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Sphider Back Up

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.
2025.10.20 93 0 comments Start a forum discussion.

M13: Battle Without Tomorrow

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.
2025.10.18 242 0 comments Start a forum discussion.

The Japanese Want an X-Bomber Model

It really wouldn't do us any harm.
The Dai-X is more memorable and iconic but X-Bomber is their home for most of the series - even if it is a bit rugged and functional.
2025.10.14 86 0 comments Start a forum discussion.

Another Day, Another DDOS

There's been a huge one going on since about 17:00 today.
Since these attacks are always directed at our forum, I moved the forum directory to a new, temporary path, so the attackers are just getting served 404 errors.

Even so, the new server has 13% CPU tied up, just serving that many endpoints with 404 pages.

It will be interesting to see what they do with that.
I want to see whether they register that as a victory on their end and leave us alone for a while.

Anyway, that leaves us with plenty of overhead and the site is running fine.

As soon as the attack rate goes down, I'll swap the forum directory path back.
It seems to work pretty well in its new location actually, so feel free to keep using it.
The worst of it is over again, so I named the forum directory back to how it was.
The PHPBB server settings have been changed to throttle back after 50% CPU time is used, or after 100 simultaneous sessions (which would probably come first).
In any case, changing the forum directory name worked well.
We'll probably do that again next time.
2025.10.13 88 0 comments Start a forum discussion.

indo301B - X-Bomber Model

I found this really nice model of X-Bomber by Japanese twitter user indo301B.

It looks to be a build of the Mark model kit with a great deal of improvements.

Only two photos were published. Both have been added to the Fan Models page.
2025.10.08 79 0 comments Start a forum discussion.

Star Fleet Teams

My friend Dan pointed out that, even though the Star Fleet Teams meeting later this month has been updated to 30th, the join link still shows the original date of the 23rd.

Apparently, when you update the meeting, the meeting link and ICS file don't get updated, which is a bit disappointing.

To get around that limitation, I suggest using the group join link.
In the application, it shows the right, 'updated' date.
2025.10.08 109 0 comments Start a forum discussion.

John Baddeley

I learned earlier this week that John Baddeley, who performed the voice of PPA, as well as General Kyle's number two officer, in Star Fleet, sadly died on 13th September.

John also performed the voice of Top Hat in Tugs, (who has a bit of a similar personality to PPA). 

I noticed that Sean Barrett, who was the voice of Captain Orion in Star Fleet, worked with John in Tugs as well, and provided the voices for Big Mac and Hercules among other characters in Tugs. 
2025.10.02 78 0 comments Start a forum discussion.

Nitter Developments

You might've seen that, whenever this site links to content on twitter, I always use nitter, which is an open-source twitter proxy that protects users' privacy by not making them log into anywhere.

For a while, the best nitter instance was on poast.org, but I'm told that, due to increasing infrastructure costs, that nitter instance will probably be stopping at the end of the year.

There was another instance at privacydev.net, which this site also linked to, but privacydev has also gone dark since last month.

However, the original nitter.net is back and works even better than before.
Hopefully, things will stay that way for a while.

Once, we had an internet, where the purpose of it was to share information.
Now, by and large, it hides and controls information behind federated logins and paywalls.
Maybe one day, we can get it back to the way it was.
2025.09.28 83 0 comments Start a forum discussion.

Dynamic DNS

Not a huge or exciting update, but, initially, when I started running XAMPP on the downstairs box and opening that machine up to the outside world, our external IP was quite static and sat there without changing for a good few weeks.

Since then, I was having to make changes to the '$box_ip' variable in the site's index page to keep updating the IP every couple of days, which was in no way practical, since we've been quite busy lately.

I was chatting on over at the deadnet forums and it sent me hunting after dynamic DNS solutions.

Dynu has a free service where you download a client onto pretty much any OS - even iOS, amazingly - that polls their server every so often to find out your external IP and then it updates dynu's DNS records for your domain name accordingly.

I see that the service also allows you to apply SSL encryption (although there is a minor cost involved) in case I ever want to host any applications on that box as well as any big files.

You should find now that the link to the Krystal file area never points to a previous IP.

That machine has a lot of space.  I would be interested to hear any ideas around what Star Fleet material we might store on there to expand xbomber.co.uk as a one-stop-shop for Star Fleet information.
2025.09.26 82 0 comments Start a forum discussion.

A New Contender Has Entered

I chucked a photo of a new build of the Moderoid Dai-X model kit, by Neko into the relevant folder.
I'm really keen to see a photo of the whole thing, finished.

I think the way he's layered and chipped the paint to do the weathering is the best I've seen yet.
2025.09.19 90 0 comments Start a forum discussion.


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