Boba tea I know this sounds horrible, but until this week, I'd never had boba tea before!

A couple of evenings ago, I found myself at the mall. I decided I should finally try a boba tea, since I'd always* been curious about them. The kind I got had a mango flavor. I found it to be quite tasty! I don't have to have one every day or anything, but it's a nice treat.

Fun Fact: Boba tea is probably the most famous food/beverage item to originate in the country of Taiwan.

* Well, at least for the past couple of decades. I consider that a reasonable approximation of "always".

AOL is discontinuing dial-up AOL's statement
NBC story

Well, it's the end of an era.

Peach Coke: A Review Every blue moon I'll grab a cold beverage from my local Coke Freestyle machine. And recently I found myself face-to-face with an intriguing new option - Peach Coke.


Not this Peach.

This sounded like an interesting beverage, so I gave it a try. Peach Coke looks like regular ol' Coca-Cola. The smell is pleasant - it gives off a strong hint of peachiness without being overpowering.

As for that really important little detail... the taste is surprisingly good! There's a strong peach flavor, but it doesn't go overboard. The peach flavor feels smooth and refreshing, a nice contrast with the sharpness of regular Coke.

Apparently Peach Coke is much more prevalent in Japan and especially China. (I'm not sure about other countries.) There's also been a Georgia Peach Coke that's made with cane sugar that comes in glass bottles - I think it's been discontinued. I have no way of knowing how similar (or dissimilar) these are to their Freestyle counterpart.

Nobody paid me to say this stuff. I'm not that famous. I promise.

I now have a banjo 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 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 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 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! 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 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.