X-Bomber the GameIntroduction »Welcome to the home of X-Bomber the Game: a vertical-scrolling spaceshooter for Windows, based on the Japanese sci-fi TV series: Star Fleet
It features lots of arcade action, weapons and explosions. 
News »  A new Star Fleet story by Suzanne: Star Fleet Sargasso is available from the Fan Stories page.
The characters in this story are written in a very clever way that really builds on what happens to them in the show, as well as other Star Fleet stories.  Here's an interesting ad-blocker: AdNauseam, which not just suppresses ads, but also clicks on them for you behind the scenes to mess with the 'advertisers' and help make their tracking telemetry worthless.
It is available for Firefox, Opera, Edge and Chrome.
I expect it work under Brave just as well, but I've only tested it in Edge so far. :)
I saw an Ericsson T28s for sale in great condition, which I had added to my collection.
Normally, the blister on the back where the antenna is mounted gets all worn and scratched-up, but this one is pristine.
I already had a T28 World, but its dark-blue colour isn't as cool as the urban grey (and also, it's not what I had when I saw at school).
The T28 was the coolest phone ever - even more so than the T39m that came after it.
The m515 next to it is the last evolution of the Palm V form factor, which was the best-looking handheld computer ever.
I have quite a few projects to write up on the site, once Christmas, anniversary, and birthday season gets a bit out of the way.
One of them took a slightly wrong turn, when I installed some unsupported Sony software into Windows 11 and my PC would no longer boot.
There were problems with that OS image anyway and it was time for a re-install. Welcome to version 11.4 of the site.
The site has had a lot of bolts tightened to work on PHP 8.x.
It is all running on 8.4, which is the latest that the server has.
That leaves us ready to move over to phpBB 4.x, in case we're ever in the position of needing to upgrade to it.
Sphider has also been updated to the most recent 5.5.3 version.
The upgrade process was actually very smooth.
The customisation has been re-done to integrate the search with the site.
This time, all the core Sphider script has been left unchanged, unlike last time, when I went and messed on with it a lot.
All the adaptations have been done from the website's end, so I should be able to drag-and-drop in new Sphider builds more easily. The site was working to a fair extent on PHP8 last weekend.
Now, the site itself is fully-working as near as I can tell.
The forum and SLIR seem to be working fine too.
Let me know if you find any problems.
The search engine: Sphider, has been updated to the latest build and works just great.
It just needs the customisation re-doing so that it fits in with the theme of the site.  We have another great update from X Blogger: Episode 22.
Only a couple more episodes left, and that'll be the whole series done.  Happy All Hallows' Eve to all, and thanks to people who hopped on Star Fleet Teams yesterday,
I made a new Pumpkin Major Zero due to request.
This one may be better in some ways than the last one, and took a lot less time to make. The work to future-proof the site and get it running on PHP 8.x has progressed quite a bit.
Most of the site runs OK on it, but there is an issue in the media indexing system, where the PHP debugging is making no sense.
The sidebar script does much the same job via a slightly different method and this works fine.
So there will probably be a day next week when I flick the PHP version over to 8.4 and chip away at the problem until that indexing issue goes away.
I had to put a new installation of Windows on my laptop the other week and haven't installed all the relevant extensions into Clickteam Fusion to get work on X-Bomber the Game moving along again.
I will try to get that done and get the game under development again before long.  I got fed up with some of the results of the usual search engines that I use and I decided to give Freespoke a whirl and see if it could find me some new Star Fleet material.
It took me to this Spanish-language blog, where I found some images of the Spanish VHS covers.
The style is a bit strange, but I quite like the 'redesigned' termoid.
On the other hand, the character illustrations are dreadful.
Meanwhile, I'm working on getting the site running on PHP 8, which is an enormous pain of an update, and takes PHP away from its original intent of being a language for personal homepages, in the interest of increased performance for web applications.
I see that phpBB 4 is in its alpha release and requires PHP 8.1 at minimum.
It's not as though I'm taking the forum over to a new major build of phpBB anytime soon, but it feels as though I need to get the site ready for PHP 8 in case the need to switch to it becomes pressing. After I pushed the PHP version on the server to 7.4, I hadn't noticed that the modules required by the Sphider search feature had been disabled and that Sphider had stopped working...
The required modules have now been re-enabled.
One further problem was that Sphider knows not to touch anything in the forum directory. The SIDs encoded into the forum's URLs that it serves cause Sphider to go around and around in circles.
After I changed the path of the forum directory, that was exactly what Sphider was doing and it wrote about 4GB of search data into the temp table of its database and a huge number of access requests into the logs. 😀
Now Sphider should be working correctly again.
I think I'll adapt the site slightly so that themes and other functionality carry over to the Search pages.
Edit: This has now been done.
Next, I need to tweak the sidebar module so that it's context-aware and goes into the right mode when displaying the search results.
I am very grateful to CaptainQuirk for his continued work on Sphider. There have been quite a few updates at X Blogger since I last posted an update about it.
Quite a few further episodes have received write-ups over the past few months, including episode 21 as of just now, and also the Bloody Mary's Promotion episode that was never English-language dubbed.
I would have signposted those here but for some reason, I hadn't been receiving email notification from substack in the intervening time.
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