It felt good yesterday to jump on the bava.tv for some homegrown karaoke streaming, and this session was even done with something of a purpose. The folks at #OERCamp asked the great Tim Owens to present on Reclaim Cloud, which he forwarded to me cause he is knee-deep in Reclaim Arcade magic. I responded with interest, but that quickly became a conversation about running a Karaoke session—which is a good indicator of my status as washed-up edtech. But unlike most folks with an ego, I embrace my waning relevance. I would sign-up as a recurring celebrity on the edtech Hollywood Squares without hesitation. Oh how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition.
All kidding aside, I’m loving this new found niche. In fact, I got another email this morning asking if we might run another karaoke session in mid-December, so I’ll have to reach out to my partner in crime, the great Chahira Nouira, to see if she can do both events. That said, I can confirm she is a lock for #OERCamp, which will be happening next Friday night, December 10th at 9 PM CET.
I have to admit there is some regret over not doing the OpenEd21 Karaoke session they reached out about, but Fall was a blur of work this year—so we do what we can. Anyway, for this karaoke test I used the PeerTube live streaming option I have on bava.tv. The live stream video can be embedded elsewhere, so I can have #OERCamp create a page and embed the streaming video so folks who want to watch can head there, keeping Zoom just for folks who are singing. That simplifies the Zoom overhead a bit, and also enables folks to watch, laugh, and hopefully comment on the live steam. Unfortunately, that is where PeerTube falls down a bit, there is no native chat for live streams in that platform.
Another open source streaming application I have been playing with this Fall, Owncast, might actually be a good alternative given it has chat built-in. Also, given I can run it on Reclaim Cloud I could spin a custom app up for each event that could be run on a subdomain of their site, like karaoke.oercamp.de. That would enable some domain/brand cohesiveness and also provide a space for folks to link into the Zoom room if they want to actually sing. It would be a pretty good use of the waiting room feature on Zoom too, enabling us to have one or two folks on deck, but minimize interference in the studio 🙂
I think next up is testing Owncast and then playing in Zoom to see if I remember how all that works, but it is high-time to put together a slick Karaoke solution for folks if they want to do this at their own events (edtech or otherwise). I blogged my 2020 Summer Summit setup which is a good reminder that Zoom wins the day for karaoke, but wondering if Streamyard is an option as well? At the end of the day Chahira and I are doing it because it’s a lot of fun and we love singing into the void, but it would be nice for folks to do it themselves because it could help cutout the Eagles and Billy Joel middlemen that come with our hosted events 🙂 Anyway, much more on this in the next week or two, until then I’ll be singing myself silly on the internet!
I’m not sure I wrote about it here yet, but back in October I picked up another arcade cabinet here in Italy, namely Millipede (1982). It was a bit ironic because I was not necessarily a fan of this game. I remember telling Tim that it ‘s one that I would sell from Reclaim Arcade, but those were famous last words I guess. It could also have something to do with the fact that the Centipede cabinet that essentially started the arcade frenzy for Tim and I overshadowed Millipede in my mind. That Centipede cabinet is arguably the most pristine in Reclaim Arcade and being the first gives it a special place in my heart, so maybe my tepid reception of Millipede in Reclaim Arcade was a result of all these factors …. I just don’t know, I’m a technologist not a psychiatrist!
I am happy to report that the CPU on the Millipede game board was socketed, so I just had to gently remove the 40-pin chip and add the above daughter card to the that socket. The CPU is placed in the provided space on the daughter card, and I used a riser (a second socket) to make sure the card would clear the metal test points on the board. It was quite simple, the next step was to remove two rom chips and add the second daughter card with the additional ROMs for Centipede, Warlords, and Super Breakout.
Millipede ROM chips to be removed
One ROM chip removed
Multipede ROM daughter board installed
And removing the 24-pin ROM chips was even easier than the 40-pin CPU chip, and I placed the second daughter board and the final piece was attaching the connector ribbon so the boards could talk to one another:
Multipede connector ribbon between two boards
I am going fairly light on details here cause the following two videos cover the installation and setup of the Multipede game board way better than I could:
As the videos outline, once you have the board installed you press down the player 1 button when the game is turned on to access the broader settings for the cabinet, each of the games, etc. The beauty of these mod kits is they can make what was a laborious activity of changing settings by pulling out the game, opening the back, removing the game board and changing dip switch settings a seamless process at power up:
Multipede settings page – press player 1 button when powering on game to get to this screen
Once you have things set as you like them you can save your settings and you will be pushed out to the game. At any point after that you can select which game you want to play by once again pressing down the player 1 button for 4 seconds:
Game selection screen for Multipede
YEAH! After that, the Millipede cabinet becomes that much more awesome, allowing for some Centipede action!
Centipede in Millipede cabinet
Centipede #4life
Or even some Super Breakout, which was Tommaso’s favorite, even though I pawned him for the high score quite quickly!
I have to say this was a welcome win after a weekend of bavacade despair. I am thrilled it worked, and I am loving the Multipede fun. It also bolsters my confidence for two more multi-game projects I have on tap, namely the Exidy 440 muti-game mod that will add such classics as Crossbow, Combat, and Chiller (to name a few) to my Exidy Cheyenne machine. Then, after that, I am going to take on the daunting multi-game Gyruss mod that adds Time Pilot and Pooyan to that Konami classic—Pooyan is a personal favorite, so super excited about that. But in the meantime I am going to enjoy the Multipede in all it’s 4-in-1 splendor!
“Sometime you eat the b’ar, and wal (well), sometimes he eats you.”
–The Stranger in The Big Lebowski
Centuri Phoenix game board
It was that kind of weekend. I was finally decompressing from travel and birthdays and trying to get back into a rhythm. I decided to try tackling some of the high score save/multi-game kits for the bavacade I had gotten this past month. I started with what I thought would be the simplest by adding yet another mod chip to Phoenix in order to not only add freeplay (I already added a mod for that), but also save high hi-scores for both bug and non-bug games (which was an awesome feature). The full list of features can be found on this KLOV forum post, but I’ll capture a few here for posterity:
number of lives
bonus score
coin settings
freeplay or not
sound in attract mode
enable or disable 204K point bug
attract maintained in freeplay mode
sound in attract mode (selectable on/off) – this works apart from the background noise in the mothership attract stage where the CPU just can’t manage it
high scores saved to FRAM (no batteries)
5 position high score table (there’s plenty more NVRAM, just no space on the screen)
enter your initials (3 letters only, “old-school”)
Separate high score lists for bug and non-bug high scores
So, the bug mode referred to in this list is the 204,000 point bug that my son Miles got twice in a row while we were playing each other and crushed all my fatherhood dreams of owning my kids at 80s video games. That said, I still love it, but I posted about this feature/bug already on the bava so I will spare you anymore thoughts here. Saving high scores is a lot of fun, and given Phoenix is a personal favorite I reached out to user philmurr on KLOV and got a custom Phoenix mod-chip that does all the above and more!
NEC 8085 processor and dip switch
The mod is pretty straightforward, you need to replace the 40-pin NEC 8085 8-bit processor with the daughter card that has the 8085 processor as well as several other chips to handle the modifications, and essentially allow you to choose the game settings from the screen rather than using the dip switch on the board.
8085 daughter board chip set
Underside of 8085 daughter board chip set
So, the daughter card would plug into the area where the 8085 processor is, and then the 8085 process would be plugged into the space provided for the 8-bit chip. The one issue was the 8085 processor was not socketed (so it was soldered right onto the board), meaning it would need to be removed by desoldering all 40 pins. After that it would be replaced with a 40-pin socket that would allow me to plug the daughter board in cleanly. I did this already for a Scramble high score save kit, so the process was not entirely new to me. Plus, I had watched Tim do the same thing for a Gyruss high score save kit for Reclaim Arcade, so I understood the drill.
40-pin socket for circuit board
Ahhh, but confidence was not enough to remove this 8085 processor chip. It started simply enough, I fired up my desoldering gun and got to work desoldering each pin. It was hard going so I did a few passes, and then remembered that for really intractable pins you might have to re-solder and then desolder so the new solder combines with the old to aid with the removal. Nothing doing. The chip was not budging at all. So I thought I might help it along with a little wedge pressure from below to see if the solder just needed to be cracked a bit, and cracked the 8085 processor chip. The first casualty of this ordeal.
Cracked 8-bit processor chip
I then re-soldered everything to see if the chip still worked, and the game was throwing garbage and making a crazy muffled Phoenix sound, so I was pretty sure the broken 8085 processor was beyond repair. On top of that, the $6 soldering tool I bought from the States a while back broke, so I was not able to solder anything else. So, believing the chip was shot I decided to desolder the legs again to see if I can at least get it off the board, and while doing that my desoldering gun broke—it was a fiasco. I was not feeling all that accomplished by day’s end, so I packed up the project and re-watched Breaking Bad with Miles to see if cooking Meth was a viable option …
I feel Jesse’s pain…
…it wasn’t, but I did pick up a new soldering iron Sunday morning, along with a manual desoldering suction pump because hope springs eternal in the arcade hobby breast. I had one goal, get the 8085 chip off the board, I had already ordered a replacement from France and China, so it was going to be a week before I could test the board, but at least I could remove the broken chip and add the socket for the daughter board in the interim.
The broken and mangled 8085 chip
The desoldering pump was not working, but I had read about a nuclear option: cut the chip off the board with a pair of snips and then remove the leftover legs. After re-soldering and desoldering yet again to no effect, I cut the broken 8085 chip out. Only things left were the mangled legs on the side I had cut, whereas the other side broke off cleanly as I lifted the cut side up to be perpendicular to the board. So, after cutting out the chip I was left with a bunch of broken legs I needed to desolder and remove:
Game board with 8085 chip cut out and remaining broken legs
You can see from the top row above that the legs I did not cut were removed more cleanly, so I started on that row for getting them out with not a little trepidation. In fact, my first attempts at soldering and then desoldering them with the new tool were not working. It took me forever to get out just 3 pins, so I regrouped after lunch and asked Anto to give me a hand. We slowly worked through that row and I realized if I solder and then lift the board up on its edge and heat up the new solder, Anto could pull the solder and pin out the other side cleanly. The same thing was not working at all when the board was flat because by the time we tried to suck the solder it was already drying, it had to be almost instantaneous.
20 of 40 remaining pins removed–and next 20 soldered ahead of time
So after figuring this out on the first twenty, I soldered the next 20 all at once, lifted the board on its edge and we methodically went through each pin heating and sucking the solder with the pump and it went super fast. The chip and all its detritis were out entirely and I was finally ready to try and set the socket.
Socket placed on pins
Socket pins going in cleanly
Disco, the socket fit cleanly and all I needed to do now was re-solder everything and I had at least dug myself out of the hole I created the day before.
Soldered pins for socker
At this point could simply wait for the new 8085 chip and pray that it works, so there will be another update on this project in a week or so to see if there is redemption for this arcade repair boy. One more thing is you might see a wire soldered to the third pin on the bottom of the 8085 chip. That was a jumper that was already there, and you will find this on boards to route around issues.
Jumper from chip to chip
I simply re-soldered what was already there, and luckily I have the images of the original should I need to revisit, but I believe it is correct. Anyway, I hope documenting your failures is as valuable as your successes cause if this first mod project is any indicator, there may be a few more failures yet to come 🙂
Read more about the Multi-Region WordPress setup on Jelastic’s blog (click image)
WordPress Multi-Region is more a hosting than application specific feature, and to be clear this functionality is possible for applications beyond WordPress. But Jelastic, our Cloud Provider for Reclaim Cloud, has created a one-click application for installing a multi-region WordPress cluster that can replicate across various data centers in real-time. There are a few elements of this that are exciting as hosting providers:
With a one-click installer it’s easy to spin-up a complex WordPress infrastructure across numerous regions
It has the ability to route traffic so folks get less latency being able to access the instance closest to them
It bakes in fail over so that if one server in one region goes down the traffic is immediately redirected to another available datacenter to avoid downtime
These are all good reasons, but the last may be the most exciting because sites go down. Data centers catch fire, DDoS attacks happen, and servers will crash; it’s not a matter of if, only when. So, as more and more edtech infrastructure has become mission critical there needs to be options to route around that painful reality, and failover is just that: it replicates a single server setup across various data centers across various regions (US-West, Canada, UK, etc.) to ensure there isn’t one point of failure for a enterprise-level service. That’s pretty exciting given this is something we’ve been dreaming about at Reclaim Hosting for a while, and given we manage quite a few large WordPress instances, this could be an immediate options for folks that want to ensure uptime.
The dialogue for the 1-click WordPress Multi-Region installer on in Reclaim Cloud’s marketplace
So, that’s the logic behind WordPress Multi-Region clusters, and while in Nashville for the Reclaim Hosting team retreat Tim started playing with this setup to test fail over. It worked in theory while we set it up, and then again in practice last week when our UK Cloud server had issues in the early morning. That reminded me that I was planning to play around with a WPMR setup for this modest standalone WP bava blog—cause the bava should never, ever go down … ever. After that, I’ll see if I can make ds106 a multi-region setup over the winter break to get a sense of how it works with a fairly intense WPMS instance. So everything hereafter will be jotting down my progress over the last two days.
Diagram of an Maria DB Asynchronous Primary/Replica setup
I started with spinning up a multi-region cluster to host bavatuesdays. It was a 3-region cluster (US-East, US-West, and UK) and after figuring out permissions to rsync files across environments in Reclaim Cloud (it was harder than it should’ve been, thanks for the assist Chris Blankenship!) the migration was fairly straight forward. The Multi-Region setup across 3 regions has one primary cluster and two secondary clusters, and you rync the files to the primary application environment as well as import the database to that environment. Soon after that it syncs with the secondary environments, and like magic the replica clusters have all the files and database settings, posts, comments, etc., imported to the primary cluster. The replication happens in less than 60 seconds, so it might say asynchronous, but it ‘s all but immediate for my purposes.
bavatuesdays blog running on bavafail-1.us cluster
I did get bavatuesdays.com running in a WPMR setup for several hours yesterday while experimenting, but had to revert to the stand-alone instance given I ran into an issue creating new posts that I’m still investigating. But as you can see above the blog is running on the domain bavafail-1.us.reclaim.cloud, and there was another instance at bavafail-2.wc.reclaim.cloud, and a third at bavafail-3.uk.reclaim.cloud. You can see from the URLs they are in different regions, US (East coast), WC (US West Coast), and the UK. These all worked perfectly, and the way to have them all point to bavatuesdays.com was to add the public IP from the load balancer for each of the different regional clusters as an A record in your DNS zone editor.
Example from Jelastic’s blog about adding A record for each WPMR cluster public IP address in Cloudflare
Reclaim Cloud provisions the SSL certificates, and after clearing the cluster’s cache the 3 sites were loading as one, with failover and regional traffic routing working well. It was pretty awesome, but there was one small issue, I could not create new posts, which is kind of a deal breaker for a blog. So I had to revert to the old server environment until I figured that issue out.* I was using the failover and routing baked into Jelastic’s setup seamlessly, but wanted to test out Cloudflare’s load balancing as well, but I’ll save those DNS explorations for another post. That said, Jelastic lays out the possibilities in their post on DNS load balancing for WordPress clusters quite well.
After setting up the A records and issuing SSL certs the bava was beaming across 3 regions. And when I turned one of the three regional clusters off, the site stayed online—so failover was working! The one issue that was also the case when Tim tested in Nashville is that when the Primary cluster goes down the secondary clusters are supposed to let you write to them. In other words, the WP authoring features accessed at /wp-admin should only work on the Primary cluster by default, but if it were to go down one of the other two secondary clusters should allow you to write. This would not only keep the site online, but also allow posting to continue without issue, all of which should then be synced seamlessly back to the primary cluster once it comes back online. I was not able to get this functionality to work. After stopping the primary cluster, the secondary clusters would throw 500 internal server errors when trying to access /wp-admin -so that is another issue to figure out.
I have since spun down the bavafail 3-region test instance after hosing the application servers trying to downgrade PHP from 8.0.10 to 7.4.25 to test out a bad theory, so the first attempt of operation bavafailover with WPMR is dead on the operating room table. Although hope springs eternal at the bava, so I have plans to resuscitate that WPMR setup given I believe it’s a permissions issue—which means I’ll be bothering Chris again.
bava.rocks failover test site
In the interim, however, I’ve spun up a two-region WPMR setup using the domain bava.rocks as a way to ensure adding new posts works on a clean instance (it does), and also to see if you can access the secondary clusters to write to the database when the primary is down (you can’t), so there is still definitely more work to do on this, but it is really exciting that we are just a couple of issues away from offering enterprise-level traffic routing and fail over for folks that need it. Reclaim Cloud is the platform that just keeps on giving in terms of next-level hosting options, and I love it.
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*I was running into the same critical error that folks mention in this forum post, but after downgrading PHP versions from 8.0.10 to 7.4.25 on the WPMR cluster everything broke. I then tested PHP 8.0.10 on my LEMP environment for bavatuesdays (not a WPMR setup) and that worked fine. So not sure if it is specific to the WPMR setup in Jelastic, which uses LiteSpeed whereas my current blog uses Nginx, but this is something I am going to have to revisit shortly.
The Reclaim Hosting team has our first get together since 2019 (the Domains 2019 conference) after any such travel possibilities were impossible since the pandemic. It’s been over two years since we have met up in physical space, and this time we choose to converge as a team in Music City. Reclaim is soon to be 11 people strong, 7 of which were able to make it to Nashville in person. Lauren Hanks, Pilot Irwin, and myself came in a day earlier to get a campus visit in at Vanderbilt University before the team “retreat” got going.
The occasion to visit Vanderbilt was fortunate happenstance given I have been in discussions with Mickey Casad, Executive Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities, around a project she is working on and I was wondering if it might make sense to meet up. Admittedly, part of this was selfish given Lauren and I love to visit campuses given it helps reconnect and ground the work we do at Reclaim. What’s more, I am a sucker for a beautiful campus, and Vanderbilt is just that: gorgeous quad with rarefied buildings smack down in the middle of a happening city. Not a bad re-entry into the campus visiting circuit.
After talking with Mickey it turns out the folks at Vanderbilt were in much the same mindset, having foregone any on-campus events like this since Spring 2020, so it was a shared return, and like I imagine many post-pandemic meet-ups will be—it was both face-to-face and virtual given an entire contingent joined via Zoom. It was good to be back!
A couple of other things I relished from the visit were catching up with Derek Bruff, who now adds Assistant Provost to his list of titles at Vanderbilt. I met him last at an ALT Lab conference in 2015, so it was super cool to find him in the room, and online tweeting!
Jim Groom, channeling Tim Owens: There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer.
Another highlight was getting to hear Lauren Hanks present about Domain of One’s Own to this group. She’s been with Reclaim for a while, and with every year takes on a bigger role in our organization and its success. An absolute honor to work beside here, and I have to say COVID-19 to not dull her presentation chops. She was as good as I have seen her yesterday, and it is really cool to see how comfortable, thoughtful, and personally-targeted her talk about the simple experience of exploring your own domain on the web. She captured brilliantly how much the magic of the web is a personal journey of intellectual discovery.
What’s more, it was cool to have one of our recent hires, Pilot Irwin (who was a Domains admin at Carleton College), on the ground taking it all in and fact-checking my ass given I am not to be trusted with acronyms and code base discussions 🙂
That’s right, the final highlight would be my taking yet another crack and trying to pull together a cogent discussions of cloud computing and the shift of computing resources to a utility model, the rise of next-generation applications beyond the LAMP stack, and the shift to container-based infrastructure that should revolutionize the idea of a sandbox for higher ed’s edtech, libraries IT, and digital humanities groups—to name just a few.
I tried to use a quick clip from Stephen Fry’s illustrated explanation of Cloud Computing from 2013, but I messed up the audio setup, my bad. That said, This is the first time I returned to this topic in earnest for a while. I first tried something like this at the University of Oklahoma in 2015, and it failed given I was getting too technical and was not entirely clear what I was arguing. I took another shot at it in 2016 with a Networked Learning virtual event, but that was not satisfying either. Since then I’ve been pretty much heads-down, full-time helping to keep the growing ship that is Reclaim Hosting floating along smoothly, making exploratory presentations less and less a focus. I do miss presenting to folks in-person, and it is the closest I will ever get to being a performer, which is something I enjoy. What’s more, using these occasions to try and connect and explain things that have eluded me for years is invaluable.
So anyway, I do thinking I was able to get some of these things across yesterday, and I actually jotted down the entire talk in text first, and then filled with images and presented on the fly. But the text as a frame to work from was really useful, so I will copy the slides and text below, and hopefully get to re-visit and refine this talk and take it on the road to start getting out in front of Reclaim Cloud—my new Reclaim love affair 🙂
I starting by quoting Tim who often notes “There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer.” While true, I think the idea here was to try and make a deeper dive to try and explain Reclaim Cloud in regards to the idea of usage-based computing, or computing as utility. So this is when I moved to the minute long clip from Stephen Fry’s Cloud Computing explanation:
From there I noted that the utility nature of cloud is no longer anything new to higher education institutions, noting that most IT organizations in higher ed are already using services like AWS, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, and/or Azure in some fashion. In fact, the predominance of infrastructure like AWS is no longer simply rarefied IT. Noting that just recently Kathleen Fitzpatrick of MSU’s MESH are looking for an AWS administrator to run their Humanity Commons project, underscoring this is not an IT department position and is also an exploratory position for the group.
My assertion is that this increasingly become a norm for edtech, digital humanities and other academic computing groups around higher ed.
I think tried to dig in on how cloudlets and reserved computing resources work in Reclaim Cloud, but after talking with Lauren and Pilot this might have been the weakest part given I was keeping things conceptual and did not need to jump into a cloudlet explanation at this point, should maybe have waited for the demo, or not at all.
After that I asked the question “Why Reclaim Cloud?” To which I said:
Reclaim Cloud was born out of us not being able to meet the needs of our community beyond the LAMP stack, which was (and arguably still is) the most popular open source stack behind PHP applications like WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, Omeka, etc.
At the same time, programming languages like Node.js, Ruby, Java, Go, and many others were becoming increasingly more popular and they depend on entirely different technology stacks, making hosting applications like Jupyter, Ghost, Minecraft, Discourse, R Studio, ShinyApps, Etherpad, a hard no from Reclaim. We were cPanel shop almost exclusively, and while the power it provides is apparent, as you saw in Lauren’s presentation, the demand for applications that ran on different infrastructure was not going away.
What’s more, the cloud is not so much someone else’s computer as it is their container 🙂
The big shift we happening alongside the explosion of cloud computing and next-generation applications beyond the lamp stack, was the rise of container-based infrastructure. And this is where the three elements discussed here (usage-based resource allotment, next-generation applications, and containerized infrastructure) provides a deeper sense of what the cloud is.
The virtualization that enables containers allows for the provisioning of numerous, variegated and bespoke technology stacks almost instantly and all on the same server. The shipping container metaphor is apt, the ship (the server) carries independent, self-contained applications that all function independently within a unique tech stack-but share a common set of protocols that allows them co-exist.
After that it was time to explore the Reclaim Cloud with a quick demo, and I show off the marketplace installers and used the Docker Hub link to find and install OwnCast on the fly, so that was awesome. Below are the points I wanted to hit, but only covered a few, but think this is a good template for any upcoming presentations cause blogging is #4life!
Demo of Reclaim Cloud:
Look at installing an application from marketplace, talk about how each is a different stack that can almost instantly run on the Reclaim Cloud server thanks to container technology
Look at the ability to create a stack from scratch across multiple programming languages
Demo the ability to install Docker engine and pull a Docker container in from scratch
Cloudlets and pay as you go pricing
Collaborative feature
Moving environments seamlessly between users
Mapped domains, SSL certificates, etc.
I also wanted to speak to how MSU uses Reclaim Cloud as a sandbox, but that did not come up until the following discussion, but here are my points there:
Look at how MSU uses Reclaim Cloud as a next-generation sandbox to explore applications they might recommend MSU’s IT department host for the broader community:
And that is a fairly solid template for future talks on Reclaim Cloud, I do think it is starting to come together, but I need to do some more research and reading to make it even tighter, but it does finally feel like progress after 6 years of trying to communicate an idea.
There is some stream-crossing going on in the Reclaim universes as our most recent shared hosting servers were named after 1980s arcade cabinets. That should keep the server naming fun for a little while, although this switch also serves a practical function. Changing the names of our servers to arcade games like Gyruss and Robotron will help us identify if a shared hosting server is hosted on Reclaim Cloud or Digital Ocean, where our punk-themed servers live.
The value of Reclaim Cloud for hosting our managed hosting and Domain of One’s Own instances was apparent quite early on, and that has proven a huge boon for immediate scaling of resources and storage while keeping server costs under control. So pushing shared hosting servers to our cloud marks a further investment in shifting our infrastructure to an elastic cloud, kind like what the digital revolution of the 80s arcade cabinets meant for the future of gaming 🙂
It’s crazy to think Reclaim Cloud has been live and available for over a year now; its value to us as a company has been huge in terms of expanding our options. What’s more, it has pushed everyone at Reclaim to step-up their comfort level with managing containers and supporting cloud native applications. It’s a brave new world, and the fact that Jelastic was recently acquired by Virtuozzo after a 10-year partnership points towards a broader push in this direction across the entire hosting landscape.
That said, changes like this raise questions around existing licensing and pricing models. One thing that’s become painfully apparent over the last several years is that the cost of software in this field (whether cPanel, WHMCS, CloudLinux, ZenDesk, etc.) has gone up significantly. Our monthly software bill has nearly quadrupled over that time period, so paying attention to changing business models around software as we commit to providing a cloud-based option to the Reclaim faithful becomes increasingly important. Sometimes you kinda feel a bit like Robotron: the last human defense against the robot revolution 🙂
227,455 – turns out the Phoenix Easter egg wherein you shoot four or five ascending birds to get 200k points + a free guy is true! #yeah! pic.twitter.com/IKwOSrqcTH
As I was playing Phoenixin my foyer, as I am wont to do after work, and something happened I thought I might have hallucinated from my quarter-stealing days in Baldwin, Long Island happened: as the birds were ascending on the second lap of my second run through the game’s stock 4 stages I shot three or four birds in quick succession and was awarded 200,000 points and a second free guy (I believe I already got the first). It was amazing!
I vaguely remembered this was a possibility, but at the same time thought it may have been some kind of 80s video game lore akin to the 13th level in the “Bishop of Battle” episode of Nightmares. Turns out it is true, and it is even documented in the games’s Wikipedia article as a bug:
When the player shoots three birdlike enemies in a row very quickly as they fly upwards, the total score is set to a value in the vicinity of 204,000 points.[17]
Bug or Easter egg? Either way it marks a new high score for me on Phoenix, blowing away my previous 65,610, which to be fair was still my best game to date. Maybe another screenshot of the new hi score is in order 🙂
How about another for posterity?
I kid. But while I do have a freeplay chip for Phoenix I installed recently, I don’t have a hi-score save kit for Phoenix. That means this score vanished after I turned it off, but thanks to a brilliant KLOV community member in the UK a custom hi-score save kit is being made for my Phoenix as I write this. I hope I can reproduce this “bug” and maybe even get to 300K?! One can still dream after 50, right?
About a week ago Hosting Advice published an article featuring Reclaim Hosting. It was pretty cool given it is the second article Hosting Advice published about Reclaim, the first being back in 2016 when we were just getting our legs. It’s interesting to reflect where we are 5 years later, and one of the biggest, most welcome differences is the visibility and leadership of Lauren Hanks in the recent article. The relevance of Reclaim Hosting is premised on the growth of the folks that work with us, and it that regard I believe we are continuing to grow. The Reclaim is really starting to take shape and I believe by year’s end we will be in a position to start being far more pro-active to the demands of growth and scaling, a process made trickier by our insistence on resisting outside funding and investment.
In this regard, the recent article tells a story of a company working to provide new services, while simultaneously preserving a sense of personal service and attention that made us compelling from the start. Forgetting your community and turning your back on what made you relevant to begin with often goes hand-in-hand with venture capital investment, and we have seen it all too regularly in edtech. At the heart of this, at least for me, is the fact that Reclaim Hosting continues to lead with support and follow-up with a promise that cheap or free, while crucial, is not just a way to get your foot in the door or promote open educational resources, it’s a commitment to a community around providing them the tools and resources to build their own world online outside the online architecture of data extraction that everywhere surrounds us:
“I do think there’s a bigger question to be asked about how far we can go with free before it either catches up to us or we’re selling more than just student data, and we’re giving away the farm,” Jim said. “When you’re a hosting company, what’s your responsibility to the sacredness of that data?”
This is Reclaim’s perspective on data monetization — something Jim said he is very proud of.
“We try and keep as much of that outside of the relationship,” he said. “They pay for a service, and that’s what they get. And there’s no additional extraction of information.”
It’s a privilege and an honor to continue to provide a service to the educational community that I’m proud of. It gets me up in the morning and puts a smile on my face. There is no casuistry needed when explaining this: we provide a space of possibility for faculty, students, and staff to build a better web.
It seems like just yesterday I was blabbing about turning 48, but so it goes in blog years. I’ve used this space to track time over the last 16 years or so, and it truly does feel like my site of record. I’ve watched a bunch of folks I grew up with celebrating this landmark passage into old age on Facebook and it seems deeply depressing to me, it’s like having your 50th birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.
Nothing beats the blog, it’s a space where I’m not afraid to admit this was a weird one for me. I’ve spent much of my 40s trying to recover both physically and financially from my 20s and 30s. My 40s ruled, in large part because the scales dropped from my eyes when it came to institutional servitude: I started Reclaim Hosting, left UMW, moved to Italy, spent much more time with my family, and even got into collecting arcade games.
I also came to terms with the fact I don’t have world enough and time and I need to start thinking beyond my EDUPUNK guns. Being sober for almost all of this time helped tremendously, and accepting my manic depression and learning to live with it made me a better husband, father, colleague, and, hopefully, mentor. You’re never cured of your brain, and those of us who regularly struggle to trust it might even become stronger for it. It’s kinda like Venom, you learn to live with, and maybe even control, the alien invader within.
In that sense, the passing of time has been a godsend for accepting my real hard limits as a person and doubling down on what I enjoy (and might even be decent at). But time looms, and while 50 is symbolic and it’s only a number and all that new age shit, I was young once and I know 50 isn’t that. In fact, we live in a delusional moment where we believe enough mountain climbing and dog walking can counter-act our fate, but I know the cold, hard reality is still out there and it tolls for me! I’m honestly not sure what this next set of numbers will bring my way, hence the idea of this being a weird one, but I do hope the personal and professional work I put in over the last decade makes whatever comes my way that much more manageable, or even enjoyable!
50 fucking years old, old man bava and the blog 🙂
It’s been a while since I posted about this semester’s Bob Ross-inspired instantiation of ds106, but, like Luther, I’ve been busy!
Looks like the last weekly video I posted was over a month ago for week 3, so below are the weekly intros from week 4 through week 8 that Paul Bond and I have been producing for the class. I think we have this week off for Fall break, so a good time to catch up. While definitely not high art, I do enjoy doing this 7-8 minute intros weekly. I get to see and breifly comment on student work, produce Paul’s weekly missives, and also play the ornery public access TV produce. That is retirement in a nutshell 🙂
The Joy of ds106: Week 4
The Joy of ds106: Week 5
The Joy of ds106: Week 6
The Joy of ds106: Weeks 7 & 8
I nice element of the last two videos is that with streaming built into Peertube I can simply stream our session from there and an archive lives on at the URL that Paul can then share with the course. It is readily apparent the Paul scripts his stuff and I just parachute in, setup OBS Ninja, and do the recording—but the nice piece is it makes it easy and we can get the whole thing done in 20 minutes tops each week. If you can’t make art, at least make it easy, dammit 🙂
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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.
There is some stream-crossing going on in the Reclaim universes as our most recent shared hosting servers were named after 1980s arcade cabinets. That should keep the server naming fun for a little while, although this switch also serves a practical function. Changing the names of our servers to arcade games like 
It’s crazy to think Reclaim Cloud has been live and available for over a year now; its value to us as a company has been huge in terms of expanding our options. What’s more, it has pushed everyone at Reclaim to step-up their comfort level with managing containers and supporting cloud native applications. It’s a brave new world, and the fact that 
