News Displaying 1 to 10 of 125  I was digging about in this old house and found my old Tracy Island.
It had been stored for many years with the batteries inside it, which had not done it any favours.
However, with distilled vinegar, cotton buds and a screwdriver to chip the oxides off the battery contacts, I eventually got it working reliably.
It also needed quite a clean on the outside.
In other news, I transferred the xbomber.com domain out to Dynu and got SSL working on it.
So at least now it serves a separate purpose.
The crash.ddnsfree.com subdomain can be used as a fallback, but not with HTTPS as the server no longer identifies itself as that for SSL signing.
My next job will be to set up some databases and see what applications we can get running. Andy T has a nice new video showing the Dynamite Action die cast figure that was released back in 2014.
I recommend going and taking a look:
Gosh sakes! I'm unboxing the Big Dai-X Dynamite Action Evolution Toy from Star Fleet X-Bomber! - YouTube
This solid, heavy figure is nevertheless a bit fragile in places and would be a pain to have to replace, so I have mine stashed away in its box in my little museum of Star Fleet.
You can still get these in places.
One of the best places to start would be FromJAPAN.
In other news, the SFXB Forum's Milk v2 theme has been patched to the latest release.
The botnets are keeping the server quite busy currently. You may notice some latency on the site.
The exclusions in htaccess and Krystal Hosting's server are handling it well for the time being. I found this nice image on Nitter.
You can find lots of illustrations of other characters here:
Robobockle (@lmRO0UY46kYzID3) | nitter.poast.org Today, the cast of Star Fleet showed up as background characters / airline passengers in this comic by Hisashi Eguchi.
Behind the scenes, the page rendering performance of the large file area has improved as the code becomes more similar to what's running on the main site.
I thought of a way of putting the xbomber.com domain to some use, so I'm doing a bit of an experiment with it at the moment.
I suggest avoiding using it for now, and using xbomber.co.uk to access the site.
In other news, I suggest to anyone using Edge as a browser, to stop using it and adopt any number of good alternatives such as Brave, on account of its now-widely-reported clear text exposure of its password manager credentials:
Cleartext Passwords in MS Edge? In 2026? - SANS ISC Well, it's certainly been an interesting week...
I got it so that the media indexing and gallery system on the large file area now has complete feature parity with the main site.
So it can handle image galleries and whatever else we want.
The sidebar navigation for folders has also been implemented.
There was an issue on the main site with the header script that was preventing the paging from working on search results. Only the first page of results was being displayed properly.
That is now fixed.
Sphider shares a PHP variable with the news subsystem, which created a bit of a conflict, which I thought had been mitigated fully, but apparently hadn't.
At the moment, I'm cleaning up remaining dependencies on SLIR so I can shelve it completely and have just the one image cache on the site.
Update 2026.05.03
The SLIR image resizing engine has been removed from the site.
It served the site well for a very long time: since long before I migrated the site away from Peter Lewis' Gibbering.net when it sadly closed its doors in 2014.
It feels a bit like the end of an era but the new method has its advantages and SLIR was throwing errors in the background, probably because it was running on new PHP versions that it was never intended to run on.
There were still quite a few dependencies on SLIR which I think I've taken care of.
If you see any images not displaying correctly, use Ctrl + F5 and see if it clears.
If there's still an issue after that, let me know where the problem is and I'll get it fixed.
Thanks to Joe Lencioni for SLIR
and to Nathan Campos whose gallery script gave me inspiration and the determination to write my own resizing engine into the site.
Update 2026.05.06
A full site backup got downloaded and the forum has been updated to the latest 3.1.16 build. | 
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