This post is the board game counterpart of the recent 2024 In Video Games end of year note. It’s been half a year since the 2024 Board Game Shelf Analysis that also included play stats, along with a promise to myself to record plays on GoardGameGEek via the BGG Catalog App. I kep … | Continue reading
There’s no denying that online content disappears. Depending on the type and thoroughness of the study, reports claim that 38% to 66.5% of webpages that existed a decade ago are dead. Sometimes we’re treated with a 3xx redirect code but more often than not they’re simply gone for … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
As I will be switching clients next year, I will also be switching programming languages, from Go back to Java. Truth to be told, I’m relieved because of it. The biggest challenges faced were most definitely not related to the choice of programming languages, but after cursing an … | Continue reading
Remember that shiny new Samsung clamshell smartphone I got at the end of April this year? It already broke. The screen suddenly started flickering and turned white. It wasn’t the more fragile hinge or the screen near the hinge, but more likely a loose connector somewhere. Yet I w … | Continue reading
During a chat with Joel about our unhealthy gaming habits, Joel got angry with me for not inviting him into the DOS Game Club and for not mentioning sooner that I was part of a super-secret club that required intricate handshakes to get in. So press ⌘+P, run to your printer, and … | Continue reading
November is no more. I have no idea how that happened, but it did, and here we are now, suddenly already hanging up Christmas lights (why so soon?), frantically preparing end-of-year get-togethers, exchanging gift lists, and possibly even thinking about last year’s New Year’s res … | Continue reading
Remember my analysis and gripes with the Rock Paper Shotgun 100? Well, since I’ve been slowly but surely building up my own video game database over at https://jefklakscodex.com where I log all my playthroughs, I figured I could just as well generate my own list based on the data … | Continue reading
When I was little, our parents took us on a trip to Spain every year. From where we live, that trip took, depending on the destination, up to 1500 km. Suffice to say, for a seven-year-old boy and his two little sisters, to get there, there was first a seemingly endless highway to … | Continue reading
This week, Rock Paper Shotgun presented their best games to play on the PC today list or the RPS 100 (2024), another interesting PC video game top 100 list. Another heavily biased top 100 list, which calls for a good doze of armchair scientific analysis to determine exactly how r … | Continue reading
Remember when I said that if you muddle with vintage hardware mixtures, one thing gets fixed but the other has a very big tendency to break? I was trying to save this for the PicoGUS post but that’ll have to wait as debugging the current problem is giving me a headache. You see, … | Continue reading
These past few days we’ve been greeted with a damp, cold mist: finally autumn is really here. Last week’s Halloween was celebrated with a local organized stroll through the park obstructed by everything scary that the organizer’s minds could think of. During the day, the walk was … | Continue reading
It took me more than two months to finally unwrap that eBay present containing a Pine Technology PT-428 baby AT Socket 3 motherboard. The original one in the 486 case, a PCChips M602, died on me this summer. Well, died is perhaps a bit exaggerated: the keyboard suddenly refused t … | Continue reading
As I wrote in last year’s Coping With Loss, just before my wife gave birth to our daughter, my father-in-law passed away. Needless to say, last year has been very hard—and to a certain extend, this year as well. We’re nineteen months later now and the resulting grief still hits u … | Continue reading
Here’s a dilemma. As a (freelance) software developer, should you specialize in one development stack or go wide by learning to be proficient in many different technologies? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and have yet to reach a definitive stance on the matter. I’m a … | Continue reading
And I blame Henrique—and, to a lesser degree, Luk, as he’s the one I made fun of for carring that small colourful keyboard everywhere (another NuPhy Air 75). Somehow, for some reason, I never gave keyboards that much thought. How weird considering typing is how I make money and h … | Continue reading
The Good Old Days relaunched last month with version 8 and I spent last week dissecting the changes from the new theme made by Mr. Creosote as it’s always fun to get inspired. They also have a museum page where you can go back in time to see what the site looked like back in the … | Continue reading
Getting timely posts out there in the open is becoming a bit of a challenge, it seems. Nonetheless, it’s still early October, so here’s my overview of stuff I’ve hauled back from last month’s internet spelunking. I’m also lagging behind my RSS reads so this haul is not as big as … | Continue reading
Bill from The Retro Sofa claims that the original Legend of Zelda is Unplayable in 2024 and wonders why that is and what we can do about it. That video was a very timely Stumble Upon as a week ago Florian from the DOS Game Club had: […] this idea of starting reading old game maga … | Continue reading
As an extension of last week’s A Historical Summary of My Music Tastes, I kept thinking about the many ways hip hop and other genres I started getting interested in intertwined. You’ve got your conventional hard rap tracks and the more gentle ones I already laid out a few years a … | Continue reading
Here’s me finding yet another cool blog, this time by Aaron Giles, a programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer. We’re off to a good start here, I love people who dabble in multiple disciplines. Aaron describes how he ended up with a thousand music CDs, how he re-r … | Continue reading
It’s been September for a good week now, I know, but you’ll have to forgive me as I’m running a bit behind my usual blog post cadence. The sudden drop in temperature makes it painfully clear that the summer of 2024 is gone, which is fine considering our garden has been ransacked … | Continue reading
Did you know that according to various easy to find sources, the total CO2 emissions as a by-product of producing cement and concrete account for more than 10% of the total emissions we as humans are responsible for? By expanding our house, we have made our humble contribution to … | Continue reading
I turned thirty-nine today: the start of the last 365 days of my youth, according to too many people who sent me a quick happy birthday message. As if I needed a reminder. Should I get myself a big bike next year? I don’t think the mid-life crisis will make a full frontal assault … | Continue reading
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