Author: Robert Schouwenburg

Another arcade favorite of mine

Retro gaming: Out Run

Same as After Burner, I wasted a lot of coins on this game in the arcade. Out Run a simple driving game. You drive a Ferrari Testarossa and the objective is to stay on the road and avoid hitting other traffic while beating the clock to get to the next stage. It was that time […]

“Hmmmm, I am not sure”

Annual smart speaker IQ test

LoupVentures put out their annual smart speaker IQ test. They tested Google Home, Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod and Microsoft Invoke (Cortana). Each system was asked 800 questions on a variety of topics and areas. Here are the results: And here are the results over time – they’ve been doing this test for 4 years now: […]

Hard to explain hobby

Audiophile truth

I’m distracted today and I’ll have to keep it short. This is a great cartoon from The New Yorker which sums up my audiophile hobby.

Corporate-driven open source communities

Slow communities, fast companies

I wrote this when the news came out that Microsoft was adopting Chromium for their new browser. Iā€™m always fascinated by how groups of people organize themselves to get things done. There are many types of organizations, but here I would like to focus on companies and communities. Everyone understands what I mean with companies, […]

Collecting data comes with big responsibility

Contrarian view: collecting private data for good

Sometimes the media goes on a tangent and seem to agree universally on a particular issue. In those circumstances, I like to explore the contrarian viewpoint to balance my own viewpoint. In this post, I’m going diving into privacy and especially Facebook and Google’s hunger for collecting your data. Both Google and Facebook have one […]

Hey, I followed the rules! What more do you expect from me?

Corporate rules and rigidness

This post is from the “attic”. I wrote it a few years ago. When I was speaking to employees of a large corporate I was doing business with a few years go, they talk about the company as an external thing. As if they cannot control it by themselves. There is a certain feeling of […]

Nintendo Switch is not a Playstation 4

Impossible port of Wolfenstein 2 to Switch

As you know, I’m a big big fan of the Nintendo Switch. If you ever wondered – like me – how it’s possible to port console games to the Nintendo, the following video is great. DigitalFoundry made excellent analysis of the differences in Wolfenstein 2 on the different platforms. I just finished Wolfenstein 2. I […]

A classic before millenials were even born

Retro gaming: Galaga

I love this game – both in the arcade as on the Commodore 128. On the Commodore, it was called Galaxy. I guess it was a clone of this Namco/Midway game. It was a faithful one though because the sequences were the same. I still remember all the sequences from level 1 through 12 and […]

Cool thing of the week

Abandoned Soviet Space Shuttles in Baikonur

People who know me, know that I’ve a fascination for abandoned structures from the past. This stretches from the pyramids in Egypt – which I still have to visit – to old factory buildings in the Midwest. I find it fascinating to see how we lived in the past and what we did. It’s sometimes […]

Asking my kids

YouTube or Netflix?

This weekend, I was chatting with my kids about online streaming video. They’re 6 and 9 years old. They barely watch regular broadcast TV if ever. To them, video means streaming. It’s the only thing that counts. I asked them if they had to choose between YouTube and Netflix, what would they prefer? The answer […]