Last month’s favorites got lost in momentum and I simply didn’t have the energy to condense them into a metapost. I’m still not sure whether or not these types of posts are actually useful but I do have a few interesting links to share so here goes. Most of February’s favorites I … | Continue reading
In October 2022, I wondered: Should We Build Our Own Wayback Machines? If you even remotely care about some of the websites you encountered the last almost thirty years of the lovely World Wide Web, The answer is undeniably yes. Sites appear and disappear, and when the latter hap … | Continue reading
Dear attacker; we don’t know each other well enough to start a letter with my dearest friend but I do not want to come across as rude as you were so I will keep the salutation formal. On Friday afternoon 24th, you were bored. I understand, I get bored all the time. I then sometim … | Continue reading
A few days ago, a stressed-out gamer confessed on ResetERA he was considering giving up on gaming, as he felt the time spent could be put to “better” use. The thread somehow struck a chord here, not because I agree, but because the mentality more and more people fall for is a ver … | Continue reading
In case you haven’t noticed lately, the archivist within me has been flaring up again. The subject of a more robust analog journal is something I’ve been pondering since I encountered Jeff Huang’s Designing pages to last mantra—although he meant web-pages, not physical things on … | Continue reading
This is an elaborated postscript to my last post on Herodotus. The real impact of Herodotus' Histories only dawned on me after reading an article on the Dutch Kunstvensters called Where is the burial chamber of Cheops? a few days ago. Cheops'—or, as Herodotus called the Egyptian … | Continue reading
The title of this post ends in a question mark because I don’t know. As the ancient zen Buddhist proverb says: “To begin, begin”. And that’s what I did, on and off, now and then: to read one of the first historical non-fiction works of humankind, written by an Ancient Greek citiz … | Continue reading
In What Happens To My Digital Identity When I Die?, I thought about my data and what should become of it when I’m no longer here. I discovered then that not even my wife has access to many of my accounts and data, which was solved by drafting and printing out a document that’s ke … | Continue reading
A few things have kept me sane during the last sad few weeks: tinkering in Go and Pizza Tower. It’s been a while since I shared a soundtrack is amazing post—the last one was Shredder’s Revenge in June last year. Thanks to a golden tip from Simon Vandevelde, I played Pizza Tower o … | Continue reading
Eight days ago, my father in law passed away. We were very close. For the first time in a long time, I’ve been struggling to write, rest, breathe, eat, sleep. My mind tells me his passing wasn’t entirely unexpected, but my heart tells me otherwise. He had to go twenty years too s … | Continue reading
Ever since the increasing popularity of escape rooms, board game designers have been adapting the formula to create various “escape at home” scenarios. I’m sure everyone is familiar with EXIT: The Game, probably the most popular one by Inka & Markus Brand, that boomed enormously … | Continue reading
Last June, as part of a new course called Android App Development, our 2nd bachelor Engineering Technology students had to demonstrate their creative app development skills. As it was a new course—but a small one, at 3 ETCS points—I had to dig through Android and Kotlin docs to t … | Continue reading
Somewhat related to Terrible Software As A Service Pricing Models, the pervasiveness and aggressiveness of “modern” (yes, those quotes are required) web advertising is a very depressing devolution indeed. I know it’s nothing new, but I wanted to present a particular case that is … | Continue reading
Remember those FM transmitters you used in your car in the early 2000s to connect your iPod to your car radio tuner because it didn’t have an audio-in port? I built an intricate version for my music setup. This idea is (again) inspired by William Woodruff’s excellent Modernizing … | Continue reading
A week late, but hey, better late than never. It’s been a year since I’ve been posting monthly flashbacks, and I’ve been thinking about skipping them all together. It never felt right to write a few paragraphs about my personal or professional life that either aren’t worth being … | Continue reading
My wife bought another set of mini printers for scrapbooking, including the Phomemo M02 mini printer. Phomemo is a Chinese brand I’ve never heard of before, and sadly, as I expected, it requires the use of a proprietary mobile app in order to send something to the printer. That v … | Continue reading
We’ve been enjoying slowly re-watching all James Bond movies in the past few months. Bond, James Bond. Shaken, Not Stirred. Licence To Kill. Double-Oh Seven. Walter PPK. I’m sure you’ve heard of the fellow: according to recent metrics, it’s the movie series with the highest perce … | Continue reading
Since January 2021—for exactly two years—after ditching Google’s products, I relied on the Swiss ProtonMail service to send and receive mails from my own domain. Until today, when I switched to Germany-based Mailbox.org. More than a few reasons made me finally look past my yearly … | Continue reading
His first daughter was born in the Chateaux de Montaigne. Michel Eyquem—his real name; the chateaux was acquired by his great-grandfather—and his wife Françoise de la Cassaigne crossed paths thanks to a fixed marriage, as was customary among the wealthy in that time. Life as a pa … | Continue reading
I miss fan sites. I’ve already mentioned the possibility to back them up using something like ArchiveBox, but the fact remains, they’re disappearing, and not a lot new are being made. Instead, fans turn to Fandom, formerly called Wikicities and Wikia, that hosts wikis on various … | Continue reading
And thoroughly confusing my pingback/webmention server in the process, causing all mentions ever to be resent. Terribly sorry about that! (This is perhaps yet another indication of the flimsiness of those systems?) The article in question was nothing more than a rant that, when I … | Continue reading
Don’t you also think it’s strange that typical classroom teachers don’t have any practical experience in the topic they’re attempting to teach? This phenomena isn’t limited to higher education, but could be applied to high school as well. Immediate exceptions I can think of could … | Continue reading
My wife enjoys crafting things. These things include greeting cards, fabric designs and prints, custom labels, … Since a few years, she utilizes two Cricut machines that are advertised as “smart cutting machines for every craft”: it’s essentially a souped-up plotter that can be a … | Continue reading
How do you take a screenshot on a Nintendo DS? That’s a good question that’s not that easy to answer. On modern console systems such as the Nintendo Switch, there’s even a dedicated screenshot button right there on the controller, and Twitch-like streaming services are often embe … | Continue reading
December 2022 is no more, or to put it more concisely: 2022 is no more. As much as I enjoy reading other bloggers' year in reviews, re-reading my 2021 attempt only calls forth negative emotions. Generally speaking, this year has been pretty miserable, a sad continuation of the pr … | Continue reading
As a self-proclaimed Brain Baker, I pride myself on being a generalist: I’ve been a software developer for 11 years, currently I’m a computing education scholar and teacher, I have a professional bread baking degree and teach sourdough bread baking courses, and I write books and … | Continue reading
I packed my bags and moved from my Pleroma instance chat.brainbaking.com/@wouter to the Mastodon instance dosgame.club/@jefklak. If you’re on the Fediverse and haven’t followed me there, please do, as the move protocol that automatically transfers your followers is not properly i … | Continue reading
The last book I read this year was Grand Hotel Europa from Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, a lengthy critique on mass tourism and Europe’s obsession with its past disguised as an innocent looking novel. It’s masterfully written. Ilja himself plays the lead, reliving memories of his past … | Continue reading
2022 was the year when… I turned my back on streaming services and got back into digital music curation; Bandcamp was acquired by Epic Games; I discovered brick stores that still sell CDs—you know, those shiny round things you hang in your Christmas tree; bought as much soundtrac … | Continue reading
Halfway through this year, I stopped actively using my GoodReads account for various reasons and contemplated adding a “books” section on the site like many other IndieWeb bloggers do. But I didn’t and instead simply wrote down thoughts about the things I read in my journal, whic … | Continue reading
The yearly Game Of The Year (GOTY) voting threads are starting to pop up everywhere, I think I might even be quite late to the party! As a retro gamer, GOTY lists merely amuse me, and the ones coming up on top are usually big budget AAA games that rarely tickle my fancy. Still, i … | Continue reading
Strategically placing a nightcam to spot animals is something we’ve done before. Back then, the goal was to find out what was causing the racket under the roof (mice) and the added bonus was discovering who left all those hairs behind in the sofa (the dog). This time, we’re facin … | Continue reading
The end of the year traditionally signals the arrival of lists, yay! In a few months, we’ll be celebrating 10 years of living in our current house. Perhaps now is a good time to dig up a few not so fond memories of maintaining it. I’ve never really enjoyed the chores that come wi … | Continue reading
November 2022 is no more. It has been a slow month. I made myself some tea just before typing this, and the drawer where we keep it broke, so that’s a good start. More things broke this month, such as the dryer (for the second time), a bike tire, a glass, a piece of the parquet ( … | Continue reading
It took a long time to fill that last available slot on the WinXP build motherboard: the PCI-E 1x is now officially claimed by an Avermedia C127 VGA/HDMI capture card, also known as the Game Broadcaster HD. I’ve had this on my retrocomputing projects list for almost a year now. I … | Continue reading
It’s astonishing how much influence a single company can have, even on the invisible part of the webdesign of your blog: the metadata. I still encounter countless sites—including my own, before cleaning up—that feel obliged to inject tags in their segment of the HTML. Because o … | Continue reading
As a follow-up to my earlier overview, Finding Stuff on Big Blogs, I decided to rewrite bits and pieces of Brain Baking by stealing great ideas from others listed in that post—in true Austin Kleon style. The main thing that changed, besides the You Might Also Like… list below eac … | Continue reading
One of the returning themes in my RSS feed lately must have been Elon Musk’s embarrassing fuckups at Twitter and the (relatively) huge influx to Mastodon as a consequence. I don’t really feel like re-listing things that a selfish narcissist does to sink a company like Twitter, bu … | Continue reading
Somehow, Writing Academic Papers in Markdown is one of my most popular blog posts. I’m glad so many (presumably academics) are looking to partially ditch LaTeX and separate content from markup! Pandoc is a wonderful tool that takes in a plain .md Markdown file and spits out whate … | Continue reading
I noticed a few days ago that my Pagefind installation, the tiny search tool I use to enable searching on this website, was out of date—so I updated it and made some adjustments as to what to index. It now supports custom placeholder translations so that’s great. But Pagefind is … | Continue reading
Our energy provider came up with a mind-boggling suggestion for monthly advances—values I immediately wanted to reduce. I’ll take that risk to have to cough up a large sum at the end of this year, thank you very much. After logging in and trying to input new meter values, I bumpe … | Continue reading
October 2022 is no more. This month broke yet more temperature records in the EU: a week ago, we recorded 24 degrees Celsius, while it should have been 10 or less. The culprit is supposedly a very slow high pressure jet stream. Who wants to take on a bet and predict that this win … | Continue reading
My Into the Breach pre-order from Fangamer.com almost arrived: I received a nice letter from Bpost, the Belgian post company, in which they claim I bought something without VAT outside of the EU. Here we go again… Naturally, after the necessary cursing, I started questioning phys … | Continue reading
Preserving web content never really left my mind ever since taking screenshots of old sites and putting them in my personal museum. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a wonderful tool that currently stores 748 billion webpage snapshots over time, including dozens of my own … | Continue reading
Flemish and Dutch businesses, teachers, governments, and shops seem to have a very difficult time correctly spelling my name, Wouter Groeneveld—and that completely baffles me. My first name is a common name in the Dutch speaking regions and can be compared to (and by Americans is … | Continue reading
Something I’ve been pondering on lately: do you preserve your very old creations? I’m talking ancient here, but do put this in context, since it’s software development ancient. How old is “old” software? In case of JavaScript, probably yesterday. I happen to be someone who neatly … | Continue reading
My desktop lacks sparkles, silliness, and a general evocation of fun. I’ve been wondering why, and came to the conclusion that the culprit is MacOS itself. At the moment, my computer desktop looks like this: OSX 12.2, 10/2022 Besides the (temporary) mess—game screenshot … | Continue reading
Ever since a professor of a neighboring university remarked “I’m most proud of my graduates when they just call themselves programmers"—while he clearly loves his status as Prof. Dr.—I’ve been wondering: is there a thematic or conceptual difference between a programmer, a develop … | Continue reading