Thefoggiest.dev

March 16, 2026

I love playing in string quartets. There is so much music to choose from and it is much more personal than playing in a large orchestra. Some time ago, three friends and I decided we wanted to play Tchaikovsky’s first string quartet in D major. It’s first movement opens with a 9/8 measure that has to sound like a 3/3, but because of the rhythm, it really sounds like a 4/4 with an extra eighth. The trick here is to realise the first tied quarter being the start of second beat, not the eighth it is tied to. Then you can play it as 3/3 so that the music starts to flow.

Tchaikovsky, Quartet in D op. 11, first violin, first page

As a first violin you often play in the higher register, such as in the last two lines at the very bottom of the page above. These contain some pretty fast notes, some of which climb quite high. It has a piano indication, so it should be played relatively softly. Typically, I would assume the other voices have a similar play soft indication, so I can still use quite some bowing and vibrato here to better project the sound.

If however, you look at the whole score, then you see that the three other voices are in fact playing stronger, mezzo forte, and the cello clearly takes the stage with an expressive melody. What I’m doing should be mere garnish, nothing more.

Tchaikovsky, Quartet in D op. 11, score, measure 34 through 39

In these cases, I find it helps to play not from my own sheet but from the score so that I can read what the other voices do while we play. The problem with this is that you have a lot more pages to turn and no time to turn them. Sheet music, however, also exist in PDF form and can be diplayed on a tablet. This is why I bought a Bluetooth keyboard with just two keys, Page Up and Page Down.

The iRig Blue Turn

This little keyboard sits on the ground between my feet and the stand which has a tablet with the score. I use an app called ScorePDF that rapidly turns pages when my foot taps one of the keys. I’m not really used to rehearsing from tablets, though. On paper, I use a pencil to make notes for fingerings, intonation, bowing and other things all the time. On the tablet, I have to pinch to zoom and use my bare finger. It works well enough, and it also solves the problem of pencils falling on the ground when turning a (paper) page. The device is even small enough that it fits neatly in my violin case’s accessory compartment.

The iRig in my violin case

The only problem I encountered was at the end of the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s quartet, where it says Da Capo, which means from the top. I didn’t know how many pages to turn back and there was literally no time. On my own score, the entire movement is on two pages so no turning was needed. ScorePDF has a bookmark function, but when I wanted to name it, no keyboard popped up on the tablet.

I had connected a Bluetooth keyboard, of course.

March 12, 2026

Last time I wrote about how I found this boxed Frontier Elite II on eBay and why I bought it. I’m still not sure what to do with the huge map poster. The stories are fun, though.

But a game must be played.

Take off

The game, right after loading, starts with a rather dramatic demo in which two pirates are chasing a big spaceship from the surface of an Earth-like world into space and through hyperspace, only to ultimately both be defeated by their prey.

After the demo, I am presented with a few options to start my career. A start at the Ross 254 system comes highly recommended, but I feel like an independent pilot today, and so I start at Lave.

What was good enough for me in Elite, is enough good for me now.

The Cobra Mk III

It immediately appears to be an excellent choice. I find myself firmly seated in the cockpit of the mighty and awesome Cobra Mk III, the ship that, when properly outfitted, can survive any battle. Powerful and elegant, it can hold its own against Thargoid fleets as well as hordes of police Vipers. It is the ship to be seen in. Mine comes armed with a rather modest 1MW pulse laser, four somewhat timid KL760 Homing Missiles and a useful Class II hyperdrive, giving me a hyper space jump range of no less than eight light years, bringing half a dozen systems into range.

What now?

Typically, one would start trading, get ambushed by pirates and have a non-zero chance of surviving their first flight.

I notice that my Cobra has no automatic pilot.

Or shields.

This isn’t the original Elite, where nothing moves but ships and the occasional asteroid. Frontier has rotating space stations orbiting rotating moons in turn orbiting rotating planets themselves orbiting one or more suns. All speed is very relative and differences are measured in thousands of kilometres per second.

Madness.

If you can manually fly a ship from the surface of a world in Frontier and dock with an orbital space station, you can, given the same controls, do that in real life (I could imagine).

I could exchange the Cobra for a cheaper Viper Mk. II, earning me enough money to outfit that ship with an automatic pilot. But the local shipyard doesn’t carry scanners (the middle of the console where you see nearby objects’ locations) or shields for that matter, so while it would allow me to navigate anywhere, I wouldn't be able to see any attacker that's not in front of me and a single brush from its laser would instantly vaporise me.

Madness.

Also, the very idea. The Cobra is mine, and if they want it, they will have to pry it from the charred remains of my hands. Which they probably will, in a minute, if I don’t familiarise myself with flying manually. First, how to dock. I let the station spit me out.

Space appears to be blue. I do remember space being black in Elite. The one game, where driving a spaceship doesn’t feel as if it’s a submarine, colours space like the ocean.

Looking back, I see the station and two ships nearby shrinking with the distance.

I set my speed, relative to the station, to 0 and my Cobra decelerates and comes to a relative halt. Turning 180 degrees, I face the station. I receive docking clearance and accelerate towards the station, keeping the cross-hair at its entrance.

I crash into the side of the station, not unlike a fly against a car’s front window.

My second attempt, upon respawning, is successful, because I remember to set the engines in off mode, to have it stop compensating my movements, when I turn it around. I also see why my controls only have to allow me to yaw and pitch. The station, when I’m close enough, picks me up, corrects my rotation and swallows me whole, all automatically.

Still, for a game that simulates so much reality, I find not being able to control my top and side thrusters directly, lacking. This way I cannot evade a pirate laser or correct my docking bay approach by slightly going up, or right, for example.

Hold on while I make room

Now that I know how to pilot the ship, I accept two packages bound for Leesti, a nearby industrious world where they must have shields in stock for me. I launch and jump. The packages will make me 1,200 credits, which, together with one or two pirate bounties, will be enough for a shield or two, I expect.

The jump puts me in the Leesti system at 11 AU from its central star. I point the Cobra in its direction, accelerate and are attacked. I switch my engines off to prevent a high speed jousting match and identify my attacker as an Eagle. It takes 13% off my hull before blowing up.

Victory

I feel victorious.

But these packages must be important. Every time I put time progression to its fastest setting, I am immediately pulled back from my dream state and confronted with red or yellow beams of death, a rather disorienting, if scary, experience. After five or so I don’t even trouble myself to re-select Leesti-1. I know I’m still going in the right direction because my engines are off all the time, and I’m getting nowhere anyway. But after those five, I don’t have any KL760 Homing Missiles any more and my hull’s condition is now at about 1%, so, yes, within a minute or so, I’m space toast. Again.

I respawn.

Still alive

Three times.

So when I finally do arrive at George Lucas Station in orbit around Leesti-1, it’s in a Viper Mk. II, with a 100% hull condition, a full complement of four KL760 Homing Missiles and an automatic pilot.

The shipyard’s upgrade shop doesn’t appear to have any shields in store, though.

Fantastic game.

March 09, 2026

I bought a game for my Atari ST^e. It arrived today in its original box, with two 720kB floppy disks, three books, a giant star map and some leaflets.

Frontier Elite II, created by David Braben of Elite/Elite:Dangerous fame, in some way licensed by none other than Konami and distributed by Gametek in 1993 is a game I played a lot, decades ago.

Box, front

Box, back side

What I found inside the box

The first time I read about Frontier was in Dutch Atari magazine “Atari ST Nieuws”, which had a newspaper like presentation. I was heavily into MSX Elite back then and the article made me so enthusiastic about Frontier, that I kept it until today.

A page from Atari ST Nieuws with a review of Frontier Elite II

“Almost any Atari ST owner will remember the game Elite. After all, together with Mercenary, it is one of the best science fiction adventures/role playing games there is. There have been rumours about a successor for a long time. Now it is finally here. Let’s see if Frontier Elite II can live up to these high expectations.”

-- Atari ST Nieuws, unknown issue

The article goes on about how you can actually land on planets and moons, and how the distances between and the sizes of objects in space are as realistic as the way solar systems are made up from stars, planets and moons. By comparison, Elite only had one star, one planet and one orbital station in every one of its 1,600 systems.

Frontier, however, has systems like the Tiandess system:

Frontier’s schematic map of the Tiandess system

If I read this right, the uninhabited Tiandess system in sector [-1,-6] has one K type star with a companion type M star orbiting around a common gravity centre. Orbiting them futher out are three planets, another duo of M-class stars also orbiting a common point of gravity, and two substellar objects. Each of those have moons, three of which are medium gas giants and another one a small gas giant. “Some small scale mining ops” is the common Frontier euphemism for being heavily infested with pirates. I should buy a lot of fuel and missiles sometime and fully explore this system.

Now that I own the game, I finally know where the comic-style drawings in the “Atari ST Nieuws”-article are from. Atari ST Nieuws in fact didn’t draw those. They’re from one of the three books, the one filled with eight stories situated on (and between) the worlds featured on that map I mentioned.

I never owned an Atari ST before 2005, but I did own a PC with Dosbox on which I enjoyed Frontier’s own successor, First Encounters, a lot. It had everything Frontier had, and also Thargoids, handcrafted missions, and newspapers.

A poster size map, with a cut-out with the Lave region

In the first decade of this century I bought and sold all kinds of antique computers, playing a few games and selling them again, sometimes even making a small profit. Prices were low, though. When I bought an ST in 2005, Frontier was one of the games I tried playing. If I read back what I wrote then, I must have found the game’s frame rate too low, so I exchanged the originally bought ST^fm with a Mega ST, for no more than €75,-. I don’t seem to have written about playing Frontier on the Mega ST.

What probably also didn’t help was that I didn’t have any of the hardware upgrades that make retro gaming now, twenty years later, so much more convenient. I can boot my ST^e, navigate to Frontier on my SD card that’s inside a device in my ST^e’s ACSI port. Back then all I had was small, slow and unreliable floppies, a big step up from the cassette tapes that I had originally used with my MSX1, but still just one step.

Two pages from the manual

What I liked about both Frontier and First Encounters, was that whole Newtonian motion thing, that I wrote about in 2024 while playing the Frontier inspired indie game Pioneer. Pioneer compiles on modern architectures, looks and sounds okay and plays fantastic. And just like in Frontier, your ship has a maximum acceleration instead of a maximum speed.

It’s a spaceship. Not a submarine.

In 2026 Frontier’s frame rate on an 8Mhz ST^e is just as low as it was in 2005, or 1993, but I don’t have to put up with floppy loading times, not to mention a ball-driven Atari mouse, any more. In fact, I find the game quite playable. And even though the SD card reader device came with a copy of Frontier, I like to own actual copies of games I enjoy, so I decided that the eBay offer was a good reason to sink my teeth into this 33-year-old game again.

March 05, 2026

The other day, I was at the office and got an invoice from ISACA for a $700+ exam I had bought. I had to pay for it myself and then declare it to my employer, using the invoice as proof. As with any exam within this business model, I will have to redo it periodically to keep being certified. It’s a sustainable businessmodel. Sustainable in a capitalist sense that is, not in a natural sense, of course.

I found the invoice at the far end of a huge maze in their website’s lowest basement. It was also guarded by several hyenas, but I succesfully tore it from their jaws and my manager approved the declaration promptly. Then I wanted to save it in my personal Nextcloud instance for my own archive.

This folder is not available, try again later or contact your maintainer.

The Files app malfunctioned. What now?

And who is this maintainer I should contact?

That night, at home, I looked at what had gone wrong. At first, I saw that my archives still existed, so that was not the problem. Nextcloud has a terminal command, occ, which you can use to see what happens when, for example, the files are scanned. That seemed like a great start:

$ sudo docker exec -it nextcloud /bin/bash
# ./occ files:scan --all

Yes, I’m still not done with Podman.

It failed immediately with a trail of error messages that came down to the fact that in line 1309 of the file SSH2.php an argument in the form of a string was used where an integer was expected:

TypeError: fsockopen(): Argument #2 ($port) must be of type int, string
given in /var/www/html/3rdparty/phpseclib/phpseclib/phpseclib/Net/⏎
SSH2.php:1309

Before I would look up the file in question, I did an online search for the error message, and it turned out that it had indeed occurred earlier, but in a file called SFTP.php:

“When a host string includes a port (e.g., 1.2.3.4:22), it was being ignored if $parameters\[’port’\] was present but empty (e.g., ’’). The previous logic $parameters\[’port’\] ?? $parsedHost\[1\] treated an empty string as a valid value, overriding the port correctly parsed from the host.”

-- fix(sftp): Handle empty port parameter to allow host-defined ports#58350

The function that went wrong in my case was this:

An undefended function that can bring Nextcloud’s Files app down

This reminded me that in order to be able to listen to my music at the office, I had used Nextcloud’s External Storage, which can access my music files over SSH. There I had left the standard port 22 empty, and I had updated Nextcloud to 32.0.6 recently. Filling out the port number in the appropriate maintenance form appeared to solve the problem.

But if you look at that function, I do think that, for something as sensitive as an ssh connection, it should have been programmed more defensively. Numerous values are extracted from a $this object that should be checked and validated within that function, in order to prevent these kinds of problems. In addition, Nextcloud’s Files app apparently falls over when retrieving External Storage files goes wrong.

P.S. ISACA, at its checkout page, appeared not too confident on its own business model. They asked me if I was willing to give them a donation.

I haven’t the words.