I now have a banjo
Posted on: Jul 18th, 2025 @ 2:40 am
Not the kind that comes with a Kazooie.
A couple of days ago, I went walking and saw one of my neighbors was getting rid of an old banjo. It was sticking out of their garbage can, a few hours before trash pickup was to commence.
I don't normally pick up other people's garbage, but I can't resist picking up a cool musical instrument for free! Especially one that's worth a nontrivial amount of money once I clean it up and restring it.
Currently, it has only three strings, but I just ordered some new ones! This'll be fun to mess with.
Experts have it easy: An essay
Posted on: May 25th, 2025 @ 2:50 am
Read it here
An interesting blog post that WTL/Mario recently shared.
I found it to be a worthwhile read - it does a good job of articulating why expert guidance is valuable, and also how experts sometimes fall short in providing guidance to beginners.
I might quote this article at some random point in the future.
WeatherStar 4000 Simulator
Posted on: May 13th, 2025 @ 9:34 pm
Link
For quite a few years, there's been a freeware simulation of WeatherStar 4000. If you don't know what WS4000 is, it was the software that The Weather Channel used for its Local Forecasts many years ago.
It's fun to set up your own Local Forecast with custom music and silly crawl messages.
A recent update restores radar functionality, which hasn't always worked in recent years.
Be forewarned that it takes a bit of trial and error to set up the locations you want to appear in your forecast.
May 2025 dev update
Posted on: May 3rd, 2025 @ 2:59 am
JaxBoards continues to grow more awesome. JaxBoards 2.1.5 offers a lot of architectural improvements and a nicer mobile experience, as well as some fun things!
JaxBoards Architecture:
- Sean rebuilt a lot of code so that it takes better advantage of PHP 8's features - now it's a web app built for PHP 8 instead of a PHP 4 web app that we retrofitted to run in PHP 8.
New features:
- Added some classic games and Easter eggs (and added a new one)
- Replaced the clock icon with an emoji that shows a different image depending on when the user timed out
Bug fixes:
- Solved all the remaining PHP warnings/errors
- Googlebot is able to crawl the forums without crashing
- Fixed an issue where the forum topic order sometimes got out of whack
- Fixed JavaScript tooltip browser warning (no actual effect)
Stuff only admins will notice:
- Now you get an "are you sure" prompt when deleting shoutbox posts - previously it was easy to delete those by mistake
- Added a PHP error log monitor
- Made a spacing fix in modcontrols.php
Themes
- Made several skins responsive - a much-desired feature
- Created a CSS-based banner for Lithosphere, which should improve load times - thanks Spritey for offering some help with the CSS
- Made the body slightly wider for the Bibby Team skin
- The New Winter Blue skin's footer is visible now
- Removed an extra copy of the Themes folder I accidentally uploaded while setting up the boards in January
Data
- Fixed obsolete bibbyteam dot jaxboards dot com links on the forum so they use the current domain instead
- Fixed obsolete bibbyteam dot jaxboards dot com links on my old profiles
- Changed # to ? in some older links so they'll work properly
- Made sure all shoutbox posts are in the database
Server infrastructure/change management
- Sean set up Git on the server, making it a lot easy to deploy changes
We now have a mobile theme!
Posted on: Apr 19th, 2025 @ 6:44 pm
I'm pleased to announce that the Lithosphere skin has been upgraded to a responsive design! This means the Lithosphere skin will offer a great experience on both desktop/laptop PCs and on mobile devices. This should make for a better user experience, especially since a fairly high percentage of people do most of their browsing on mobile devices nowadays.
Fortunately, these changes won't result in any significant changes to the desktop experience - in fact, you might not even notice these changes if you're on a larger screen.
A very big thanks to Sean for helping make this happen.
The JaxBoards Default, Yoga, and Bibby Team Classic skins are also fully responsive as well. It should be possible to make all the skins responsive, though each skin would take a bit of time to upgrade. If you like using a certain skin on mobile and want to make a request, feel free to do so!
I'll still keep doing my monthly "here's what's new" dev updates, but this is a big enough deal to warrant its own topic.
The Nintendo Switch 2
Posted on: Apr 12th, 2025 @ 12:45 pm
Nintendo recently formally announced its successor to the Nintendo Switch. Are you thinking of getting one?
I might get one eventually - we shall see. I never had an original Switch, believe it or not, so I like that it's going to be backwards compatible with the vast majority of original Switch games.
April 2025 dev update
Posted on: Apr 1st, 2025 @ 11:48 pm
It might be April Fool's Day, but JaxBoards 2.0.2 is anything but foolish.
Time zone oddities and issues with topic/forum read markers
should be fixed now. Fingers crossed.
Sean fixed an annoying bug where users who don't have a birthday filled out aren't able to update some of their profile fields.
The Quick Reply window has a close button again. We're not sure when the "X" button ran away, but either way, it's back now. Thanks again to Sean for looking into this.
One of the nice things about the Googlebot is it basically serves as an automated testing suite. If it can't crawl a page for whatever reason, it'll tell you in Google Search Console. This analysis has helped me fix a few bugs that could break things for human users as well. For example, it helped me find a bug that caused JaxBoards to crash if a guest user tried to access any topic containing a poll. Whoops. Similarly, I found an issue with certain YouTube links (I think those containing start/endtime parameters). The problematic code should be fixed now. Also, I expanded the size of the "location_verbose" field in the sessions table from a maximum of 100 characters to 128. This fixed a rare bug where JaxBoards would crash if anyone tried to view a topic with a topic title of more than 87 characters in length.
Some of these bugs have been issues since the beginning and prevented a nontrivial number of pages from being visible in search engines - if Google runs into too many broken pages, sometimes it'll stop trying to crawl other pages as well.
Bots and crawlers become a LOT more active almost as soon as I made these changes. This is basically a good thing, since a lot of traffic comes from search engines like Google and Bing, and since it's helped us fix bugs in the JaxBoards software. On the other hand, I don't want to roll out the red carpet for every bot, since many bots provide no value to site owners and communities, and some bots (especially bots training LLMs) consume so much bandwidth that they can crash your site. That's not to mention some of the other ethical quandaries with gen AI bots. For now I want to monitor how bots are behaving after I made these changes, though soon I'll probably need to start blocking or throttling the less useful bots.
Also, WTL has been cooking up some great updates that add more professional rigor to the JaxBoards codebase. Not all of these changes in production yet, but I am impressed with what he's doing! If you'd like to follow along with the latest code changes, here's another reminder that
our GitHub is a thing.
[5/2 Edit: Changed "Quick Reply button" to "Quick Reply window"]
Stupid Political Game 2024
Posted on: Mar 23rd, 2025 @ 1:36 am
Download it here... if you really want to
Something I made late last year, back while JaxBoards was on hiatus.
High on the list of things "nobody* asked for but they got anyway," this was 2024's pointless game about the United States presidential election! After all, commemorating presidential elections is an ancient tradition that I couldn't pass up. There is a very distinct chance that this game could've been inspired by something else.
And yes, there are online high scores and multiple endings.
Have fun... or something.
* One person on YouTube asked for this. I don't know why either.