Watch the bava blog trailer!
about
is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
Testimonials:
Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
-Joe McMahon
Everything Jim Groom touches is gold. He's like King Midas, but with the Internet.
-Serena Epstein
My understanding is that an essential requirement of the internet is to do whatever Jim Groom asks of you while you're online.
-James D. Calder
@jimgroom is the Billy Martin of edtech.
-Luke Waltzer
My 3yr old son is VERY intrigued by @jimgroom's avatar. "Is he a superhero?" "Well, yes, son, to many he is."
-Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom is a fiery man.
-Antonella Dalla Torre
“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
I am Jim Groom
Find out more about me here.
Recent comments
- Reverend on Punk’s Not Dead
- Reverend on Punk’s Not Dead
- Martin Weller on Punk’s Not Dead
- Maren Deepwell on Punk’s Not Dead
- Jim Groom on Punk’s Not Dead
- Jim Groom on Punk’s Not Dead
- Scott Leslie on Punk’s Not Dead
- Alan Levine on Punk’s Not Dead
- Jim Groom on You’re definitely Dr Detroit …
- Jim Groom on Atari 2600 Game Cartridge Display Stand
- Jim Groom on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Jim Groom on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Tom on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Zach Davis on Atari 2600 Game Cartridge Display Stand
- GNA Garcia on You’re definitely Dr Detroit …
-
Recent Posts
- Punk’s Not Dead
- Unscripted Futures
- Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- You’re definitely Dr Detroit …
- The Reclaim Student Showcase Returns for 2026
- Domain of One’s Own Version 2
- Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It’s Off to ILTA’s EdTech 26 We Go
- Atari 2600 Game Cartridge Display Stand
- Building a Blog You Can Walk Into
- Deferred Maintenance: Upgrading Mastodon and PeerTube
browse the bavarchive
Contributors
some favorites
- Alan Levine
- Andy Rush
- Audrey Watters
- bava.social
- Bonnie Stewart
- Brian Lamb
- Bryan Alexander
- Chris Lott
- Clint LaLonde
- Cole Camplese
- Darcy Norman
- David Kernohan
- David Wiley
- Gardner Campbell
- GNA Garcia
- Grant Potter
- Jeffrey Keefer
- Jon Beasley-Murray
- Jon Udell
- Kate Bowles
- Kin Lane
- Laura Blankenship
- Leslie Madsen-Brooks
- Lisa M Lane
- Martha Burtis
- Martin Hawksey
- Martin Weller
- Mike Caulfield
- Mikhail Gershovich
- Mountebank
- Paul Bond
- Scott Leslie
- Serena Epstein
- Shannon Hauser
- Stephen Downes
- The OLDaily
- Tim Owens
- Tom Woodward
- Tony Hirst
Category Archives: Mastodon
Deferred Maintenance: Upgrading Mastodon and PeerTube
I’ve been neglecting the Mastodon instances at both social.ds106.us and reclaim.rocks. But recently there have been some critical updates, and with the state of security on the web I figured it was time to be a good host. So I … Continue reading
Mastodon Costs
I started running both social.ds106.us and reclaim.rocks Mastodon instances back in November 2022. The ds106 server has about 40 active users, whereas the Reclaim Rocks server is pretty much Reclaim Hosting‘s own server, and we have 3 or 4 users … Continue reading
Today is the Day I Got My Mastodons Dockerizized
To battle the immense feeling of frustration with yesterday’s West Coast outage at Reclaim, early this morning I decided to take Travis Bickle‘s advice and get my Mastodon instances dockerizized. I would blog the process of migrating from a source … Continue reading
Containerizing Mastodon on Reclaim Cloud
Taylor and I did a stream yesterday wherein we (royal) set about taking one of my experimental Mastodon instances (bava.social) and moving it from a Debian VPS into a Docker container. We got the bug after a recent open source … Continue reading
Hitting an Open Source Update Trifecta
One of the things I have been working on recently is stitching together a bunch of open source tools for an online “Oblivion University,” if you will. I’ll write about that more in another post, but I just wanted to … Continue reading
Reclaim Cloud’s 1-Click Mastodon Installer
Creating a couple of videos highlighting Taylor’s 1-click Mastodon installer for Reclaim Cloud has been on my to-do for too long, so this week I knocked it out. I did two quick videos, the first takes you through the basic … Continue reading
The Allure of Mastodon
Since November I’ve been toying around with Mastodon on Reclaim Cloud. At first it was to take up the gauntlet thrown, and see if I could create a space for the ds106 community. I did a bunch of work for … Continue reading
Creating a Domain Alias for Mastodon Files Served through DigitalOcean Spaces
As promised in my last missive, this post will take you through creating a custom domain alias for the files being served by a DigitalOcean Spaces bucket. What does that mean? Well, DigitalOcean Spaces is a cloud-based file storage that … Continue reading
Moving Mastodon Object Storage from AWS S3 to DigitalOcean Spaces
These days I’ve been in a Mastodon maintenance state-of-mind, as my last post highlights. Early this week I tried to shore up some security issues linked with listing files publicly in our AWS S3 bucket. This encouraged me to explore … Continue reading
Mastodon Version Updates, Object Storage Security, and More
This post provides a place for me to capture some of the maintenance work I’ve been doing on social.ds106.us and reclaim.rocks; the two Mastodon instances of note I’m currently administering. Keep in mind these two instances are running on a … Continue reading