News

Sailfish Swims Again

I set up my Sailfish phone (Sony Xperia 10 III) back in 2023.
Sailfish is a beautiful OS and a great alternative to iOS and Android.
It is also straightforward to install and I had the job done in about 40mins.

Sadly, back then I didn't have time to make it do all the things I wanted it to do and I missed the camera from my Lumia 950.
It was relegated to a drawer in 2024 but recently, I needed some data from it, and I eventually managed to get the phone to power back on.

The browser in Windows Mobile doesn't deal well with the Anubis forum extension, so I took that as an indication to try and move on again from Windows Mobile.
I updated SFOS from 4.6.0.x to 5.1.0.11 and a lot has improved.
I was able to get Brave and Thunderbird running as android apps under AppSupport, as well as VLC and The King James Bible.
The full Pure Maps application via Chum is on there too and the FluvalSmart app to adjust the lighting in my aquarium even works, now that Bluetooth works via AppSupport.

One problem that I had before was trying to get Sailfish to sync contacts and calendars with xbomber.co.uk over CardDAV and CalDAV.
Nothing seems to have improved in that area, so I exported everything from Roundcube and created a new fruux account.
Everything syncs flawlessly with that.

I will probably still end up using the Lumia as a camera from-time-to-time, but I feel very positive about having a phone that does everything that I want without the unbelievable intrusiveness of android.

Linux phones are more important now than ever. - feddit.org

2026.07.31

141

New SFA/XB1 Super Pack

I have been finishing the consolidation of the erstwhile 'large file area' with the Game section of the site.

All game installers and executables are available together in the Releases folder.
The source code files have been archived together to help the downloads page to keep track of the files. 
This has led to a bit of a reduction of the footprint on the server.
The earlier Multimedia Fusion files compress quite well, but with the later MFA files, 7-Zip doesn't manage as good a compression ratio.
There may be a certain amount of compression inside the MFA files as it is, which leaves 7zip with little to do.
They have all been archived as .zip, since 7-Zip's zip compression method is so good anyway that there wasn't a big enough benefit in archiving them as .7z.

As part of tidying up the Releases folder, I made a new Super Pack for Star Fleet Arcade and XB1, which now includes the contents of the original installer packages as well as the extracted binaries.
This might be fun if you wanted to see where X-Bomber the Game started out, way back in 2002.
The Super Pack has been around for many, many years, but the new one is even more comprehensive.

It has now been over a year since the last release of X-Bomber the Game.
Once I've had a bit of a rest over the coming weeks, I'm looking forward to bringing the fight back to the Alliance and getting X-Bomber v0.84n finished and released.

2026.07.09

200

Robot Wars

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Due to a lack of anything new worth watching, I started watching the 'new' 2016-2018 Robot Wars.

One thing you notice is how much faster, more deliberate and more destructive the robots were, 13 years on from the end of the original 1997-2003 Robot Wars.

That being said, the new show is strangely charmless compared to the original.
The lighting is terrible. A lot of the interesting challenges like the gauntlet are completely gone. The presenters are awkward compared to Craig Charles and Philippa Forester.

In the current, American Battlebots incarnation of Robot Wars, you may be struck by the sheer scale of corporate sponsorship and enormity of the resources that go into most of the new robots. One machine even had AMD sponsorship.
The charm of the original Robot Wars by contrast was how many of the robots were built in garages by hobbyists with donated or salvaged parts and materials.

There is a colossal playlist on youtube with all episodes of the original show.

The other thing that sets the new and original shows apart is that the original show has some good music that really sets the pace. I particularly like Road to Armageddon and the Battle Theme.

2026.07.07

222

X-Bomber Trailer

I found an early trailer for X Bomber on nitter.

As noted in the comments, the 17-second clip seems to be made up mostly of footage from the 'preview show' and looks to pre-date the airing of the show by quite a bit.

The voice-over is apparently done by Yuji Mitsuya, who played PPA in the original Japanese version of the show.

I have added the video file to the Star Fleet Â» Videos folder for safe keeping.

At the same time, we have a nice, in-depth conversation going on about the show on the forum.
It's good to see that getting quite a bit of use.
It's an honour to host the forum, which I inherited from Andy at SFXB.
Its continued availability is in no way contingent on its activity, but at the same time it's gratifying to see it not acting like a read-only resource.

2026.07.01

179

SFXB Forum Updated

The Forum has been updated to the newest build.
There is a nasty security hole in any prior version.

That means we can happily carry on with our Star Fleet re-watch.

The developers at phpBB have done a great job of patching this and the upgrade mechanism is excellent these days.
phpBB gives you lots of good tools and diagnostics to help get the job done.

I added some nice new images from Paul Wilson of another X-Bomber created in No Man's Sky, which can create ships for the player in a quasi-AI, procedurally-generated way.
The resulting ships normally look as though they're designed by committee but I like to add these to the site all-the-same, because the modular style matches the EDF design ethos.
You might see a ship like these if EDF later decided to build a mass-produced ship based on X-Bomber.

2026.06.25

203

TwistedPinnacle3D

I came across this interesting find on Etsy.

I really like how these figures have different poses and carry different weapons that look authentic to the show.

On a separate subject, the linking between the media and news parts of the site wasn't made to work across two domains.
At the end of July, I will migrate the whole site across to the home server so that everything sits on the same domain.

Here are some great miniatures of the termoid soldiers, as well as Captain Orion, done by TwistedPinnacle3D.
Amazingly, each of the figures have a different pose and carry different weapons: many of which at least look to be very accurate to what I remember from the show.

2026.06.25

161

Star Fleet Section Migration

The Star Fleet section of the site has been replicated and switched over to being hosted on the downstairs PC.
As a result, the 720p upscaled DVD rips of Star Fleet have been moved from the large file area to here, which is where it would have made sense for them to have been since the outset.

Getting all the Star Fleet data was a bit of a procedure and had to be done in two stages.
The site has over 9,009 files, 252 directories and 10.7GB of stuff about Star Fleet.

2026.06.20

164

Evolution Dai-X Instructions

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I had a request come in from Dan at the SFFB to see if I could get a scan of the instructions for the 2014 Evolution Toys Dai-X figure.

This is a very clever idea because it clearly should be on the site, but it had never dawned on me to scan it.

This is a new, straighter version from just after the scanner plate got a good clean.

2026.06.06

142

Daft Ideas

I received some very interesting information from Daft_Ideas (aka. Grey Area) about the history of the available X-Bomber 3D models, and the people that were involved in making them:

Daft_Ideas created the model that Dan used as his template and which Nick Cass took further and developed as well.

I've summarised part of one of Daft's emails:

It was nice of Dan to credit me, and I feel proud that my simple model (I am in no way a designer!) started off this craze...well - there were two predecessors, on opposite ends of the scale; one by Dorian Sherratt who I fear may have passed away (his model was beautiful), and the simpler "benheu" version.

I found some links and now that I have a much better printer (my first prints were on an ANet A8!) I've decided to spend some time on it again; but since I can't go "Better" than Gary or Dan's version, I have only one choice.

I'm going bigger.
I hope to joint the body into as many parts as possible (currently looking at 16), and I think on my printer I can get a 75cm model (I was hoping for a round metre I'll be honest, but the biggest jointed part would be the neck at just over 40 cm, and my printer tops out at 35.

I included here on the site some screengrabs of Daft's current work on X-Bomber and Dai-X.
Hopefully, we'll be seeing some more.

2026.06.04

149