archive the repositories that were publicly archived.

DevOps

Open Source

HTML

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

Thumbs Up 👍

Don’t you hate it when that happens? You compose a targeted question, re-iterate the sentence a few times to make sure it is easy to interpret, press send, only to get a thumbs up in response? How should you even interpret that? Is that an ironic sure thing buddy go ahead I’ll revert your changes behind your back anyway ; is that a honest go for it! ; is that a whatever, no time right now but here’s something telling you I’ve read your thing ; or is that a too long didn’t read ? I don’t know, do you? Clear and effective human communication is one of the hardest things to get right. The widespread adoption of emojis only made the problem worse. Instead of adding context, by, you know, using words, like these, emojis manage to strip even more context, sometimes paradoxically by adding layers of confusion. Isn’t a thumbs up a universal sign of good! ? It’s not, as I’ve seen it being used and abused in ways I would never ever dare to stick out my own thumb, like I would probably never Roll On the Floor Laughing when sending ROFL. Shut up boomer, that’s also being replaced by an emoji. I know, I just proved my point. And I’m not that old (yet). You won’t find any usage of emojis in Brain Baking articles because I not only think they’re ugly or they form a danger to our ability to interpret longer texts, but also they induce ambiguity that always leaves me dazzled. Here’s some random proof why emojis just don’t work. Oh that’s what you meant! : reducing emoji misunderstanding by Tigwell and Flatla (2016—that’s almost ten years ago!): […] the purpose of the emoji was often misunderstood, e.g., “To me that looks like a nervous face but a lot of people use it as a really happy or excited face” This gets worse in cross-cultural communication according to Cominsky. It’s not just a cross-cultural problem, it’s also a generational problem: a study by Zahra and Ahmed revealed that emojis such as thumbs up, crying laughing and skull are more likely to cause mix-ups between generations . Or how about surrounding the emoji with textual context in order to reduce potential confusion? That was disproven by Miller et al. in Understanding Emoji Ambiguity in Context : The Role of Text in Emoji-Related Miscommunication: […] we found that our results do not support the hypothesis in prior work: when emoji are interpreted in textual contexts, the potential for miscommunication appears to be roughly the same. Guess what, Wang et al. found out that emotioanl emoji elicits are being abused by social media marketeers in order to increase customer engagement. Digging further specifically into thumbs-up emoji research, Bates writes about the recent court case recognising the thumbs-up emoji as having indicated contractual agreement, concluding that: Perhaps it is best that communication with icons stays within three general settings: (1) A highly contextualized environment, in which a limited number of symbols are to be clearly understood, as with road and airport signage, warning labels, and computer interfaces; (2) Interpersonal communication—private exchanges often prioritizing the establishment and maintenance of good relations; (3) Internet postings meant for public consumption (e.g., social media comments). A big thumbs up, Bates! See, that was easy, right? The last piece of research I’d like to share here is that of Shandilya et al. on using non-contextual communication in virtual workspaces like Slack and Google Chat. It looks like new employees first have to read between the lines and learn the intricate interpretation details of the micro-culture, sometimes even differing from team to team within the same company. Before we can send out a thumbs up, we first have to decode how others around us are using and interpreting it. Which might differ greatly from your habitually usage in causal app messages to friends. Fellow blogger Horst Gutmann recently pointed to another study on the connection between emojis and personality traits : heavy reliance on emojis seems to shape our perceived image—and not in a very good way. The biggest problem, however, is not using the thumbs-up emoji as part of a message: it is using the thumbs-up emoji as a reaction in itself—the recent phenomena called reaction emojis . A reaction is not a response. Our languages have words to form an expression, let’s make use of them. I sometimes receive conversation duds like that as an answer to three sentences of mine explaining how things are going. What am I supposed to do with that? If you’re not interested in knowing how I’m doing then don’t bother asking? My wife has one particular friend who simply replies all his messages with a thumbs up reaction. I would be inclined to stop exchanging messages at all with such a person. I ROFL-ed (how am I supposed to conjugate this?) when I read MaliciousDog’s opinion on emoji reactions on Reddit: They break the text consumption flow. In a coherent text, an emoji is somewhat like a fart in a middle of a nice song . It may be fun by itself or in an appropriate context but not everywhere. Like a fart in a middle of a nice song. By Wouter Groeneveld on 10 November 2025. Reply via email .

Design Communication

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

The 1994 IBM PC Invoice

In 1994, my late father-in-law bought a new computer. That then brand new sparkling piece of hardware now is my 31 year old 80486 retro PC . When he gifted it to me in 2020, he also handed over the original invoice, as if the warranty was still valid. Also, who saves a twenty something year old piece of paper that becomes obsolete after two years? I’m glad that he did, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this. Below is the scanned version of the invoice printed out by Veldeman Office Supplies in Hasselt: According to the KBO public search , The company went bankrupt in 2013 after 28 years of faithful service, even though their head offices moved a couple of times. My father got his original 486 somewhere in Brussels, and after that, I remember we always went to Bells Computercenter in Diest, a specialized hardware store that still exists today! When the first Voodoo cards dropped, Bells is the place we ran to. It was that kind of place with the cool looking Creative sound card big boxes in the front windows to attract attention. It seems like a strange choice to buy a PC at Veldeman , a store that mostly sells general office supplies. The invoice details the exact purchase: amount of the following: I received the computer with of RAM installed, not , but perhaps my father-in-law upgraded it later in the nineties. See my Reviving a 80486 post for photos: the CPU was stamped with an early version of the Microsoft Windows logo, and below it, it proudly states “MICROSOFT WINDOWS COMPATIBLE”. That must have been the main reason for the purchase, as my father-in-law mainly used it in conjunction with Windows 3.x spreadsheet tooling for keeping track of expenses and general calculations as part of his job as an mechanical engineer. Buying a new PC in 1994—on the 16th of May, to be more precise—turned out to be a very risky business. In the nineties, technology moved at a dizzying speed. Windows 95 was just about the corner, Intel’s Pentium became more and more affordable, the AT system got replaced by ATX, the motherboard layout changed, AGP got introduced pushing VLB into obscurity, … In less than a year, the above purchase would become obsolete. That’s quite painful for such a hefty price. The invoice totalled to an amount of 1 or . Taking inflation into account , that amounts to in 2025, which is more expensive than the most beefed out 15" MacBook Air you can get right now boasting the M4 CPU technology with 10 cores, 24 GB of RAM, and 512 GB SSD storage. That MacBook will stay relevant for more than six years—my last one managed to keep it together for eight, and the one I’m typing this on is almost six years old. The 486DX Mini Tower sold by Veldeman lasted less than a year. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly the most performant machine you could get your hands on in 1994. It didn’t even properly run 1993’s DOOM : you’ll need more raw CPU power (and preferably more RAM) to push beyond ten to fifteen frames per second. But if that PC already was more than in current EURs, you can imagine that a true high-end machine was only reserved for the wealthy. According to DOS Days UK , in 1994, a mid-range PC typically came with a DX2-66 with more RAM, so technically speaking, this invoice here is for a low-end PC… As a result, my father-in-law faithfully clung on to Windows 3.1(1) while others moved on to Windows 95. My wife recalls they didn’t buy a new one (or upgraded the existing one besides the RAM slots) in quite a few years, while my father bought a new machine early 1996 that was capable of rendering Quake . Keen observers will notice that the Veldeman PC Mini Tower did not come with a sound card. Popular Creative Sound Blaster cards were sold in big bright boxes for more than without adjusting for inflation: needless to say, the good ones were crazy expensive. Nowadays, people don’t even care any more, and the built-in sound chip that comes with the motherboard is usually good enough. It’s remarkably difficult to get hold of historical price data on 1994 PC hardware. The Computer Paper Vol. 7 No. 7 , an archive from , contains an interesting “Grand Opening” advertisement from 3A COMPUTER WAREHOUSE in Markham, Ontario, Canada, listing similar hardware: An excerpt from computer hardware ads. Copyright The Computer Paper magazine publisher. A “basic” OEM Sound Blaster would have set you back for —that’s in 2025 or . Note that only the PCS 486DX Multimedia CD on the bottom left comes with what seems to be a generic “sound card”. IBM PCs simply didn’t come equipped with decent sound capabilities: many of us Apogee game fans have the iconic speaker sounds permanently burned into our brains. The IBM PC advertised at the top left most closely matches the hardware from my invoice and came at — in 2025 or . That’s quite a bit less but hardware was/is more expensive in Europe but I’m probably comparing apples with oranges here. Besides, the Canadian ad didn’t state it comes with a free mouse mat! Other magazines closer to home are MSX Computer Magazine (no ads containing prices), Computer! Totaal (vol. 3 is from 1994 but I can’t find a scanned version), and the one I remember my grandfather buying, PC-Active . Unfortunately, my parents threw out all copies after cleaning up their elderly house years ago. I’ll try to be on the lookout for copies or might pay the Dutch Home Computer Museum a visit that also collects old computer magazines. Luckily, my Dutch retro blogging liaison Diederick de Vries managed to procure the following scan of PC-Active issue 49 from May 1993 containing ads of 486 PCs: AMBRA PERSONAL COMPUTERS: gun je verstand de vrijheid (give your mind freedom). Copyright the PC-Active magazine publisher. The mid-range PC advertised is a 486 SX (25 Mhz, 100 Mb disk space, 4 Mb RAM) for , while the high-end one decked out with a 486 DX2 (66 Mhz, 200 Mb disk space, 4 Mb RAM) was for sale for the staggering amount of . That’s in today’s money—wowza. Can you imagine spending that much on a computer? Of course, in 1993, the DX2 was brand new and within a year it became much more affordable. And in another year it was rendered irrelevant by the Pentium… In a way, I consider myself lucky to have grown up in that golden age of molten silicon. Hopefully today’s Ryzen CPUs will be remembered as fondly by my kids as I remember the 486 and early Pentium/Celeron/Athlon era. I highly doubt it. In case you hadn’t noticed, we sensible Belgians use as the thousand separator and as a, well, comma? ↩︎ Related topics: / am486 / Hasselt / By Wouter Groeneveld on 6 November 2025. Reply via email . In case you hadn’t noticed, we sensible Belgians use as the thousand separator and as a, well, comma? ↩︎

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

Favourites of October 2025

This year’s announcement of autumn, SPIEL Essen , Halloween season, and daylight saving time switch is already officially behind us. 2025 has only two months left: I see people starting heated debates on the upcoming Game of the Year awards and I see people planning their Christmas home decorations—seemingly every year a day earlier. We went mushroom spotting in the woods with the kids a couple of weeks ago which seemed like a fitting October thing to do. I have a decade old mushroom identification guide lying around that always manages to induce more confusion than it solves but we had great fun nonetheless. Previous month: September 2025 . This is getting embarrassing. Maybe I should simply omit this section in future monthly overview posts? I’ve managed to read a few pages from the two Senet Magazine issues I ordered (issue and ) after seeing someone on Mastodon boast about theirs. Senet is a pretty sizeable independent print magazine on all things board games that is easy to recommend to cardboard fans. I managed to finish three short games: A week after finishing Wizordum , Limited Run Games happened to have Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition stock left in their vault. Since Wizordum got me back into the retro shooters vibe, I figured why not. The Turok trilogy is another one I’m currently eyeing at. For those suckers like me who buy physical Switch games, I didn’t know the scene was that weird and scattered: here’s AntDude Plus on YouTube revealing some of the quirks: As for board games, nothing except the try-outs at the SPIEL fair… October was a pretty rough month in terms of spare time. Related topics: / metapost / By Wouter Groeneveld on 2 November 2025. Reply via email . Wizordum , a bright and blocky throwback shooter that’s a cross between Wolfenstein 3D and Heretic . It’s a fun diversion that doesn’t stand out from the increasingly busy indie boomer shooter crowd. Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap , the 2017 remake built on top of the 1989 Sega Master System original that helped pioneer the Metroidvania mechanics. It still holds up remarkably well and the new lick of paint is beautifully applied. Halloween Harry (or rather, Alien Carnage ) was the DOS Game Club’s game of the month. I played this one back in 1994 but didn’t really get into it and now I can see why. It’s average at best thanks to typical mediocre DOS platform jank such as cheap enemy placement, hit boxes that clip through stairs and shitty controls. But at least now I can say to my younger self that it was good to have skimped over this one. Dan Q created Paint-grade QR codes to fool around with. It’s wonderful to see these QR visualisations sparking people’s creativity. Speaking of drawing stuff, Stone Tools put out an excellent article from Christopher Drum on Deluxe Paint on the Commodore and Amiga. I think Natalie was the first to turn her LEGO Game Boy into a working one . Many geeks followed suit . PekoeBlaze explains why retro FPS games weaken their rocket launchers . DOOM II ’s super shotgun deals as much damage as the rocket launcher! Expect more retro shooter links, such as these Blake Stone maps that greatly help navigating the levels and their dizzying amount of (locked) doors. Frank Sauer, the artist who created the pixel art for Agony on the Amiga, writes about his workplaces from 1982 to now. Tarneo shares his experience trying to kick the AI addiction : congrats for those months being sober! Eli from Oatmeal posted on music, games, and text editors and reminded me I should add Isles of Sea and Sky on my backlog and try out the Helix editor. PC Gaming’s Weirdest Weapons In Gaming list contains a few oldies but goodies such as the sheep from Worms and any crazy weapons from Build Engine shooters ( Shadow Warrior , Blood ). Brit Butler hits the nail on the head with this ethical critique on LLMs . This older post by Joe Siegler on the history of Rise of the Triad was very educational on how the game’s concepts came to be as Joe himself was part of the development team. Harvard University published Generational Data Interviews on digital preservation. They asked 14 people the same question: If you were given unlimited funding to design a system for storing and preserving digital information for at least a century, what would you do? The Amiga Graphics Archive is awesome. A new Heroes of Might & Magic game is in the making called Olden Era ! It looks beautiful, hopefully it manages to retain most of what made III so great. The Sounds Resource is a handy site where you can download specific sound clips of old games. This is where I got that Redneck Rampage shotgun sound from as I no longer own a copy of the game. There’s an interesting thread on ResetERA on dungeon crawling RPGs or “blobbers” where I picked up the little indie game Heroes of the Seven Islands that’s inspired by Might & Magic VI(I) . Faceclick is a lightweight Emoji picker with keyword search I don’t need because I use a handy Alfred plug-in and try to avoid Emoji usage like the plague but it might be of use to others. I might be needing this in the near future: Wizardry Combat Strategies for the original AppleII/Digital Eclipse remaster. The menu font when in Switch handheld mode is annoyingly small though. Did you know that next to the traditional shareware model, postcardware also exists? Aaron Giles, the creator, scanned everything he received and put them up at https://postcardware.net/ .