Over the weekend I was struggling to get a mapped URL for a Ghost container on Reclaim Cloud resolving consistently to the main URL. While the home page worked, several subpages were defaulting to localhost:2386, which is hardcoded in the config.production.json file.* This is where that URL is normally defined, but Docker environmental variables are not actually read through this file, which is a bit of abstraction you have to wrap your head around when working with Docker. That file will work consistently if it’s hosted on a stack, but in a Docker container you need an environmental variable file (or .env file). Another detail discovered on my journey towards understanding Docker. Thankfully I have Taylor Jadin to think this stuff through with now given he’s a bit further ahead in his grasp of containers and has played with Reclaim Cloud a fair bit.
So, the proper way to deal with this issue in Reclaim Cloud is to add the url variable to the container environment. In the Ghost application container go to Additional Settings –> Variables:
Accessing Variables menu on a Reclaim Cloud container
From there click on the green Add button:
Add button and pre-existing Ghost container variables
After that you need to add the url variable as illustrated below (keep in mind url needs to be lowercase):
Adding Ghost url variable in application container
This will ensure your environment loads cleanly over a mapped domain, and all references to the domain url are updated throughout the container. Be sure to restart the application container (not the load balancer) and give it a minute or so and the site will come back up.
This solution helped me stop using the hack of cloning the site with an edited url field in the config.production.json file to fix the issue, while also solving my adjacent issue with setting the Newsletter/Support emails. I’ll write more on that in my next post about Setting Up Email for a Ghost Newsletter.
Adding Ghost’s mail__from variable in Reclaim Cloud
Another variable I added to my Ghost container was mail__from -you can see an example of this above for the address ghost_at_bavatuesdays.com.
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*This file is found in the var/lib/ghost/ directory of the official Ghost Docker image.
My first bavaweekly stream of 2022 is in the can, and you can watch it here. It’s a bit of a comedy of errors with my dog, Duke, trying to get his bone out from under the green screen. So it goes with my b-blog projects. I kept this recording simple with just my chroma-key camera super-imposed on my browser as I take you through some pre-populated browser tabs. If I tried producing it the way I would have liked it would have consumed more time than I have right now. I’ll always opt for getting stuff out quickly over perfectly, which is why I get shit out at all. I find pushing on despite all the warts means the growth and brilliance is always just around the corner 🙂
It felt like a productive week on the blog front for sure. On top of that, early last week a snowstorm raged through central Virginia knocking out power for a few of the Reclaim Hosting folks working support, so I was answering quite a few tickets as well. It was a busy week for sure. Crazy how the I-95 became like the Sierra Nevadas in the 19th century with a strangely Donner Party vibe….what the hell is happening in America?
The first group meeting of the Instructional Technology division at Reclaim Hosting was a blast, looking forward to more of that. Also super excited for the Reclaim Roundup monthly newsletter we are working on, which is a big reason behind all the experimenting with Ghost. Things are good at Reclaim, I’m really feeling a work rhythm right now, and that is always nice. Need to ride that wave for a bit and get more folks blogging at Reclaim, it takes an edtech village 🙂
bavacade
Frankly I was a bit surprised I got anything done on this front given how deep I was into exploring Ghost, Reclaim Cloud, and doing general support, but a technician that repaired the power supply for Asterock reached out Friday after I noted the power was still not working on that game. Turns out there is a second power supply unit on the sound card that was sending 13 volts to the game board, which is about 8 volts too many. Game boards usually prefer 5 volts, so I’m not sure if the game board is fried or not, but we’ll see. The upside is we are chasing down the issues on this game, so I have to believe it will be working here soon. It is really the last of the eleven games located in Italy that fills me with dread. The Sidam Explorer game is also down for the moment, but that is a vertical hold issue on the monitor chassis, and it can be fixed. I’m excited for the day all eleven games here are in working order, but I’ll take 9 out of 11, and I do think a perfect 11 for 11 is just around the corner.
Sidam’s Asterock, an Italian bootleg of Asteroids.
Also, the marquee for Astro Invader is finally working. It was a 220 volt unit, and that confuses me as an American, but the technician helped me on that one and it was quite simple, so that was a small win. All the games in the foyer now have the marquee light working, it looks awesome.
Astro Invader marquee all lit up
Donkey Kong Jr. Screenshot without the shakes
The final thing was taking a look at Donkey Kong Jr‘s switching power supply. It was sending out fairly low voltage, 4.8 volts, and I had read on the KLOV forums that it could be one reason why the monitor is slightly shaky. We tried swapping the power supply out with a couple of extras I had lying round, but that did not work. The units smoked, so the technician took the original switching power supply home and fixed that one, and we tried it the day after (Saturday afternoon) and it worked and we could adjust the voltage out to the board up to 5.1 or 5.2 volts but that did not fix the shakiness, which most likely means the issue is with the Sanyo monitor chassis. This is good news in terms of figuring out the issue, the bad news is my extra chassis for this game is in New York 🙂 We’ll get there….
Reading/Watching/Playing
In terms of actually playing in the bavacade, I played a fair bit of Donkey Kong and Centipede, setting personal high scores in both, 55,000 and 44,000 respectively. I checked with Tim and I still have a ways to go on both to match the Reclaim Arcade high scores for those games, but I am a patient man.
It's been a good Sunday. New personal bests on both Donkey Kong and Centipede this evening. This morning/afternoon was spent figuring out email settings for a Ghost Docker while playing New Wave on #ds106radio. I'm always so close to actually understanding how containers work.
I also watched some Sterling Hayden films thanks to the Criterion showcase, including The Killing (1956), Crime Wave (1954), and Pharos of Chaos (1983), the last of which is quite a trip to hear Hayden’s contempt for Hollywood as well as his self-loathing regarding his cooperation with the House of Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. It’s also fun to watch him talk about working with Stanley Kubrick, and just his way of talking is wild. I really enjoyed this one, you can see a bit below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOyZMFfGJ3A&t=89s
I guess watching my son play The Last of Us Part II qualifies as watching, right? That game is simply amazing. I loved the first one, and watching him play Part 2 on the most difficult level is fascinating, it is purely a game of stealth. I love it. I want to carve out some time to play it, cause watching him work his way through it on a ridiculous difficulty level has been inspiring.
The Last of Us Part II
I was also able to get a book in this week, Emmanuel Carrère‘s The Advesary, a true crime account of a man who lived a lie for decades that finally imploded in murder. It is a quick, compelling read, and Carrère can write, even in translation it was hard to put down. I do love the true crime genre—which is a disturbing realization—and this story really delves into the almost unimaginable reality wherein someone can live an absolute lie in solitude for more than 20 years. To the point that when it starts to unravel his whole world falls apart overnight, it’s crazy. I also like the fact the author doesn’t moralize, but simply tries to understand, something that he is not really able to do in my opinion, which makes the whole thing that much more authentic. If I taught a True Crime class again, this would make the syllabus, especially given the murderer’s attempt to find religion in prison is reminiscent of the early American execution narratives, this vision of redemption and God’s love just falls flat in the world of this story which is fascinating when read as another chapter in the genre of true crime.
Personal
I took my regular walk with Duke, but I have been all work the last week. I probably need to start balancing that out a bit here, but I can be streaky when it comes to inspiration and work, so I tend to ride it out. Just got to be careful of the mania, cause that is always lurking behind any bout of productivity 🙂
That said, for the New Year Antonio Vantaggiato and his wonderful family were visiting Alto Adige, so we joined them for a hike in Val di Funes, which is always magic.
After that they joined us in Trento for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and we ate, drank, talked, and laughed a lot, a wonderful way to usher in 2022. I’m forever thankful for the awesome people I have met on my journey on this blog and beyond.
Well, I did get my first weekly video update for 2022 done, and I’m sharing it now with the understanding that the full “show notes” with a more fully fleshed-out post will follow tomorrow morning.
My time was running short, but I did share some game updates from bavacade, as well as a clip of Sterling Hayden chatting about Kubrick. And I did read a book this week, namely Emmanuel Carrère‘s The Adversary, which was some top-notch true crime. All the while I had to wrestle Duke away from the green screen, only to realize too late it was sitting on top of his bone. Fun, fun, fun.
On Wednesday, January 12th from 12-1pm EST, Reclaim’s latest edition of awesome, Taylor Jadin, will be sharing a site template he created in WordPress—something of a SPLOT—that will help folks quickly and easily build a website for showcasing work. It comes complete with a simple submission form for non-logged-in users that all SPLOT admirers have come to know and love. It’s aimed at folks trying to open up the blackbox that is cPanel for their Domains projects, but it’s an idea/technology that can be used for a wide range of use-cases well beyond that.
These are in many ways the notes for a case study for when and why to use Reclaim Cloud, and given that space is going to be a big focus this year I do love having good examples. So, Alyssa Marinaccio and Jeffrey Goetz from Welseyan University reached out earlier this week to let us know the course they were running on their Domain of One’s Own instance, WesCreates was hitting resources limits. They also let us know the site is home to a mini-course for alums and the broader Wesleyan community and more than 3000 folks signed-up! That is pretty awesome for them, and it makes those earlier MOOCs look small 🙂
Wesleyan University’s Living a Good Life Mini Course
At the same time a single WordPress site in a cPanel environment is going to struggle under that kind of activity, even if on its own VPS. When you have a few hundred people, even 100, hitting a WordPress database for a sign-up, etc, the server will feel it. So this was a perfect use-case for migrating that single site to Reclaim Cloud to run in its own container that has instantly scalable computing resources that can go from 1 GB to a 12 GB+ server instantly. That is a beautiful thing for a site like this, and luckily moving over a WordPress site is not too time intensive, not to mention I wanted to demonstrate the power of scaling resources in the Cloud for sites just like this.* I dig that the good folks at Wesleyan are doing this in their own environment apart from the corporate MOOC ecosystems, and this is where scaling an open source tool like WordPress for thousands of people seamlessly helps us return some of that open architecture back to campus experimentation.
What’s cool is that Reclaim Cloud in many ways is geared towards this kind of scaling with one-click containerized WordPress that can scale instantly. There are even clustered and multi-region instances, but I do think that it would be overkill here. That said, multi-region in Reclaim Cloud is super exciting for me. The container is using a LiteSpeed setup, as opposed to Apache or Nginx, which is referred to as LLSMP (Linux, LiteSpeed, MySQL, PHP). We’ve found this stack be ridiculously performant when it comes to WordPress. It’s running PHP 8 and there is a built in content delivery network, or CDN, to speed up the delivery of media objects, add to that scalable CPU resources, and you have an infrastructure that can allow you to spin-up your own, home grown MOOCs on top of WordPress without worrying about scaling to thousands of participants.
LLSMP -Linux, LiteSpeed, MySQL, PHP
That’s awesome, and I would argue it will prove to be pennies on the dollar if you were to run this on a VPS of 16GB or 32 GBs, not to mention having to build-out your own the environment. The economic difference is folks will hit the site hard a couple of times a week, and when they do you resources can scale, but for the rest of the time you’ll be using a fraction of the resources and paying only for that. Elastic computing can be scary for some given there is no set bill, but in many ways we have come to accept this with utilities like gas or electric because we understand it is based on usage and we can control that, it is the same thing for computing CPU and it will save most folks significantly.
On the left you pay only for resources you use (Reclaim Cloud) on the right you pay monthly for a server at XGB no matter the resources used
One of the things we have been doing for Domain of One’s Own schools is providing a $500 credit in Reclaim Cloud to simply explore what’s possible. I offered this to Wesleyan as a good-faith gesture to demonstrate that running this site for 3000+ participants using a scalable, performant WordPress setup will not break the bank. So, the next wave of traffic comes in early next week, and they are now comfortable hosted in Reclaim Cloud, and I want to believe the vision that the Cloud is yet another offering alongside WordPress Multisite and Domain of One’s Own becomes that much clearer with this example.
Anyway, I shouldn’t get too far ahead of myself just yet given the proof is in the pudding, and it still has to perform as promised before any Reclaim Cloud victory laps can be run 🙂
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*There were many facets to the MOOC revolution, and one of the most important for me was the way in which Coursera and others where scaling those infrastructures seamlessly for tens of thousands of people instantaneously on AWS. The birth of the MOOC at scale was in many ways the first example of the power of cloud computing in edtech, warts and all. I wrote about this pretty early on at the request of Jared Stein for the Instructure blog in 2012 (the blog is long gone, but I always keep a copy on the bava!) and I think it still resonates.
Stephen Downes linked me to a video that documents his following my documentation for spinning up Ghost in Reclaim Cloud. I have to say I was a bit worried it would end in frustration, but luckily it had a happy ending. That said, watching him try and follow my instructions was really instructive for me. Seeing how someone as tech savvy as Downes have to interpolate through several of my assumptions helped me understand I need to slow down and explain things better. These videos are relatively new territory for me, and seeing where and when they work and don’t work is a great exercise. So thanks for doing this Stephen, I appreciate you spending the time going through it cause it will help me do better.
I few things I learned:
I’m not that precise all the time, words like “here” when referring to a location on the screen for folks is not very useful. Specify where you are and where you are going. But more generally, when giving instructions I need to be more precise.
Know your audience. I was doing this video for folks using Reclaim Cloud yet I jumped out of our infrastructure all together when pointing DNS—that is very confusing, and as he noted I could lose someone pretty easily at that point. Downes stuck with it, and watching him navigate DNS in cPanel was also instructive as to how unintuitive that system can be, so cohesion and consistency is important.
The above point about about DNS raises a bigger point. The how-to video about installing Ghost using a Docker container should have just been that, I should have saved the domain pointing and SSL certificate for a follow-up, separate video.
I need a better system for zooming in on things I’m doing to illustrate where I’m working on the screen more clearly. I think I lost Stephen with the public IP address because the Cloud interface can be confusing when you have multiple containers in an environment, like the load balancer and the application, etc. That is both a UI issue and an explanation issue.
In these videos I’ve been trying to develop a technique for creating compelling, relatively quick tutorials via video—although being a text person, I also include a step-by-step textual guide with screenshots. The push to be succinct in video, which is important, is hard for me given I like to ramble. A lesson that hits home here is separating out processes into shorter videos that can be more readily consumed, hence saving the bit about domain mapping and A record pointing for its own video, wherein I can talk in more details about Reclaim’s DNS management versus a tool like Cloudflare, which is quite valuable when mapping domains to the Cloud.
Yesterday was in many ways the start of something new, fun, and cool at Reclaim Hosting: the first team meeting of Reclaim’s emergent instructional technology team. I realized during that two-hour-marathon-meeting-that-did-not-suck that I’ve been waiting near-on nine years for this moment. I have dabbled in being a successful businessman, arcade owner, and rising Karaoke starlet (most noble pursuits :), but at the end of the day I’m a lowly instructional technologist. It’s the work that gives me the most pleasure and satisfaction, so knowing that we’re going to have a team exploring and sharing what’s possible with teaching and learning on the web brings me great joy.
What’s more, the team comes with experience. Pilot Irwin was running the Domain of One’s Own project at Carleton College after being a freshly minted college graduate, and a year on the frontlines showing faculty, staff and students the power of the open web for teaching and learning has made their transition to Reclaim Hosting seamless. Not only have they thrived as an account manager for existing schools, but have joined at a perfect time to get in on the ground floor of edtech at Reclaim. The whole idea of pushing hard on instructional technology was born from the realization that an instructional technologist with years of experience, such as Taylor Jadin, might not only be interested in working at Reclaim Hosting, but have a strong vision for how instructional technology at Reclaim can reinforce and support the development of Reclaim’s existing university partners and those still unmet friends and partners.
After talking with Taylor, Lauren and I knew we needed to make a space for him at Reclaim, and provide Pilot the opportunity to further hone the skills they’ve already developed at Carleton had the makings of a team. Then comes the third-wheel, old man winter bava! There’s definitely a selfish reason on my part for pushing edtech at Reclaim—I want a group of folks that I can explore alongside when it comes to both cPanel and Reclaim Cloud. I love tinkering with these next generation tools, and if we can continue to harness the power of open source technologies to liberate us from the edtech borg—then my day job continues to be all sweetness and light. I’m convinced the containerized infrastructure of Reclaim Cloud opens up a whole new world for edtech that’s by-and-large still unexplored, yet as Taylor notes in yesterday’s meeting, the Cloud is quickly becoming trailing-edge tech 🙂
Anyway, the meeting was two hours long, exploratory in nature, and a whole lotta fun. We took notes, and I’m going to capture some of those here for both reference and posterity:
Offering instructional technology services for new DoOO schools-> one of the things we have been lacking given labor limitations with new Domain of One’s Own schools is targeted support beyond admin training. So edtech can start filling that roll of coming in after the training and getting a sense of how this will be rolled out across campus and then run targeted workshops for folks on campus to show them what’s possible
Workshops for the Reclaim Community -> This is already happening, next week, Wednesday, January 12th, Taylor will be running a community chat talking about how to create a community site for Domain of One’s Own to capture and promote the work happening on campus. You can sign-up here.
Proselytizing Reclaim Cloud -> 2022 is the year of Reclaim Cloud, I can feel it in my bones. And I want to get out in front of schools and show them what Docker makes possible and also how they can scale applications for larger instances of an application like WordPress seamlessly. There is much to do on this front, and it is work that excites me to no end cause it cause hand-in-hand with exploring possibilities, which I associate so closely with the best kinds of edtech
Document the work we do (writing, streaming, etc.) -> blog it, vlog it, tweet it, get it out there. We have to write, record, and generally share the work we are doing. It is a “central pillar” as Taylor notes, and I concur!
Professional development for edtech -> I loved this idea, and it dovetails beautifully with our Reclaim Roadshow work. We have been good at trying to offer folks training around Domain of One’s Own instances given staff turns over, technology changes, and needs come up that weren’t apparent at the start. We can do more of this, even beyond Domains. We could push on more white-labeled professional development around WordPress Multisite, Containers, Docker, etc. There is a lot here, particularly when it comes data science that many libraries are exploring, and it might be awesome to bring in folks who are doing this on campus.
Edtech on Campus -> Another idea that was born of the last was running a Reclaim Today series wherein we talk with edtech groups at various campuses to get a sense of their mission, day-to-day work, and the principles and values that drive them. Super useful for us to know, and would be wonderful to hear folks share their visions.
Panel around hacking on WordPress -> WP4life -Taylor notes a panel around folks hacking WordPress to their will as a way to highlight cool work and re-enforce what’s possible, do love that.
WordPress Multisite Series -> This is something I have been thinking about for a while. I cut my teeth on WordPress Multisite, and I still love that app. So it might be fun to have a series wherein we talk with folks using WPMS and find out their experiences, maybe a look underneath the curtain at plugins, themes, and other mysteries. I would love a co-host on this one, so any interested takers let me know.
Everything but WordPress Series -> We are definitely geared toward WordPress, but there is a world beyond the W, so this series would explore other tools as a counterbalance to a 40% and counting WordPress-powered web.
We also talked about the newsletter that will be going out at the end of January, and I’m super excited about using Ghost for that—talk about the web beyond WordPress. It’s a good time to be a Reclaimer, and we look forward to further shaping and defining what edtech looks like at Reclaim Hosting, but that’s not done in a vacuum, so let us know what you might want/need. I have to say it’s been a long time since a two-hour meeting went so fast and seemed so fun, a good sign for sure.
One of the things I wanted to figure out after installing Ghost as a Docker Container on Reclaim Cloud was how to update it to subsequent versions. Below is a very short video on the process as well as the commands to do this via SSH:
Keep in mind, changing permissions for the user is something you only need to do once, after that you should be able to change to the non-root user and update Ghost.
Run the following command to see what user Ghost is installed as, keep in mind Ghost is installed at /var/lib/ghost using the official Docker Image:
ls -al /var/lib/ghost/.ghost-cli
The following result of the above command let’s us know node is the user in the group node:
-rw-r--r-- 1 node node 83 Jan 5 09:40 /var/lib/ghost/.ghost-cli
We then change the user node to a superuser with the following command:
sudo usermod -aG sudo node
And then update the user permissions:
sudo chown node:node /var/lib/ghost
This command changes the file permissions:
sudo find ./ -type d -exec chmod 00775 {} \;
You also need to update the node user’s password given you will be prompted for it:
sudo passwd node
After that, change to the node user:
su - node
Change into the ghost install directory:
cd /var/lib/ghost
And finally run the following command to update Ghost:
ghost update
This is where you will be prompted for the node user’s password:
? Sudo Password
If all goes well you should get something similar to the following output, but in this case Ghost was already up to date: + sudo systemctl is-active ghost_undefined
? Checking system Node.js version - found v14.18.2
? Ensuring user is not logged in as ghost user
? Checking if logged in user is directory owner
? Checking current folder permissions
? Checking folder permissions
? Checking file permissions
? Checking memory availability
? Checking free space
? Checking for available migrations
? Checking for latest Ghost version
All up to date!
Reclaim Hosting is planning on using Ghost to power our monthly newsletters starting this month, so Pilot has been exploring installing it on Reclaim Cloud using the Marketplace app. Turns out it was out-of-date and not so easy to update, so we explored getting Ghost Docker image running in the Cloud using Docker Engine, which Pilot documented brilliantly on their blog. Turns out it might even be easier to install Ghost using Docker Hub on Reclaim Cloud, so the following video and guide will take you through that process.
So, in Reclaim Cloud you can create a New Environment:
After that, make sure you are on the Docker tab and click on “Select Image”:
[*Read more about option to rename environment subdomain at bottom of this post.]
After that you will be given a dialogue box with a search bar to find containers on Docker Hub. Type in “Ghost,” and the first option is the official image, which is recommended:
After that select the top-most Ghost image:
Then click “Next” and the Docker container will be selected. After that you want to ensure the public IP address is not selected for this container, and you can also choose from one of four regions to install to:
Once the Ghost container is set, you will need to add a Load balancer, which will enable the instance to have a Let’s Encrypt certificate for mapped domains. This environment will also need the public IP address, so be sure to turn that option on:
After that you can click Apply and the environment will be spun-up.
Once the environment is spun-up, you will need to do two things. First, point an A record for the domain you want to map to the environment’s public IP address. I did this through my DNS settings in Cloudflare, and you can see it below:
After that, you will need to go to the Add-Ons icon for the Load Balancer container and configure the SSL certificate through Let’s Encrypt:
Once that is done you should be able to load Ghost at the mapped domain you specified:
To configure Ghost you would need to go to yourdomain.com/ghost –good luck!
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*While optional, it might be useful to rename the environment subdomain to something a bit more user-friendly:
I took yesterday off for a nice walk in the mountains with visiting friends, which was a real treat. 2021 offered a few glimpses of life after the pandemic with various visitors from across the Atlantic which made life happier and healthier. Looking forward to more in 2022.
The Odle Dolomiti group in Val di Funes
The last week was pretty much dedicated to hanging out with the family enjoying the holiday and playing with some video streaming using OBS, the ATEM Mini switcher and Owncast. In fact, the intense play helped me to turn my weekly reflection post into a 20 minute weekly relfection video (will work on making it shorter in future episodes) which was a lot of fun. Like and subscribe for more!
Taylor Jadin taking us back to netscape in 1998!
In fact, a few folks at Reclaim Hosting have been playing with the Owncast and the various streaming gadgets that come with it, Taylor Jadin had an awesome stream yesterday wherein he introduced me to the open source retro emulation project called MISTer that not only emulates a ton of old gaming consoles with remarkable accuracy, but also does a brilliant job emulating a 486 computer running Windows 95, that was amazing. He was accessing his network with a modem and it was loading at real time for a kilobytes per second connection (56-128k!), and was also proxying websites from 1998 for Netscape that absolutely blew my mind. It would be a brilliant setup for the 1990s living room computer I dreamed of creating for the Coventry Living Room to highlight the early 90s media, which would be framed by the personal PC running Windows 95 somehow wedged into that family space as an invader that would soon colonize all the existing furnishings forever 🙂 The stuff Taylor showed yesterday on his stream returned me to that dream, and I am now going to get myself a MISTer and start playing more with 90s emulation, not to mention Intellivision and ColecoVision—cause the 80s will always be pure in my heart.
Reclaim Arcade’s living live stream!
Speaking of the 80s, given some of the fun we were having with streaming in the #watercooler channel at Reclaim Hosting Tim got inspired to figure out a way to stream out whatever is playing on the living room TV at Reclaim Arcade, which is absolutely inspired! The livestream is here, and it will go online whenever the arcade is open, so check it out! You can see folks watching VHS tapes, laserdiscs, or playing the NES or Atari 2600 at any given time. The streaming page has a space for TV image, a shot of the living room to see the folks playing, a nice room mic acting as a bed underneath the film/game playing, and even space for bringing in live chat. It’s a gorgeous stream setup, and Tim figured out how to pull in the chat from Owncast as an embed within OBS, which is awesome. it has been a fun week for streaming, and it is always good to use the technology to enhance and share the passions around, well, the older technology 🙂 Also, I love the streaming cause it helps to fine-tune my video chops helping to keep one’s presentation compelling and engaging, the days of Dr. Oblivion’s monotonous lectures are over! 🙂
Anyway, what was going to be a short introduction became a blog post about streaming, but that’s fine because what will follow are the show notes to the video I produced for this week’s bavaweekly, and the above reflections are stuff that I didn’t cover in that video given world enough and time, blah, blah, blah.
Reclaim Hosting
The Reclaim Holiday movie this year was a brilliant selection by our Sysadmin extraordinaire Chris Blankenship: The Star Wars Holiday Special from 1978. It was a real treat despite its association with some early childhood trauma around converting the most amazing thing I had ever seen in 1977, namely Star Wars, into a two-bit variety show. It was amazing to have all eleven of us at Reclaim Hosting together enjoying the film, and I really love our tram right now, we are really well situated to make 2022 an epic year.
A few highlights from the Holiday Special:
Harvey Korman as Julia Childs in Star Wars Holiday Special
I have not seen this since 1978, so I remembered very little, just impressions of how weird the Wookies looked and the 1970s tree house aesthetic stuck with me. But seeing the comic legend Harvey Korman in a skit about an alien cooking show was amazing, and Meredith noted it was very much in the vein of Julia Child, so good! An Art Carney was also unrecognizable at first, but how cool he was in this!
Station ID from Dayton Ohio for recording of Star Wars Holiday Special
Also, the Station ID that showed up in the lower third reminding us this was taped at the time, and there is no actual release of this special on any other format. We were watching a copy of a VHS copy from Dayton, Ohio during the 70s, that is epic!
Finally, the matte art for the Wookie house was pretty amazing. it is very inline with the retro 70s sci-fi art I love so much, and a definite precursor to the Ewok villages in Return of the Jedi.
The highlight was the Moebius-inspired animation sequence that officially introduces Boba Fett into the Star Wars universe. You can see it online in its entirety, and it is quite fun if you are into that kind of thing.
That was a good time, and the streaming of the special through Whereby for the whole team was quite seamless, which shows how far all that technology has come in so short a time.
Other than that I intentionally tried to unplug. The Reclaim Hosting team is on-point, and I am truly excited to be diving into building nan instructional technology “division” next year, but free-time to play is what I associate with Winter break—and it is precious to me.
Reclaim Arcade
As mentioned last week, the year-end accounting was a bit more over-head this year in-part because Reclaim Arcade was fully operational and quite successful in 2021.
Reclaim Arcade Lighting it Up!
It will come as no surprise that Tim has been doing the heavy lifting for the arcade over the past two years, and that intensified even further this Fall as he took on the Herculean task of getting food and alcohol service up and running—which became a reality in late November. Amazing! At the same time, given the enormous time and energy required to run another full-blown company we made the decision for him to take full control of the Arcade and I remain wholly planted in Reclaim Hosting, so neither of us feels split.
Stepping away from the arcade was not an easy decision for me, but being 4,000 miles away with no prospect of returning made it a necessity. Relinquishing my stake so Tim is not beholden to some ex-pat living the bella vita while he’s making the donuts was only right.
Tim and I have an unbelievable partnership that’s lasted more than a decade. It’s been the single greatest professional collaboration of my life, and he is an awesome friend to boot! I hope everyone has the same good fortune as I have to work alongside a wunderkind like Timmmyboy—nothing but love! I also think knowing when to get out of the way will ensure the longevity of our work together, cause we’re far from done. Avanti Timmmmyboy …. avanti Reclaim Arcade!
bavacade
I avoided doing any work this week on the Gyruss high score save and multi-game kit because I know it is going to be an involved project, and I wanted to spare my vacation from the dread that comes with soldering 🙂
Gyruss needs to be modded still!
Streaming
And I thought this post was already long 🙂 Not even sure where to begin here, but watching the bavaweekly video version will demonstrate my work on this during the week, but will capture some useful videos and resources I consulted, as well as a few tools below:
ATEM Mini: This is the rabbit hole I fell down for winter break, and it has been well worth the time invested. The AYEM Mini is a $300 multi-HDMI switcher that is awesome for a multi-camera, multi-input output using one USB-C input on your cpmputer. Like Loopback for audio, it allows switching seamlessly between video/audio inputs—and it has some nice chromakey options too. It’s a great tool, and it takes a bit to wrap your head around, but once you do it is a really powerful addition to any streaming setup. Here are a few videos I watched to get started:
There are more, but these three gave me enough to get started with understanding how production/preview works, getting the Chroma Key going, and how I can imagine the different uses of the ATEM Mini versus OBS.
VHS/DVD splitter: This 2x RCA splitter/switcher out to HDMI splitter proved to be extremely useful. Here is the model on Amazon and I love this little tool. It not only allows me to run two RCA video devices through one HDMI input in the ATEM Mini, but it also allows you to select between 4:3 and 16:9 scaling, which prevents the box from autoscaling to fit the monitor. It is amazing for the VHS and Commodore 64 in particular. It also acted as a kind of filter to get my DVD video to play cleanly given the HDMI directly out to the ATEM Mini was not working (think it is a cheap, universal DVD that might not convert well) as well as fixing the bad audio output from the Retro C64 device I was playing with (that HDMI pushed video through the ATEM Mini, but not audio).
2x RCA switcher to HDMI Out
Commodore 128d: If nothing else, this week has been a huge win in finally getting the Commodore 128 to stream cleanly. Once again the 2x RCA Switcher was awesome, and it turns out an adapter I bought that splits the 8-pin DIN video output from the C128d to S-video and component RCA. And, what do you know, it finally worked being pushed through the RCA Switcher into the ATEM mini. I had no luck with it when using the Elgato video capture card I was using previously. This was a huge personal win, and returned me to the Commodore explorations I documented on this blog back in 2016 and 2017, and will be the topic of a stream or two next week.
EpocCam: Tim informed me that Elgato bought EpocCam, which convinced me to avoid getting a Go pro and just use my phone as an additional, wireless camera for the streaming setup. I used it to great effect in the bavaweekly video to show-off the setup. And a one-time $7.95 payment for the pro version to remove the watermark was an easy sell.
Misc: I also finally figured out how to get my 27″ Sony Trinitron to act as a monitor when streaming and archiving VHS tapes, so the VHS can pass through the TV and then come into the computer, and that led me to daisy chaining two Sony Trinitron TVs—the 27″ to the 19″–which was pretty awesome. I am finally figuring out S-Cart configurations—which are completely odd to me—but getting and S-Cart adapter with a S-Video input/output changed the game for me. I’m actually pretty amazed how much better S-video looks, but I have to dig into that is actually the reason given I do not know that much about s-video at all.
Watching/Reading
Rush (2013): After Miles told us he watched and enjoyed it at his friends’, Antonella and I watched it on Xmas eve waiting for Santa. It was fun, even if Thor always annoys me, but Eric Fellner was awesome.
Iron Man 1 and 2: I have to say, I was not a fan of Iron Man when it first came out in 2008, but re-visiting it with Tess on Christmas was enjoyable. In fact we watched 1 and 2, and even saw the Elon Musk cameo in Iron Man 2. Bizarre how film shapes life, the fictional Stark meeting the real-life mutated instantiation of its own image. But hard to deny that Jon Favreau has become a kind of a legend Hollywood filmmaker in his own right, punctuated recently with Mandalorian.
Miles got the Tumblr Lego for Xmas, so we had to re-watch Dark Knight, and Heath Ledger’s performance is as rich as it ever was with each re-watching. He is probably the best villain of all the comic book adaptations, and that’s what most contemporary comic book movies are lacking, a convincing, truly dark villain. Probably why Dark Knight is the best comic book film of the last 25 years.
Rambo 4: It was so bad that it was actually fun to watch with Miles and Tommy, although it was a bit gory in the end. But Sly Stallone really phoned this one in in every way imaginable. Jesus.
Vendetta: This was the Netflix series about a TV station in Sicily that was “anti-mafia.” Turns out the whole series was depressing, it showed how broken the justice system is in many ways, and rather than being compelling it just ended up being depressing. Everyone seemed on the take, and nothing was to be trusted. I guess that is why it was relevant, but at the same time how much of that can you take?
Gli eredi della solitudine or in English, the The Inheritors of Solitude, a book Antonella is reading about Alto Adige that was published in the 1970s. It is a reportage in the vein of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men about how the folks in the mountains of Sub Tiröl are living in conditions akin to the Middle Ages. She has been telling me all about it, so like I am reading it 🙂
Personal
A lot of family time, a lot of walking/hiking, and a lot of fun. Here’s a video of Duke in all his glory for those that only come for the Duke of New York, A#1!
And here is Antonella reporting on a child that was born on the heliport here in Trento just a couple of days ago, with some live helicopter coverage from yours truly 🙂
So, it was a good week, and we had a great Christmas lunch and some lazy lounging around the house watching movies and building Legos that were punctuated with some fun walks in the park. The good life. Here’s to more in 2022, and wishing all of you that made it this far (and only you!) a very happy New Year!
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