This month’s train conversation award goes to two students discussing a paper assignment they resented. I just want to, like, go working or something? Let’s not hand it in. Let’s just stop doing all this. I’m totally not motivated. Dear students, I’ve got some bad news for you: i … | Continue reading
This article was originally written in 2019 as part of a technical Game Boy series to be published as a bundle. See also: An Ode To Game Boy Cartridges. In March 2001, Nintendo introduced an advanced portable model to the gaming market with the release of the Game Boy Advance (GB … | Continue reading
Moments of utter confusion struck me while catching up on household bookkeeping. After running the bookkeeping script, I’m often left with a puzzling Excel file where lots of manual re-tagging seems to take too long. Why? Because of statements such as this: 13-01 Vilnius -7.79 12 … | Continue reading
Joel got a Polystation for Christmas as his very first console. As an imposter machine that came with a million games in just one console, for kids or parents alike that have no clue about video gaming, I’m sure seeing that sticker on the box must have led to many hearts skippin … | Continue reading
The second PKM Summit is taking place yesterday and right now, a cosy (un)conference on how to create personal methods to fluently process information and ideas. I was only able to attend the first day in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and had a blast doing so. Last time I was in Utre … | Continue reading
I finished reading De Lezende Mens (The Reading Human) by Ruud Hisgen and Adriaan van der Weel, a historic take on the evolution of reading and writing that ends with a criticism on our modern emphasis of short and sweet text snippets (social media anyone?). According to the auth … | Continue reading
Last week, I updated the Brain Baking copyright and tracking policy. This is what it said before (in the last section, No Tracking): I achieved this by ditching Google Analytics and hosting third-party libraries myself. So rest assured, Google does not know you were here! Instead … | Continue reading
This month, our daughter will turn two, I’ll be already two months into the new gig, and we’ll finally be rewarded with sunshine. Looking good so far! On top of that, Frank convinced me to attend this year’s PKM Summit, due in just two weeks. I am really looking forward to sharin … | Continue reading
In Sarah Bakewell’s masterful How To Live I am re-reading as part of my compile your own philosophy strategy, she tries to let someone else take multiple stabs at answering that question by excavating Michel de Montaigne’s Essais. The result is a wonderful book that highlights so … | Continue reading
Why do so many board spaces eat up too much precious shelf space? Whatever happened to small, nimble boxes with as much components and gameplay mechanics as possible crammed in? They do exist, but sometimes designers go overboard resulting in fiddling and barely readable cards. L … | Continue reading
As per recommendation by a co-worker who is very enthusiastic about the possible ramifications for the startup I now work for, I started reading Hastings & Meyer’s popular No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. Emphasis on started, as by page 100, I was so disgus … | Continue reading
Matthew Lamont, a fellow stationary aficionado, shared his stationary drawer with us this week, elaborating on all the writing implements, things to write on, and fountain pen stuff that are tucked away there. Thanks Matthew, I love posts like those! Your drawers are shockingly s … | Continue reading
Since COVID, we’ve seen a huge surge in board game popularity, especially within the subgenre called roll & write (or flip & write) games. These games are easily recognized by the sheet(s) of paper (or wipeable surface) you’ll be writing/drawing on as part of the “board interacti … | Continue reading
This year, I will have existed twenty years without glasses and twenty years with. I can’t say this is especially worth celebrating as I’m not very fond of requiring spectacles. For the first five to ten years, the glasses were regularly put aside and I was still able to make out … | Continue reading
One more miserable month to go. Hopefully March will bring end to all the mire and misery which was noticeably more bad than previous years—both when it came to the weather and the world news… But hey, today was a rare beautiful albeit cold day! January signified the end of the h … | Continue reading
It’s still January so hopefully I’m still permitted to put out these kinds of year overview notes from 2024. I did not forget to create the book overview post—I actively avoided doing so, as I haven’t read a lot and didn’t think it would be worth wasting words on. I still don’t, … | Continue reading
We have a soft spot for art-induced TV shows, especially if they’re about the exciting discovery of once-lost paintings from famous Dutch Masters. The new Dutch show De Gezonken Meesters (literally: The Sunken Masters) on NPO Max does not fail to deliver in that regard. The premi … | Continue reading
Even though I don’t find these kinds of posts very interesting to read, I guess it can’t hurt to quickly raise up to the stupid blog questions challenge—Thanks, Joel. There is nothing shockingly new in here and most other articles about blogging might be of better use to you. Get … | Continue reading
Two years ago, Ian Scott created the picoGUS card that uses ISA sound card emulation using the RaspPi’s Pico’s microcontroller. My July 2023 post was the first post to mention the card and I’ve had it on my radar ever since. Last summer I received my own copy and tried assembling … | Continue reading
2025 will become my personal year of philosophy. I turn forty this year, which, if all goes well, marks the first part of my life as over. Considering recent illnesses along my family and friends, I have little hope of ever reaching eighty, but let’s keep that as a grand goal for … | Continue reading
It seemed a good idea to start the year with a fresh and lively sourdough starter. Mine has been lingering in the fridge for the last few weeks, generating vinegar and slowly killing itself. A few days of throwing almost everything out and replacing it with new flour + water luck … | Continue reading
Happy New Year! I’m more than ready to put number 24 behind me. Professionally, last year feels like one giant mistake. Luckily, some bright spots here and there helped me keep my head (somewhat) above water. Judging from last year’s December post, 2023 was also a difficult year— … | Continue reading
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