Thefoggiest.dev

March 24, 2025

I live in a town with pretty good public transport. There are metros, trams, buses and so many train stations that sometimes it’s even easier to take a train. On top of that, my town has 1,292.2 km of bike paths. And in the rather rare occasion that I can’t use any of them, there are always car sharing cars available within walking distance from my home.

Yet, we own a car.

We have three kids. Both my mother and my parents in law are elderly, and we should reliably and timely be able to get to them, even during the night. My mother lives 200km away. We consistently use the car during the summer holidays.

That last excuse is actually not that bad, because international trains in Europe are mostly a joke. Yes, you can, if you’re on your own, take a train to Prague or Barcelona, but it’s prohibitively expensive and utterly unreliable. Brussels, Paris and London are the exception, at least from where I live. But for the coming summer holidays, we rented a beach house in the south of Portugal. I really hope in a couple of years international train connections will be what they once were, because travelling by train is fantastic, fun for kids and relaxed when it works, but at the moment that’s far from the case. So we’ll drive, and we’ve rented hotel rooms on the way there and back.

A bike diversion announcement

My town, and by extension my country, is world-famous for its bicycle infrastructure. Bikes, especially the non-electric variant, are safer, pollute much less and take up just a fraction of the room and other costs to society of a car, so consistently expanding bike infrastructure is basically a no-brainer.

You’d therefore be forgiven to think that people who bring their kids to school by bike before going to work by bike are always a priority. They’re not. Whenever there’s some work going on, cars consistently are prioritised above bikes. Just last week, for the entire week, a small bridge in a bike path next to a two lane 30 km/h car road was being blocked for maintenance. Instead of repurposing one of the car lanes to cyclists and their kids, they placed a series of signs indicating a diversion which grew a 451m route into a 1.6km one, via several very intense crossings involving cars on their way to their driver’s work.

To try to get three kids to put down their Lego and put on their coats and shoes, get their bikes from the shed and ride them to their school is already a rather time-consuming exercise, and school starts at 8:30 sharp, so I don’t need the added stress of navigating unsafe situations with kids on their bikes.

The part of our normal route that was affected. The red dot indicates the maintained bridge.

Seriously. What message would I project to them, when I would take the car whenever something like this comes up? “Dad, it's raining!”

At the other side of the road, at the bridge where the maintenance takes place, there is a pavement of perhaps a meter wide. I directed my kids to cross the street, dismount their bikes and walk to the point where we could cycle again. This proved far less involved than the recommended diversion, and we weren't the only ones doing that. Others had different solutions. I saw people just cycling down the car lanes, and I saw someone with a cargo biked cycling on the pavement and almost run over an elderly lady.

The proposed diversion

If you're living outside my country, the above could very much come across as spoilt. We have outstanding bike infrastructure here, and cars mostly aren't allowed to go faster than 30 km/h. I understand that people almost everywhere else find themselves in situations where they would never cycle their kids to school. What I'm trying to say here, is that when people are confronted with a changed situation, they will follow instructions when they make sense. When they don’t, they take matters into their own hands, and before you know it you get unsafe situations.

And even here, cars get prioritised, seemingly without people even realising it.

March 20, 2025

NAGI-P Soft is a developer of online software since August 3, 1998. It says so, right on their website. But way before that, in 1989, they published Mars, a horizontal space shooter that used only a tiny portion of the screen. In the following year, they produced Mars II, which is a completely different game.

Mars II titlescreen

All screenshots in this blog post are produced by my Sony MSX2+ and send to my PC using a procedure described here.

In Mars II, you control a small craft that glides over surfaces and can make jumps onto higher surfaces. It can't fly horizontally, so when the ground vanishes, it falls down. The scene scrolls along horizontally to the left, but does so in a two-layered parallax where the platforms move faster than the background. When you start a stage or bump into a wall, your craft moves slowly at first but after a few seconds it will pick up speed, which is when the game really starts to flow fast, especially on a 60Hz Japanese MSX. Mars II has perhaps the smoothest parallax scrolling I’ve ever seen on MSX1.

Stage one

While you are finding your way speeding over and jumping between the platforms, you have to take care not to bump into asteroids that also move to the right but at a lower speed than yours. If you do, you lose a life and have to start over the stage. Some of them, especially the green ones, are going almost as fast as you, so they stay with you for a long time. And while you have to avoid bumping into walls, they go right through.

Stage cleared

You can shoot the asteroids, but your cannon, which is the only one you have and for which there are no upgrades, only shoots horizontally. If an asteroid is above you, you can shoot it by jumping, but if there's a platform between you and it, there’s nothing you can do. Even worse, when they have the same colour as the platforms, they can hide while going along with you to suddenly become visible when you have to jump or fall to another platform. The asteroids are generated at random, so each time you play a stage, it is different.

Falling toward my inevitable demise

The trick, of course, is to stay on the lowest platform possible. You can control going up but you can't control going down.

Mars II looks quite good, for an MSX1 game, that is. Of course, most 1990 games looked much better so one does wonder why Nagi-P limited themselves to MSX1. I did reach out to them but never recieved a response, so I can only theorise that perhaps part of Nagi-P's market segment was still using MSX1 and later MSX generations could play Mars II just as well. Or was it a bit of retro-coding? After all, consumer technology moved much faster in the eighties than it does now and six years was a long time then.

Each of the seven stages has its own detailed platforms and background design. The first stage looks like a desolate moon and subsequent stages feature trees, Greek-like arcades and scenery that looks like the inside of a giant machine. The upbeat and cheerful music is in style with the rest of the game, but becomes repetitive quickly because there’s just one in-game song. The only other music is playing at the screen that congratulates the player on finishing the game.

Jump!

At the start of the game, you get three lives, which isn’t a lot, considering there is no way to increase that amount. The game over screen does allow you to continue at the last stage, though. You also get a limited time to complete each stage, as shown by a count-down timer at the top of the screen. When that time runs out, you lose a life as well. Especially stage six has lots of walls that slow you down so I had to practise this level at a lower speed using the speed control slider on my MSX before being able to play it at full speed.

Stage seven

Mars II is an uncomplicated, elegant and fast game, but it can be a tad unfair at times. It is mostly a game of skill, where you need to get better at shooting at and avoiding asteroids while remembering maze-like structures of platforms and tunnels. The randomly generated asteroids however can often make it literally impossible to get through, so even when you don’t make a single mistake, you can still lose a life and have to redo the stage. This wouldn't be a problem if there was a bonus life to be won after every 10,000 points or so, but as it stands, this somewhat lowers the addictiveness of an otherwise fun game.

March 17, 2025

Below is a screenshot from my Philips VG8235 MSX2 running SymbOS, an operating system for various Z80 based machines with a Windows 98-like graphical interface and proper pre-emptive multitasking, playing Amiga MOD files while running CP/M 2.2 in a virtual machine.

SymbOS with a terminal window running a CPM VM and SymAmp playing MOD files

The reason that I’m using my Philips MSX2 for this, and not the superior Sony MSX2+ that is sitting next to it, is that the Philips, with 1MB RAM, has twice the Sony’s memory, which means I can run more programs at the same time.

For some time now, I’ve been wanting a way to make proper screenshots of my MSX computers. I’ve been taking pictures using my phone and a Nikon camera but never got it exactly right. Reflections from outside windows or lamps always obscured part of the image and the out of phase frequency constrained how I took the photos. Also, to take the picture, I had to pause the game at the right moment, which was often tricky. So when I bought a Sony Trinitron monitor with RGB BNC output as well as input, I bought a pair of SCART to BNC cables and opened up one of them to change it into a BNC to SCART cable. For that, at the SCART end, I had to desolder the wire connecting to pin 20 and resolder it to pin 19.

The connector with most of the glue removed

It sounded easy enough, but I hadn’t taken into account the way this cable had been glued together. Once I opened up the SCART connector's housing there appeared to be glue everywhere and tearing it off meant risking damaging the wire connections as well. After carefully remove the glue, I did what felt like a despairing attempt at desoldering, resoldering and duct taping the housing, but it never produced a stable image.

My new Hydra 2 SCART switch

So, I chickened out, as the American proverb goes. Now, these days, poultry makes up 71% of all bird biomass in the world. The reason for this is that especially chicken are cheep to grow, slaughter, prepare and consume. This objectively makes them rather successful as a species. With so many chickens around worldwide, you’d hope that anyone had a good chance of seeing at least one alive inside their lifetime, but the American notion that chicken are in any way flight animals, as opposed to fight animals, seems to indicate otherwise.

But I digress, like a gentleman, is a phrase with six words. And a comma.

The SCART signal from the Hydra 2 is converted to HDMI

So after my failure described above, I found an amazing Hydra 2 SCART switch, which has two SCART output ports working simultaneously. It was sold to me for about half the original price, and after I had paid Dutch customs a substantial fraction of that, I received the package and connected one output to my Sony monitor and the other one to an upscaler, that via a long HDMI cable is connected to an HDMI to USB converter of less than €10,- to my PC.

The converter is recognised by OBS so now I can make screenshots like the one above. I don't even have to pause the game anymore because OBS can record the entire session, after which I can easily select the most memorable moments.

A cheap converter offers the HDMI signal over USB to my PC

The long chain of conversions makes the image quality not quite as good as what I’m seeing on my monitor, and OBS won't put the frequency above 30Hz, so at some point I might invest in a better HDMI to USB converter, but for now I think the lack of reflections, combined with potentially uninterrupted gaming sessions, is quite nice.

I will also write about SymbOS is the near future. It’s awesome.

Not so good

March 15, 2025

Rubenerd, I blog I frequent, asked his readers how they are going. Funny you should ask.

After two nights with hours of too little sleep, I thought I was tired enough last night to fall asleep smoothly and sleep through the night. I had also had an active day beforehand. Children to school, cycling to the bakery, vacuuming and mopping the house, 12 km running, lunch, children out of school, bathroom and toilet cleaned. When my wife let me know that she was coming home, I started cooking.

It is my habit not to look at screens an hour before I want to go to sleep. So at half past nine I don't use a TV, computer or phone any more, so that I fall asleep quickly at half past ten and sleep as deeply as possible. I also hadn't eaten anything after dinner, which should help me fall asleep quickly.

After putting the children to bed, I finished something on my laptop and turned it off in time. But because of the bad past few nights, I didn't last until half past ten. Sleep did not come. When my wife, who had been into town with a friend, joined me in bed around 12:00, I could ask her if they had had fun. They had. Then she fell asleep.

My mind, at rest

I sat downstairs on the couch that night, took paracetamol for emerging headaches, I listened to podcasts when I was finished with my own thoughts and otherwise only tried to sleep by counting my breaths, as my sleep coach had once taught me. The excersize is meant to keep thoughts from wandering off, but they still do.

Around five o'clock I fell asleep. The alarm went off at a quarter to seven, because our eldest had a hockey match. Always getting up at seven o'clock is the most important rule, so I had breakfast and made coffee. What else could I do?

I can usually cope with a little interruption during the night, but this feels different. It's like my body doesn't know what to feel. There's a slight but discernable pressure on my chest and the sides of my head. Meanwhile a splitting headache is peeking from under the cover of the paracetamol. My eyes want to close but I can't let them. Insomniacs Rule nr 3: don't sleep during the day.

My chronic insomnia, which has been going on for three years, is going in waves but seemed to have really had its day. What could have caused me to suddenly sleep worse than ever this week?

But enough. How are you going?

Transporting office gear

March 13, 2025

As mentioned in this blog before, I work at the Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) (Dutch National Railways) as a software developer. This means that whenever I take a train ride, I'm at the office. And I don’t mean that in the sense of how it feels. Every workday that I don’t work from home, I unfold my laptop and start working as soon as I’m in the train, sitting in a first class seat, which my employer is allowing me to use for no more than €16,- a month. The train ride from my home town of Amsterdam takes almost half an hour, so I can work on code without an internet connection.

This post is not about doing local commits and coding without online documentation or even how Dutch trains actually do offer Wi-Fi but at a less than useful quality. This post is about how to transport my laptop, two pairs of headphones, my lunch box (did I mention being Dutch?) my mechanical ergonomic keyboard, an e-reader, an umbrella and a water bottle.

A backpack made from ocean bound plastic.

From my home to the central station in Amsterdam, I cycle. My bike is a Gazelle Orange T27 2016 which I bought in 2016 and which I have since been maintaining myself. The one way trip takes about twenty minutes, depending on the wind direction. At the station, I park my bike at a bicycle garage and walk to the platform. After the train ride, there’s another short walk from the platform to my office.

I could put all the things mentioned above in a backpack. There are backpacks made specifically for this kind of luggage and at some point I even salivated over this one but luckily decided not to. The one I did buy was the one in the picture above from Solgaard that came with a solar powered battery pack that doubled as a boombox. The bag itself was even made from “ocean-bound plastics”. I imagine Solgaard employees hanging from trees above the mound of a river using scoop nets to fish for plastic, just before it’d enter the wide ocean.

Questionable design decisions greatly constrained this bag’s life-span

Cycling with backpacks is not ideal, especially when first having to bring my four-year-old daughter to school. She doesn’t cycle herself yet, so she’s in a children’s seat at the back of my bike. This means I’m carrying the backpack in my hand while steering, switching gears and braking with the other hand, hardly ideal indeed. And even when it’s on my back, backpacks are heavy and if my bike has to carry me and my luggage anyway, why should I carry my luggage as well?

There are backpacks with hooks to attach them to the side of a bike, but finding the right one wasn’t easy. As said, I need quite a lot of space, and it also has to be sturdy, which the one in the picture above, from Norlander, wasn't. It held out two weeks before both the hand grip and the shoulder strap tore off while taking the bag from my bike. Both had been attached to the same point, which meant that together they would feel the force of any pull at one of them. The other problem was formed by the plastic hooks that had to bend each time I put the bag on or take it off my bike. The force required became too much for the hand grip and the shoulder strap.

A well-thought out mechanic will outlast anything relying on bending plastics over and over

Having learned this, I bought a new bag with hooks that could subside mechanically instead of having to bend. Pulling the strap in fact opens the hooks, so no extra force, beyond what required by the weight of the bag’s content, is needed. Better yet, there’s a separate hand grip that’s even more robust, so I always use both to effortlessly pull the bag off my bike.

I’m not sure if the material this new bag is made from was in any way ocean bound, but what use is it to design a product from recycled plastic when it will be waste within weeks? When my daughter is in her child’s seat at the back of my bike, the back is attached well beneath her so it doesn’t get in her way and cycling is much safer this way too. That all sounds a lot more sustainable than a temporarily not ocean bound bag with a design problem.