Well, as mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be trying to capture various things that happened from week-to-week in these, hopefully, quick weekly summaries. The reason is it takes me some time to right a blog post, and hopefully these weekly posts will help be condense the happenings so they are documented because if everything requires its own, potentially-lengthy post nothing will captured. Anyway, it’s a work-in-progress, so we’ll see what happens.
Reclaim Hosting
- Big new son this front, after seven years at St. Norbert College Taylor Jadin has joined Reclaim as a Community Instructional Technologist. The fact that we have hired an instructional technologist is pretty magical on many fronts, and hopefully I can parse some of the reasons in a future post, and Taylor has been an amazing member of the Domains community for years, so having him onboard is an honor and a pleasure—looking forward to working closely with him for the foreseeable future!
- Last week also so the official announcement that we will be retiring Rockaway Hosting and moving all existing account back into the Reclaim Hosting fold. This was a long time coming, and 2021 has been about growing, consolidating, and focusing on what’s next.
- The end of last week also featured a meeting wherein talks around a Domains API were re-started, and a project for 2022 initiated. This is something we’ve been talking about on and off for years, so here’s to hoping 2022 marks a big leap forward in this possibility.
- Chris Blankenship and Lauren Hanks definitely earned their Reclaim wings last week dealing with a server issue that required extensive recovery work and communication simultaneously (never easy), but the fact that Tim and I were not on the frontline marks a big turning point.
bavacade
- Installed dev kit on Atari Millipede that not only adds free play and high score save capabilities, but also several other games like Centipede, Super Breakout, and Warlords. You can read the post about it here with all the gory details: “Multipede: 4-in-1 Cabinet Fun!”
- Installed dev kit on Cheyenne that adds nine more Exidy shooting gallery games, including Crossbow, Combat, Chiller, Clay Pigeon, Catch-22, Crackshot, Hit ‘n Miss, Combat, WhoDunit, and Showdown. I posted about this as well just this morning, so you can read more here: “Exidy 440 Dev Kit on Cheyenne.”
- A failed project was trying to get the marquee light for Astro Invaders working. Looks like there is a short in that circuit somewhere, so that project is on the docket for this week, as well as installing the multi-game kit for Gyruss, which fills me with dread given the need for desoldering CPU chips 😐
Streaming
- I spent a bunch of time last week re-visiting my streaming setup and playing with Peertube and Owncast as possible options for the OERcamp Global’s Friday Night Karaoke session I’ll be co-hosting with Chahira Nouira. Not gonna lie, I totally love the karaoke stuff, and not only because I have an awesome voice, but also because I love to play with streaming stuff. I wrote two posts on the setup, one focusing on my test with Peertube and another on Owncast. For the OERCamp Global session on Friday night October 10th at 9 PM CET we’ll be using an instance of Owncast mapped on karaoke.oercamp.global. This is doubly cool because it will allow me to introduce the session with a quick nod to what’s possible on Reclaim Cloud—always be branding!
- I also cross-cast all the video streaming experiments to ds106radio, so there’s that.
Reading/Watching/Listening
- Tom Woodward presenting “It Could be Beautiful-Aspirational Learning Technology”– is well-worth your time. Tom talk about what pursuing the mind-blowing experiences when integrating tech into teaching and learning, and I can dig it!
- Miles and I are on a Better Call Saul kick while re-watching Breaking Bad —it’s wholesome fun:)
- I got my Criterion streaming fix with The Swimmer —it’s all about aging not so gracefully. What an awesome film.
- George Romero’s The Crazies – I picked up the VHS tape and an original movie poster when I was back in the States, so I had to watch this pandemic classic again. Gas masks were a theme this week given the role they play in Breaking Bad and the the fact we will soon be required to mask outdoors in Trento …. ugggh!
- Creepshow soundtrack from Waxworks —the cover art says it all, and it’s fun music to work to for sure
Personal
- Mostly day walks with Duke and Anto to parco Gocciadoro as it starts to get colder here, looks like our first ski/snowboard outing will be next weekend.
- Pretty quiet week all round. Feeling the work groove while preparing for Christmas with some initial shopping and house prep.
- Starting uploading a few thousand photos to Flickr in hopes of vetting and publishing photos I took in 2021 before year’s end.
- Duke and Daphne got hair cuts and look so good!
- Postponing Christmas trip to NYC -my dad’s not getting any younger and my kids miss all the aunts, uncles, cousins, so this year was gonna be the one we made it home. But not gonna happen for a few reasons, so punting until Easter. A bit sad, but relieved not to be traveling at Christmas for sure.