It’s been a couple of months since my 486 motherboard gave up after I tried refitting it into the case with makeshift AT style motherboard standoffs. A PS/2 keyboard connector proved that the keyboard still works, and Vogons search results proved that flickering and then dead key … | Continue reading
Mike Sass compiled a list of 36 assorted things, topping Nic Lake’s 35 things, so I figured I will be doing Mike a big favour by creating a list of 37 things. Here goes. The pistachio flavour servers the best quality check for any self-respected ice cream parlour. Why do my feet … | Continue reading
On May 2023, we received an at first dubious parcel that turned out to be twenty-five copies of my book The Creative Programmer to celebrate its English release in print. Well, last Friday, I received another strange parcel, this time coming from Japan, and containing three copie … | Continue reading
July is no more: we’re officially half-way through the summer vacation of 2024. I’ve been doing my best to keep on writing on my blogs but The Parent Trap is making it very challenging. The less time I spent writing, the more restless I become. I kept my journal and fountain pens … | Continue reading
We’ve always firmly said no when people asked us if we ever wanted to have kids. I guess something must have gone wrong: tomorrow, our daughter will be sixteen months old. I blame those summer get-togethers where our friends bring their kids along and our stone-cold hearts warm u … | Continue reading
Robert Birming started collecting links to interesting and inspiring blogging journeys of which most are /timeline “slash pages”. He was kind enough to include a link to my /museum page, even though technically speaking, that’s not my blogging journey but more broadly speaking my … | Continue reading
Two years ago, I initiated a yearly recurring thing called The Board Game Shelf Analysis that hasn’t yet recurred so I figured it’s about time to change that. Here’s the summer 2024 edition of the Board Game Shelf Analysis that’s hopefully going to be a yearly series now! This ti … | Continue reading
Remember that time when after downloading and installing WinZip using Internet Explorer, the next thing on the list was fetching the latest ICQ Wise installer from the Mirabilis website? No? I’ll oblige with another hint in case the memory needs a bit of a jog: Toc-toc-toc… Uh-oh … | Continue reading
Luk Weyens over at Pensive Ibex (RSS feed here) wrote a great piece on educational games from his childhood and the sweet memories that come with them. As warped and full of holes these joyful memories might be, which I experienced myself while trying to piece together my own lis … | Continue reading
Did you know that if you write a lengthy blog post of say a thousand words twice a week for fifty out of fifty-two weeks, you’ll end up with a hundred thousand words, which is longer than the average book? Even if you can’t muster the discipline, getting beyond 80k isn’t particul … | Continue reading
Although the summer vacation has officially begun, it’s still barely visible thanks to a seemingly uninterrupted series of rainy days. Kees van der Leun shared another graph showing 123 years of cumulative precipitation between October and June. The Highest so far was 700 mm. Thi … | Continue reading
Four years ago, in the post A Personal Journey Through the History of Webdesign I introduced the concept of the Brain Baking Museum: a place where you could re-experience my very first website from 1998 and see it evolve throughout the years to what now is Brain Baking and its re … | Continue reading
About a month ago, I bought a PicoGUS, an ISA Gravis UltraSound sound card emulator that aims to fit comfortably in-between conventional eighties expansion cards. My first intention was to slot it into the Win98 machine next to the Sound Blaster Audigy to work as my DOS mode MIDI … | Continue reading
My wife is a big fan of Australia’s biggest export product—no wait, she’d rather spread a thick layer of Nutella instead of Vegemite on that slice of bread. We Belgians are chocolate addicts after all. Now where was I? Right, export product. She loves gossiping about what she cal … | Continue reading
After four years of faithful service, I’m retiring the brainbaking-minimal website theme. I got tired of the clean look. It didn’t spark joy and I didn’t really like looking at my website any more: the minimal theme perhaps became too clean. The more other personal blogs I discov … | Continue reading
For a Go project we’re working on, the ever-increasing boilerplate code yet again started getting on my nerves. This seems to be a recurring story in enterprise software projects written in Go, but I digress. This time, the question is: how to do proper database transaction manag … | Continue reading
Brain Baking has been powered by the static site generator Hugo for a good decade now. Everything I’ve written and published here has come to fruition with the help of Sublime Text and Hugo. Yet in 2021 I started using another Markdown-powered editor called Obsidian to edit my di … | Continue reading
The remake of Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door released a couple of weeks ago—the same Paper Mario that’s on my Top 25 Best Games of All Time list. Naturally, I didn’t have to think twice to consider buying it, and naturally, as a person who prefers holding the real deal to an eSh … | Continue reading
It’s June, and it looks like it’s November. We’ve never had that much bad weather in years, and doesn’t look like it’s getting any better. Although admittedly Sunday was quite pleasant with a sunray or two finally managing to break through. We went to the 2024 Dutch Pen Show host … | Continue reading
I miss BSD/Linux. Or was that GNU/Unix, I’m not sure? Silly jokes to get a statistical minority reading this on the edge of their seat aside, I do miss it. It’s still out there, but no longer in here, so what happened? In 2007, work happened, permanently putting a hold on endless … | Continue reading
Not of fine wine and frothing beer, but of mood souring rain. The groundwater levels have hit an all-time high, almost beating 2021’s gigantic summer rainfall that resulted in the local waterways overflowing, and an hour drive away even transforming complete cities into brown flo … | Continue reading
After fiddling with various ways to sync notes across multiple vaults and iterating on my local data backup strategy, I figured I needed a new overview on the current design and the tools involved. I tried to keep things as simple and as low-friction as possible, with varied succ … | Continue reading
Joel recently shared a treasured memory of his first contact with emulation, which was a very timely post as early May’s Retronauts episode 609 also happened to be about the past and current state of emulation. These made me reflect on my relationship with emulation and how I fir … | Continue reading
A bit late to the party, but hey, it’s May! And just like the previous month flew by, I have no idea what actually happened besides the fact that the total and utter chaos at work combined with the naughty pranks of our toddler-to-be completely drained my batteries. I have to adm … | Continue reading
A few months ago, I was interviewed by Jeremy Jung of the Software Engineering Radio podcast about my book The Creative Programmer. The episode, #614, was published yesterday, so be sure to give it a listen! Here’s how Jeremy summarized our hour-long conversation: Wouter Groeneve … | Continue reading
Time for another design mistake, this time from our new Internet Service Provider (ISP). We switched last week because I required a business subscription as part of the cost-optimization plan. In Belgium, there’s very little choice when it comes to ISPs, with two giants completel … | Continue reading
It took a very long time to finally add a new entry in the personal phone history matrix, and I’m quite proud of that. My last smartphone, a hand-me-down Sony XZ1 Compact, was eventually rooted and flashed with LineageOS, significantly prolonging its lifespan. In fact, the phone … | Continue reading
My Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system has hit a new wall since I started taking notes on my work laptop in a new Obsidian Vault. How do you sync notes across devices? The Obsidian Help page doesn’t beat around the bush: either use Obsidian Sync—their proprietary add-on th … | Continue reading
Or should that be invasiveness? Persuasiveness? It’s no longer a distraction, it’s an addiction, it’s everywhere, and its aggressive promotion and passive acceptance is driving me crazy. I’m walking around on campus where students don’t look up while walking but down—desperately … | Continue reading
I’ve been known to (re)play old games—sometimes in new engines, sometimes on original hardware. The latest games to fit that bill are Duke Nukem 1 + 2 as part of the Duke Nukem Evercade Collection 1 where an amazing feat was pulled off by completely rewriting the engine to suppor … | Continue reading
What happened in March? Can you believe that my head feels like the Belgian weather of late: damp and very cloudy? I tried keeping my head above water in the complete chaos at work. I gave more talks about my creativity research. Kev and I exchanged lots of friendly emails as par … | Continue reading
Electrical baby toys are interesting to disassemble and look at how it’s made. Not up to the point of screwing out the PCB, decapping the chips and trying to reverse-engineer the ROM—I’m sure that’s interesting too—but just on a basic mechanical level. Companies like VTech and Cl … | Continue reading
In the programming language Go, it’s very easy to build something using high-level concurrent patterns thanks to the concept of Goroutines and channels used to signal between them. A Goroutine is essentially a coroutine that maps onto green threads that map onto real native threa … | Continue reading
The nameservers of brainbaking.com have changed, from Cloudflare back to my trusty local hosting/domain provider. Since the DDoS attack of last year, I moved the nameserver to Cloudflare to more resiliently catch dumb fuckups of people with questionable ethical motivations, as Cl … | Continue reading
We’re out of olive oil. Again. I don’t know why, but these dark green glass bottles always seem to be empty earlier than expected. My friend Luk over at Pensive Ibex buys his in the form of a big 5 l barrel directly through the farmer, and he claims that’s enough for about a year … | Continue reading
The site stats tell me that my about page at /about is consistently one of the most visited pages on this website. That confirms what everyone already knows: people are very curious, sometimes even nosy. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m just as nosy as my visitors: I love clic … | Continue reading
It’s been three years since the first desk setup post from 2021, and while a couple of things have changed, nothing major has. The preservationist in me wanted to post an update nonetheless, so here goes. The Desk The desk setup: an overview. The room is still small, th … | Continue reading
I came across a weird function in our Go codebase the other day. It was supposed to do just one thing but accidentally did a bit more—you know how this goes. Suppose you’re validating some business rule and need to fetch a bit of data to do so: func (s *Service) IsPeriodInvoicabl … | Continue reading
My first month back in the software engineering industry as an independent software architect is behind me. I’m still adjusting to the big change of pace. The paper work involved to set up a company (besloten venootschap or bv) in Belgium took longer than I anticipated and there’ … | Continue reading
Ana Rodrigues too deleted her Spotify account, citing numerous valid reasons (see my You Shouldn’t Listen To Spotify post), of which one in particular stood out for me: Spotify is bad for the environment. She cites Natalia Waniczek’s FFConf 2022 talk where Natalia presented painf … | Continue reading
I’ve openly proclaimed my dislike for current trends in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) before: it’s being misused to genereate crap to put on the internet and the availability of hallucinated crap makes students’ learning painfully worse. So I’ve been wondering: can these Ch … | Continue reading
In retrospect of several creative endeavors, on average, I feel like I spend 25% of my time creating, and 75% hustling. I don’t think that’s a healthy balance at all: it should be 60%+ creating and 40% or less hustling. Yet in this world where uninterrupted yelling is the norm to … | Continue reading
Board gaming is such a lovely hobby to keep your mind and your company on edge. No bright blue screen or need for electricity only adds to that experience. But board games also allow you to give in to that creative urge: instead of playing with the flimsy cardboard components, wh … | Continue reading
A few months ago, I was interviewed by Henry Suryawirawan of the Tech Lead Journal podcast about my book The Creative Programmer. The episode, #161, was published yesterday, so be sure to give it a listen! Here’s how Henry summarized our hour-long conversation: Wouter Groeneveld … | Continue reading
The first month of the new year came and went, and with it, surprise flurries of snow, episodes of frozen slippery fun, and sudden peaks in temperature once more confusing our shrubberies that are budding way to soon. It was my last month at the university (see why I am leaving a … | Continue reading
As an electrical and mechanical engineer, my late father-in-law was an expert in crafting home-grown black boxes that meticulously—and sometimes also miraculously—executed certain tasks in and around the house, such as automatically opening and closing the curtains based on the p … | Continue reading
Thanks to the multi billion dollar advertisement industry, searching for something on the internet has devolved from a joyous Altavista guess-the-keywords activity to a tiring chore where one has to wade through endless pools of generated SEO-optimized crap, hollow company blogs … | Continue reading
My mother-in-law bought a new laptop that came pre-installed with Windows 11. I thought that was a good idea since we were looking for an easy-to-use operating system. I was wrong. This post is a reminder to myself that, next time someone needs to be introduced to the world of di … | Continue reading