As part of Boba Quest 2025 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week.
As I wrote about last week, one of my favorite boba shops, Shiny Tea, is closing soon (now extended to May 17th). Knowing that time was running out to fill up my privacy-preserving stamp card, I brought two friends with me to review it: Emmie and Wen.
We headed over to the Upper West Side; it's located at 2667 Broadway Ave. Getting there via the subway is easy, you can either take the 1 train to 103rd Street or if you don't mind walking a few minutes, the 96th Street station has 2 and 3 service as well.
Left to right: mango green tea, taro milk tea, classic milk tea, jasmine green milk tea.
I ordered my usual jasmine green milk tea with boba, 100% sugar and less ice:
Boba: 3/4 the boba was solid, with good flavor and texture. (I previously would have called it perfect, but I've had better)
Tea: 4/4 exactly what I want out of a jasmine green milk tea. Nothing more to say on that.
Bonus: 1/1 Shiny Tea doesn't really have any ambiance, you can barely stand inside of it. But it makes up for it in great customer service and its privacy-preserving stamp card.
Total: 8/10.
Emmie was truly dedicated to the cause of helping me fill out the stamp card and ordered two drinks. (But also she said she felt like having two drinks.) Both were worth consuming in her words — she didn't throw them out unfinished or regret it — but found them a bit disappointing.
The first one she had was a taro milk tea, regular sweetness, no ice, with boba:
Boba: 3/4 the boba was fine, enjoyable, tasty, but not spectacular.
Tea: 2/4 maybe I'm too picky when it comes to taro, but I didn't enjoy it that much. I think there was too much milk and something about the taro wasn't to my liking.
The second drink was a mango green tea with lychee jelly:
Jelly: 3/4 standard enjoyable jelly in tea. Nothing special.
Tea: 1/4 - what I really wanted when ordering this was something more akin to fruit juice, but I didn't see mango drinks on the menu that were closer to what I was thinking of. I wasn't a big fan of the tea flavor, but I think it's primarily a personal preference.
Emmie did not award a bonus point, agreeing with Wen (keep reading) that it was small and cramped. Fair enough.
Totals: 5/10 and 4/10.
Wen ordered a classic milk tea with 30% sweetness and less ice. Notably he did not get boba nor any other topping, despite this being a boba review series. SMH
Boba: n/a
Tea: 3/4 I wasn't blown away by the tea flavor but it was decent, and it was also a good level of sweetness.
Bonus: 0/1 the shop was tiny, so we had to wait on the sidewalk for our drinks. It also got cramped quickly with multiple customers.
Congrats to Wen for managing to break my meticulously devised rating system, but I think we can add it up to 3 out of 5, or a total of 6/10.
It is a bit disappointing when my friends didn't enjoy one of my favorite places as much as I did, but that's one of the fun things about boba, everyone likes it in their own particular way. And yes, even if you don't like the actual tapioca balls, we can still be friends.
I have sad news to share: Shiny Tea on the Upper West Side (UWS) is closing at the end of this month on May 17th. When I used to live on the UWS, it was my go-to boba shop, and I was one of their regulars. Within about 2-3 months of me moving into the area, the person who took my order started simply asking me, "You want your usual?"
I had a Friday evening routine of walking through Riverside Park, passing General Grant's Tomb, picking up Chinese food near Columbia and then finally grabbing my jasmine green milk tea with boba from Shiny Tea on my way home.
This is not a review, I'll do that next week. I just wanted to spread the word so people can visit it themselves before it closes. It's located on Broadway, between 101st and 102nd streets, near the 1 train's 103rd Street stop. If you don't mind walking a few minutes, the 96th Street station has 2 and 3 service as well.
Be careful, Shiny Tea is really easy to miss, it's basically the width of a closet:
It's the smallest boba shop I've ever seen, there's not even enough room for multiple people to wait in line to order drinks!
I rarely go there now that I live in Queens, but last week I had an appointment on the UWS, so I stopped by. Even though I moved out of the neighborhood basically a year ago, he still recognized me and commented that it had been a while since he'd seen me.
After a bit of catchup, he broke the bad news: the owner of Shiny Tea was not interested in renewing the lease, so it would be closing. It was a gut punch for me, so despite getting my regular order, I didn't really feel like doing a formal review.
I highly recommend stopping by in the next week if you're in the area, it will be worth it!
As part of Boba Quest 2025 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week.
Unfortunately I've been sick for the past two weeks and haven't been able to go around to try new boba places, which honestly made being sick even worse. But I'm better now, and ready to catch up on all the boba I missed!
Last week I tried Erye Tea Shop in Long Island City, Queens, located near the Court Square–23rd Street station, which provides 7, E, M and G service. In Chinese, 二葉 (pronounced er-ye), means "two leaves", which is also what their logo looks like.
In the beginning of March, regular readers will remember that I visited a boba shop located inside a laundromat. In a similar vein, Erye shares its location with a hair salon:
It's not really the most pleasant place to sit and sip tea since hair salons are relatively loud places with blow dryers and other things. I ended up walking down to the nearby Gantry Plaza State Park and had my boba at the waterfront.
Speaking of which, let's get to the boba! I ordered a roasted oolong milk tea with boba, 70% sugar and light ice.
Boba: 4/4 it's been a while since I've had honey boba that tasted this good. It struck a nice balance between being able to taste the honey flavor, but it didn't overpower the tea.
Tea: 2/4 I didn't really enjoy the tea; I think some of the blame is on me for ordering oolong, which I'm not as big of a fan of, so I'm giving them a 2 instead of a 1.
Bonus: 0/1 mixing a boba shop and a hair salon is really not super appealing
Total: 6/10. I don't see myself coming back here unfortunately, Long Island City is pretty boba-rich and has other places that I rated more highly.
I recently switched my RSS/Atom feed reader away from Tiny Tiny RSS and its companion Android app. I had fallen behind on upgrades on the server, and the app had been removed from F-Droid, so I needed to do something. I had set up Tiny Tiny RSS in 2017, so it was time for a fresh start.
I wanted a similar setup: a server that would maintain track of my subscriptions, articles and (un)read status, and then an Android app with a good UI and offline support. I do most of my feed reading on my phone these days, so I'm a bit more picky on that side.
Rachel (by the bay) recently praised the FreshRSS developers, so that was the first thing I tried out. And it worked...fine? I set up a container with podman, hooked it up to a MariaDB database (also in a container), and imported all my feeds.
Mostly for due dilligence, I tried out Miniflux next. It only supports postgres, which knocked it down a peg for me since I prefer MariaDB. I was really impressed with its feature to download content from the link instead of what's in the feed to "fix" feeds that truncate content.
Then I learned that FreshRSS has the same feature, just a little less automatic! FreshRSS requires you to manually enter a CSS selector, which so far has just been pretty trivial since it's either article or main. It also supports manual feed construction using XPath, which seems really cool, but I haven't gotten that far yet.
The main limitation I encountered with Readrops was not having a preview or snippet when viewing all the articles (example). I also found the "estimated reading time" indicators kind of patronizing with no way to disable them.
As far as I could tell, Flux News didn't have any support for offline reading.
I like Capy Reader, it's a clean UI that's similar enough to what I had with Tiny Tiny RSS. FreshRSS worked right away, but I couldn't get it to connect to Miniflux over the Google Reader API. I'm pretty sure it's a me problem, since others are using it with Miniflux just fine.
In any case, I tried out FreshRSS+Capy Reader for a week, and while I still need a bit more time to get used to it, I think it will meet my feed reading needs. So yesterday, after taking a backup, I shutdown my Tiny Tiny RSS server after more than 8 years in service 🫡. Here's to 8 more years of feed reading with FreshRSS and Capy Reader!
As part of Boba Quest 2025 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week.
Flushing is one of my favorite neighborhoods in Queens because of how diverse and lively it is. Originally founded by the Dutch in the 1600s, today it's an incredible melting pot, primarily populated by Asian immigrants.
My coworker David Huerta originally recommended Xing Fu Tang to me at least two years ago. I went last year, loved it, and knew I had to review it for Boba Quest.
Even before you walk in, you get the sense you're in for a treat. They keep a giant pot of fresh boba on display and you can see employees scooping it up into cups.
Their speciality is brown sugar boba milk (not tea). So that's exactly what my girlfriend, Kajol, and I got — with light ice and regular sugar.
Probably the third different "No. 1" chain from Taiwan that I've tried.
My review:
Boba: 4/4 the boba looked fresh and it tasted fresh too. It was as close to perfect as I think you can get.
Tea: 4/4 it was everything I wanted out of a brown sugar boba milk. Excellent sweetness and they make it special by caramelizing a little bit of the brown sugar so you even have a bit of crunch texture.
Bonus: 1/1 it's a pretty small store, there's barely enough room for the line. But that ends up making the atmosphere even nicer, because you can tell everyone else is really there for the boba. Also if it's a nice day, you can sit across the street on the steps of the library.
Boba: 3/4 - It had a good flavor; it started out with a "melt in your mouth consistency" and then eventually got slightly chewier. I liked it better once it was chewier.
Tea: 2/4 - it was just milk so there was no tea flavor, but I would've liked the tea flavor! The caramelized bit on the top was wonderful, as it added some great texture.
Bonus: 1/1 - the ambiance was nice, the menu was clear, and there was a small area in the back where people can pick up a stick and then pick out a fortune based on the number on the stick.
Total: 6/10. Kajol said she would definitely want to go back to try the boba milk tea version of the drink.
Interestingly this is the first time Kajol and I have had our reviews diverge by more than a point. Of course, I think I'm right, but we'll have the opportunity to try it again in the near future.
For our next visit I think I'll be obligated to try Xing Fu Tang's more extravagant option: the gold foil boba milk. Yes, they really put gold leaf on top, and certainly charge you for it!
Shoutout to David for originally recommending Xing Fu Tang to me; if anyone else has tips, please let me know.
SecureDrop team member Kunal Mehta demo’d the SecureDrop Workstation at RightsCon 2025 on Feb. 25. You can watch a recording of the talk; the slides (PDF) are also available.
In the demo, Mehta explained the multiyear project to provide better and more streamlined tools for journalists to safely handle potentially malicious submissions. Built on top of Qubes OS, a security-focused operating system, SecureDrop Workstation leverages security-through-isolation to keep untrusted files isolated in virtual machines where journalists can review them without risking their safety and security.
Mehta also described a pilot phase in which the SecureDrop team collected and addressed feedback from journalists, before making SecureDrop Workstation generally available in 2024. It is now rolling out to all news organizations that use SecureDrop. In the session, he showcased the SecureDrop Workstation, while contrasting it with the classic SecureDrop workflow, to highlight its new usability and security features.
If you’re a journalist interested in using the SecureDrop Workstation or want to learn more, please contact us — we would be happy to help. Thanks to Access Now for hosting RightsCon and giving us the opportunity to present.
