1-Click Installer for Owncast in Reclaim Cloud

Posted on December 30, 2022 by Reverend

Following-up on yesterday’s post about our Owncast session for the Open Media Ecosystem series, I wanted to quickly highlight that we now have a 1-click installer for Owncast in Reclaim Cloud. I tried it out yesterday, and it is yet another slick installer from Taylor Jadin, he is en fuego!

Animated GIF of Elmo raising his arms triumphantly in front of raging flames

First things first, what is Owncast? It’s free and open source live streaming software that integrates cleanly with production tools like Open Broadcaster Software to stream video to the web. [NB: Reclaim Edtech will host a three session flex course on OBS in the second half of January.] Owncast frames itself as an open source alternative to tools like Twitch, and with more social integrations (including the fediverse) it may be a nice fit for announcing streams across your social spaces. Keep in mind it’s first and foremost a streaming tool, no recording video, no production suite, or anything like that—live streaming and live chat is all. Much of its strength lies in its laser focus on streaming and a simple, elegant interface.

In terms of the installation on Reclaim Cloud, it is really quite simple, as a 1-click installer should be. You search for Owncast in the Marketplace:

Screenshot of the Reclaim Cloud marketplace window with a variety of apps to install and the search box reads Woncast

Search for Owncast in the Reclaim Cloud Marketplace

After that you select to install Owncast and you will see a dialog box asking for the Environment name, display name, and region for installation:

Screenshot of Owncast installer dialog box

Owncast installer dialog box

Once you fill this out and click “Install” the app will start installing.

Screenshot of the Package is being installed please wait dialog box

The Package is being installed please wait dialog box

After about a minute Owncast will be installed and you will get an email with the environment IP address for pointing an A record to if you want a custom domain like cast.bava.tv. The email will also have the default username and password for Owncast, which is admin and abc123 respectively.

Screenshot of Owncast email you receive after installation

Owncast email you receive after installation

Needless to say you should change your password once you logic, and it just so happens it is the same as your secret stream key, which I find convenient. Also, you will notice the email says that if you what a custom domain domain and A record to the listed IP address, what’s more, there is an Add-on in the environment that allows you to add the custom domain and once you do it will automatically issue an SSL certificate, which is very slick!

Screenshot of Owncast domain configuration addon

Owncast domain configuration Add-on

And the next step is super clear, enter the domain name and click change:

Screenshot of Owncast Domain configuration window

Owncast Domain configuration Add-on for changing the domain

The other piece which is quite nice is an Add-on for updating the environment to the latest version, which saves folks a lot of futzing in Docker, which can be a bear if its new to you:

Screenshot of Update Owncast Addon

Update Owncast Add-on

And with that you have the entire installation, and it was so fast for me I almost thought I did something wrong 🙂

In terms of managing Owncast, that is quite simple, you login with admin and abc123 at yourowncastinstall.com/admin URL and the dashboard will have the RTMP and Stream key front and center.

Screenshot of Owncast dashboard with thr RTMP and Stream key front and center,

Owncast dashboard with the RTMP and Stream key front and center

The stream key is also your password for logging in, so I recommend changing that immediately at Configuration–>Server Setup:

Screenshot of Configuration-->Server Setup

Change your stream key/password in the Configuration–>Server Setup window

After that plug your streaming URL and stream key into your OBS software stream settings and you are ready to stream live to the web. There are other features like web hooks for integrating with social sites, live chat that just works, and streaming from S3 buckets, so get in there and play around.

What’s cool about this installer is now we have working 1-click installers for every application we are featuring in the Open Media Ecosystem series: Azuracast, Jitsi, Owncast, and PeerTube. That is pretty awesome, and I think I heard/saw something about a 1-click installer for Mastodon as well, WHAT?!

Screenshot of the marketplace 1-click installer for Mastodon

I spy with my little eye a 1-click Mastodon installer in Reclaim Cloud

Posted in open source, reclaim, Reclaim Cloud, Reclaim Edtech | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Open Media Ecosystem: Owncast

Posted on December 29, 2022 by Reverend

In another installation of the Open Media Ecosystem series run through Reclaim Edtech, Pilot Irwin and I did a stream last week highlighting the virtues of Owncast, a free, open source application for live streaming video. We used the Who, What, When, Where, How and Why approach to providing an overview of Owncast, just like Azuracast, and the verdict was there’s much to love about a small, open tool with a singleness of purpose. Owncast aims to provide a free alternative to Twitch for streaming, and that it does very well. And with momentum around the fediverse growing it may provide a good alternative for live streaming to a distributed community, potentially making monolithic tools like Twitch with restrictive copyright that much less appealing. What’s I love about Owncast is it’s simple interface and straightforward approach to live streaming, but if you watch the short overview session below you’ll hear Pilot and I say as much a lot.

The other cool thing worth noting here is that during this stream Pilot and I mention the possibility of a 1-click installer for Owncast in Reclaim Cloud, and soon after that Taylor Jadin went ahead and created it. So good!

I’ll have a separate post about the Owncast installer on Reclaim Cloud here shortly given I just tested it out, but if you are looking for an elegant and easy tool for live streaming to the web—no recordings, no media production, just streaming—then look no further, Owncast fits the bill quite nicely.

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Cloud, Reclaim Edtech | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

bavachromatosis

Posted on December 29, 2022 by Reverend

We’ll see how much I can reflect on 2022 in the next few days, I still feel like I have to blog about what’s happening now so thinking about 12 months of time might have to happen after the new year, which may save me from publicly committing to resolutions that will become quickly marooned on the bava island of hopes and dreams.

But 2022 was a good year on several fronts, and one I don’t blog about too much here is health. Sometime in early 2019 I got a scare after some routine blood tests showed crazy levels of iron proteins in my blood along with high readings for liver enzymes. I was still going to the doctor in the US when this happened, and driving back from the visit with a prescription for an abdominal scan as well as gastroenterologist visit I remember thinking this this may be the beginning of something else. The levels were high enough that it was impossible for the physician’s assistant to hide their concern, and that concern was contagious. I got to thinking, “Really? The kids are still young. Never been happier at home. Reclaim is getting to a really good place. WTF?!” You can just imagine the mental dramatics of someone caught in traffic on the I95 trying to process what turned out to be a not-so-routine visit. I even started imagining I could feel my liver revolting within me like a grotesque scene from some crazy Cronenberg film. I could swear I felt something above my stomach, which was probably just the expected dread of a moment like this.

Turns out the liver scan was normal and their was no immediate cause for alarm there, so I could hang-up my Walter White plans for a bit. Nonetheless there was something behind these ridiculously high iron levels, but I’m pretty good at burying these concerns if not immediately in danger. In fact, on a visit back to the US a few months later I was telling my sister Kissy, who happens to be a nurse, and after hearing my blood levels she immediately said, “It’s probably hemochromatosis.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but damn if she wasn’t right on the mark. She even told me exactly how it would be treated (phlebotomy) and that if my heart hadn’t been damaged and/or my liver wasn’t shot already, I should be alright. In that short 10 minute conversation in her living room on Long Island I had a blueprint for what was to come—I am still quite impressed by her for that. She was better than any doctor I had seen—and funnier!

And while Kissy’s diagnosis was not yet confirmed, I was still between two health care systems, and had yet to make an appointment with a gastroenterolgist in the remaining six months of 2019. As life took over that never happened and by the time I returned to dealing with it in 2020 the pandemic hit—and I was not going back to the US any time soon. I did finally return in October 2020, but that was a Reclaim Arcade trip and I never did make the time for a doctor’s visit (maybe I was in denial?), but it was still in the back of my head and would occasionally fill me with thoughts of biological dread. 2020 was also the time Antonella and I decided not to return to the US anytime soon, so it would mean I was officially switching to the Italian healthcare system in 2021, and boy was that an awesome choice.

So, at this point it is early 2021, the pandemic was still raging with the Omega strain and things were not opening up on the medical front. I did manage to get my iron and liver enzyme levels tested again in mid 2021, and by this time the iron protein ferritin had doubled to over 2000, so I was now almost 7x over normal limits, which meant the biological dread returned more frequently in 2021. And while the pandemic was still overloading the healthcare system, by the end of that year I managed to get an appointment at a local blood bank to start giving blood given I was still feeling absolutely no symptoms of any kind (sometimes it is linked to fatigue, discolored skin, impotence, etc.). In fact, hemochromatosis can often be asymptomatic, which means if I didn’t get a comprehensive blood test in 2019 that looked at my liver enzymes and ferritin levels I might still be in the dark on this condition.

Once they saw my levels at the blood bank they referred me to a specialist in Verona, and it was at that point in January of 2022 that my sister’s diagnosis was corroborated. They prescribed a test to see if I had the gene given hemochromatosis is often genetic passed on by the parents, and once the gene’s presence was confirmed all my treatment thereafter was 100% free. Socialized healthcare means paying far less than in the barbaric US system, but full blown, idealized communist health care is when you have a rare blood disease and you don’t even pay the 10 euro visit fees. There are some in Trento who bemoan their healthcare system, but I try and assure them that if they had the US model it would only get 1000x more expensive, and as a result that much worse. Civilized health care is reason enough not to go back home. The horror the average American experiences as a result of health care costs and the uncertainty of insurance coverage is evidence of how deeply deleterious the revered practice of profits before people can be to a nation’s soul.

So, for all of 2022 I have given anywhere from 350-500 ml of blood a grand total of 21 times. That averages out to once every 2 and a half weeks for an entire year. My ferritin levels have dropped from 2000 in December of 2021 to 540 in early December 2022. Here’s to hoping by mid-January my ferritin and liver enzyme levels will be normal for the first time in at least 3 years.

One of the fun facts about hemochromatosis is it usually occurs in Northern European men, and based on some internet research Antonella did there is a hypothesis that this genetic mutation was common amongst Celtic warriors anywhere from 1000 to 3000 years ago.* This condition might have developed over many generations to help deal with the large amounts of blood loss suffered in battle. I’m sure there are some finer points to this genetic history I’m missing here, but this does kinda mean I’m a Highlander, and I can lose a lot of blood. For example, I gave blood on average every 2.6 weeks and never got dizzy once. I am a super hero—the true heir apparent to Iron Man! So 2022 was pretty good in that regard, the whole confirming my superhero status and getting carte blanche access to the Italian health system #4life!

_________________________________________

*The scandanavians are arguing it is actually a Viking gene, but given I am of Irish origins I hold with the Celts

Posted in family, health | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Defaulting to the Cloud

Posted on December 28, 2022 by Reverend

Earlier this month I did a session for Reclaim Edtech’s Open Media Ecosystem series on the open source web radio software Azuracast. I also posted about Azuracast’s web hooks that sent notifications to both Twitter and Mastodon when a live broadcast is happening. It’s been an open source media software kinda month for us at Reclaim, so the bava abides.

On the way to documenting changes made to listen.ds106rad.io, I ending up thinking more broadly about how my approach to hosting personal sites has undergone a major shift. I no longer default to cPanel, rather I am pretty much cloud-first all the way!

Screenshot of ds106radio listen page

The listen.ds106rad.io site now hosted on a micro-Apache server on Reclaim Cloud

Until two weeks ago the domain listen.ds106rad.io was pointing to a catch-all cPanel account, and I setup a subdomain for listen.ds106rad.io which hosted the HTML file with the embedded player and an image or two. As I continue to push as many applications from cPanel into Reclaim Cloud as possible,* I wanted to see how easy it would be to spin up an Apache server environment hosting the webpage. It’s probably overkill, but at 1 cloudlet (128MB RAM and 400MHz CPU) it’s also not too crazy.†

Screenshot of Reclaim Cloud interface with with the listen2ds106radio apache server

The listen2ds106radio apache server in Reclaim Cloud

The process was as easy as installing an Apache container, adding the HTML file and images to /var/www/webroot/ROOT opening up port 80 and 443 in the environment firewall and finally getting an SSL certificate (no load balancer necessary). And it worked cleanly, I want to see if I can start playing with virtualhost configuration to figure out how Apache servers manage mapping domains, but this is pretty awesome. It is the early stages of a server to host all my archived HTML sites over the years (there are many now), and if I am trying to go cPanel-less this year so figuring this out will be crucial.

Once I move a site/app into Reclaim Cloud I often find it easier to run DNS through Cloudflare rather than cPanel. I do this not only because I love the Cloudflare interface, but also because it provides everything from proxied SSL certificates to DDoS protection to load balancing to object storage to a global CDN and that’s just a few of the features.‡ In fact, the migration to the Cloud over the last two years has helped me understand that  Cloudflare could stand-in for large swathes of what cPanel does currently.

Screenshot of Cloudflare's DNS interface

Cloudflare’s DNS interface is so beautiful!

In fact, take the case of ds106radio. The main application Azuracast is hosted in a Docker container on Reclaim Cloud; the DNS runs through Cloudflare; the transactional email through Mailgun, and we’re currently setting up S3 storage for hosting backups and  recordings of live broadcasts. The more I play in Reclaim Cloud, the more I begin to understand how the future of Reclaim Hosting could look. While long overdue for my slow brain, it’s still exciting to start finally seeing the outlines of the future.

Reclaim Cloud Add-ons

Reclaim Cloud Add-ons can be thought of as packages of functionality from cPanel on an app-by-app basis

The various pieces, i.e.server (Reclaim Cloud), DNS (Cloudflare), email (Mailgun), and storage (S3), are currently distributed across various services given each does their own bit best—what’s more rather than the kitchen sink approach of cPanel, you can have addons for specific features that you can choose to activate (and pay for) on any givenenvironment as needed. So also should have the ability to manage email, DNS, or storage settings as Addons for any given server environment in Reclaim Cloud, and then go one step further and integrate them to make it possible to select which tool you will use for DNS management, storage, transactional email, etc. (this could also be cPanel, but no longer assumed and defaulted to).

So, for example, you want to install Azuracast on Reclaim Cloud, and then manage the DNS through a Cloudflare addon. After that you can setup email through a Mailgun addon, and then choose whatever S3 provider you use to integrate storage—that’s another addon. All of these pieces are managed using Addons, and keeping them linked to a specific environment helps you remember what service you used for which server/application.

I think a hosting company at this moment—not unlike an edtech—needs to be thinking through how to integrate the best of breed cloud tools into a simple, elegant interface using APIs that will essentially stitch together a next-generation hosting interface. And for the next-gen apps this goes beyond just a one-click installer for the application, it also has to make sure DNS, email, and storage all work. And this is where the one-click Ghost installer Taylor Jadin built really helped me see it all in one place tied to the Reclaim Cloud environment. It is a blueprint for making these traditionally difficult-to-install next-gen Cloud apps far more accessible, and the addons at the environment level is where you can naturally integrate all the other pieces traditionally offloaded to cPanel, DNS, Email, version updates, and storage quotas to name just a few.

Screenshot of addons in Reclaim Cloud

Addons for a Ghost 1-click isntaller in Reclaim Cloud that helps you manage Mailgun, DOmain configuration, and an easy container update.

We have talked about this at length with the idea of Domains 2.0 and trying to abstract out the hosting process to try and understand what people need rather than defaulting to registering a domain and then immediately driving folks into cPanel. What if the interface  was more contextual (tied together by APIs from other services) that can communicate with your DNS records, have bucket keys for storing files, and see what mail records exist for a given domain. I understand that what I am saying here and what Taylor has done for Ghost is not the same thing, but for me it represents a path forward to explore what Domains 2.0 might look like if Reclaim Cloud were the default, not cPanel.

I think the other piece worth discussing at length, and I will save it for my next post, is how this shift to the cloud effects hosting costs. It has been my experience that this approach can get expensive quickly, but the other side of that is that process becomes that much better and what’s possible that much greater that it seems worth it, at least for me given my day job.

Image of a white board with the early blueproint for DOmains API

White board with the early blueprint for a container-driven Domains API

All of which reminds me of when Tim and I met Kin and Audrey at Emory University in 2014 or so. We were chatting at the hotel, and Kin recounted his early server admin days when he discovered AWS (and soon after understood the power of the API) and the hook was that it is scalable infrastructure that you would only pay for what you use. But as he noted, it was so flexible and so much was possible in terms of replication, increased uptime, and generally tinkering with how the next generation of server infrastructure works that it ended up costing more, but everyone was happy because there was no downtime, while more and more infrastructure could be automated and managed remotely. In 2014 I was just trying to wrap my head around something Kin had been working on for years, and as always he was graceful and generous with everything he knew. In fact, later that year Tim and I asked Kin to help us map out the long road towards a container-driven hosting service managed using APIs, and I think that vision is aging well, and with Reclaim Cloud as robust as ever I know one thing I’ll be thinking a lot about in 2023: defaulting to the Cloud!

_______________________________________

* It’s been two years since I moved the bava.blog and the main ds106.us sites to Reclaim Cloud, and the experience has been great in terms of performance and management.

† Especially once I figure out how to automate virtual hosts so I can map domains and host numerous flat HTML sites from this one server, or basically reproduce the tilde space approach for my archived sites.

‡In many ways Cloudflare represents various pieces of the hosting panel for the next-generation of web applications, and it would be smart to figure out how to integrate, rather than try and reproduce, their features through Reclaim Cloud. An integration between Virtuozzo and Cloudflare for Reclaim Cloud driven by a series of API calls that would allow folks to use it seamlessly with Reclaim Cloud would be a worthy goal. I have much more to say about Cloudflare in the coming posts and beyond, but suffice it to say in this long footnote that there will be a day as soon as next year where all my web properties will be hosted in Reclaim Cloud with the DNS managed in Cloudflare and the email running through Mailgun.

Posted in docker, ds106radio, reclaim, Reclaim Cloud | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Here’s to 17 Years on the bava….

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Reverend

…and all the irreparable joy it has brought me!

We were chatting about blogging in the Reclaim Edtech meeting on Wednesday when it occurred to me that I missed bavatuesdays’ 17th orbit around the web. December 13th is this blog’s birthday. Seventeen gott damned years!  I’m not sure I’ve done t0o many other things as consistently and for as long as I’ve blogged. There has been a post at least once a month, every month since December 2005. By year’s end I’ll hit my 3700th blog post, and have over 16,000 comments.

There’s some serious mileage on this site, and I have said it before and I’ll say it again, I pretty much owe any pathetic semblance of a career I have mustered in the last 20 years to this space. That’s why I remain a true believer in the open web; I have experienced its power in my own work. Continually sowing ideas like seeds on this site, working tirelessly to help them germinate, and then sharing the fruit with those who would bite from the bava apple.

The bava.blog continues to be a happy home for sharing thoughts, championing the work of others, and documenting all the things I would otherwise forget. In many ways blogging is a quotidian affair: they’re often not big ideas and many are arguably forgettable, but the habit of reflecting regularly by writing has been transformative. And for me the blog has always represented a liberation from academic writing—a prison house of language I had been stuck in for almost a decade during grad school. If you think my writing is bad now, you should have read my grad school papers 🙂

I still struggle with some of the basics of writing, and I think part of what attracts me to it is that it’s always been so damn hard for me. I’ve learned that if I continue to try and cobble together a sentence that captures an experience or idea sooner or later one will hit. There are certainly more pricks than kicks, but it’s all worth it when I am able to bring forth one cogent thought that resonates with a couple of other people, it’s a deep reminder of how hard we have to psychically work to try and connect with one another—and I’m not interested in trading that for the tempting convenience of offloading the work. In many ways it’s all we have.

But there I go philosophizing  again. The simple point is this blog has been very, very good to me. The least I can do is write a post every twelve months to remind myself that the scribblings in this virtual notebook are a kind of small life’s work that is prosaic enough to be easily forgotten, but remarkable enough to potentially intersect—however briefly—with another life’s vector. There’s a magic in that banality that I don’t ever want to take for granted.

Why blog? Because there is faith in a seed. #4life

Posted in bavatuesdays, blogging | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Reclaim Open: Webs Past, Present, and Future

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Reverend
Image of Reclaim Open Art

Reclaim Open Art

I don’t think I have posted yet about Reclaim Open, so let me fix that now and forever! Reclaim Hosting‘s 4th bi-annual conference will take place next year on June 5th, 6th, and 7th in Fredericksburg, VA. As luck and planning would have it, the event coincides with our 10th anniversary as a company, so we decided to go back to where it all started: UMW! To make the deal that much sweeter, there will also be an anniversary/birthday bash at Reclaim Arcade to celebrate this momentous occasion.

Image of Reclaim Arcade

But if you are still not convinced to make the journey, my final plea will be to join us not only for a 3-day event (1 for the un-conference, two for the show, three for the celebration let’s go, go, go), but also be part of a micro-history in the making as we’ll be coordinating a DIY documentary to try and capture the past/present/future of the open web as lived and witnessed by many of the folks on the ground. For example, it would be a lot of fun to bring together a panel of folks from UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) during the Web 2.0 years to help anchor that moment of the web and acknowledge its importance for the very existence of Reclaim Hosting, right?

Andy Rush may or may not be involved 🙂

I’m absolutely thrilled for this, not only is it akin to a homecoming, but the prospect of re-connecting with so many amazing people that we’ve collaborated with over the years is truly exciting. In the new year we will also begin announcing three brilliant keynotes speakers, each of whom will be focusing on one of the three temporal conditions of our event, namely past, present, and future of the open web. It’s going to be an event for the ages, even accounting for my bias. If you have attended any of our previous events you know there is a there there, and we will bring our A-game x10 because this represents the culmination of a decade of Reclaiming. And if the Fediverse is any indicator, we’re all just getting started on yet another reclaiming journey, if I may be so bold, sir. I hope to see you there, and you can read more about it and submit a session through our absolutely stunning conference website–the combination of a Lauren Hanks design with Bryan Mathers art is formidable!

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Open | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

WordPress Backups in Reclaim Cloud

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Reverend
Screenshot of WordPress Back-up Addon Interface

WordPress Back-up Addon Interface

I recently wrote up a support guide that outlines how to backup a WordPress environment in Reclaim Cloud. We already take regular nightly backups of all environments that are  kept for 14 days, but those can only be restored upon request.

Screenshot of backup server setup dialogue box

Reclaim Cloud backup server setup dialogue box

With this approach you can manage backups based on your specific needs. Whether it’s hourly, weekly (or even a specific day of the week), monthly, etc., it’s all possible. Add to that on-demand backups if, for example, you need to test something in the moment and want a quick and easy method to restore if things go south. And there is no two-week limit as with the automatic backups, you control how long they stay around. This tool comes in really useful for folks who want to manage their own backups, and the additional insurance is never a bad thing.

Screenshot of Reclaim Cloud WordPress backup server options dialogue box

Reclaim Cloud WordPress backup server options

Having working backups has been one of the essential elements of keeping Reclaim Hosting running as smoothly as it does. And while not always the sexiest topic, I always feel better knowing they’re around. We can also use Jetbackup in Reclaim Cloud environments for an additional licensing and storage cost which also allows for on-demand backups, what’s more they would happen in a completely different data center to ensure even further redundancy. That would be a nice addition to the current feature in Reclaim Cloud, allowing folks to backup and restore from (and possibly to) a different region in the unlikely event the entire data center is offline. This does overlap a bit with some of the WordPress multiregion hosting we have been doing at Reclaim Hosting this year, and while we can setup region-by-region backup servers for a multi-region environments, they’re still tied to the region the instance lives it—to have these backup environments be region-agnostic across our cloud servers would be pretty badass.

Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Cloud, WordPress | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Azuracast Webhook for Mastodon

Posted on December 20, 2022 by Reverend

While I have been moving house to Mastodon over the past month, I knew I would be missing the ds106radio tweets announcing someone going live. That bot was created by UMW student Aaron Clemmer in Sping of 2011, and has been doing its thing for more than 10 years with 134,000 tweets since.

ds106radio twitter profile

ds106radio twitter profile

In 2020 when we moved ds106radio to Azuracast, Tim did some surgery on the bot to keep it working with the new application (we were previously using Airtime). The bot notifies Twitter whenever someone goes live or plays a new track is played, but the trick is it only needs to send notifications when someone is broadcasting live. When no one is live the station falls back to WFMU and none of that is sent as a notification—if it did it would be a very loud account. Yet another functional relic from the most awesome course ever!

To be clear about the details of Tim’s intervention mentioned above, the web hooks available in Azuracast integrate with Twitter and post whenever a new song is played or a new DJ goes live. The issue for us with that is it posts everything, not only when a DJ goes live on ds106radio, but also all songs and DJs when the stream defaults back to WFMU. As mentioned before, that would be way too noisy. So Tim wrote a script that bypasses the Twitter web hook and call a PHP file that has code that only posts to Twitter when someone goes live and when a new song plays—everything else is muted. That works great for Twitter, but what about Mastodon?

Image of webhook interface in Azuracast

Webhook interface in Azuracast

I looked at Tim’s code, but not only was that for Twitter, but I am not a programmer so even if it did translate there’s no way I could do anything with it. At the same time I noticed the lead developer of Azuracast, Buster Neece, announced they built-in web hook support for Mastodon. I checked that new feature out by upgrading to the latest release candidate, but it was not full featured yet. So, given this is an open source app and Azuracast has a Discord community I reached out to see if this was in development and if the ds106radio community could help fund it, literally within days the web hook for Mastodon not only had all the features we needed (namely posting only when a DJ goes live and the metadata changes for a live stream). But even cooler, the Twitter web hook that existed for Azuracast also got these new features, making Tim’s script to no longer necessary. So good!

"Live only" option for both Mastodon and Twitter webhook in Azuracast

“Live only” option for both Mastodon and Twitter web hook in Azuracast

The Azuracast web interface makes it easy to integrate with Mastodon, and you can customize the messages that go out pretty seamlessly.

Web Hook for Mastodon

So now I integrate Azuracast with the Mastodon account for @ds106radio on the social.ds106.us server and I am once again in tune with the mighty ds106radio!

Posted in ds106radio, ds106social | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Open Media Ecosystem: Azuracast

Posted on December 19, 2022 by Reverend

Open Media Ecosystem blitz hosted by Reclaim Edtech kicked off last week. Amanda Schmidt and I got the series started by highlighting the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and Hows of the free and open source software Azuracast. You can watch this session that not only features how to install Azuracast on Reclaim Cloud, but also the impressive interface for radio broadcasting from the browser using WebDJ. The series is meant as an overview of several open source software projects dealing with media, and Azuracast is near and dear to my heart given it has been powering ds106radio since 2020.

What’s more, we just worked with the Azuracast’s creator and primary developer, Buster Neece, to further develop the webhook for Mastodon so that we could integrate ds106radio more cleanly with yet with another open source media ecosystem! More on the Mastodon in January, February, and March…but no spoilers just yet!

Posted in ds106radio, open source, reclaim, Reclaim Edtech | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Galaxian gets T-Molding, Wheels and a Good Clean-up

Posted on December 14, 2022 by Reverend

T-Molding on Galaxian

I have a couple of video games that are undergoing full cabinet restoration work, namely Moon Patrol and Venture, and they should be finished up before Christmas. But being the paragon of efficiency that I am,  I squeezed in a third quick refurbishing project of the Galaxian cabinet. This was not nearly extensive as the other two projects, and was born of my trying to quickly remove the pale blue T-molding in order to replace it with lime green, which is what I remember as the original trim finish.*

Image of Galaxian cabinet with glued in t-modling

Galaxian cabinet with glued in T-molding

When I started to remove the T-molding I learned it was glued in, and what was previosuly a presentable game quick became rough around the edges, literally.

Galaxian T-Molding

Now I understand why you never want to glue T-molding, taking it out was becoming next to impossible without chewing up the edges, which would only make things worse. So I stopped and brought in the professionals, namely Alberto!

Alberto took a look and told me he has a router tool with a saw-like blade he can adjust to cut out the old T-molding and replace it with the lime green beauty. I was more than happy to let him work his magic, and  he did!

And with that the new T-molding was installed:

Galaxian with New T-Molding

And while he had it in his workshop I asked him to put in on wheels (they’re proving to be absolutely clutch in the bavacade) that can be hidden behind an added base made of 2x4s:

Galaxian Project

He also did a nice job cleaning-up on the cabinet overall, in addition to repairing the side of the coin box:

Galaxian Coin box housing Clamps

This Galaxian was already in good shape, but now it’s just about mint. I have the original feet should someone want to remove the added base and replace the wheels in the future, but I plan on getting every game I have on wheels at some point, it just makes moving these things around that much easier.

Galaxian Project: Original Feet

Galaxian Project: original Feet

And after putting it all back together in a couple of hours, I now have it in the foyer alongside Dig Dug, Pac-man, and Donkey Kong Jr. Quite a classic line-up!

Galaxian Project: It's Working!

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*Although I imagine it may have had more than one color given the immense popularity of the game.

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