What started with just four stickers, mostly Emacs (Lisp) related quickly spiralled out of control after the arrival of my Redbubble order. I’m sorry, I tried neatly arranging them, I really did. But the end result is, as my wife called it, chaotic¹. But in D&D, chaotic alignments can be good as well, right? Minsc is chaotic good? Sarevok can turn into being chaotic good if you treat him well in Throne of Bhaal? So here’s my chaotic good laptop:

Now it’s just a matter of time before a conversation is sparked. It will depend on the sticker they choose to discuss whether they’ll become besties. While Ton chooses not to apply stickers to avoid a conversation about their meaning, I am actively trying to provoke it. Dear students, if you’re reading this: surprise me!

Why don’t you try to guess which is which? I’ll hand out a few hints for each sticker and reveal their true nature in a spoiler tag below. From the top left to the bottom right:

1. Big black cloudy square: FSF.
2. Pixelated weirdo in long darkblue coat: an old pirate.
3. Mini round foil sticker: a certain Paw that needs to be Patrolled.
4. Big green skull: think old French adventure game.
5. What is a man: I think I already spoiled that one; but which game?
6. Next level round one: fantasy console
7. Pixelated kid dressed in green clothers holding up a sword: does this really need a hint?
8. Warning: this product may contain trace amounts of Lisp: an alien!
9. Feeling Extra Fine: a fine writing implement
10. A shocked skeleton: what’s the opposite of Mario?
11. A towering purple tentacle: travel in time to find out
12. Green pixelated asparagus: just food
13. A round white E: the logo of an editor I’m using right now
14. Mini round foil sticker: has a little brother called George
15. A sink overflowing: GNU Emacs is literally on it
16. We Rise At Dawn frog: what’s inside the jar?
17. Small pixelated bug: involving grid-based tactical manoeuvring
18. An old wizard with long beard sitting on a chair: related to the green skull
19. Small pixelated bug: see 17
20. Menacing looking black bearded fellow with hat: looking for that pirate

Perhaps I went a bit overboard with the (retro) gaming-related stickers. I had more but ran out of space. I realised too late that I was missing a music-related one. The biggest challenge was fixing a few overlapping edges that looked bad, where I had to rip off and redo a part of some stickers. The extra fine nib tip is already getting loose…

Related topics: / stickers /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 16 October 2026.  Reply via email.

The scolding happened in a casual way amongst colleagues, as colleagues often do—but again, I think he has a point. The same point as the ridiculousness of a Free Software Foundation sticker on the laptop, or the same point as trying to decide which laptop to buy after this one. How am I as a humble consumer supposed to decide which company is the “lesser evil”? Do I buy open hardware where I can put truly free and libre software on that aligns with my ethics? Or do I buy a flashy laptop with hard-to-beat components (oh, and 100% recycled aluminium, dear colleague) that comes with the downsides of macOS and perhaps shady lawsuits brushed under the mat?

I am not an expert at the field of hardware (or let’s say, IT) ethics, so I have to rely on the opinion of experts on this. Luckily, technical reports are dutifully published (and no doubt nudged in the morally just direction) containing information on CO2 production per unit produced—this is called the “Lifecycle Assessment or LCA”—giving us humble consumers a way to easily compare laptop 1 with laptop 2 when it comes to the initial environmental cost. Or so you’d think.

In The Score, C. Thi Nguyen explains that such a heavily condensed metric trades trust for transparency. We simply don’t trust experts: when we ask an Apple or Samsung engineering manager “is your stuff ethically just?” what do you think the answer will be? So we invent numbers to keep the cheating at bay. But that forces experts to decontextualise these numbers, resulting in:

• Apple’s 2025 MacBook Air: 155 kg CO2e
• Framework’s 2022 laptop: 200 kg CO2e
• Lenovo’s 2020 ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6 20XY: 520 kg CO2e

We now created another problem: comparing these numbers became impossible. First, the last Pro versions of the Framework laptop is missing numbers. Second, what does a single number say about the ethical standpoint of the entire company? According to the Business and Human Rights Centre, forced labour in tech industry supply chains remains a huge problem. Samsung supposedly does much better than say NVIDIA. Suppose for a moment Apple works with NVIDIA: which number do you trust now? The low CO2 one or the high “uh oh child labour” one?

You see, dear colleague, I take this shit seriously—because shit it most definitely is. In the end, I still think you’re right: none of these giant companies act morally just. Some form of pollution—environmental, economical, human rights-related—sticks on every single piece of circuit board.

And while that’s depressing, the point is that you as a humble consumer still have the power to mitigate this by choosing the lesser evil. In Blizzard’s Diablo terms: go for Andariel or Duriel, but avoid Mephisto. Yet the best option is to postpone the purchase. I doubt this will shock anyone, so just as a reminder to myself, the best action to take is to:

1. Refuse buying. You don’t need a new laptop right now. Wait another year. The RAM crisis will help with this.
2. Repair if possible. Maximise that lifespan.
3. Buy second hand or refurbished to avoid starting that factory production process.
4. If you really have to; “vote with your wallet”: make a morally just decision.

A few more side notes. First; for me, a MacBook (even an Air) is surprisingly enough built to outlive the average laptop up to a ratio of two to three times as long—making the perhaps “unethical” Apple a more ethical choice. Another point against transparency metrics.

Second; a morally just decision is a personal one. As Seb pointed out while we exchanged conversations regarding this topic, we each have to draw our own line in the sand somewhere. For me, that’s giving money to Anthropic. I am also looking at a Framework Pro as my next laptop because I miss Linux¹ and support the idea of free and libre software. Heck, I’m typing this in Emacs—yes, in macOS. Because it’s still a Unix environment, and then I can move on with my life, as sometimes I get stuck in making these endless decisions.

To me, LCA scores are meaningless. And as Nguyen has pointed out, any score can and will be gamed. I work in higher education; I’m all too familiar with cheating the system—both from the standpoint of a student as that of an institution trying to maintain the yearly funding budget by any means necessary.

Almost a thousand words later, here’s a conclusion: I am postponing buying a new laptop.

By Wouter Groeneveld on 13 October 2026.  Reply via email.

The reason for this is simple. Sebastián sent me a couple of Emacs-related stickers, knowing I couldn’t resist. It’s all his fault. Look at what he did!

(And yes, I am well aware of the irony of pasting a Free Software Foundation sticker on a MacBook that runs on a proprietary OS. I promise my next hardware choice will be more ethically sound.)

Of course I can’t stop there: what to do with all that open space in-between the stickers? I could have placed them all at one side to make it even more painfully obvious that the beautiful symmetry is completely gone now. As for the question of where to stick them: I already think far too much and was too happy with the stickers to give this much thought. They’re on there. The Apple logo is still visible: a Brain Baking logo sticker covering that up might be the logical next step to take.

Every time I receive stickers at conventions, I hesitate: do I stick these onto the laptop? Wait, what do they represent? Do I really want to proudly display the Octat GitHub mascot to promote GitHub as “the only way to do Git”? Nope. Do I really want to paste a Java mug or Gopher on there, identifying myself with these programming languages that aren’t bad but don’t get my engine running? How about a colourful JetBrains IntelliJ one that can serve as a free ad? Nope, nope, nope. It was easy to be in the (tech) sticker hater group.

And then I finally found something that was fun to mess around with. So yes, I am now a happy Lisp and Emacs advocate at work. The stickers already provoked many Emacs versus Vim discussions that end once you show them that Emacs can be a window manager running your other apps, or that EVIL mode exists. Still, 99% of the die-hard coder colleagues—which are less than 10%, the others of course rely on VS Code—are Vim users. That’s great!

But one wasn’t and told me he yesterday closed his Emacs window for the first time in weeks. We both had to move classes but I’ve made a mental note to meet up and exchange Lispy configs. Thank you Seb & Seb’s stickers.

Many of my students like stickers on their laptops. Most just stick on there whatever they can get their hands on. I’ve seen a lot of Gophers but nowhere in our curriculum we explore Go and after approaching them, I learn that they don’t even know how to write a line of Go code. A Gopher is cool, that’s what matters! I do think that you should at least know what you’re implicitly preaching.

Which is why I’m not limiting myself by sticking only tech-related stuff on there. The question then becomes: what else? Something retro game-related, obviously. But still: what? A classic Castlevania logo? I’d rather go for a custom-printed sticker with some obscure sprite work, from for instance Wario Land 3 or Gobliins 2. If someone is able to recognise all these, I’ll finally have found my missing soulmate.

Maybe a pixelated version of bread or a fountain pen? Or am I giving away too much information that way? Also, since the laptop turns seven in January, I should keep copies as the stickers are not transferable.

Another approach would be to cover the entire back, making use of every square millimetre. A few colleague design lecturers carry laptops like this. I don’t think I’m cool enough for that.

Terence caught a nasty laptop sticker paralysis while trying to perfectly place his, so a bit of thoughtful preparation might be in order. I love Abigail’s Kirby sticker on her Thinkpad. She even scanned her laptop with a photocopier and converted the entire thing into a clickable polygon-based SVG. Much cooler than my lazy cellphone snapshot. I’m also jealous of her Cory Wong pizza slice sticker! I do wonder what she’ll do when her laptop breaks down or it’s time for a replacement. Nia’s laptop stickers (a November 2022 snapshot) also contains some cool ones, as does Manton Reece’s, such as bookstore stickers. Here’s a discussion on the Framework forum containing more inspiration.

It is clear that I still have some work to do. The four stickers are only the beginning. Laptop Stickers: Yay Or Nay? Yay. But then: how many? Overlapping or not? Planned placement or not? Tech-related only or not? See, even the most banal decisions in life come with Deep Thoughts!

To be continued with a photo when it’s done.

Related topics: / stickers /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 9 October 2026.  Reply via email.

André describes it as follows: imagine a heartfelt moment with your lover, perhaps on a special occasion. Instead of savouring the moment, you imagine yourself well into the future, looking back at this moment with nostalgic feelings. That alone took a while for me to understand: you’re creating future moments of nostalgia with every significant moment, yes, but why would you be deliberately thinking about a future where you’re looking back at his moment instead of just being in the now?

Exaggerating this further, a constant yearning for the past to the point that you attempt to retread your (or someone’s) exact steps will always result in disappointment. Aciman often tried to visit the New York he experienced when watching a seventies movie. But that version of the city was an imaginary one where imperfect parts of the place have been expertly brushed up to deliver a great picture. When Aciman tries to locate an apartment where a scene from a movie took place, he realises that the building has been torn down a long time ago—heck, even the entire neighbourhood is gone and replaced by a more modern version of tall concrete.

It gets worse: some buildings never even existed in that city. For the purposes of a movie, streets and facades can be rebuild and completely altered—in Hollywood, not in New York city. Miles away from the city you live in and you think evokes pure nostalgia because of those magical moments in the theatre. That yearning is dangerous, and yet, thousands of tourists travel all over the world to retread the steps of their favourite author/actor/whatever: visiting their grave, their birthplace, the studio they worked in, the school they spent time in.

Homo Irrealis is full of these brain twisters where Aciman identifies with an actor in a movie that in itself is already filled with irrealis moods, where the things that are being discussed have not happened and might never happen—yet they’re discussing it as if it already happened and looking back on it. My brain hurts.

To my big surprise, I often catch myself in an irrealis mood. If I’m unsure to take up that job offer, I imagine myself doing it and try to reflect “back” to evoke a feeling: will I like this? Do I see myself doing this for a long(er) time? Suppose I take this, will this make thing a and b less painful? If I say yes to this offer to give a talk, how would I look back to having given the talk?

I gave a sourdough bread baking workshop last weekend and always regret saying yes at first because an event like this in the weekend causes logistical problems for parents with young kids. Yet I’ve been doing this for more than ten years and I just know the participants will be enthusiastic and I just know I’ll bike home with a big smile on my face. Thinking about that makes the initial reluctance disappear. Technically speaking, that’s an irrealis mood, since I’m reflecting on the workshop being done before it took place and how I feel having given it. But since I’ve gone through these many times before, I guess it’s less problematic?

What I take away from André Aciman is that indeed, irrealis moods can be problematic as we can get stuck in the future of the past (huh?) without just enjoying the ride. I guess the main perpetrator here is again restorative nostalgia. I stumbled upon Aciman’s book by sheer luck: it was set on display in a second hand book store and somehow attracted my attention. Hoping to extract some philosophical guideline on how to contain and constrain nostalgic feelings, I walk away confused. Not here nor there, what should you make of this? That the human mind is an extraordinary thing that can look into a future that hasn’t happened yet and there reflect back on this moment now as if it happened a long time ago. But to what purpose?

All of us seek a life that exists elsewhere in time, or elsewhere on-screen, and that, not being able to find it, we have all learned to make do with what life throws our way.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t seek a life that exists elsewhere in time. Making do with what life throws my way sounds great: making amends with making do might be my most important mission ever. So perhaps I misunderstand the entire concept.

Yet an irrealis mood might help putting a currently challenging time in perspective. My kids might be giving me trouble, but I can see myself in the future looking back at this moment and thinking ah, weren’t those the days?. That might possibly even involve a bit of yearning because in that future trouble will still find us—that’s simply what life throws our way. It’ll be a different kind of trouble. But it will be trouble.

Looking back at the things I have experienced, done, or not done, does not immediately invoke yearning. I’m glad many of those aspects are gone: I was happy to finally live by myself; learn how to stand on my own two feet. I was happy to let go of commuting to Brussels every day and slowly killing myself, even though working with that team was such a privilege. All things considered, I am happy to have kids now. Every part of life comes with its own upsides and downsides. Suppose that wasn’t the case, then living turns into a boring drag. Nothing to look back at in order to pat yourself on the back and say hey, I survived this. Is that part of being a Homo Irrealis? Perhaps not.

Less irrealis, more realis.

Related topics: / nostalgia /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 6 October 2026.  Reply via email.

What happened in September? More letter writing! The snail mail project is going well. I keep track of the amount of outbound letters: the grand total for the last two months is 20 handwritten letters. If you’d like to chime in, please let me know so we can become pen pals! More than 50% of these offline conversations fizzle out after one or two letters so it’s only the die-hards that are willing to invest some time that get to see the best I’ve got.

Previous month: August 2026.

Games I’ve played

Contrary to the summary of August that listed two board games, I have finally picked up video gaming again after a summer holiday hiatus—which in case of a lecturer is two months. Yup. Come join us! I also started (re)playing some older Castlevania games in anticipation of Belmont’s Curse.

The Telwynium Book 1-2-3 is an episodic eighties Sierra-on-line inspired high fantasy game crafted by the same person that gifted us the The Drifter experience. They’re free on itch.io and will be bundled as one big adventure when the final episode releases somewhere in 2027. I enjoyed playing through them but there’s nothing especially remarkable here.

Castlevania: Rondo of Blood does not need an introduction. When it comes to the release window and the platform it was released on, is the black sheep of the ‘Vania family. Luckily, it got a remaster on the PSP although I’m not a fan of those graphics. Review to follow soon.

The venerable Jeremy Parish recently worked through Rondo as part of his Turbo Works Gaiden 01. If you’re interested in the weird history of this game, I recommend you watch his video instead of reading my crappy review:

Castlevania: Dracula’s Kiss, also known as Dracula X in the US, is a “port” (although not really) of Rondo of Blood for the SNES. It’s… not good. The “NES Hard (TM)” part here borders to the unfair, the level design is bland and the best parts of the original didn’t make it to Nintendo’s console.

Castlevania: Bloodlines is a very good 2D action game that feels a tad different—perhaps mostly because you’re technically playing it on SEGA’s MegaDrive? It also released a year before Vampire’s Kiss here in Europe. The soundtrack took the obvious hit but is still surprisingly catchy.

I started playing Eastward as a break from ‘Vanias. The pixel art and music is amazing! And so is the first chapter but then it suddenly changes pace. The endless blabbering that even the “skip dialogue” button can’t fully fast-forward is a bit painful. I’m 8 hours in at the end of chapter 4. I still want to know where this postapocalyptic strange tale is going; but wow this game has pacing issues…

Selected (blog) posts

• Speaking of Rondo of Blood, I liked Indie Gamer Chick’s review and analysis of the game.
• This one’s from 2019 but I didn’t know about it yet: Piers Cawley ran a micro bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL!
• Lyteforce Games writes about Combolands, an indie game that he summarises as “Balatro with buildings”. I have yet to check it out.
• The Ruby/Rails world has a big problem: DHH. What to do when your favourite programming language has a fascist problem? I feel for every Rails fan. Please stop the ridiculous Omarchy investments! The list of fashware keeps on growing and growing. The amount of people I know—including myself—truly being excited about software development keeps on shrinking and shrinking. See also Chad’s I am retiring from tech to live offline. Perhaps Chad wants to write me a letter. You know, using a thing called a pen that emits not HTTP return codes but ink?
• Nick also writes about the end of a craft. I think you can see this one coming.
• More AI drama in the KDE world as explained by Nate.
• Not a blog but a very cool online fountain pen catalogue by George Starcher.
• Notchoc rebooted their blog and started using Makko. It’s always interesting to see new small tools like these pop up. I don’t feel the need to change my setup just yet.
• Jason Murphy talks us through a pen nib swap: switching one architect grind for the other.
• Toni writes something bang-on: having kids changes everything.
• I really liked Paul Taylor’s morning routine checklist system that leveraged Alfred to the max.
• Did you know that freeing up memory in C/C++ by calling free() does not necessarily free memory? Daniel Lemire explains why.
• Lee Reamsnyder writes about friendship and thanksgiving aptly calling it friendsgiving memories.

Other random links

• In case you need to quickly look up a Race for the Galaxy card: use the RFTGPics service. Tourist World for the win.
• I had to jump through a few more hoops than usual to get SDKMan to work with the Fish shell.

Related topics: / metapost /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 2 October 2026.  Reply via email.

The first song on the album is a rearrangement of a classic Castlevania track—something Mega Ran loves to do and I love to listen to. The lyrics of the linked track—nr. 2; Make It Out (Siren Head)—set the tone of a dark haunted castle that, once entered, refuses to let you go:

Too much time trying to get away Eerie sounds almost had me swayed Thinking there was someone to save Got me dodging an early grave […] I don’t know if I’ll make it out (4x) But Lord knows I’m trying

Speaking of which; why don’t we all play as many Castlevania games as we can in October? We’ve got two things to celebrate: the spooky season (and thus the harvest of ample of pumpkins I guess) and the arrival of Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse, a new 2D entry in the mainline series!

If you don’t count Igarashi’s Bloodstained series as a mainline Castlevania game, it’s been since Order of Ecclesia in 2008—18 years ago—that we ‘Vania fans are being treated to a brand new 2D metroidvania game. I’m not counting 2009’s The Adventure ReBirth; the remake of the 1989 Game Boy game; nor 2024’s Haunted Castle Revisited; the remake of the 1987 arcade game. Yet perhaps it is worth it to paste in a flyer for the arcade game to help get you into a creepy mood.

Doesn’t that penetrating gaze from the beautifully dressed woman kneeling next to a grave marked as “STONE” without getting a single spot of dirt on her very visible shiny legs send a chill down your spine? Or send anything down anything else? How about the gaze of Dracula himself, staring dangerously looking into the foggy distance, or rather, having this I-need-to-pee look? That was the late eighties—they don’t make them anymore like this.

But no worries: they are still making a Castlevania game! Someone at Konami finally resurrected the genre after realising that this could be a sure way to fill the coffins back up with lots of cold hard cash; needed for research purposes to do execute some more cross-breeding vampire-werewolf-human experiments. I don’t understand why they realised it so late but better late than never. The Castlevania Collections on multiple platforms are still selling well; shouldn’t that be an indication for an appetite for more?

In any case, I will enter October prepared. I already went ahead and played a couple of 16-bit entries that I somehow missed, such as Bloodlines on the MegaDrive and Vampire’s Kiss on the SNES. I play Aria of Sorrow each year: to me, it’s simply the best game in the series, and one of the best games ever created. It executes every typical ‘Vania mechanic flawlessly, has a soundtrack that just slaps, and doesn’t outstay its welcome. Obviously, it’s in my Top 20 GOAT list.

Yet for being such a fan of the more “modern” metroidvania adaptations the series evolved towards after Rondo of Blood, I have never truly finished thé most important entry: Symphony of the Night. I wasn’t a Sony/PlayStation kind of person and even after finally having access to it through a hidden unlockable in the Dracula X Chronicles remake on the PSP, I had other more pressing things to do such as trying to figure out how this thing called working works. The game arrived in Europe a year after I graduated.

Each year in October, we at the DOS Game Club play a spooky DOS game. Last year, that was Halloween Harry. In two days, you can join us playing Legacy: Realm of Terror. In Legacy, you explore yet another spooky mansion—this time not Dracula’s, but from someone or something much worse: something that serves as a gateway to ancient eldritch horrors.

Why don’t you create your own spooky video game backlog to try and work through in the upcoming month? Here’s mine:

• Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles (the Rondo of Blood PSP remake)
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• Diablo II: Resurrected (I’ve played the original to death and feel the sudden urge to do a few more Mephisto hell runs. Plus, the new class looks amazing: official new content in a game that’s basically 26 years old!)

I don’t expect to finish them all but if you are interested in exploring the Castlevania series, I do recommend to just start with the beginning. The original “classicvania” stage-based games are very short—but also very hard: that was the accepted way to artificially prolong the game length in the eighties/nineties. Play them through the Anniversary Collection or en emulator that features save states in case you get frustrated by bats knocking you off staircases. Trust me, you will. There are enough “best ‘Vania games” lists floating around on the internet. For me, the GBA and DS games are firmly placed at the top. Skip a game if it doesn’t click with you in thirty minutes.

Enjoy whipping and be whipped by Death! And don’t forget to make good use of the bathroom if you suddenly find yourself staring at the distance.

Related topics: / games /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 29 September 2026.  Reply via email.

The next supermarket visit, I refrained from buying meat or fish. Since 2010 up until last year, I’ve been a vegetarian—for fifteen years. Not just because of Foer’s book: that was simply the trigger. I never liked eating meat, and I’ve always had an interest in animal welfare. It was a very simple thing to do, and I haven’t missed it since that day. Since I’m the cook and my wife agrees with our philosophy, she followed suit, although not as “hardcore” as me. When we go out for dinner, she does order a steak once in a while.

Last year, with the birth of our son, our lives radically changed—again. The second kid had a big impact on the physical health of my wife. Meanwhile, getting the first kid to eat anything at all during dinner always ends up in a long battle that leaves both parents with nothing but frustration. In a desperate attempt to get her to eat, I started buying meat again. On top of that, the medical condition of my wife also demands a change of diet.

Hence, for the first time in fifteen years, I’m frying a piece of chicken. Guess what: the strategy for our youngest didn’t work: the chicken was too “dry” (it wasn’t but she claims it was and kept on chewing on it like forever as yet another excuse not to eat any more). On to the minced meat, I guess. I whip up meatballs with an added egg and some chickpea flour and finally get her to eat something. Why is parenting so hard?

A practical question poses itself. As the cook, I have to determine whether the meat is well done. That means tasting it. Remember, my abstain from all things meat and fish is not because of my inability to digest it but because of ethical (and obvious environmental) concerns; and I really don’t want to serve my kids undercooked meat. So I taste.

Another practical question poses itself. If you cook meatballs for everyone else, which proteins do you prepare for yourself? Do you just eat along and try to reduce the amount of times a week meat and fish is served on the table—like a reversed Thursday Veggieday—or do you throw some diced tofu in the pan as well? Or another pan since that one is “contaminated” with animal fat? I’m not a purist and that last option is just not a very practical one. I’m having enough trouble just keeping the kids and myself alive here lately so yes, I sometimes just eat the same stuff I serve them. At other times, when it’s a bit less hectic (which is not often), I prepare something vegetarian just for me.

There goes my streak of fifteen years without eating animals. Damn kids. Yet another thing they have successfully destroyed. The youngest is served (very finely chopped) meat at the daycare and because of the small scale, there’s no other option. But we’re fine with that: I don’t want to raise the kids on a very strict diet, causing a sudden dilemma when they’re invited to a birthday party where hot dogs are served. I want them to make their own choice when they’re older. In the meantime, we’re going to keep our animal consumption to the minimal. At this moment, that no longer means zero.

I know a couple of ex-colleagues who are vegans (we do eat our own chicken’s eggs; thank you Zoë and Coco!) and raise their kids as vegans. So yes, I know it can be done. Currently, for our family, that is simply not an option. It’s difficult enough to account for everyone’s dietary subscriptions and make something tasteful enough for the kids to start eating. I’ve tried the mashed-potato-with-everything route. I’ve tried the soup-all-day route. I’ve tried the broccoli-all-day-since-you-seem-to-like-it route. There’s always a new problem and I’ve run out of ideas.

I am not proud of this. I will keep on not eating animals whenever I can. I still don’t have a big appetite for its taste, I still have a big heart for their welfare, and I still have many concerns about its environmental and ethical impact.

I am tired.

Related topics: / parenting /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 25 September 2026.  Reply via email.

In the context of coding, the same concepts apply: you’ll need to have some technical background in order to judge whether something is creative—during both the process (the code) and the end product (the thing that hopefully makes your end users happy). Thus, technical knowledge is one of the prerequisites for being a creative programmer. The talk, entitled A Critique On AI-Assisted ‘Creative’ Programming, predictably included a summary of my book The Creative Programmer.

Here’s the executive summary of the talk:

Nobody will dispute that creativity is essential to being a successful programmer. With the rise of LLM systems, we lazy coders are even more allured to take the shortcut and by handing out the most mundane aspects of our everyday jobs. Yet what we do not know is that by doing so, we are also seriously hampering our happy, silly, and joyful side of programming, or in other words, the creative aspects of programming. In this talk, we’ll explore why AI-assisted tools are not beneficial but detrimental to our creative side—that very side that is sorely needed when facing complex issues that require coming up with a new and unique approach.
Be inspired by what makes creative geniuses tick. Stop being a prompt engineer. (Re)start that critical thinking brain. Fulfil your Homo Faber destiny!

The slides are also available in PDF format, although being the nerd I am, I did write them in Markdown and used Marp to present. Besides the idea of the Creative Programmer, the second takeaway I wanted everyone to think about was the fact that we’re so eager to off-load “mundane” work to our new LLM-based assistant. But without that 90% of “boring” transpiration, the 10% of interesting illumination will never occur. We, as inherently lazy humans, are yet again thinking only of the short-term wins. Yes, we can now push a story to production in three days instead of a week. But those days we’ve won now will most certainly come back to haunt is later in the maintenance phase.

If you’re interested in a bit more background behind the main ideas that were touched on, here are the related posts where I based the slides on:

• My book The Creative Programmer;
• The Creative Programming Problem Solving Test (don’t forget to press that I’m Feeling Lucky button);
• The most important slide, the mind map summarising the seven domains of creative programming in software engineering, is explained in the article what is creativity for software engineers;
• The critique on genAI found its roots in my commentary on genAI through different lenses that summarises the papers I’ve mentioned;
• Bert Hubert’s AI Train talk that inspired me to include a warning for ecologists and economists;
• Dan North’s Programming is not a craft blog post from 2011 that caused quite a stir back in the day but is ever so relevant nowadays. 95% of the people in the room claimed to be code craftsmen, yet we’re increasingly telling someone else to craft something. Why? To create something is to be human (or the other way around). The dangers of a depressing professional existence lurk around the corner.
• James Gosling’s interview on the Telusko YouTube channel (see below).

James’ interesting choice of words:

In the spectrum of problems in SE, coding has never really been a big one. The places where there are problems are in like testing. […] So I view AI in part asstealing the fun and making the torture worse. - James Gosling

Stealing the fun and making the torture worse. His words, not mine.

If you have any questions or concerns related to what I might or might not have said yesterday, you’re welcome to reach out! For those who couldn’t make it, unfortunately there’s no recording available. Perhaps next year?

Related topics: / talk /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 19 September 2026.  Reply via email.

I am privileged to be able to make good daily use of these cycling paths that normally are neatly separated from the usual road traffic. But it’s not just the greenery or the maintenance of (most) cycling paths that’s striking: it’s also some of the bridges that take you across a national road or a canal that stand out. I thought it would be fun to make a few snapshots to highlight a few of these bridges.

1. Train/Cycling Bridge

During the period 2007 to 2024, fifty (!) bridges across the Albert Canal—Belgium’s most important waterway from Antwerp to just above ALiège—were rebuilt to be able to support four-layer container ships, as the previous bridges were too low. See Upgrading of the Albert Canal, an official site of the Flemish Waterways, for more information.

One of these nearby recently restructured bridges used to carry trains across the canal. Naturally, it was inaccessible by bikers. The new bridge now carries both trains and humans on bikes across, connecting two sides of the waterway in new ways. It might not be a big deal as the previous (car and cycling) bridge is just about a kilometre away, but this is very convenient for my daily commute. Oh, and if you take a break on top of it, you can peek down inside the courtyard of the adjacent prison. I’m not sure you can throw smartphones and other shady packages that far though.

2. The Lock Bridge

A good three kilometres north, you’ll bump into one of the six canal locks needed to accompany for the difference in elevation of 56 metres between Antwerp and Liège. This one, in Diepenbeek, has a lift of 10 metres. The lock control tower on the upper left is not new, nor is one of the many windmills in picture, but the winding cycling-exclusive bridge standing on top of big concrete pillars is. It’s part of the cycling network highway known as the Fietssnelwegen or F network that allows faster e-bikes to speed through at ease without hurting normal bikers like me.

Normal traffic can pass on top of the tarmac-laid lock as usual, but for bikers it’s a little bit safer now. Except that you still have to cross that same lane at the end of the bridge, so I’m not sure what they were aiming at here. It’s certainly striking though, especially because of the weird arcs.

3. Below Water

Still in the rough area of Hasselt/Diepenbeek/Genk, we find a bridge that’s not really a bridge but rather a way downwards. In the Provincial Domain Bokrijk, you can cycle straight through the water and meet the ducks and swans eye to eye instead of from the usual height. Too bad the sides aren’t made from some kind of translucent material. Our kids love this, and it’s a real tourist attraction.

4. Above The Train Station

A bit farther from home, a train ride of forty minutes away, you’ll find the city of Leuven with its many iconic historic buildings including the station. Yet the building itself isn’t the most striking aspect of the station: the three-sixty degrees cycling bridge is, taking cyclists from the station square up towards the business complex nearby. Or how about going even further up, turning right, and cycling above the train station and its tracks to get to the other side of Leuven? As a traveller waiting for your train to arrive at your track, you can literally look up to see cyclists passing by!

The only downside of this bridge is the pedestrian stairs cutting through the centre that I used to take to walk towards the station. It’s quite crowded and crossing this bike line can be a challenge. I waited for five minutes before I could take this picture with only a few cyclists in the far distance.

5. The Campus Bridge

Back to our own university college campus. In order to connect the campus with the other side of the busy national road that leads to more parking options and another connecting road to the northern part of Limburg, 1500 tonnes of steel was brought in via the aforementioned Albert Canal to create the Campus Bridge. This dramatically reduced conflicts of the intersection for pedestrians and cyclists and should find a connection with the F cycling highways nearby—the road and infrastructure up to the bridge is currently being rebuilt.

The bridge looks more impressive from a certain height as explained on the agency for roads & traffic website. Even though in the photo below it looks like a classic bridge spanning at most 50 metres to cover five car lanes, you’ll be cycling for almost half a kilometre (410 metres) to cross it!

The photo was taken from the right side where you can take a big ramp up in two parts including a U-turn to reach the top of the bridge, only to cycle back down in a circular style on the far left, reaching the campus buildings of the business department. Fortunately, pedestrians can take a shortcut via two connected staircases in-between the turns. There are even cosy looking benches placed halfway towards the top to enjoy your lunch on a sunny day.

Related topics: / bike /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 17 September 2026.  Reply via email.

1. This is not right, it’s not supposed to look this way!
2. Why is this hyper realistic? Is this a From Software game ported to a finally capable Nintendo machine?
3. Is this Ocarina of Time (OOT) or is this Breath of the Wild, where you can scope out a point in the distance from a tower, glide down and actually visit that place? Go back to point 1: it’s not supposed to look/work this way!
4. Seventy bucks for a game that I already own on multiple platforms including the perfectly reasonable polished 3DS edition? I don’t think so.
5. The chickens are not supposed to have more than three polygons. Now they look like plastic.
6. Where’s the fog? Why can we see that much?
7. Et cetera.

Since that initial shock, I’ve mostly come around. Well not really, but good enough to tolerate it’s a remake, not a remaster, and it’ll please the youngsters who don’t even know what proper Zelda gameplay is, since Breath and its direct successor don’t even feature proper dungeons.

Let’s take a step back. I’ve been mulling over the purpose of a remake/remaster (let’s keep the distinction out of this discussion for now) and came to the conclusion that the reception of games like these can be categorised in the following taxonomy.

On the one hand, you’ve got people who never played the game before. They are either young enough to never have witnessed the original (and have not heard enough about it to care), or people who missed the original release and are now reminded of its existence. This is exactly what a remake is for: to push the original game forward into the future, ready to win the hearts of another generation. In case of OOT, I doubt any self-proclaimed gamer will deny its presence in nearly all top of all time lists, but in the case of the average game from the nineties that since has fallen into obscurity, a remake is a sure way to try and resurrect it from the dead.

On the other hand, there are folks who already played OOT. These are the critical annoying folks who’ll tell you Breath of the Wild is not a true Zelda game (look who’s talking). We can further categorise these into grumblers who want to preserve the exact experience from back then and the folks who are open to reliving its core message whilst marvelling at a completely revamped engine or even fleshed out storyline.

Given my affinity with nostalgia—good or bad—I tended to side with the grumblers. That’s indeed shrewd usage of past tense. My first raw reaction when seeing Young Link in motion, built out of 3446833 polygons instead of just 10 was definitely a grumbly one. But like I said, I’ve come around.

Why do I buy and play so many remakes/remasters? A non-exhaustive recent selection:

• Paper Mario 2: Thousand Year Door
• Mario RPG (remake? Debatable)
• Soul Reaver
• Anything from Nightdive Studios such as Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition, DOOM (again) or the Turok trilogy
• Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap (remake)
• Bio Menace Remastered
• …

Why do I buy and play so many retro-inspired new games? A non-exhaustive recent selection:

• Shooters like Project Warlock, DUSK, Nightmare Reaper, Wizordum
• Shovel Knight et al.
• SKALD
• Ruffy and the Riverside
• Adventure games like The Telwynium, Crimson Diamond, The Aching, Gobliins 6, and even The Drifter
• Forbidden Solitaire
• …

Why do I buy and play so many retro collections? A non-exhaustive recent selection:

• The Castlevania collections (Dominus, Advance, Anniversary)
• The Turtles Cowabunga Collection
• The Turok trilogy
• The Duke Nukem collection 1 for Evercade
• …

Clearly, I am the ideal target audience for a game like the OOT remake. Yet my first reaction was scoffing—why? Because that’s not how Link is supposed to look like and how the field of vision is supposed to work on authentic Nintendo 64 hardware? There are a plethora of HD ports out on the PC such as Ship of Harkinian, offering modern controls, widescreen, and other quality of life stuff we’re all addicted to nowadays. Including me.

Including me: the first thing I did when replaying Might & Magic VIII, a 26 year old PC game from 2000, was apply a patch that improves the field of vision, adds widescreen, and fixes some of the controls. The first thing I did after installing Ultima Underworld was patching in “modern” mouse controls. It turns out that I’m less of an authentic player than I thought I was—yet I refuse to play Serious Sam HD and stick with my Windows 98 PC for that one. Why?

Because Serous Sam is supposed to be low-res that used to be enormously high-res and cutting-edge. The HD version looks too different compared to the original that in my personal context has a tight affinity with the ATI Radeons and GeForces of the early noughties. I didn’t want to alter how Ultima Underworld and Might & Magic VIII looks or sounds—merely how easily I can manipulate its world.

Yet if you give me the choice to play Paper Mario 2 on the GameCube or on the Switch, I’d choose the latter in the blink of an eye. This is coming from someone who spent forty hours on both games, in 2004 and in 2024. Stuart Gipp from The Retronauts podcast recently interviewed the editor in chief of UK’s Retro Gamer magazine who was shocked to hear that some people collect PAL versions of console games as opposed to NTSC ones. We in Europe were never treated with good framerates, but why would you not want them, given you can now access everything through the internet? Because they wanted to experience a restorative nostalgic moment; to perfectly recreate their childhood memories.

In practice, it’s never that black and white. I like the HD version of Age of Empires II, but I would still play the original on my old hardware if I felt like it. The “remastered” version of Warcraft III is a gigantic trainwreck. I don’t want to touch Diablo II: Resurrected. But that’s just me pretending: my hardware currently can’t handle it. I want to play it so bad: it’s recently got a new playable class—for a gameplay loop that’s twenty-six years old, that’s just crazy! Wait, the game is out on the Switch??

Yet I’d never want to play the blurry mess that was the GameCube version of Paper Mario again if I can spin up a crispy clear version on the Switch that even comes with cleaned up and in my opinion an improved soundtrack.

What about The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening and the Switch remake then? I did not buy it and I have zero intentions of doing so. The aesthetics of the new version are off-putting to me: the original was a (very) pixelated 2D game. The new one technically still is, but the 3D engine full of bloom effects evoke an entirely different feeling. Yacht Club Games’ newest Mina The Hollower successfully evoked the original Link’s Awakening theme, but in doing so, it perhaps turned off a group of youngsters that are used to playing Fortnite. The fact that the engine allegedly stutters in more than a few places, dipping below 30 FPS, does not help either.

So where does that leave us with the upcoming Ocarina of Time remake?

Just set aside that €70. You know you’re screwed—might as well admit it now.

Related topics: / nostalgia / games /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 12 September 2026.  Reply via email.

Anyway, this time, we’re taking a look at the Pilot Custom 743 with the Falcon or FA nib. I am a big fan of Pilot’s golden nibs: they have never failed me and they’re smooth yet provide a rich writing experience. Yet this time, I was “chasing nibs, not pens”, so I planned on acquiring an FA nib. The unique draw (ha!) of such a nib is the fact that the tines can spread with a bit of applied pressure, thereby producing a great variety of line thicknesses. That sounds complicated, but seeing is believing, so let me just paste in my review written in my notebook to get you to run out and buy one for yourself.

Note the subtle but very present line variations in the title, the I love this one! on the lower left, and even in the text itself. In case my handwriting is too bad for you to read (it is, I know, sorry), let me spell that out for you:

This is Pilot’s “modern flexible nib”; the or Falcon one; on the Custom 743 body—the #15 [nib] size. Their #10 is on the Custom Heritage 912 which I already own with a Waverly nib. The 743 is about as big as the 823 Vac Filler so also more pricey.

The nib is the highlight here—slightly pointed downwards to produce a (very) fine line without pressure. But what happens then [with pressure]? This: a huge amount of line variation! (And railroading; depending on the speed of writing and the ink—this is Kaweco Turquoise. This pen is quite wet with ink like De Atramentis.)

I love this one! More than enough “flex”, easy to pull off; but also: an excellent surprisingly smooth daily writer for such a fine point. There is noticeable feedback present but no scratchiness. Is it worth the price tag? That’s up to you, I guess…

There are ways to alleviate the railroading issue by buying an ebonate 2-slit or 3-slit feed but I haven’t tried that yet. When I do try to write a bit of Copperplate(-esque), I have to slow down anyway, so the railroading only happens when quickly pulling the pen downwards, which I never do with such a big line as in the example above.

The green “Verdigris” body is only available in The States. That sucks: my only option of buying a 743 here in Belgium was the boring black body for a painful €500. I initially wanted the 823 with an FA nib, but that’s even more difficult to get as only a select number of Japanese brick & mortar stores sell these. So I went with the import option through Goldspot Pens. Price: about €345. Shipping: about €45. I did find a 10% coupon code that almost nullified the shipping cost, so I was quite happy.

Until it arrived in Belgium and customs said “Hi. Uhm, what’s this? You gotta pay VAT here dude! Oh, and since I’m typing this, an additional fixed amount of “processing fee”. That’ll be… Let’s see… €108.” There goes my attempt to cheapen out. So I paid about €450 for an injection-moulded green resin pen that can’t be found elsewhere in Europe. That’s still €50 less than the boring black one.

So what’s the difference between a Custom Heritage 912 and a Custom 743? They both use Pilot’s CON-70 converter which I’ll take any day over their crappy CON-40 in my Capless. As you can see in the photo above, they both have the exact same grip, but the 743 shows a bit more “class” by having more elaborate engravings (oh look, three stars) and a classic bulb on the end of the clip. The 743 is a tad longer due to the cigar shape. The biggest difference, however, is again the nib: the 743 houses Pilot’s bigger #15 nibs, and the CH 912 the (slightly) more modest #10.

To be honest, I prefer the body of the CH 912. I would have bought a CH 912 with the FA nib if I didn’t already have one with a WA nib—the CH 912 is only available in… drumroll… black. Except for very very limited editions in Japan only that sell out in a few hours and come with a premium price tag. As I didn’t want two pens to look exactly the same, I went with the 743. And no, having someone put on urushi art for only €600+ and a waiting list of about half a year with additional shipping fees was not really an option.

I tested the #10 FA of a friend and didn’t feel a huge difference. They say that the #10 FA nib is softer so it’s easier to pull of nice flexy writings, but I didn’t feel that in practice. Since 2022, Pilot did “stiffen up” their #10 FA nib according to a few sources so take that with a grain of salt. The biggest drawing point of the #10 nib is the price: that same Goldspot will charge you €280 for the 912 with the #10 FA nib—about €65 less than the Custom 743 with the #15 FA nib. Pen prices are going crazy: when I got my WA one, I paid about €200.

In the end, is it worth it to buy Pilot’s FA nib? Absolutely: they’re beautiful writers, the flex part works well, and they’re surprisingly smooth for a downwards-facing pen point—much smoother than the Posting (PO) nib I tried, although of course that one writes even smaller/thinner.

Is it worth it to spend half a fortune on these pens, though? I don’t know. Maybe? If you get a cheap body that can house JoWo/Bock #6 nibs, you can also go to fpnibs.com and buy a steel semi-flex nib for €35 that is supposed to pull off the same trick. I don’t have one so I can’t compare.

But damn it, these Japanese folks know how to make a nice writing implement. (Even though my friends who are not into the pen world think this pen looks like cheap rubbish because of the resin and rather boring looks. Guess what friends, chase nibs, not pens!)

Related topics: / fountain pens /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 8 September 2026.  Reply via email.

Previous month: July 2026.

Games I’ve played

Nothing? The kids have kept us busy and during the evenings I preferred grabbing a book instead of a screen. We did buy and play a few board games:

Cozy Stickerville: a very simple game in which you gradually fill the board (the terrain) with stickers that starts out as a tiny village but hopefully evolves into a bustling town. It feels a bit like an offline Sim City game with some elements of Animal Crossing? I do have a problem with the term “cozy” here: often, a card instructs you to do either A or B resulting in sticker X or Y. The problem is that you never know what the (dis)advantages are, resulting in a lot of stress to do the right thing for our city! I also wonder whether it can be replayed on the other side of the board.

Pirates of Maracaibo: I’ve been (dead-)eyeing on a cool pirate-themed board game for a while and it came down to either this or Dead Reckoning which is a much heavier game with 4X vibes. In other words: something I won’t ever be able to bring to the table that often. Pirates is a hidden race game in which you speed along the Caribbean Islands to reach the port of Maracaibo (three times). Along the way you’ve got plenty of options to plunder, explore the island, and dig up and hide all kids of treasure. X marks the spot!

Board games too are getting expensive. We paid €50 for Pirates, a standard box with mostly cardboard and paper (cards) materials. It was in a brick & mortar store—one of the few ones left—so you might be able to get a slightly better deal online.

Selected (blog) posts

I don’t have too many links to share this time as the holiday business didn’t allow for much casual surfing. I almost forgot how to even run a command in a shell.

• Mary at From the Pen Cup stated Don’t Toss It! Mail It!; a lovely way to upcycle cardboard boxes from various food supplies. Just turn them into postcards!
• I don’t remember where this came from but this YouTube short shows how to cross-write in a journal. I’ve never tried that before and it certainly makes re-reading sections challenging.
• A The Fountain Pen Network thread discloses how to use and take care of flex nibs. Some links include .pdf guides to Copperplate writing.
• Adam Le Doux open sourced two GBA game engines.
• April from Ink Flexibilities maintains a Best Modern Flex Fountain Pen Nibs guide. Conclusion: just get yourself a Pilot Custom Heritage 912 with the FA nib.
• Jim P. agrees with the above pen selection. I especially like his wording of “reaching the bottom of the rabbit hole”:

I do believe this may be the bottom of the rabbit hole for me for quite some time. I now have a wide variety of makes, models, nibs, and materials. More than enough to do pretty much anything I’d want. Enough to keep me writing for several years no matter what might happen.

I hope I too reach that bottom soon. It’s getting a bit silly (and expensive).

• On that same site: how to practice calligraphy with flex nibs.
• There’s a lot of controversy surrounding the use of agentic AI in open source projects. The Linux Kernel is no exception, unfortunately. Is that too turning into slop? What on earth are we doing?
• Renzo Thönen, who still develops Commodore 64 games, wrote about his complicated relationshiop with EGA colours.
• I liked Frank’s solution to the annoying LED problem in hotel rooms: put a black sticker on it! (in Dutch)
• Retro Junk goes back to the 90s with a look at typical board games from then.
• Damion Schubert wrote a series of posts to discuss his top 100 board games of all time. You know I’m a sucker for these kinds of lists.
• Kimberly from The Pen Addict reflects on her five years there. The post links to a lot of good other pen-related resources if you’re into that kind of thing.
• Ruben Schade asks: will there be another one?. My answer is always a resounding yes. Regret, here I come!
• I discovered Melanie Richard’s blog. She has a the cool idea of the subdomain making where she puts photos of drawings or sewing/crochet projects.
• Cheryl Jones shows off her Pilot Capless. Wait, that thing has a stacked nib? That’s just crazy!
• Miss Booleana writes not just about the work-life balance but the child-work-life balance. (in German)
• If you ever wondered how the Internet Archive digitises books: now you know.
• Another blog recommendation: The Typewriter Revolution by Richard Polt. You can even write him a letter, but I reckon he expects them to be typed, not written.
• Michael Gisiger philosophises on the freedom not to give up on the old. (in German)
• Rachel’s experience report of the 2026 DC Pen show taught me wax seals can be multi-layered.
• Divya over at The Monadic Sheep introduces us to the wonderful world of Canves in GNU Emacs.
• The trend line in that popular “my nine games that I grew up with” side is depressing. Minecraft, Splatoon, and Apex Legends, is that all you think made you you? Time to dive into the indie world, I guess. While trying to create my own list, half of the games I want to enter don’t even appear in the list. That might explain a thing or two.
• Ruben’s retro motherboard rack on shelves is a neat way to store a lot of old hardware builds. In a more recent post, he also explains how he powers them (with a picoPSU).
• To close of with video games, Syl posted her favourite game screenshots. I think I’ll steal that idea for the near future.

Other random links

• Van Dieman’s puts out amazing shimmering ink. I’ve got to try one of those.
• For the hardcore pen nerds out there: Kyuseido Tokyo creates stacked nibs.

Okay so maybe I lied. Apparently, I did stock up on links.

Related topics: / metapost /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 4 September 2026.  Reply via email.

The solution to these problems is simple and not so simple: de-solder the component from the board and look for a replacement, and throw out that rubber or the drive entirely to find modern replacements such as the SD-to-IDE interface I use to emulate a HDD. Fixed—now the old motherboard still thinks it’s speaking to a genuine vintage hard drive! Not fixed? The distinctive mark of a humming disk is gone: an SD card has little to say except for crack when you jump on it.

The true retro enthusiast—the real appreciator of smelly electronic components that go beep—will want to hear that beep. Not just a beep, but a bzzzzzkkrrrttttt tzk tzk tzk BEEP: your classic spin-up sound when these mechanical drives start spinning. Thankfully, some retro enthusiasts are prepared to do more than just accept the fact that the noise is gone. Some go as far as building their own expansion card that fully emulates the sound of yore. This is the story of my friend Peter Bridger’s HDD Synth.

Peter was kind enough to send me two prototypes to play with¹; his third revision (Mark III) of the idea, as pictured below, currently in the state of an ISA card.

The first thing I thought when I heard the idea was: how is this going to work if your sound card’s drivers are loaded only after the bootup procedure? Peter’s design makes use of another speaker mounted on the card, separate from your sound card or built-in PC Speaker. It leverages the Raspberry Pico to output sampled sound directly to the custom speaker by listening to the ISA port for HDD activity. Earlier models used the HDD LED in pins on the board to detect activity. As I type this, Peter is working on Mark V to reduce the footprint of the card, including getting rid of the requirement of an ISA slot to enable putting this inside older non-IBM PCs as well.

One of the coolest aspects of the HDD Synth is its ability to load custom samples as well. The SD card slot is there to hold both firmware & configuration as well as custom sound samples. This allows the card to emulate any kind of vintage hard disk drive, playing just the right sound for you to evoke that instant jolt of nostalgia. Just add four files in a subdir inside samples: access.wav (the rattling when the HDD used to be busy), spindown.wav (power off), spinup.wav (power on), and idle.wav (general background noise).

The settings.json configuration file looks to be fairly straightforward:

{
    "PLAY_SPINUP": true,
    "PLAY_SPINDOWN": true,
    "PLAY_IDLE": true,
    "ACCESS_HOLD_TIME_MS": 500,
    "VOLUME_DEFAULT": 0.9,
    "BALANCE_DEFAULT": 0.2,
    "SAMPLE_PACK": "Mark1",
    "SIMULATION_MODE": false
}

Here, a subdir samples/Mark1—in my case a preset one matching my memories quite well—exists on the SD card where the samples live.The only problem I so far encountered was powering off the computer that too quickly discharges all energy resulting in spindown.wav being cut off halfway through.

Even though the HDD Synth is still in beta phase, Peter put in a lot of effort to create an experience: the commissioned stickers remind me of the Game Boy’s Play It Loud campaign and the instruction manual was modelled after the original Sound Blaster manuals, detailing every pin and suggesting troubleshooting tips. As the sticker portraying a PC fan emitting a MHDDLA sound states: I’m A Big Fan! Get it, fan? No? I thought that was a good one.

The peripheral card currently claims an ISA slot, but as stated, in future versions the card will shrink and the need for a slot will disappear. Apparently, Peter received the request to build something similar that will fit inside a MacBook. Bring Back The Noise, stupid silent MacBook Air I’m typing this on! I’ll be very curious to see how this will pan out.

The card’s hardware (and software) design is fully open-sourced so if you’re a capable electronics expert you can order all the components and solder them on yourself.

Thank you Peter for letting me try out one of the prototypes. I feel very honoured to be mentioned in the special thanks print on the back of the PCB. Please keep an eye on Peter’s site Strife Streams for more retro goodness and HDD Synth updates.

Related topics: / pc hardware / soundblaster /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 1 September 2026.  Reply via email.

Once things settle down, I hope to finally start writing that own philosophical work.

Things didn’t settle down. Perhaps that’s the excuse. Still, compiling my own philosophy is still one of my main goals for this (and the next) year. I’ve been working on it on (and more off) for a good year now. The theoretical framework is in place, the notebooks are filled. It’s time to get serious. If Rousseau did it when he was forty, why can’t I?

The lives of most of these French 17th, 18th, and even 19th century philosophers are filled with pain and misery. Montaigne got five kids but only one made it to adulthood. He himself did before he turned sixty. Pascal died half a year away from reaching forty. His sister Jacqueline barely made it to thirty-six. Descartes—died at 53—had a daughter while staying in The Netherlands who died at the age of five.

What do we do when we read about all that death? Panic? Montaigne famously suggested to build your house with windows facing the local cemetery. That way, you’ll practice your personal Memento Mori sayings every single day. The years zip by without me noticing it. Writing the Forty blog post felt like yesterday yet here we are. The older I get the more obsessed I become with trying to “live more fully” by following the aforementioned philosophers in their footsteps.

But not too much. Montaigne wrote extensively about educating children yet left his only still alive child and wive to explore Germany and Italy for almost a year. Pascal hated upper class aristocratic distractions yet loved to mingle with them in the Paris salons to keep his fame. Rousseau vowed to take it easy and go back to nature, yet made his lover pregnant and ran away thinking he couldn’t take care of them. Seneca suggests to enjoy the small things and live frugally yet was one of the richest statesman in ancient Rome. Heidegger proclaimed his hatred for technology that destroys the beauty of nature we no longer see, yet sided with the upcoming fascists that did nothing but employ technology to kill anything and everyone who didn’t agree with their opinion.

Our son is one. We no longer have a tiny baby that requires constant attention. We now only have two whiners that require constant attention. He started eating little fruit pieces by himself. The mixer doesn’t need to do its job anymore. I can’t believe that intensive part of parenthood is already gone, even though there are still plenty of intensive parts left to tackle.

And yet, in the grand scheme of things, nothing really matters. According to the Existentialists, the cosmos hates you: we’re but a speck of coincidental cosmic dust.

So there is little else to do but to accept the horrors of the gaping void and to forge our own destiny.

There. I guess I might as well have that other big piece of chocolate.

I’m publishing this with a date in the past as it was originally my intention to push the button on my birthday. I forgot and we went on a short vacation. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone brings a computer to a trip.

Related topics: / birthday /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 26 August 2026.  Reply via email.

Other Red Mailboxes aren’t that lucky: in 2019, BPost—the Belgian posting company that was privatised in 2000—removed over one fourth of the Red Mailboxes all over Belgium in an attempt to “save the company”. The biggest reason might not surprise you: most of these boxes didn’t receive much letters:

Volgens BPost is het aantal brieven dat mensen in de rode brievenbussen deponeren, met 60 procent gedaald sinds 2004. Uit een kwart van de bussen haalt de postbode nog hoogstens zes brieven per dag op, luidt het. [According to BPost, the amount of letters that people deposit in the red mailboxes has diminished by 60 percent since 2004]

That year also happened to be the year of BPost’s stock market crash. Still, I think ultimately their decision was the right one: of all the letters I send out, I only receive about a fourth replies in that same analogue form. Especially in 2026, people don’t use The Red Mailbox anymore, turning the battered broken red metal box attached to a brick wall into a weird artefact of the past. I wonder how long it’ll take before the same emotion is triggered as wandering around in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild’s broken world, where artefact bits and pieces poking out of a ruin reminiscent of a once thriving community now only cause weariness.

Before the Mailbox Removal Program, BPost also permanently closed multiple post offices. Our village’s old post office building now is a Turkish food joint. Yet another thing of the past, just like physical banks, toy stores, and if we’re not careful, bakeries and butcher shops. Yet we are nimble: a bike ride in two directions, both about four kilometres, will take you to another office. Do verify opening hours before leaving.

Even Google Street View archives dating back to 2009 do not have a photo of the old post office building in its original state. The archives do contain traces of deceased Red Mailboxes, such as the one below weirdly enough mounted against the front facade of someone’s home? I would like to believe that the owners of the house kept a notebook besides one of the windows to track all those weird people stopping by to drop their weird letters.

The dismounting job revealed an ugly square stain behind it. Passengers will no doubt wonder what used to be on that wall, thinking the owners of that house must have done something weird. They didn’t: the government did.

I wonder what personal history The Red Mailbox can tell us. How many love letters did it ingest all these years? Or birth announcement cards? Marriages? The bearer of happy news. Let us intentionally leave out the boring and perhaps more depressing tax related correspondence. We made good use of that very same mailbox when we got married, and when we had our daughter and son—I can distinctly remember it barely containing the envelopes when I dumped all those birth cards in there at once. The expected Thunk! sound of the envelope hitting the bottom was replaced by the shuffling of papers and me trying to jam them all in. I still make good use of that trusty old mailbox whenever I feel like using a pen to send a message to a pen pal, which admittedly happens less and less. Perhaps I too am a part of the problem.

The Red Mailbox was not always there. In fact, it’s one of the more modern alternatives—relatively speaking—compared to the late 19th century cast iron standalone models that are now officially classified as being part of our Flemish/national heritage. This particular model in the link still stands proudly in Antwerp, yet these are the exception to the rule: I haven’t encountered a cast iron painted one in our vicinity. The little door to retrieve the letters is a lovely touch.

According to heritage info of the city Spa, these models were cast by the J.G.Requilled foundries of Liège between 1860 and 1938. The most striking difference between these original models and the ones on the photos above is perhaps the fact that its purpose is no longer explicitly mentioned: the French inscription “LETTRES/IMPRIMES” is gone. By now everyone knows that a Red Mailbox is a letterbox from BPost, not a personal one. I hope.

If you ever received a letter from me: think of The Red Mailbox where its humble journey all the way to your letterbox started.

Related topics: / letter writing /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 24 August 2026.  Reply via email.

That’s frustrating for the reckless explorers waiting to hear something from their family back home (or the other way around). But at the same time, nearly four hundred years later, these lost letters are the only thing that help us shape our view of lower and middle-class Dutch letter writers, which is otherwise dominated by upper class male writing. I’d love to think that if the Belgian Post loses a letter I sent, it’ll turn up in a couple hundred years for researchers to marvel at. I’m pretty sure by then this website is long gone. Who says the internet will still be alive? Or the planet, for that matter, judging by the extreme weather conditions…

Unfortunately, Letters As Loot is written in a stereotypical form of Academese and hard to recommend in its current state. So I scanned the pages diagonally and summarised the coolest findings here. The most interesting is the deconstruction of a typical 17th century letter, written by Angenieten Cornelis to her husband at sea Roelandt IJosten Ostvorndijck.

Here’s what she originally wrote:

looft goodt u booven al dit geschreuen uit rotterdam date
met alle vrient schaep schep schaep den viftienden
september
eersaemen seer beminden man roellant iosten oost voren dick
en alderliesten man ick ul husvrou angenietge cornelis
laet ul weeten als dat ick en ul vaeder en min vaeder en
moeder noch klock en gesont sien en ick hoep min alderliesten
man roellant iosten oost vooren dick oock mede soo is waer het
anders het souden min niet lief om hooren weesen en ick
hoep dat het den goeden god goodt langen sal laeten dueren
aen siel en aen lichaem ist ons salich ick hoep dat ghi met gesontheit
weeder thus komen mogen dat wij men kander weeder sien en
spreken mogen min alder liesten man roellant ioosten oost
vooren dick ick wenssen ul veel hondert dui duisent mal
mael goeden nacht met een kus aen den brief
min pet oem een vrou is doet daer hebben ick mede te
begrauen gewest daer wort geseit dat wij buiet gelt
ont fangen sellen eersdaechs maer ick weet niet hoeveel middle part
sij praeten dat ghi licht noch wel drie of vier maenden uit
weesen mocht ick senden ul hier twee niewen heemde
met een paer kusen1 met een kam met een mes met
drie nosdocken met een dasse ie met een sloepie
niet meer op dit pat danden heer bevolen min alder lieten
man ghi moet het min ten besten houden ick heb daer ending
geschreuen van dat goedt tebet stellen maer passchintge konden
niet nou moet ick het thuis houden hondert duisent
mael goeden nacht bij min
Angenieten Cornelis

That’s quite challenging to read even for a Dutch speaking person like me. Here’s the line-by-line translation by the authors:

Praise God above all, this written from Rotterdam
with all friendship, the fifteenth
September
worthy very beloved husband Roellant Iosten Oostvorendick
and dearest husband, I, your wife Angenietge Cornelis
let you know that I and your father and my father and
mother are still in good health, and I hope my dearest
husband Roellant Iosten Oostvoorendick is also like that, if it were
different, I would regret to hear that, and I
hope that the good God will let it last a long time
to body and soul, we’ d be blessed, I hope that you, with health,
may return home again, that we may see each other again and
speak to each other, my dearest husband Roellant Ioosten Oost-
voorendick, I wish you many hundred thousand
times good night with a kiss on the letter
my godfather’s wife is dead, I went to the
funeral, it is said that we a share of the loot
will receive one of these days, but I do not know how much
they say that you easily another three or four months
may be gone, I hereby send you two new shirts
with a few stockings with a comb with a knife with
three handkerchiefs with a scarf with a pillow slip
nothing more on this occasion than commended to the Lord, my dearest
husband, you must not take it ill of me, I have
written to order the goods but Passchintge could
not make it, now I have to keep it at home, a hundred thousand
times good night, by me
Angenieten Cornelis

What’s so interesting about this letter? The fact that more than 50% of its contents is what we’d nowadays call formulaic nonsense:

• God is praised in the “address field”¹?
• Why write worthy and very beloved husband to address and start the letter?
• Why repeat the full name of your husband and yourself? Surely your husband will know your name?
• Nothing more on this occasion than commend to the Lord?

If you’re married to Roelandt (written as Roellant, which I’m quite sure is misspelled), why write such a cold an distant contents? She’d “regret to hear it” if he wasn’t in good health anymore. I think my wife would kill me if I’d write like that, thinking there must have been a very suspicious reason for my aloofness. She must have made up for that by ending it lovely: a hundred thousand times good night by me—but just to be sure, write your full name again. It is I, Leclerc!

Some expressions, such as a way of ending the letter, were so common that they were abbreviated: uwe dienstwillige vrient (your faithful/obedient friend) would become U.E.D.W.. The most funny one most certainly is ick sal onse kijndt eens soenen voor u (I’ll kiss our child for you). It only appeared a couple of times so the writer must have been a creative one.

The use of a very formulaic structure was extremely common in the 17th century, which gradually disappeared in the 18th century and onwards. The authors of the research also discovered that this greatly varies between classes: lower class and female writers are much more likely to write like this, while upper class and male writers seem to skip this entirely.

It hadn’t occurred to me that this is largely due to (il)literacy. Letter writers having difficulty writing will stick to copying example letters from letter-writing guides. The authors make the distinction between more elite manuals, the very popular school books, and Jacobi’s Gemeyne zeyndt-brieven from 1645 that was reprinted well into the 19th century. Most of these books came with example letters and offered formulas for starting a letter, expressing regret, how to end it, how to note the date, and so forth. Kloek en gezond (strong and healthy), laat u weten dat (to let you know that), blijft hiermede den here bevolen (stay with this the Lord recommended) and so forth are all examples from Jacobi’s book².

If we look back at Angenieten Cornelis’ letter, you can easily discern some basic structure and delete all the junk to filter out what Angenieten actually wanted to tell her very respected and devoted husband. Here’s how I imagine that letter might be written nowadays:

15th September, Rotterdam. 

Dear husband, 

I hope you are well. Our family back home is still doing good. Except for my godfather's wife who died but we're expecting a nice cut from the inheritance. More info soon, it can take up to three months. 

I miss you! When are you coming home? Here are two new shirts, a few stockings with a comb and knife, three handkerchiefs, a scarf, and a pillow slip just in case.

That's all for now. Anticipating your return!
With love, Angenieten.

How much formulaic sentence and paragraph structures do we use nowadays? Barely any, and yet, the main form of the letter hasn’t changed since the 17th century: there’s still an opening (date, addressing to), a short formulaic exchange of pleasantries (hope you are well, how’s things), the bulk contents of the reason for sending the letter (here’s some stuff), and a closure (cheerio or as M.I.A. would write, XXXO). As the time went on, the strict use of formulaic structure disappeared. Thank God for not having to thank God a thousand times good night anymore.

Most letter writers, including me, would start a letter with the date & location, but most older letters would switch this up and end with it. Also, the address we now place on the envelope would be the beginning of the letter, integrated as part of the text. This, together with the formulaic weirdness, would make it easy to spot if a piece of paper with scribblings on it was in fact, a letter, and not some customs clearance notice, tax slip, or worse, declaration of Independence.

In sum, for the Dutch history nut into letter writing, this bottom-up research of the “Sailing Letters” by Rutten and van der Wal is a gold mine. I didn’t even touch the importance of these letters to the etymological history of written versus spoken words in Dutch. The digital version is freely available. Don’t let the dry text discourage you; just scroll through it to find a cool photo and read a few bits here and there.

Time to buy a good brown ink. Looft God Booven Al!

Related topics: / letter writing /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 21 August 2026.  Reply via email.

And thus here is a beginner’s guide to committing yourself to writing less of the former and more of the latter: hooray for snail mail, booh for electronic junk. If by any chance this text convinced you to start writing and looking for a postage stamp, but you don’t quite know who to address it to, please reach out and we can start a fruitful conversation on paper!

Let’s start with the material needed to start writing a letter: pen and paper. First, get yourself a nice pen. This being Brain Baking, of course I’d recommend a fountain pen, but a good roller ball is as good as any. Write with something that feels comfortable: a letter might feel like an endurance session if it’s been a long time since you’ve held a pen. There are plenty of resources that list great entry pens in case you need to start from scratch: the Pilot Prera/Metropolitan and Lamy Safari are both superb and don’t cost an arm and a leg.

Second, consider which paper to use. If you do decide to write with a fountain pen, remember that cheap printer paper has the tendency to bleed through depending on the ink and the pen nib size. I once got gifted beautiful off-white laid paper for writing letters, but the ribbed texture makes writing with a small nib size difficult. If all this sounds too daunting, get out a sketch book pad, tear out a page and just get writing.

How do you address someone? Should you note the date and the location you write from? (“Dear friend x” might do and yes and yes) Did you know that you can write, draw, sketch whatever you want in a letter since it doesn’t adhere to a rigid structure full of zeros and ones? Did you know you can “attach” anything you want as long as it stays under a gigabyte in size? I love slipping in sealed Magic: the Gathering boosters I have lying around and hearing they pulled a valuable shock land afterwards. I love printing a photo with the Phomemo printer and attaching it with a piece of washi tape. I love using different pens to write different sections. Or whatever. Do whatever you want. Write whatever you want. But write.

And don’t stop there: actually sending the thing is also highly recommended. It’s time to choose a stamp. If it’s designated for someone you really like you could consider paying a little extra to pick a nice theme. In Belgium, at the time of writing, 10 non-prior stamps with a theme cost €16,80—with just the king’s boring head it’s €15,80. You can even create your own stamp! My European stamps are gone so I’ll be ordering these:

Weirdly enough, that’s not more expensive than the pre-made philatelic stamps for EU correspondence: €14,75 for 5 stamps. Yes, that’s still much more expensive than quickly blurting out a few words on a keyboard before pressing the send button. Perhaps that’s also an advantage: it causes you to more deliberately think about what to write. And that’s only from BE to anywhere outside BE within EU, so perhaps only my loss¹.

Don’t forget to switch pens when writing the address as the envelopes I can buy here are not made from very high quality paper.

Once you’re done with that, the real fun can begin: flip the envelope, write your own address (Return To Sender, Address Unknown—shut up, Elvis), and then it’s time for the grand finale: sealing the envelope. Since I wrote about wax seals in 2022, I got another seal: of course the Brain Baking logo. I now own both: the W+K design for sending letters to family as mentioned in that post and the Brain Baking one for my internet friends.

I’ve seen folks complain about delays in mail deliveries if they do use a wax seal, presumably because the letter got stuck in the sorting machine because of the thickness of the seal. As far as I know, that’s just speculation, and I haven’t encountered that problem. At least no more delays than the usual delays. We’re still talking Belgian postage services here; they’ve got to live up to their name. Try to not spill too much wax everywhere, I guess?

Now why would you go through all that trouble of sealing and picking a nice stamp? Because you’re not only doing yourself a favour in doing so, but also the person at the receiving end. And no doubt they are worth it as you decided to take out your pen instead of turning to your computer—or even worse, instant messaging app on your phone—yet again.

In case I still haven’t convinced you, please read Simon Garfield’s book To The Letter that begins like this:

Letters have the power to grant us a larger life. They reveal motivation and deepen understanding. They are evidential. They change lives, and they rewire history. The world once used to run upon their transmission – the lubricant of human interaction and the freefall of ideas, the silent conduit of the worthy and the incidental, the time we were coming for dinner, the account of our marvellous day, the weightiest joys and sorrows of love. It must have seemed impossible that their worth would ever be taken for granted or swept aside. A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen.

Time for the final act: take out a bike (or polish your walking boots), seek out a mailbox, and donate the envelope, hoping for the best.

Wait. I forgot to tell you something important. Did you already seal yours? No? Good. Because just a touch of modern technology usage won’t hurt here: take a snapshot of your letter—both sides. In a month, when you do receive a reply, you can still refer to whatever it was that you sent. The original one doesn’t usually get sent back like in a digital email conversation. I once received a reply and after three weeks I completely forgot what I wrote. “It was very touching”. Thanks but… what was again?

Happy posting!

Related topics: / letter writing /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 17 August 2026.  Reply via email.

The reason why this thought bubbled into my head is Blaise Pascal’s criticism of games and leisure time in general. According to Pascal, we’re all squandering our valuable time and should instead be looking for God by living the ascetic way devoted to prayer and spiritual growth. After his (second) intense spiritual experience, he began to ponder the way in which we invent all kinds of means to distract us from the more pressing and urgent questions of life and death (Graham Tomlin’s words):

Take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without disguising it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion (Pascal’s words).

Pascal isn’t the first nor the last philosopher to issue such a statement. This post isn’t meant to serve as a firm reply but rather as a way to form my own opinion regarding playing. I have yet to read Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens which states that we as humans are primarily playful/playing beings. Pascal seems to deny this entirely¹, but at one point does put emphasis on the importance of social intimacy. Anyone who ever played, as a kid outside with a ball or as a grown up inside with cardboard and meeples, will know that playing does exactly that: it strengthens human bonds.

Of course games can serve us very well as a distraction to our life’s problems. I will be the first to admit that turning away from a problem to boot up the Nintendo Switch—digital games are better at this than analogue ones—works as a magnificent escape hatch for the currently present misery. Best enjoyed with noise cancelling headphones. Yet that misery will still be there when you decide to save and quit. I think Pascal’s focus on spiritual enlightenment made him reject certain facts of human life: to live is to cope with misery. Playing can be coping. There is nothing wrong with that: without games as a coping mechanism, I wouldn’t have made it this far. So there’s the first argument for instead of against games: coping.

But since that has little to do with board games specifically, let’s shove that philosophical debate aside for a minute and instead focus on why board gaming can be very enjoyable. In the following sections, the term “game” will refer to board game, not video game.

Most games require another player to fully enjoy its mechanics and story. Pulling a box from your shelf and unloading its contents onto the table usually means you have company. The social aspect of gaming has already been touched on but bears repeating often. It’s a perfect excuse to meet up with friends, call regular gaming sessions, ask how everyone’s doing and share a piece of the aforementioned life misery to help shave off the rough edges. I do enjoy the odd solo play session but often prefer to play digitally when I’m on my own. Board gaming is a profound social experience. Taking this argument a bit further, you can even forgo individually owning games and set up a shared game pool: good board games don’t need to be owned.

To me, the social aspect of these games its single biggest appeal. It allows for families to bond (or argue), it allows me to wind down together with a friend. You can pick a fight by playing a competitive game with a lot of direct interaction, or you can decide to save the world together by cooperating. I do recognise that this argument also stands for many video games: I love playing point & click adventure games together with my wife precisely because of it. But I am more of a single player video gamer than I am a single player board gamer.

It’s also a good way to reduce your screen time—unless you buy too many games that require hybrid play sessions with for instance a tablet. It certainly is easier to grab a handheld gaming device of your choice, press that power button, and start playing. There’s the hassle of calling friends, trying to pin down a moment everyone’s free, plowing through the manual, … But it might be better for the eyes.

Speaking of manual, the learning component involved in board gaming is an exciting way to keep your brain active. I recognise that this might be personal but I really like figuring out how something works. I have a few friends who just shove the box and manual over and say “here, you read how this stuff works”. They’d rather get on with playing. Some games can be very daunting to try and get into, but that in itself can be a part of the game—or a challenging game on its own! The problem then becomes trying to remember how it worked as not very game is played each month and the more difficult ones rarely hit the table here.

Everyone who knows me will know what’s coming next: the physical component of board gaming is so much more satisfying than its digital counterpart. I love analogue card games because I can hold something in my hand, scan my opponent, or just fool around and secretly trade cards even if it’s not allowed, just for the heck of it. Fooling around is a fundamental part of play. I love fooling around (which is why I love the original Bohnanza).

In a board game, you can make or break the rules. Some rules might not make a lot of sense for your play group: just throw out that rule or invent your own house rules! No need to try and hack the binary by opening up a hex editor or scouring the internet in search for a trainer or cheat codes. The “bendability” of these types of games is a core mechanic of the recent legacy game subgenre where the rules are constantly permanent changed by tearing up cards, placing stickers, and so forth.

A card or board game is an enjoyable way of spending your evening. Creating such an experience surely is also an enjoyable way of spending your working day—most games are made by just one or two designers. Remember the mass layoffs in the video game industry? Giant AAA studios hiring hundreds of highly specialised folks, taking care of one specific part of the engine, script, or story? Thankfully, analogue games have none of that. As an amateur game designer, create your own roll & write or print & play games to enjoy with friends, inspired by your favourite mechanics. No programming language, expensive RAM, or graphics card needed.

I could also make a case for the attractive financial aspect of a card game versus an AAA console game that nowadays costs €80 but that argument will only hold if you keep your collection modest and stay away from the huge limited edition boxes that easily go above €120. I trade and buy/sell board games much more often than I do video games, because I can, and with digital games I simply cannot. Also, the average medium-sized board game costing €45, played ten times over a session of one to two hours means money well spent in good company compared to a one-time movie ticket—or even a single player video game. As always, your mileage will vary: some finished legacy games cannot be sold since you tore up cards.

Board games are designed to be replayable. Most contemporary video games are not. I still love playing Agricola, a game that will become 20 years old next year. The simplicity of the rules, the variety by for instance a variable board setup, the gradual complexity and feeling of “beating” the game thanks to skill instead of luck, …

Of course I also still love (re)playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past which is 35 years old so perhaps most of the above arguments can also be applied to video games. None of these statements are meant as an argument against playing video games—I just tried to focus on the more unique aspects of board gaming. When I’m too tired to pull a game box off the shelf, I’ll still boot up the Switch instead. Or read a book.

Such as Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. Which makes you ponder… Why do I really play games?

Related topics: / boardgames / games /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 12 August 2026.  Reply via email.

Hey, what’s causing those drops of water on the ceiling in the kitchen? Wait, isn’t this exactly above the toilet in the bathroom? Uh oh. Hey, what’s that pool below the toilet doing there, that wasn’t there two days ago? Uh oh. The best part of this worst part is that we weren’t the ones to discover it: we were on a short vacation and my mother in law came to check up on the dog and cats. I yet again failed to make the connection of not flushing the toilet that clearly accelerated the dripping.

When we got back home, we called a befriended neighbour who’s a DIY wizard as I had literally no idea where to start: the inner workings of the toilet are neatly tucked away behind the wall as this is one of those hanging models. How do you even open that thing? It turns out that the plastic cover representing the push buttons can be squeezed and removed to reveal more screws and more plastic to be removed to reveal even more screws and more plastic to… you know the drill. Eventually, the inner workings will be revealed.

Pssshhhhhh. No more drip, drip—now a straight-up hose sound. It looks like we found the culprit: the flexible part connecting the water feed (on the photo: in the top centre) with the floater valve (or flutter tap? I don’t even know how to translate vlotterkraan to English) showed clear signs of bursting due to the continuous pressure over the years. Flushing the toilet changed the pressure, “resetting” the build-up: since we go to the toilet every day, the drips kept on dripping but not spraying like mad once we were away.

Changing that cable fixed the problem. But then a second problem arose: the befriended neighbour helped us open up this thing and point out the problem, but I was the one who had to replace the part and correctly reassemble everything. I forgot to take a few pictures but did manage without any help.

Two weeks later, we finally got the courage to take on another bathroom DIY project, this time without waiting for the proverbial drip: replacing the sink taps that were damaged thanks to twenty years of “hard” or calcareous water. I did replace the sink tap of the guest toilet downstairs but that was very easy. This one, not so much: I again didn’t even know where to start.

As the famous Buddhist saying goes:

To Begin, Begin.

After two minutes, I stopped. I couldn’t access the screws because the previous owner of the house found it necessary to have the bathroom furniture installed in such a way that it was just impossible without sawing a hole on the back under the sinks. Ah, dang it. Get me that neighbour on the phone, will you?

Ten minutes of extremely annoying whining of the neighbour’s multitool with dull saw attachment later, we could in fact access the screws. Progress! I took my daughter to the local Home Depot to fetch new taps matching the hole(s). But I didn’t install them: they came with a “waste trap” system you install inside the sink itself to stop the water from flowing away. The problem (yes, another one) was: we already had really old traps screwed in that also were in dire need of replacing. Great coincidence, I hear you think. Except that the old ones refused to let go, whatever I tried. I even ended up damaging and bending one of the holes inside the thing and wasn’t sure whether I would still need the old ones so I stopped. Again.

I don’t know how those Buddhists did it, but I seem to have a track record of quitting DIY projects faster than I manage to start them.

Anyway, it took four hands to screw out the old metal ones that were rusted up and hopelessly stuck. But then another problem (oh yes) arose. We had to temporarily dismantle the plumbing system below the sink to install the waste trap. Oh, and where did that rubber ring go that was supposed to stop the whole thing from leaking? Evaporated during the years. Dismantling is easy, but putting it all back together is a sure way to get stuff leaking precisely because of that: wear & tear. Oh, and did I know I had to tape in that screw thread over there with Teflon to make sure it’s waterproof? No I did not. But I do now!

I’m ashamed to admit that I had to rely on that too kind neighbour far too often when it came to the bathroom projects. These used to be jobs for my father-in-law & me but since he no longer roams this planet and my own father, although also very good at DIY, isn’t a great teacher, I’m usually left to my own devices. Scrambling around. Postponing things. Drip, drip, drip.

To begin, begin.

Related topics: / DIY /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 9 August 2026.  Reply via email.

I took the eldest to the city centre and of course we ended up in the bookshop where I bought Blaise Pascal’s biography by Graham Tomlin in a whim. I consider that another win: I once started his Pensées but it didn’t yet click. My gut told me to grab that book. I am glad my gut is still intact. Lifts up shirt. The real one as well, thankfully.

Previous month: June 2026.

Games I’ve played

June was a really good month video game-wise. July wasn’t: cero cero cinco. I did try my hand at Void Stranger and got to room eighty-ish but the summer holidays invite outside play here, not inside. So I shifted gears and tried to pick up the board gaming hobby again as that one was doing really bad this year.

The shelf cleanup made room for new ones: so far I picked Pirates of Maracaibo and my wife chose Cozy Stickerville. That’s yet another hobby getting quite expensive: the Pirates box was €50. For a standard-sized box that holds mainly cards and a few cardboard sheets to punch out, that somehow feels very steep. I’ll have to dig into the price history a bit more.

Here’s the BGStats summary of this month’s plays:

The Matcha expansion of The White Castle is well worth the purchase: it streamlines nearly everything in the base game that I found slightly annoying (one more turn, more lantern combo activations, even more variety, …). We’re at play number eight in Dorfromantik: Sakura and just unlocked the ability to collect sakura flowers. Playing such a lighthearted legacy game with the wife is both relaxing and exciting!

Selected (blog) posts

Yet again, I find myself knee-deep into the fountain pen rabbit hole, so apologies for the fountain of (ha!) pen-related links in here.

• The Pen Addict ranks all Pilot CH 912 custom nibs. The Soft (fine) medium wins and my favourite, the Waverly, does poorly. To each their own!
• UK Fountain Pens has interesting reviews on their blog/site.
• I think I already posted these, but there’s a theme going round: If I Could Only Keep 10 Pens. I saw The Well-Appointed Desk’s post first. Thanks!
• This is a 2018 post, but Tom Gidden’s Flex And The Art of Line Variation is a gold mine when it comes to making sense of “flexible” nibs, both old and new.
• Winnie Lim wrote a letter to her 10-year old younger self and warned her not to play the status game (and more).
• Another favourite fountain pen blogger that also sketches, Parka Blogs (Teoh Yi Chie), wrote a review of the Pilot Custom 743 with the Falcon nib, the one I bought last week. I haven’t yet encountered ink flow issues as I’m not a good “flex writer”—yet.
• You might have heard it already: as Roy Tang puts it, the end is nigh for physical video gaming. Nintendo won’t save us this time I fear, Switch 2 is also evolving that way.
• The Gentleman Stationer quips: chase nibs, not pens. Will do! Clicks buy (again)
• David reviewed Drop Duchy an indie game mixing Tetris with deckbuilding? Sounds right up my alley!
• Marcus The Boardgamer shared his current top 10 games over at Mastodon.
• Fude Fan put out an updated guide on how to buy pens and ink directly from Japan.
• I really enjoyed this designer diary post from the makers of The White Castle: Matcha. They won’t play the game without the expansion anymore!
• On a strange corporate looking blog I found a summary of unique Kit-Kat flavours exclusive to Japan. That list goes on and on and on!
• Nagasawa Pens is a well-known store in Kobe, Japan that collaborates with the Big Three Japanese brands to sell unique and limited edition variants. The more you know!
• In 2021, Jane from Yoseka Stationary wrote about the origins of the Sailor Naginata Togi nib. Many nibmeisters nowadays offer similar grinds like “katana” or “blade” that resemble the Naginata Togi. I have a Kodachi on my list from Mr. Nagahara Junior.
• Related to that, Parka Blogs compares Sailor specialty nibs before and after 2015/2025.
• In case that wasn’t yet clear: the pen is Mightier than the Keyboard. Ennui Vagaries agrees.
• A Kelson Vibber conspiracy theory: genAI uses a lot of em-dashes because it’s trained mainly on WordPress blogs and bloggers use a lot of em-dashes—to they?
• Did you know you can fit a Sailor nib inside a standard JoWo/Bock housing? Or Pelikan or whatever? Thanks to Flexible Nib Factory, you can!

Related topics: / metapost /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 1 August 2026.  Reply via email.

Take a look at the photo of the above linked post to inspect the state of the board game shelf in 2022 and 2024. Below is the updated 2026 version, just before selling the culled ones. Please ignore all the baby toys that seem to find their way up, under, and inside every single piece of furniture in our house.

The top right box contains games that should leave the collection. I’m trying to figure out a system starting from the left (in) and ending to the right (out). The idea was also to have a few spaces on eye level where I could place the games that deserve more plays/attention.

So what’s gone and what’s new?

The Gone Ones

• Nightfall was already “culled” in 2024 but I can’t seem to make a sale on that one. It’s out of print and I don’t charge a lot. That is one persistent box!
• Dungeons, Dice & Danger (Richard Garfield made a roll & write and it’s not very good)
• French Quarter is just not as good as Three Sisters and I can’t justify owning both
• Ora & Labora is the one that got felled as I own too many Uwe games and want even more
• Speaking of which, Click A Tree is a disaster, I wish I didn’t back that one.
• I also gutted Framework and Robin of Locksley in 2025. Yes I have/had too many Uwe games, I told you. And Nusfjord is on my wishlist. Perhaps also Hallertau?
• Conservas is a neat little solo bag building game. I finished the campaign and it has not a lot of staying power after that.

As mentioned in the 2024 post, we own too many small box 2-player only games that my wife no longer likes to play. Glasgow, Caper, and/or Paris are my next culling candidates.

The New Ones

Again, the columns are defined as follows: game name, BoardGameGeek average score (1-10), own score (4: Great!, 3: Good, 2: Average, 1: Bad, /: No Score, see my grading systems discussion), BoardGameGeek weight (1-5), estimated plays (From ++; played a lot, to -; barely played). The table is sorted by plays (most to least).

I left out two new dice for Railroad Ink that I have yet to touch and the Kingdom Legacy: Distant Lands expansion that’s also still in shrink wrap. Ouch. That list is longer than I anticipated… Only Fliptown is from 2026 though, the rest is from last year.

You might also notice the correlation between a game that gets played and the BGG weight: the heavy hitters sit at the bottom. See my posts on parenting as to why. I’m already more than happy that my wife likes both Dorfromantik: Sakura and The Dice Chambers. It’s really cool to play a tile-laying campaign/legacy style game: the last time we managed to open a new box and envelope and we were really excited to see what’s inside!

I got Earthborne Rangers for my 40th birthday last year from a friend. We attempted to start the campaign and played again with more than a month in-between and already forgot most of the rules. He since has moved on to other games he’s into so I think I’ll try and get a solo campaign started instead as I really liked what I saw but I can’t seem to get it on the table. The unopened Spirit Island I got for Christmas is another painful one.

The 2026 Play Stats So Far

I don’t really want to share these stats: in 2024, I wrote Since our baby turned into a rebellious toddler we’ve had to dial back hobby time significantly. Well guess what we had another one and that one loves screaming and kicking around lately. It looks like 2026 is an all-time low when it comes to logged board game plays.

We’re trying to more actively play something small together after the kids are off to bed which is nice. Writing summaries like these help me ground myself: it seems that I have more than board games enough to cover the next few years. And yet backed versions of Sail Legacy and Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients still have to make their way to our doorstep. I still read Board Game Quest’s Kickstarter summaries but more cautiously evaluate whether it’s worth it. Click A Tree was a good learning lesson.

Today my friend & I played Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition and The White Castle with the expansion. It was a great afternoon to unwind outside (even though we had to seek shelter from the heat after the first game).

Related topics: / boardgames /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 29 July 2026.  Reply via email.

I’d like to take a shot at solving the problems that surfaced. I’m playing The Long Game now—I should enjoy the daily small wins, knowing that it’ll be an exhausting ultramarathon, not a short sprint. I never fully realise this but a friend of mine might be right: I usually overly focus on the negatives instead of cherishing what I already have.

So how to turn that around? Perhaps I should simply repeat an experiment from 2013. In one of the first blog posts ever to appear on this site, I explain how I end my days with happy thoughts. I never thought I’d cross-reference to something more than 10 years old but there it is. The idea is simple: instead of letting frustration roar at full speed inside, try to shift your attention to small wins. Tiny little things that unlocked a smile are enough. A daddy, look! perhaps.

This is what I came up with in my journal:

The “small wins” page spread should cover the entire month and is divided into four columns: (1) day indication, (2) small win description/remarks, (3) mood, and (4) physique. It should be dead-easy to fill in otherwise I won’t be doing it, hence the Studio Ghibli stamps. Totoro happy? Me happy. Totoro OK? Me so-so. Totoro with umbrella? Me expecting emotional rainfall. I have yet to stamp a happy Totoro in there but the point is mostly to what you’d call “get a grip”.

For that reason, I don’t want to write anything neutral or negative in the second column. I’ll be needing a fine nib to squeeze everything in there. Maybe I should ignore the “remarks” title altogether. I wrote “TIRED” next to the first umbrella, but should I?

A considerate reader told me they take more pictures of their kids just running around in and around the house to look back on fondly afterwards. That’s sound advice. We should do that more often and forget about it in the many hectic moments. I re-read three journals from a few years ago today and the pasted in photos (mostly from the pocket printer) always make me smile. Our daughter found the photos of the baby funny: “hey look, that’s mom and little brother!” “No it’s not, it’s you when you were a little baby!” “oh wow! but now I already am high up in the sky!”. Note to self: order new pocket printer sheets.

The Long Game means leaving short bursts of dopamine behind. And yet I find myself buying fountain pens—the last purchase was three years ago—or scrolling through BoardGameGeek’s The Hotness list to see what else I can pick up after I sold a few ones just lying around on the shelf. I often try to escape into my laptop or book or whatever when things get heated with the kids. I notice I grab my smartphone during breakfast while I never did that before. The Long Game means noticing, admitting, and trying to change behaviour. I guess stage one is as good as any place to start.

The youngest gave me a really hard time today. In August I’ll be playing daddy-day-care for both of them and I already feel slight hints of panic rolling my way. The Long Game means acknowledging it’s going to be a mess but we’re going to be okay regardless. As my favourite philosopher Michel de Montaigne said: the purpose of life is to live it.

A short sprint would mean this to be over in no-time. The look back into my previous journals already taught me that The Long Game is more than fast enough: one day you’re writing “hey today the first one said bye bye and walked off onto the street for the first time!” and the next day you find yourself writing “next month the youngest turns one what happened??”

Small steps. Small wins.

I’ll be writing them down.

Related topics: / parenting /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 26 July 2026.  Reply via email.

I can’t remember my parents having any hobby except for keeping me and my sisters—and perhaps the vegetable garden—in check. When I ask them about this now, they respond along the lines of “just wait, you’ll quickly learn that with kids there’s no space for that”. That was a few years ago when we had only one kid. I didn’t believe them. Now I do.

I also can’t remember my parents taking the time to often visit friends. There have been a few moments where they would drive over to friends with us three kids but that was initially limited to a few times a year and then gradually disappeared. Yet another thing scratched in favour of more time/life for the kids? Perhaps I am writing this down as a warning for myself not to let my own life derail too much: last week I could feel the dark abyss calling my name. I often resent just starting the day and sometimes wish I didn’t wake up. I am exhausted.

Should I be? I see friends jamming their way through life, with multiple kids, pretending there’s an endless well of love to give. I read and hear about folks taking their very young kids on their far travels while we can’t even muster to get our asses to the Belgian coast.

My well isn’t endless: it’s drying up. Its love level is about the same as the rain barrel outside: dangerously low. We are giving and giving up to the point that we don’t recognise ourselves anymore. My relationship with my wife is crumbling because of these little takers. I partially changed jobs because of them. My head is a gaping void and the few intact spots are partially inaccessible due to brain fog. I want to go and sleep this off and wake up a few years later.

But I should know better. We people are experts at pretending. Other households have their own problems, they just carefully hide them. As my wife likes to say: nobody escapes their youth unscathed. I’d like to extend that saying: nobody escapes parenthood unscathed. It permanently changes you—and not always in a good way. What am I doing here in front of this laptop anyway, during these few hours that my parents are looking after the kids? Shouldn’t I go back to bed? More anxiety pops up: how to most efficiently pass this highly rare quality alone time? Before you know it it’s gone. This need to quickly enjoy this little bit of free time evaporates my motivation to do anything at all…

And thus I keep on thinking: creating life is sacrificing a bit of your own. Creating two lives is sacrificing a lot of your own. Sometimes too much. But the kicker is that you are completely unaware of this as a soon-to-be parent: you’re just excited about what’s to come, blind to the “few” downsides that come with it. And then it’s too late. What did we even do to pass the time before we had kids? I can’t remember. Loitering? Nothing? Gaming? Living?

Even in the sense of a non-living creation, creating life is also giving: you’re pouring years of hard work into a project to realise something. Only with kids, these years never end, and the working hours are not from nine to five. Every little scream and cough at night will keep you awake and every little scream and cough during the day will drive you crazy.

We don’t have the fortitude of a big social safety net making it difficult to break through this circle of negative thoughts. I didn’t write I regret having children but sometimes I do and today is just one of those days. Another problem that presents itself in our situation is that you can’t talk about this with anyone. Friends with only one kid don’t understand what the big deal is. Friends with multiple kids that are older simply forgot their biggest nightmares and very helpfully say it’ll get better. Friends that don’t have kids can’t imagine that misery—and I don’t blame them for not trying.

And even if you could. I don’t have the energy to talk. What is there left to say that will change our situation? Nothing. We’ll still have to get up tomorrow and we’ll still have to keep on giving life in order to sustain and grow these other little lives. A few months ago we had a rare weekend off for ourselves and got out of the house to do something nice together. Later that night I got sick. Flash! Now the weekend is gone and you’re back to giving.

My apologies for these rather depressing words but I have the feeling that too many parents are pretending and not showing the true side of daily misery. That’s what it is. It could be happy bearable misery but it’s still misery nonetheless. And it won’t end: diapers will be replaced by another thing to worry about. We endlessly worry. Why is she eating so little? Oh no the youngest fell again, what’s this bump on his head? Was that there yesterday? Why doesn’t she say how school was? Does she feel at home there? Do we really need to rush off to the doctor again for the third time this month?

During all that worrying, we lose ourselves. We should be worrying about ourselves instead. But at the end of the day, when the kids are in bed, all we have left in us is the ability to lie down on the couch and mindlessly watch something or read a light novel, if that. Maybe the secret lies in not thinking too far ahead: if you look ahead in time you’ll only be faced with that gigantic amount of life still to give until they’re old enough to start changing our diapers.

Related topics: / parenting /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 22 July 2026.  Reply via email.

I keep telling myself I don’t need more but somehow I think I do.

There; the search can already stop before it has properly begun: I don’t need more. But I think I do. Shut up little devil in my head. It’s been three years since I bought a new pen and the ache is real. Especially after seeing a few top list posts appear in my RSS feed such as The Gentleman Stationer’s 12th anniversary post: what’s in your pen case these days?. Six out of ten pens are Pilots! The Well-Appointed Desk followed up with a if I could only keep 10 fountain pens post, as did Rachel’s Reflections.

And now I also want to list ten. Except that I don’t have ten decent pens! As mentioned in my daily drivers post, there are three workhouse pens that are constantly inked with a few newer ones and a few that I barely use. I guess I can make up a top 5:

1. Pilot Custom Heritage 912 Waverly
2. Lamy 2000 Fine
3. Pilot Vanishing Point Matte Black Fine
4. ???

Okay fine, a top three then. Spot four could be taken by the newer Pelikan M400 Medium ground to a cursive italic that’s fun to write with, yet I regret not getting a M600 or even M800. The 400 body is just too small. My ideal body proportion-wise is Pilot’s CH 912 that’s just perfect. The M400’s grip section is short and thin, but the M600+ versions come with a (too) hefty price increase. I guess I can still hunt down a bigger body and attempt a nib swap.

My wife gifted me a Waterman Expert III Fine when I got my PhD and while it’s an excellent writer it doesn’t really come close to the three pens listed above. And then I wanted a proper Sailor with some colour but not a Slimline variant. I bought a Wancher variant on eBay that came with a busted nib so had to send that off. I postponed that for years hence it’s not really been used yet so I can’t give it a proper place in the above list.

A friend listed his own top 10 as well: Pilot Falcon, Pilot CH 912 FA, Pilot CH 912 PO, Pilot Custom 823 F, Pilot Vanishing Point F, Sailor Pro Gear Naginata Togi specialty nib, CONID Bulkfiller, Montblanc 149 Calligraphy nib, and two others. After the Pilots, the price ramps up to almost $1000 which is way above my budget for a pen. I don’t really want another 912 even though the nib variability is seductive: it only comes in one colour; black.

When we visited Italy in 2016, I wanted to buy a proper Italian fountain pen. The Brain Baker in me of course first thoroughly researched all Italian brands and I concluded that Aurora makes unique in-house nibs so I wanted an Aurora—perhaps even their expensive flagship model the Aurora 88. In Milan a friendly employee helped me to an Ypsilon as the others were very expensive. Two months later, some of the cheap metallic layer covering cheaper plastic came off. I also hear quality control issues for other Italian brands so I’m still unsure even though that Leonardo Momento Zero Grande special edition Tulp Fields Ru looks great. But both the size and the price are a bit too big for my liking.

Is it just me or are you just paying for more looks after passing the €300 mark?

So what else is on the wish list? Back to Pilot? Yes! Their Custom 823 is a vacuum filler and in select shops in Japan you can order a flexible #15 Falcon nib along with it: impossibly difficult to import. But you can also buy a 743 with a FA nib and swap them… One for the price of two! Why not just get a single 743 then? Because it only comes in black. Except for the US-only limited edition Verdigris colour. I can almost hear the custom till going ding ding ding.

I always like looking at special nibs as my daily writers are already here, lying on my desk. Sure it’s lovely to have a bit of a pen rotation going on, but I’m not dropping hundreds just to have yet another fine nib. A Platinum music nib then, which has two slits and has wide down strokes but thin side strokes?

As a Belgian fountain pen writer, I’ve always wanted a CONID, especially after testing one from a friend. These expertly machined pens in small batches are made from very durable materials which… drumroll… makes them ridiculously expensive and difficult to get. But they are the ultimate demonstrator vacuum pens with swappable Bock nibs that make it easy to order a few crazy ones from say fpnibs.com. Maybe that’s what’s missing in my lineup?

The cheapest alternative are TWSBI pens, but my Eco already has plastic nicked off here and there so I’m not a huge fan of their usage of cheaper material. Perhaps the more robust Vac700R is worth taking a look at. In-between CONID and TWSBI, you have the Irish Gravitas pens, of which the new Vac 2.0 looks very attractive both price-wise and aesthetically. Vac-filled, two separate ink chambers, can be fully disassembled, and easy to screw in other Jowo #6 nibs.

So what’s the conclusion here? Perhaps I already own anything I will ever need. Otherwise:

• Buy a too expensive and too big Leonardo just for the looks
• Import a too expensive Pilot 743 with FA nib in Verdigris
• Buy a Gravitas Vac 2.0 and order another Jowo semi-flex nib to fiddle with
• Meanwhile be on the lookout for a Pelikan M600 body?
• If all else fails, get a Platinum 3776 with a music nib?

I left out Visconti’s Homo Sapiens, Aurora’s 88, and Sailor’s Naginata Togi. I just can’t justify putting in €800 so unless someone wants to get rid of theirs at a reasonable price, those will stay within the bounds of distant dreams.

Whatever you do, don’t look at the latest Sailor and Pilot prices. Pilot is planning to increase their prices in October—again. On top of that, their limited edition CH 912 is priced at 65k YEN which is more than twice the base price. And Sailor? They’ve been upping the stakes and marketing themselves as more premium: since 2024, prices have literally doubled. Yet another reason to hold your horses… Or to get out that cheap but very serviceable Kaweco Sport?

Related topics: / fountain pens /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 18 July 2026.  Reply via email.

Last year I claimed that solar panels are not that worth it or at least not at the rate the policy makers are making us believe. Perhaps they’re also fond of Lying Science. In any case, suppose you’ve made the purchase. In Belgium, the biggest advantage—being able to sell the generated energy back at a reasonable price—is long gone. Instead, based on the new digital meters that automatically upload exactly what you take and give, the national energy supplier added a “peak moment taxation”: you’re now paying for what you use and a fixed amount based on your monthly max kWh intake.

Long story short, it’s financially interesting to store the surplus of energy you generate yourself and use it when you need it. During the evening when cooking, for example. The problem that pops up is essentially the same as the solar panel problem: is it worth it to put in the money for a professional home battery installation given that these are still very expensive? Not really. But a simpler solution, a plug-in battery that is smaller, cheaper, and easier to install might. What follows are a few Armchair Calculations also known as Rigorous Science (TM) to support that statement.

First, a few given facts:

• Our local Home Assistant installation collects energy data via a P1 meter that taps off that same official digital counter data.
• Our energy stats for the last quarter, from 1/04 to 30/06, are: import 467.32 kWh, export 753.07 kWh. Peaks at the expected 16-19h interval, mostly ranging somewhere at 2.4 kWh.
• The Flemish capacity tariff has a minimum amount! That means regardless of your peak use, you’re going to be paying for a peak of at least 2.5 kWh at 53 EUR per year. Suppose your peak is 3, then you need to pay an additional amount of 159 EUR per year.
• According to various sources (selectra.be, fluvius.be), the price for energy in June 2026 is about 0.30 EUR/kWh while the injection tariff (putting it back on the grid) is about 0.04 EUR/kWh. That’s right: almost one tenth of the buy-in price. To be avoided at all costs if you are to buy back everything during the evenings/night!
• According to intallisol.be , last year the global solar radiation in kWh per square metres was 1184.8 . meteo.be also tracks the amount of sunnier days but the weather is very unpredictable and local.

Okay, so where does a battery help you? At two levels: at reducing what you buy in by providing the energy when the sun is gone, and at reducing your peak energy usage.

But that latter is less interesting than you think because of that minimum tariff. Not only that, a plug-in battery has to conform to strict rules: just plugging it into to a socket in the wall (into the 230 V net) means it’ll be limited to taking and giving 800 W. That is a big downside that is never mentioned on manufacturing websites. Suppose you’re turning on the oven, the AC, and more: you suddenly require more than a few kW but your battery is only able to help out for a puny portion: 0.8 kW. In addition, it’s not able to store energy as fast as possible. Suppose you want to buy in energy during the night if you’re on a dynamic contract and energy is in surplus then. A completely depleted battery of for example 5 kWh might take over four hours—during which the price might have gone up dramatically.

You can counter this major shortcoming by installing the battery in a separate electrical circuit connected to its own fuse in the fuse box. The Marstek Venus 3.0 battery we bought can be configured to give/take 2.5 kWh instead of 800 W but then you better make sure your installation is up for it. A fuse of 16 A should be good enough (16 * 230 = +3.6 kW).

Suppose you don’t immediately go through all that trouble. Then the battery can somewhat soften the tariff blow: from your 3 kWh peak to 2.2 meaning you’ll save about 42 EUR yearly.

Then there’s the matter of the battery cycle. How many cycles the battery goes through from depleted to full indicates how efficient you’re able to use the stored extra energy. Given the above numbers (current quarter export, amount of days sun, …), a rough guess could be 160 cycles. Remember that during the winter period, this thing will just sit there doing nothing. I live in Belgium, not in Spain. The Marstek Venus has a capacity of 5.12 kWh, meaning we need to import 820 kWh less.

Given the current price of energy, that’s 0.25 EUR/kWh less or 205 EUR. Add the softened peak and you’re at a total saved amount of 245 EUR per year. The Marstek currently costs about 1300 EUR—so the total payback period is about 5.3 years. Look at all this Rigorous Science (TM) working flawlessly!

Given the separated fuse box upgrade, that might lower to almost four years. Doing that same rough calculation with a professional installation of 9 kWh that still costs over 4k, you’ll end up with a payback period of nine-ish years which is ridiculous: the bigger batteries still do nothing in the winter and for all we know, the average life span of these things might be ten years.

This is exactly the same conclusion as local consumer magazine Test Aankoop:

We generally do not recommend installing a home battery to store the electricity generated by solar panels. There exist more effective and cheaper alternatives such as increasing self-consumption and energy saving investments.

Until recently, a simpler solution such as a plug-in battery was also not really worth it because these batteries could barely store a few kilowatts. The more popular HomeWizard battery costs 1200 EUR and can only store 2.7 kWh significantly increasing the payback period. Their premium software is the biggest draw here, but I don’t need all that crap anyway as I want to monitor and control everything through Home Assistant.

The true test will be the autumn and winter period of course, but during the summer you can still see an interesting pattern in the historical capacity chart: hidden standby power consumption.

During the day the battery does nothing as the solar panels produce a big surplus of energy. The sudden drop at 17:30h is me getting crackin’ in the kitchen. After 19h30 the kids are gone to sleep, the AC is off, and there’s pretty much nothing except a few light bulbs turned on, hence the slight downward slope until about 06h30 when there’s enough sunlight to recharge (which takes a while as I still have to install that fuse).

From 19h (3.3 kWh) to 06h30 (1.17 kWh) equals about 200 W of standby consumption: the NAS backing up files at night, the TP-Link mesh access points, standby modes of various devices, the battery itself that consumes about 15 W regardless, … That means a single HomeWizard battery might not even cut it for you to cover the standby consumption during the evening and night!

Enough armchair logic for now. At the price of an entry level MacBook Air, I’m glad we didn’t shell out a huge amount for a useless installation (that needs its own space we don’t even have) and I’m glad the battery does at least something. Oh, and that peak? Yesterday we bought in total 1.56 kWh. The peak at 18h00 was 0.57 kWh. Similar patterns in the past week: the peak stays below one. Still ample of juice left as we have to pay for that stupid minimum of 2.5 anyway.

The is it worth it? question was obviously approached from an economical perspective instead of an ecological one. In that latter case, perhaps the toxic construction of the battery isn’t worth it? On the other hand, more independence from shady energy dealers also is worth something? Things are getting a bit mucky and difficult now… How much CO2 was produced during the production? What kind of battery are we speaking here (LiFePO4)? I guess the ecological question is still remaining to be answered for now.

Related topics: / energy /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 15 July 2026.  Reply via email.

By building a less conventional house on wheels, of course. Or by building a row boat and claiming it’s also a house. Or by attaching a few farm tools on it and claiming it can also act as a tractor. That also works. Hey, no! No brother you can’t have my house! Wait since when is that your house? I’m working on your house give me a minute. Why don’t you build something yourself? No. I can’t. You must. Ok then. No! Brother can’t have my figures! That’s not allowed! Isn’t it dad? Sigh. We have twenty figures. Even if we would have two hundred, I think I’d hear the same complaints.

Here’s your house slash thing. Happy now?

Daddy? Yes? I don’t want to play anymore. But I just built you the thing you really really wanted? I don’t want it. Really? I mean I just… No. Sigh.

Welcome to my summer holiday… Hey! Little brother, no, you can’t eat that! Wait!

I’m sorry, I have to go rescue Peppa Pig’s skirt.

Related topics: / lego / parenting / creativity /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 8 July 2026.  Reply via email.

Previous month: May 2026.

Games I’ve played

A few very short ones and one quite big one that I ended up enjoying very much.

• The Aching—a Sierra On-Line-like adventure game weighing less than 1 MB that runs on any 8086 machine. It also happens to be good, even though it feels more like an introduction of this horrified world.
• Serious Sam: The First Encounter—I started replaying this two years ago and finally pushed forward a bit more. After endless complete freezes of my Win98 machine I gave up. AAAAAHHHHHH boom. I remember liking this a lot more: it’s…. bland?
• Dread Delusion—A weird looking game that I was drawn to the first time I laid eyes on screenshots a few years ago. I remembered it and felt the time was right to crack this one open. It’s one of the best games I’ve played in the last years. I recorded a playthrough log to convince you to drop everything and go play it as well!
• Lucy Dreaming—A lovely classic nineties adventure game that’s perhaps playing it too safe to try to be an homage to Monkey et al.? I still enjoyed myself but the abrupt ending was a bit of a letdown.

DreadXP, the developers behind Dread Delusion, also recorded dev diaries on YouTube:

Selected (blog) posts

• Speaking of The Aching, the developer explains their philosophy behind the Gorgon Engine.
• Interestingly, Gorgon is designed to be small and able to run on older original hardware, while new adventure games that look and feel old like The Telwynium are made with PowerQuest for Unity and require hundreds of megabytes. Nobody really cares, but I do.
• This ACM paper on a conceptual model for ownership types in Rust sheds new light on how the borrow checker works from an educational point of view.
• More Rust-y stuff—even though I have yet to touch the language—Michael Neumann investigated how long it takes to compile Rust from source compared to other languages. Hint: looooooonnnnggg. As in lonngggggggggg.
• James also printed his blog in book form years before I did! He selected all coffee-related articles to create a lovely personal caffeinated hardcover.
• Games That I Missed documents progress on their pinball machine projects. That old electronic stuff inside the machines is mesmerising.
• Phil Gyford laboriously kept track of how much money he spent each year on music for the past 30 years (via ruk.ca)
• In a timely manner, Miss Booleana wrote about Claire Dederer’s Monsters: What Do We Do With Great Art By Bad People?. I asked myself the same question recently and added the book to my toread list.
• Andrew Webster publishes a Great Truth on The Verge: The Nintendo DS is still the best gaming handheld for travel. Yup.
• Another paper that confirms LLM-driven gender bias in citations in academic work.
• James Pennebaker confirms what I’ve been thinking and feeling: expressive writing can influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. The link is a past event but a good starting point to find publications by Pennebaker.
• Chris Kirk-Nielsen begs us to start playing indie games. Stop that Assassin’s Creed nonsense: scroll up and watch the Dread Delusion dev diary instead!
• Nic tringali sometimes feels the creative drudgery. A surprise ending is in it for you if you decide to read it.
• Jeff Gerstmann finally decided to apply Rigorous Science (TM) to compile an exhaustive (!!) list of the best NES games ever released in USA. Number one is NOT Mario nor Zelda!
• I particularly enjoyed Erik Hane’s piece in Typebar Magazine on fandom strain and the IP illness killing Magic: the Gathering. The magazine really is “An interesting thing to read on the internet”, as their footer claims.
• In a post called Cultures of making and relating, Konrad Hinsen brings the recent Cultures of Programming book our attention. It’s been an open browser tab ever since.

Other random links

• Memray looks like an interesting memory profiler for Python, if I ever would need one.
• GentleOS is a friendly hobby OS for 32-bit PCs.
• The Corporate EU Observatory revealed that Big Tech invested almost 50% more in lobbying throwaway money (€382 mil!) compared to 2020.
• Diablo II has a new class: the Warlock. I really wish it was playable without the remaster though.
• Warp Point is a curated list of indie video game websites and Jefklak’s Codex is in it.

Related topics: / metapost /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 3 July 2026.  Reply via email.

And then I saw someone claiming that London-based Postcard Teas is “even better than Mariage Frères”. My initial reaction to that was “impossible”. I secretly made a note in my journal regardless. When our stock started to dwindle, I dug up that note and said to myself: what the heck, let’s do something crazy and order elsewhere.

Postcard Teas is a small shop in London that sells specialty teas by importing directly from the growers. Their unique selling point is hinted in the name: these growers only have a few acres in which they aim to grow the best quality possible. The result is only a few kilograms of yield each year, yet the average price remains acceptable. Each bag of tea you order comes wich a lovely postcard and piece of art depicting a work from the country of origin. I have no idea where Mariage Frères’s tea comes from and love the fact that with Postcard Teas, this knowledge is accessible—even evident. Besides the location and yield, the back of the postcard even contains the grower’s name and a tidbit of bio.

Watch China Minutes’ visit to the small shop to breathe in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, I’ll go prepare myself a cup of their summer Darjeeling.

Still interested? Great! Yet people outside UK should be warned as shipping comes with a hefty taxation at the border I didn’t mentally prepare for… Just take that into account when you’re browsing their webshop—and don’t forget to compare prices with your usual supplier per 100 gr, not the deceptive 50. With that being said, here are some impressions of the teas we tried out:

Black Teas

Pure

Golden Darjeeling

A lovely dark red tea that goes down very well without being too strong. I usually buy first flush/spring Darjeeling and kind of wish I did here as well as that’s usually milder, but this summer Darjeeling is excellent, even if you accidentally let it steep for too long. Contrary to its spring variant, it also handles heat very well, so I usually set it with boiling water.

A pure Darjeeling is usually my go-to in the morning or even right after lunch. This black tea is less black than the cheap green powdered teas bought in supermarkets.

4 out of 5 Blounts—Great.

Scented

Gianfranco’s Earl Grey

The first thing that came to mind after opening the bag is: I hope the strong scent does not reflect in the taste. And luckily, it doesn’t. Mariage Frères’ Roi Des Earl Grey is more purgent, up to the point that they might have overdone it. Gianfranco’s bergamots in Calabria pair very well with Kerala’s small Darjeeling tea farms.

The structure and colour of the tea is very similar to the previous one, the Golden Darjeerling. This is because Postcard Teas blends both flavours in their shop in London giving them the advantage of carefully choosing both ingredients. Since I love a good Darjeerling, it’s impossible to resist.

I do still prefer Mariage Frères’ more daring lavender Early Grey.

4 out of 5 Blounts—Great.

New Assam Chai

This is the first tea from Postcard Teas that I like less the more I drink it. The culprit? The particular blend of spices: way too much green cardamon. Cardamon is a spice with a minty freshness that easily overpowers everything else, as it indeed does here.

Also, the Assam is cut in finer pieces than I’d wish making this brew very dark and strong. I recognise the need for a strong tea to counterbalance the just as strong spices here but for me it was just a bit too much. Adding lemon and honey helps but only up to a point. I know you’re supposed to drop a few splashes of milk in it but I’m not British nor Indian so I don’t.

2 out of 5 Blounts—Mediocre.

Green Teas

Pure

Guri Green

This is a traditional curled green tea from Japan called a “kamairicha” tea: instead of steaming the tea to stop the oxidation, kamairicha is roasted in a dry pan. Contrary to most Japanese teas such as Sencha, the typical bitter taste is gone because of this process. Mr Ogasa’s farm in Gokase is only 14 acres big.

I’m not a huge Japanese tea expert but I do like this one. I do find it difficult to properly prepare: at more than 75 C the tea oxidises and still comes off as a bit too bitter. It’s more evenly balanced than the Senchas I have tried before, but that does mean it can come across as bland. I enjoy this tea the most when I am not doing anything else besides drinking tea.

3 out of 5 Blounts—Good.

Miyazaki Oolong

This complimentary little bag of Oolong tea leaves from Mr. Takuya Yokoyama tastes like a sweet Sencha instead of a typical Oolong tea. It’s one of the greenest ones with virtually no astringency, as described by Postcard Teas themselves. This is exceptional tea of which only 10 kg was madein 2025. This is interesting because Oolong is usually made in China, not Japan.

The problem is that this tea is very delicate: if you’re working or watching or playing something, you might gulp this down without blinking and afterwards think “what did I just drink?” I think these delicate teas are an acquired taste and require a mindful, peaceful moment of tea but nothing else. But why should I buy this Oolong when I already have the Guri Green?

I usually prefer my Oolongs to be a bit more oxidised. I hope I’m not getting slammed for this. Oolong teas have a huge variety in roasting/oxidation/etc and this one ranges in the “barely Oolong at all” category. What I also learned is that for Oolong teas the first steep is usually a “wash” to get to the more flavourful second steeps. Perhaps I should try that for Miyazaki’s tea.

3 out of 5 Blounts—Good.

Scented

Jasmine Green

As mentioned on the postcard: “a delightful Vietnamese tea made with spring-picked green tea from Mr. Than’s tea co-op in the mountain village of Ban Lien in Lao Cai province”. Delightful is indeed the correct word here: this must be one of the best Jasmine teas I have ever tasted. It’s very delicate, never bitter, and after you’ve had a cup, you want to make another. What else can I say?

It accepts 80 C but you better wait a few more minutes until it cooled down to at least 75 C and not let it steep for too long. Of course, our pantry now doesn’t stock the three Mariage Frères jasmine teas we tried, so I can’t directly compare them. They’re all great and completely different from the supermarket-bought Jasmine crap.

5 out of 5 Blounts—Amazing.

Related topics: / tea /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 29 June 2026.  Reply via email.

But to what purpose, I hear you think? Ah, but to what purpose have we been born into this increasingly dangerous world, I hear myself think? Wait, we’re digressing again. Punch thing. Right. We have many of these little tools that look like small versions of classic perforatoring contraptions, only this time they don’t eat up two small round pieces at a paper edge of choice: they punch out a custom form, such as a dog, a cactus, or in this case, a rectangular stamp—sawtoothed edges included.

The trick to a “good punch” lies in the careful consideration of the viewport: which side of what thing are you trying to stampify? What angle of which picture do I want to cut out? I’m making up a lot of English words as I go here which is good as it should intensify the homegrown craftiness of this post.

I find rummaging through discarded (cardboard) paper especially rewarding with this stamp punch in hand. It turns wrapping film into a tiny piece of art that I can arrange and stick onto a journal page, instantly upping the enjoyment factor of said page. I tried to capture what I’m trying to get across with these weird words here in a photo. Doesn’t the view of all these little homemade stamps make you happy? Some of them are portions of blown up pasta. Some of them are weird angles of flowers or parts of fruit. Others contain a logo of an Italian milling company. Oh, and a yellow Loco Roco harvested from a Retro Magazine that now is permanently crippled. But that’s alright: it was only the PSP page.

In case anyone wonders, Hoogstraten is our local strawberry wholesaler. That laughing kid is playing with rubber ducks my son likes to chew on in bath. The red TONY ones come from a bar of Tony Chocoloney, but the two pieces of blown up dark chocolate I cut out together with the logo (not pictured) are from the best Belgian chocolate brand Jacques. And then there are cut-outs from a local bakery logo, a cereal brand, cookies, asparagus, a tea bag, and other stuff I can’t remember. A lot of fun, right?

That fun does end somewhere though: the puncher is only satisfied with thick enough paper, edging to true cardboard. Cheap newspaper from local advertisements won’t make the cut—literally. I found cardboard boxes/wrappings from supermarket purchases work best.

I have no idea what to do with all these small pieces of paper but my daughter loves showing them off (and destroying them). Most of these will end up in my journal just to spice up the odd boring page or two. Perhaps I should try to send a few letters with them as well and see what happens.

Not every part of everything we do should have a purpose and be measurable. Sometimes it’s also fun to just goof around and try to do things without having a specific goal in mind. And in an hour or two, that means you’re bored and willing to move on, that’s fine as well. I have a colleague who’s impressed by the amount of journals I’ve filled, proclaiming “wow that must have been a lot of work!” Sure, but the emphasis on “work” and the time-based aspect doesn’t apply here. It also heals my soul. It also provides raw material for me to publish. And sometimes, more often than not, it yields nothing at all.

Maybe we should store everything into a box and in a few months sort our collection by colour and try to lay them out in a particular pattern to create an interesting cut-out poster effect. I just made that up, but the more I think about it, the cooler this idea sounds. Into a box they go!

Related topics: / crafting /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 25 June 2026.  Reply via email.

You see, exactly ten years ago, during this period my friend & I had to prepare and defend our bakery skills in front of a jury. After three years of éclair after éclair after éclair, you get sick at just the sight of them. The Belgian patisserie scene is just like most other Belgian gastronomic affairs: it’s mainly variations of French cuisine—hence the éclair as the pinnacle of an indulgent Sunday afternoon snack.

During our training, the cooking of the pudding and the preparation of the choux pastry dough was perfected by repetition, until we could do it with our eyes closed. Most of these Fridays I would return home with a painful tummy. How else do you judge the readiness of the pudding than by tasting too much of it? Hence my growing disgust of the éclair.

If you don’t know what a choux pastry is, just think huge profiterole tower—the one where you pour a ton of hot chocolate over. These round doughy balls, risen by employing the steam of the wet pastry, are usually filled with either whipped cream or custard/pudding. An éclair is a longer pudding-filled profiterole. One of our assignments was the creation of such a tower, yet now that I look back at the photos we took of our table displaying the baked goods, somehow the profiteroles disappeared? Perhaps in the jury’s belly? I can’t remember.

What I can remember is that we didn’t like the traditional Flemish/Belgian take on most of these pastries. My friend and I visited Paris to do a marathon bakery run and the result was no ordinary pudding/custard. Instead, we infused the boiling milk with a good dose of chai tea.

Most other pastries got the “twist treatment” as well. For example, the frangipane dough we were taught is awfully dry. We Belgians are used to that kind of filling but I didn’t like it. I found recipes that combine half frangipane and half pudding/custard to create a smoother texture (the little tartlets on the left part of the picture with pear slices in them). The result? Our jury was displeased: the filling was “too wet”. Sure, if you compare it to the junk typical Belgian bakeries sell you, then yes. Needless to say, the training encouraged you to stay in line and not experiment too much.

The black gooey swirls are supposed to be what we call brioches made with buttery yeasted dough. That’s a bit of a deception though: a French brioche is something else entirely, and most swirls you’ll encounter in a French bakery are made with laminated dough instead. Historically speaking, both brioches should share the same yeasted basis, but ours is much less enriched with butter/eggs. Normally, we would spread out the dough, slather it with more pudding and raisins, roll them up and proceed to bake after a quick second rise. We couldn’t stand even more pudding so we turned to David Lebovitz’ chocolate babka whilst keeping the form of a Flemish brioche.

Want more pudding? You can’t handle the pudding! I know I can’t. The round sugar powdered things on the far left are boule de Berlins or Berliners. They are traditionally made by deep frying like a doughnut but we made them from sandwich dough instead to keep them light (and digestible). The baked and cooled round shapes are then cut in half, after which… one proceeds by filling them with a thick layer of pudding with the help of a piping bag. No jam-filled Berliner to be found here: pudding pudding pudding. I think I threw up once after getting home from one of the many pudding-filled lessons.

As you can see, the end exam consists of a very evenly distributed assignment of 90% pastry and 10% bread. We did make some what we call pistolets, a typical Belgian round bread roll with a crispy crust (due to plenty of steam injected during baking) and soft inside. These are heavily yeasted rolls. I had to sneak in some kind of sourdough somewhere so the salt-and-rosemary sprinkled focaccia was, to me, the tastiest thing we produced. Of course, the jury disagreed. We got our diplomas anyway but I wouldn’t dare to dream of opening a dreadfully boring average Belgian bakery where the yeast, questionable bright yellow looking margarines called “superior butter”, and pudding flows and flows.

It turns out that Week of the Eclair is organised by Puratos, a big industrial supplier raw bakery materials. I wonder if all bakery participants are Puratos clients as well? I know our local bakery, where I got the sticker from, is, as I regularly spot the Puratos truck restocking them. The initiative is a Belgian one—I doubt it that French people really need such a week to promote the éclair. Just walk into a random bakery in downtown Paris and you’ll be mesmerised by the unique shapes, forms, colours, and tastes of their éclair offer. Meanwhile, here in Belgium, most bakers offer just one: the classic chocolate top-coated one with vanilla pudding filling.

There goes my stomach again… Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off to get my éclair fix.

Related topics: / patisserie /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 22 June 2026.  Reply via email.