News Displaying 33 to 42 of 103 The comments area for news items has been tweaked a bit.
I'd wanted to make it more imaginative for a while, and make it look like a physical device.
The idea will have stemmed from my fondness of Y2K PDAs and handhelds, but also from the recent Earth Final Conflict website, where the content loads inside a graphic of the sliding 'global' communicator.
I wanted it to be something like the Ericsson concept phone from the 2001 Tomb Raider movie.
When I saw that at the cinema, that always struck me as the perfect PDA phone.
The big-enough touch display and physical navigation buttons would make it very usable.
Meanwhile, the sharkfin antenna that came on the Ericsson T28s and the ergonomic, ruggedised body gave it a lot of practical charm.
This phone was a shrunk-down concept based on Ericsson's Diana prototype:
PDA-phone ‘Pamela’ & ‘Diana’ | First Communicator Platform – Ericssoners
Ericsson knew where the market was going. A lot of Pocket-PC phones vaguely similar to this were made later by different manufacturers.
But the market wasn't ready in 2000/2001, immediately after which, Ericsson became Sony Ericsson, which immediately torpedoed its Scandinavian design ethos.
Anyway, the bezel surrounding the display of the Tomb Raider phone is too big and the comment field would have to be made too small, if I were to use that as a template.
I remembered that the game 2007 STALKER has a PDA where you manage your mission objectives.
This thing looks nice and rugged and in-line with what Star Fleet would have.
In other news ...
The botnets are keeping the forum nice and busy.
There is a new extension in development called AnubisBB, which does look to be actively supported.
People who have tried it reported that it works outright, which is more than can be said for cloudflare.
With cloudflare, they seem to want users to stay hooked on their service, so it seems to help 'manage' the symptoms but not actually cure the problem. Firstly, I want to say that I've recently received a lot of very kind and lovely emails from Star Fleet fans in the past few days.
I will be replying as soon as I can, once I have 5 minutes of downtime.
The progress of getting site functionality working on my XAMPP home server originally went very slowly since August of last year, but has accelerated greatly since I got an old, cut-down offshoot of the site engine running on the server, earlier this year.
Since the XAMPP box serves as our media server, I need to re-add its 3rd spindle disk, which was repaired and was delivered today.
I will switch the site main menu to point back to xbomber.co.uk temporarily, while the server is down for maintenance.
The SFXB Forum is going to stay on Krystal Hosting ...
There are quite a lot of reasons behind the decision to try and run the site from a home server and make it part of the "small internet".
One reason is the constant demand against the forum from the DDoS botnets, which has been going on for at least a year now, and shows no sign of going away.
This way, we can allocate all performance resources of the hosting account to running the forum, rather than having to guesstimate what share of account resources the forum should be allowed consume and apply that via phpBB's load settings. 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. Thanks to everyone that joined the Star Fleet Teams call last night.
Unfortunately, the call was quite a bit disrupted due to incompetence on the part of the organiser.
Thanks to all those that were able to stay in the lobby to *eventually* join the call.
I have added two trusted friends of the site as "owners" of the group, who should be able to admit anyone into the call in future, in case we ever have a similar occurrence, which we won't.
Off the back of the discussion, the DVD AI Upscale page has been a little updated to link to more information about the upscale process by dym2005 and later by Spoutnik.
In a less recent update to that page, links to download the series from the 'large file area' were added.
If anyone has any suggestions for a catchier name for it, then I would be keen to hear them. I had to take Krystal: the downstairs box, down for a few hours last night to move it across to a new case.
The previous case was an Aerocool DS200, which was a good and useful chassis, but the soft touch rubber coating on the exterior had deteriorated.
I wanted a white case for the lounge with a glass panel, rather than just the acrylic window.
It is remarkably difficult to find a chassis now that has an optical drive bay in the front (this Fractal Pop XL has two stunningly enough) and takes more than two 3.5" disks.
This chassis takes four in theory, but you lose one mount point for each optical drive bay that's occupied.
While moving the drives across I managed to break the SATA connector on one of the WD Blues.
I found a repair service where they replace the SATA connector on the drive. I will see if it's any good.
The cost of an 8TB WD Blue is £100 more now than what it was 4 years ago, which is not a great sign for current economic and technical development. This is an interesting Star Fleet fan illustration by Ricardo Andrade.
I don't think I've ever seen a Star Fleet fan artwork done in this style before.
I would be interested to know how it was done. It looks to be a traditional painting.
It's interesting how some fan artworks focus on the machines and action from the show and some focus on the human character aspect like this one. I found this illustration of Dai-X by Jerry Bennett, who did this for a friend of his.
Very nice style, would be good to see some more of this - maybe even a colour version.
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