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Frontier Elite 2

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.

No files in NextCloud

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.

Mechelen

March 02, 2026

Mechelen is a small village in the southernmost Dutch province of Limburg, about 20 km east of the city of Maastricht. It is the most Burgundian province of the country. They have an actual eating culture (vlaai!) and you can make walks in gorgeous hills.

Morning mist

The first time we rented a cottage in Mechelen was in the summer of 2020 when it was difficult to go abroad. A few months ago we thought we would go there again, but then in the winter.

Another view

After two months of some of the coldest winters of the last few decades, wednesday afternoon it suddenly was about 20°C. That morning, around 7:00, when I got up, I looked out of a window and what I saw was so beautiful that I grabbed my camera.

From Docker to Podman (2)

February 26, 2026

I promised more adventures on migrating from Docker to Podman. So the first thing I did after I succesfully ran the cgit container last time, was to create a file /etc/containers/container.conf and putting in the line:

pull_policy="missing"

The problem this meant to solve, was that when trying to run images that I had built myself and that were therefore locally available, Podman would still try and pull them from a repository. This line was officially the default, but not on my server, it appeared.

Now it is.

Mea culpa

Last time I was complaining about Podman not being consistent in using root and non root containers. Of course, I was at fault there, not Podman. Starting the podman socket as root was the mistake, when attempting to use podman as a non-root user.


$ sudo systemctl disable --now podman.socket
$ systemctl --user enable --now podman.socket
$ podman compose up -d cgit
>>>> Executing external compose provider "/usr/libexec/docker/
cli-plugins/docker-compose". Please see podman-compose(1) for 
how to disable this message. <<<<

[+] up 2/2
 ✔ Network bender_default Created                         0.0s
 ✔ Container cgit         Created

Yes, it was still using docker-compose(1) to start the container, but the Podman engine was doing the work:


$ podman stats

ID            NAME          CPU %       MEM USAGE / LIMIT  MEM %
  NET IO          BLOCK IO      PIDS     CPU TIME    AVG CPU %
02148ac098dc  cgit          0.19%       1.171MB / 8.276GB  0.01%
  1.5kB / 698B    0B / 0B       2        34.516ms    0.19%

So, after cgit, I did three others and logged off for the night.

Systemd

The next morning, peeking over the rim of my coffee cup at my containers, I noticed that they were all tightly asleep. My uncoming envy made way for growing puzzlement. Why hadn’t my Podman containers made it through the night, while the Docker ones were still running. Might it be my user? Since I had logged out, my user session had stopped, so perhaps so had my rootlessly run containers?

Podman has a tight integration with systemd in the form of so called quatlets, systemd container units that reside in different locations. A Quatlet plugin in Podman Desktop could generate them almost right and I could start, stop and inspect them. But that way I suspected I’d experience the same thing the next morning, since I’d need my user session to make it through the night for my containers to do the same. Which it wouldn’t.

The solution to this would be to have my user session linger:

$ loginctl enable-linger me

A user that can elevate its rights using sudo(8) lingering in my server all night didn’t exactly feel clean, so I tried another way. First I created a dedicated user for Jellyfin and created a home for them:


$ sudo useradd --system jellyfin 
$ sudo mkdir /home/jellyfin
$ sudo chown jellyfin:jellyfin /home/jellyfin

Then I got a shell for the jellyfin user and set up a systemd unit for it:


$ sudo machinectl shell jellyfin
$ mkdir -p .config/containers/systemd/

There I created a file jellyfin.container with these contents:


[Container]
Image=docker.io/jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
AutoUpdate=registry
Network=host
UserNS=keep-id
Volume=/volumes/jellyfin/config:/config
Volume=/volumes/jellyfin/cache:/cache
Volume=/media:/media

[Service]
# Inform systemd of additional exit status
SuccessExitStatus=0 143

[Install]
# Start by default on boot
WantedBy=default.target

And started that with:


$ systemctl --user start jellyfin

Or so I thought. My jellyfin user lacked the subuids needed to download and run the image:


(potentially insufficient UIDs or GIDs available in user namespace
(requested 0:42 for /etc/shadow): Check /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid 
if configured locally and run podman-system-migrate: lchown 
/etc/shadow: invalid argument): exit status 1

For any user to be able to run podman containers, it needs ample subuids and subguids, so on the host, I added a line with jellyfin:200000:65536 to both /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid files. Now I could go back to the jellyfin shell, do the podman system migrate suggested in the error, and succesfully run the container under its own user.

Perfect.

Except, no, because I need a way to quickly find out how my containers are doing. For Docker, I used ctop, for Podman I can use podman stats -a on the host or Podman Desktop remotely, but both will only show containers of the current user and getting a shell for each of fourteen users one by one to check on its only container, is not my idea of quickly seeing what’s going on.

Of course, a simple sudo systemctl --failed would tell me if any container, or rather, its encompassing service, had failed, but what ctop also provided was a real-time view on how much RAM, CPU and network bandwidth any container used, which I really need on a machine as limited as mine. If the only way to do this was using a single user and let that one's session linger, I'm not sure if all this is worth the trouble.

In other words, though still quite enthused, I was neither done, nor convinced, yet.

Questionnaire

February 23, 2026

Nathan Upchurch found a webmaster questionnaire that used a semantic HTML element I never previously heard of. It made me update my CSS and provided me with a chance to exercise its use.

1. Please introduce yourself.: I am Diederick de Vries (he/him), I live in Amsterdam.
2. How long have you been making websites?: Since around 1997. HTML was easy, but apparently nobody knew that, so I could make good money by making static websites for student organisations and two museums. I also had a homepage, a personal website, since that year. Archive.org’s earliest snapshot is from 2001.
3. And what got you into the hobby?: Making websites was never a hobby unto itself for me. It seemed a natural way of applying the internet when using a computer. In 1995, I went online for the first time and since I had grown up with computers that you programmed yourself using BASIC, Building HTML websites felt like the obvious thing to do, and much easier.
4. What kind of website are you most interested in?: Nowadays, sites with meaning, so mostly indie blogs.
5. What's your workflow? Do you plan your websites out thoroughly, or do you come up with the design as you go along?: Though I used to build and maintain a homepage and build other sites on request, I haven't built a website for years, except for my blog. I suppose it’s just like with other software. If something doesn’t exist the way I need it, I create it myself.
6. Please link to your biggest inspirations.: Phil Plait, aka the Bad Astronomer, inspired me into creating my own blog. He has long since stopped blogging and started a mailing list, a move that is hardly inspiring. His writings still are.
7. What's your favourite part about making websites?: A website is a bit different from anything else that you create. When you write fiction or music, for instance, you send your creations into the world where it meets new people. You hope for the best, but it is out of your hands. A website that is under your control can always be improved, based on user feedback, or just when you change your mind.
8. And the thing you struggle with the most?: I don’t
9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Or do you use different ones?: All pages have the same lay-out. Consistency is important and a lack thereof can be confusing if not done right.
10. How confident are you with CSS?: Enough not to use A.I. but not enough not to use Stack Overflow.
11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>?: Now I do. Thank you for that.
12. What is your favourite HTML element?: <dl>, at the moment
13. If you're making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do?: $ python -m venv venv
14. Do you know JavaScript?: Yes. It's very powerful. Anything can be anything.
15. How about PHP?: Yes. It's slightly less powerful. Anything can be anything, as long as it is an array.
16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to?: It has a theme, but it comes naturally, and I certainly don’t stick to it. I explain this in my about page. It is technology’s broken promises.
17. Are you more focused on content or design?: Content.
18. Do you own a domain name? If not, would you ever want to?: I own three, two of which point to the same site at the moment.
19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or "retro" websites?: I like them, obviously because like their authors, I also was born in a time when technology was still fun instead of mandatory and boring. That said, I don’t feel retro has to be nostalgia. I just never stopped using technology that I liked once and that still works. If website links are normally blue but change to purple when clicked and I find that useful, even though it seems dated, there is nothing nostalgic about that.
20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check?: I remember writing valid XHTML and prominently presenting validation banners on my homepage. But now, if ^U doesn’t show me red squiggly lines, I’m fine.
21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners?: They serve me.
22. What do you think of button walls in particular?: They seem a bit much.
23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different?: At this point, I probably would not. I don’t have the time.
24. Are you envious of other people's websites?: No.
25. What text editor do you use?: Usually vim, though I seem to be typing this in Nextcloud’s notes app. Sometimes I use a text editor on an MSX or other non-multitasking computer if I don’t want to be distracted.
26. Why do you use that one?: I use whatever is convenient at the time and I had to switch computers earlier this evening so working in my own cloud was convenient.
27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host?: I host all my content myself. I do not want my readers to have to send requests to some third party that might be less into not tracking people than I am.
28. This might not be relevant to you, but what's your opinion on the Neocities vs. Nekoweb debate?: I haven’t the foggiest, but as a general rule, people shouldn't present subjective things as objective.
29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up?: $ du -d0 -h blok 66M blok
30. Do you keep local backups of your files?: Both my site and its content are in git, so yes.
31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites?: Simple, though I was of a different mind 20 years ago.
32. Do you stick to certain colours? Do you do that on purpose, or is it your subconscious?: I vividly remember black MS-DOS screens with green or amber fonts. Since then, my screens are light with dark fonts.
33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Why?: Quitting what?
34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby?: Being a webmaster is not a hobby, it is an identity.
35. Do people in your real life know about your website?: Yes, even though they frequent some of my websites more than others.
36. Do you update your website very often? How often is "very often"?: I seem to be able to add content once or twice a week, though that wasn’t always the case.
37. And the overall design, do you change that much? Why or why not?: The design serves the content. I suppose that if I'll change the latter, I would also change the design.
38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused?: My website is as me-focused as the cup of coffee that I'm sipping from right now.
39. Do you do web design professionally?: No.
40. If not, would you like to? And if you're comfortable answering, what do you do for work?: No. I develop software for the Dutch national railways.
41. Do you communicate with people by email very much?: Often.
42. Some people reject social media and use websites as a replacement. Do you keep social media outside of your website?: Yes. Absolutely.
43. How about instant messengers? Do you use a mainstream one like Discord or Telegram? Or something like Matrix? Do you avoid them?: I only use Matrix, Discord, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp and Mattermost. And Teams and Slack, for work. I still need to set up an XMPP server. Why?
44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? If so, what kinds of artists?: Sometimes. Mostly Bach.
45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one?: I currently own several websites, but only created one of them. The others I only provide with content.
46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many?: I don’t feel a topic in this context is different from a theme, so see Q16.
47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? Or do you construct a persona on purpose?: I present my real self, as far as I know.
48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website?: Yes. Several, in fact.
49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work?: HTML is fine, I don’t like CSS much. Especially grid-css is less readable than what it replaced.
50. What are practices that you think people should avoid?: Designing for phones only, like many mailing lists do. It signals that their readers should read their content as a way of filling gaps in their time.
51. What about under-utilised practices, or things you think people should do more?: I can't think of any.
52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure?: My content is between article tags.
53. Do you consider different browsers?: Are there?
54. Speaking of, what's your preferred browser? Convince your readers why they should use it.: Firefox. I frequently am.
55. And what OS are you on?: Arch.
56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it?: I strongly feel I should use Arch.
57. Are your websites mobile-friendly?: I think so, though it is not a priority.
58. What are your thoughts on autoplay?: That's horrible.
59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any?: I like them. I'm in three of them, and I frequently visit my neighbours and others. I also frequent webrings of other websites.
60. Do you have any web shrines? What do you like to see in that sort of page?: Not yet, but I'm planning one.
61. Are your websites "cliche", in your opinion?: Very much so.
62. What is your ideal website? Are you striving for that, or for something else?: A good website has meaningful content, doesn't use more electricity and cooling water than needed and doesn't sell its visitors' privacy. This is exactly what I'm striving for.
63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets?: Yes and no. In a way, I suppose.
64. What are your favourite resource sites?: The ones on the internet.
65. Is there a habit you just can't get away from no matter how hard you try?: Doesn't anyone?
66. What's your biggest advice for a new webmaster?: Use what suits you.
67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some?: All in CSS.
68. What do you think of frameset layouts?: You should be able to link to any content on a site. Framesets typically do not allow that.
69. How about table-based layouts?: They are difficult to maintain, but still better than grid-css.
70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of "one-column", "two-column" and "three-column" layouts? Do you use any of these?: I think a single column suits me best. I have one site with a three column landing page, but the content is presented in a single column.
71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS?: I don't know.
72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? It's useful for your thoughts.: Yes.
73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Or do you only make layouts when the need arises?: A website must have something to say.
74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? Somewhere in the middle?: I'm not sure.
75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit?: No.
76. How did YOU learn how to make websites?: I think I got hold of an HTML primer and decided to see that I could do with that.
77. Do you ever force elements to do things they're not supposed to?: In code? Sure.
78. Thoughts on floating elements?: None.
79. When you're sizing stuff, what do you use first? Do you use px, em, %, or something else?: pt.
80. Do you have a favourite font?: No.
81. Would you run a website with another person? How would that work?: Agile, probably.
82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often?: Yes.
83. Do you bookmark other people's websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours?: I usually don't. If try to subscribe to RSS feeds. People subscribe to mine as well. I like it when people read what I write.
84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website?: Its content.
85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect?: I don't see myself as a collector but I do own things that I write about.
86. How often and for how long are you online?: Ouch.
87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience?: My peers
88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML?: See Q20.
89. Do you program in general? Have you ever written a program for use with or on your website, not counting simple JavaScript?: I used to create cgi-bin scripts in Perl and I have one site with a Java back-end.
90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Have you ever used one?: I created my own, and it serves me well.
91. Do you keep a hitcounter? Why or why not?: No. I can look at my server logs to find out how many visitors my sites get.
92. Do you frequent forums? Which ones?: Yes. I visit Stack Exchange and Reddit forums as well as the Arch Linux forum and others.
93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere, like a text document or a Word document?: My own SSG is git based. I write my content in an editor and push it to its repository, after which it will become available.
94. Do you think you appear cool to others? A more accurate answer now: do other people ever say you're cool?: No.
95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame?: Archive.org makes deletion useless.
96. Would you close down your website if you couldn't update it, or would you leave an archive?: Not sure.
97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? Or are you more secretive?: As much as needed for what I want to say.
98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website?: No.
99. And do you optimise the images on your website?: I remove all EXIF tags and lower the resolution so that it shrinks to a few hundred kBs.
100. We're out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? ....other than exhausted.: I wonder who'd read all this until the end.

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