Hitting an Open Source Update Trifecta

Posted on October 24, 2023 by Reverend

One of the things I have been working on recently is stitching together a bunch of open source tools for an online “Oblivion University,” if you will. I’ll write about that more in another post,  but I just wanted to note here that last weekend I decided to try updating three of the open source tools that will be part of this setup: namely Mastodon, Azuracast, and PeerTube —open media ecosystem anyone? And a crazy think happened, they were all successful!

Adrian, I did it!

I’ve been using Mastodon for almost a year now, and also running a few servers for just about as long. I’m really enjoying the mellow pace of that social space. The scale and scope are quite manageable, and even better the software is constantly improving. The most recent update to version 4.2.0 was a big one with a ton of features, and I must say the updates happened without issue on all three servers I currently maintain. The instances are running on top of a Debian VPS in Reclaim Cloud (RC), but I’m getting interested in what a move to Docker for any one of them might look like given I think that will make the process that much easier.

A nice part of running this infrastructure in RC is that I can clone these environments seamlessly, test the upgrades, and if all is good run them on production. Been doing that regularly ensures they work, and guarantees less stress for sure. The commitment to running a Mastodon instance for 30+ people is a bit more overhead then other apps like my blog because if stuff breaks, others will immediately feel it—so I’ve tried to be careful. But with the cloning tool in RC (and regular backups!) Reclaim Hosting has the technology shored up and has run our small corner of the federated social web without too many issues thus far.

The there is my favorite social network, the mighty ds106radio, which is #4life. Far from mission critical software, it has managed to hang around for near on 13 years. I use nightly builds for this when upgrading, so a successful upgrade can been elusive, but last weekend I hit the jackpot and it worked seamlessly. This application is hosted in Docker, and the upgrade was two commands and done.

cd /var/azuracast
./docker.sh update-self
./docker.sh update

Dead simple, and it has been working flawlessly. In fact, the web dj feature even works for the first time ever, so ds106radio is in prime shape for the day-long Halloween show Reclaim is planning most of the day October 31. That show will be on another upgraded instance of Azuracast, namely Relcaim Radio: https://listen.reclaimrad.io

Finally, I gave upgrading PeerTube a shot given I was on a roll, and this is another Docker instance that was seamless to upgrade, three commands and done:

cd /your/peertube/directory
docker-compose pull
docker-compose down -v
docker-compose up -d

The value of Docker for seamless updates was all too apparent for me after going from a VPS instance of Mastodon to Docker-driven images for Azuracast and PeerTube, I really need to experiment with a Dockerized Mastodon instance sooner than later, I mean we even have an installer.

Posted in Azuracast, ds106radio, Mastodon, PeerTube | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Bava GTO

Posted on October 20, 2023 by Reverend

One of the most talked about sessions of Reclaim Open in June was Tom Woodward’s “Your website is a slow, bloated, carbon-belching monstrosity.” I know this because our session on Reclaim Cloud went up against it, and it did not end well for us 🙂 It is a session we want to re-visit with Tom, and one I think about a lot because my site is the big bloated, carbon-belching monstrosity he warns against. I’m not gonna lie, I do kinda love that my site is a 70s muscle car, but at the same time I know they appeal and relevance is dated. Anyway, regardless of all that (or maybe because of it) my site is a super charged GTO thanks to my mult-region setup under the hood with a Cloudflare caching and optimizing delivery setup that makes it an untouchable, aerodynamic beast of a site.  It will make short work of Tom’s zeitgeist Prius off the starting line as we street race for web credit. Hell, I can even use images, which he can’t for fear of the bava!

Bring it on, Woodward! NOBODY!!!

Posted in bavatuesdays, fun | 4 Comments

Highs and Lows

Posted on October 19, 2023 by Reverend

Whew, where do I start? The last 6 weeks or so has been a bit of a roller coaster. For all the obvious reasons: Lauren departing, semester starting, bavacade polishing, life happening, staring into Oblivion,  etc. But I also had the brilliant idea of brining on a new platform (ReclaimPress) and making a big migration push (necessary). Yeah….ambitious.

Since some time after September 1st up to this moment has been a weird, haze-like fever-dream of work, punctuated with some moments of escape. Craziest of all, a part of me has been feeding off the energy. There are few things more gut-wrenching in our line of work then a server offline or a migration gone wrong, and we had a twofer the last few days that I may have just dug us out of. As things got more intense so do my moods, and I have been battling the mania, trying to stay grounded and not give in to going sleepless for days and winding myself up into a ball of insanity. But the taste of it now is so sweet, that it is almost hard to resist. I’ve been walking that minefield carefully, and with some much needed drugs and a little help from my friends, I’m still here!

But it has been an interesting series of highs and lows, that mirror my mental state. I mean in terms of highs: more then a couple of big migrations went super smooth—almost to the point of surprising; the arcade is nearing on perfection in every way; amazing trip to Veneto to see Veronese in a Palladian villa; some side-of-desk experimentation with offloading media to S3 and using Cloudfront (new and exciting for me) to server over alias domain; interest in our .edu hosting continues to grow; we may have had the best community chat ever at Reclaim yesterday; and hiring Jason Teitelman (an amazing addition to Reclaim) and bringing in Maren Deepwell as a consultant to save my working soul; and that is just to name a few things.

But the lows, that sense of dread (but also feeding off it) when the migrations I carefully planned go south and folks are rightfully unhappy. I used to be able to use Tim and Lauren as body armor in these moments, but that is not the case anymore. The team stepped-up as they always do, but in moments like these you begin to question your own value, and that can be a deep, dark hole to crawl out of. One that impacts my family more than anyone given my work and my life are fused, there is no separation, there is no health, there is just bava. Sometimes that can get scary, but I’m feeling the lows ebb and the highs ground out a bit. And the self-awareness that I know this is part of how my brain works and it can be harnessed and directed is truly magical, it is the closest thing to a sense of wisdom I have come away with in these 52 years. I’m in search for a milder mental sine wave to ride through the rest of October, and beyond, and maybe, just maybe, get that perfect arcade I have been chasing 🙂

Posted in blogging, It Came from the Bava, learning | 9 Comments

Elevator Action Project Update

Posted on October 19, 2023 by Reverend

I’m pretty excited about how the Elevator Action project is coming along (a harbor during the storm). I’ve only done one other stencil before this, my first real project Scramble, and I must say working with stencils on these machines is pretty fun, it’s like grown-up art class. I use a fine paint roller, so my work is never going to be perfect compared to the compressor kids, but it’s close enough to fool some. Anyway, on with the picture show.
The original cabinet was the green on green Taito classic that housed Jungle Hunt and Jungle King, and folks on KLOV note many Elevator Action cabinets lived in this colored cabinet given they were designed to be interchangeable for games—so purity and originality, as always, is a slippery slope. That said, this color guide I found on Flickr for classic Taito machines tries to match color combos with games, and I love it:

Just Brian’s Classic Taito Color Guide

You’ll notice Elevator Action and Wild Western have all but identical color schemes, and Tin Star and Frontline are pretty darn close. So, I designed to start from scratch and prime over the original Jungle Hunt/King cabinet after water damage repair.

Jungle Hunt Cabinet for Elevator Action

Original Jungle Hunt cabinet I got Elevator Action with

Cabinet repaired and primed, you can just make up the original art

After Alberto did his work, highlighted above, I had a clean slate to work with, but the issue was I had no definite color match. I looked high and low online, but did not get any solid color codes for the original Elevator Action, so Antonella and I went to the local professional paint store with some images of an original Elevator Action machine and studied. The guy who worked there was super helpful, and we decided on a rosy brown for the base, which you can see below:

I wasn’t sure it was a perfect match, so when I started masking for the first side of stencil work, it was with some trepidation.

Elevator Action Project

 

Elevator Action Project

But I committed, and it was gorgeous, fearing the dark orangish brown for the Taito design was too orange, I once again hep my breath, but….

Elevator Action Project

Elevator Action Project

…it was beautiful!

Elevator Action Project

Elevator Action Project

I’m sure it is not “exact” and using a roller left some clean-up work, but the cabinet is absolutely gorgeous, another off-the-line game in the bavacade.

Elevator Action Reproduction Control Panel

And to double-down, I had brought back a reproduction of the metal base of the control panel, and picked up a new version of the control panel overlay art. Some might say, “why?” Well, because the one the existing one was not only a reproduction, but it was a crappy one. Take a look at the following two images, the first is the control panel overlay art that I have now, the second the one I will be applying to the new control panel to make it more perfect in every way:

Elevator Action Project

Crappy control panel reproduction I was saddled with

Elevator Action Project

New control panel art with so much more detail

So the new control panel art is exciting, and given both the bezel and the marquee are the original glass, this game is the shiznit.

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade, video games | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Oblivion University!

Posted on October 17, 2023 by Reverend

I could say more, but who has the time—not to mention, who would listen?

Posted in digital storytelling | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Coming Full CUNY Circle

Posted on October 10, 2023 by Reverend

One of the projects I have been working on for the last two weeks is migrating the old gold WordPress Multisite platform for the Macaulay Honors College. The Eportfolios platform has been around for near on 15 years, and has thousands of sites, almost one terabyte of data, and a massive, unruly database—only consolation is it’s not sharded. We’re currently migrating the instance from Digital Ocean to ReclaimPress as part of a broader migration project the company is undertaking. This site was prioritized because the database was so resource-intensive when we started hosting it 8 years ago, that we had to run the database in its own server, which is currently an outdated Ubuntu instance that needs to be retired. So, we took this opportunity to update the server and bring the database back in the fold within a scalable, containerized environment on our Cloud.

In fact, that process is all but done, we’ll make the final DNS switch this morning, and all things being equal (fingers crossed!) the migration and consolidation of the venerable Macaulay Eportfolios onto ReclaimPress will be complete. The full circle piece comes in here, sure I took on this migration to run ReclaimPress through its paces, offload the nearly 1 TB of storage to S3 (I love that stuff), get more servers off Digital Ocean, and manage what I knew to be a particularly unique server setup. But the other big reason I took this on is Macaulay is where I got started as an educational technologist. While a perpetual student at CUNY’s Grad Center I got the Instructional Technology Fellow (ITF)  position to pay some of the bills after having just left my job as an English teacher at Brooklyn’s Clara Barton High School. I was a newly minted father, and the stresses of grad school, a new family, and the impossibility of living in New York City were catching up to me. The ITF position seemed practical because you got a free Macbook as part of the deal, and it was not too much overhead, something about doing things with computers and teaching. I knew some basic HTML and I needed the supplemental income (and the time it freed up) to double-down and finish the Ph.D. so I could get on with my life….little did I know that the ITF position would become my life.

As part of the ITF position I discovered WordPress and MediaWiki and the scales fell from my eyes, it was as if a brave new world of platforms had finally arrived to up-end the drab, florescent-lighted spaces of online learning environments. It all seemed so clear after playing for a just a small while, and the fact it was all open source and could be self-hosted was the clincher. I mean, that is literally now my job, and I am migrating the WordPress platform for Macaulay that was the epicenter of so much of the ITFs work over the last 15 years. Sadly, the ITF program was discontinued not too long ago, but that program gave birth to a whole generation of educators and ed techs that had to confront the impact of the changing world of web-based technology on higher ed—it was a program that asked Ph.D. students to think about an intersection that would quickly become crucial to the very soul of the academy—a struggle still very much playing out as I write this.

CUNY was a lot of things to me, it taught me how to teach, it introduced me to an amazing cohort of fellow travelers and life-long friends, it hooked me on edtech, and it even introduced me to my special lady friend. I mean the roots run deep, and in many ways I cannot have arrived at this moment wherein I type these words on this blog getting a paycheck from Reclaim Hosting without having been there and done that at America’s premiere no-bullshit city university system. Sure the bureaucracy and sheer scale of CUNY is insane, but it changed my life, and for that I’m forever grateful. While some of it was luck, place, and timing, just as much was folks working in that system (namely George Otte, Steve Brier, Luke Waltzer, and Zach Davis) creating an opportunity for others to take a peek into the future and see what’s possible. There is no greater educational experience, and this migration (if it works) will be proof of that 🙂

Posted in e-portfolios, Instructional Technology, reclaim, ReclaimPress, s3 | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Cheyenne Rides Again!

Posted on October 9, 2023 by Reverend

Crossbow in Cheyenne

In my last bavacade repair log I was all but certain Cheyenne was going to be on the bench indefinitely given power issues. But as it happens, Cheyenne rides again in the bavacade thanks to a fairly simple fix of identifying and repairing a shorted wire going from the pwoer supply to the monitor. At some point during its long slumber—this game has been out of rotation for at least 8 month—a taped wire seems to have come undone and was shorting the circuit and blowing a fuse. I unplugged everything going into the power supply (coin door, monitor, interlock switch, and the game board) and then plugged them in again one-by-one to figure out which one blows the fuse. It was the monitor wire, and I knew this because it wasn’t even connected to the chassis. So, after that I inspected the wire and saw the electrical taped area exposed with some slight burn, so repaired that and plugged it back in and…..magic!

Cheyenne

Now the discerning eye will realize that this cabinet is running a Crossbow board in a Cheyenne cabinet, the two games are essentially interchangeable and I enjoy both games a lot, but the campaign/choose-your-adventure aesthetic of Crossbow makes it special.

Crossbow in Cheyenne

You can also see in particular scenes from Crossbow how it borrows the desert graphics from Cheyenne. I would really love to get a Crossbow cabinet as well, which would have, you guessed it, a crossbow rather than a rifle as the control panel interface.

Cheyenne

But these Exidy cabinets are big, and the way the power supplies work is unique to say the least. In fact, the other game game that gave me all sorts of issues for months was also an Exidy cabinet: the ever amazing Venture! I do love these cabinets, but they also are a lot of work. I had the 440 dev kit in this one to allow a single cabinet to play multiple games, but the GAL chip went bad and caused some of my board issues. If I ever find the time, I would like to see if I can get that kit repaired, but we’ll see.

Exidy 440 Dev Kit on Cheyenne

At this point this game is working really well, which puts me a K4600 chassis away from perfection, a fully functioning arcade—maybe by week’s end? We’ll see, but I will take this win for now, there is something truly gratifying about bringing a game back that has been out of commission for a good, long while.

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

bavacade Repair Log 10-04-2023

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Reverend

Last month was almost as busy on the bavacade front as it was on the hosting front. I’ve been using the arcade projects to balance my inclination to become totally consumed by the day-to-day at Reclaim, but then I become totally consumed by the cabinets—so not sure it is much therapy in the end 🙂 That said, there is a great sense of satisfaction in taking the machines apart, cleaning the various parts, repairing and painting the cabinet, and then putting them on wheels. There is a sense of hope in breathing new life into these golden-age arcade cabinets.

Bavacade classics

bavacade classics

At this point I can disassemble or re-assemble a game in about an hour or so, sometimes even re-assembling a game without referencing the pictures I took as visual aides—no small feat for this hack. I’m just a handful of games away from having disassembled and re-assembled every game in the collection, which means they’ve almost all been fully restored and put on wheels. For the time being I’m not touching the three Sidam bootleg machines manufactured in Italy given they’re all but mint already, but they may be the final candidates for wheels once the rest are finished.

Here are some of the bavacade projects:

Painting and re-assembling Yie-Ar Kung-fu, for which the new art is being printed by one of Miles’s friends and will be my first custom cabinet, very excited for this one. Major kudos to Bryan Mathers for the unbelievably awesome side art he created for this one.

Yie-Ar Kung-Fu

Yie-Ar Kung-fu (originally a Defender cabinet) painted and preppped for new side art

Yie-Ar Kung-Fu Waiting for Custom Art

Yie-Ar Kung-Fu Waiting for Custom Art

I completely disassembled and re-assembled Joust, and Alberto did some minor touch-up work and put it on wheels. I then got the brown matched and gave it a coat of paint and I must say it came out beautifully, yet another “like new” machine in the bavacade.

Joust Reassembly

Re-assembling Joust

Joust Looking sharp!

Joust looking sharp!

Disassembled and re-assembling Defender, and Alberto put this legend on wheels. Like Joust, this one is gorgeous, nothing a little touch-up paint can’t heal.

Restored Defender Cabinet

Freshly painted Defender Cabinet

When re-assembling Defender I gave the original power supply a hose down to clean it up, and then let it dry-out for about 3 days in the sun.

Freshly Washed Defender Power Supply

Freshly Washed Defender Power Supply

After re-assembling the game I was having issues with the image not showing on the monitor. Turns out the FPGA board on this game is having issues with delivering the image (tested it on Stargate to confirm).

Defender with a then-working FPGA Board

The then-working FPGA Board in Defender

The original Defender board set worked, although eventually gave a RAM error as all Williams games will, so I need to hunt down that issue. But, in the interim, swapping out the FPGA board that was in Stargate worked a treat and Defender plays fine.

Joust and Defender side-by-side

Joust and Defender side-by-side

With this working and another FPGA board on the way, thanks to the great Tim Owens, I’ll have a completely restored Williams collection featuring Moon Patrol, Make Trax, Robotron, Joust, Stargate, and Defender. All like new and all on wheels.

Super Cobra

Super Cobra touched-up and on wheels

I also did a quick clean-up and added wheels to the venerable Scramble sequel Super Cobra. Alberto finished this one super fast, and the cabinet was already mint, so just some touch-up paint and re-assembly and this one was good to go.

Jungle Hunt Cabinet for Elevator Action

Jungle Hunt cabinet that houses Elevator Action

Being a glutton for punishment, I started another big project which will be a complete overhaul of Elevator Action. It’s one of my favorite games in the collection, and not an easy one to find in good shape. When Alberto dropped off Super Cobra he picked-up Elevator Action and has already gone to work on it. It’s actually a Jungle Hunt cabinet that had some significant water damage, and the backdoor was an absolute mess, so I decided to have him clean-up the extensive water damage and refinish the sides of the cabinet so I can re-paint the classic Taito design to the original Elevator Action browns.

Jungle Hunt/Elecator Action Restructuring

Taito cabinet being restructured

Jungle Hunt/Elecator Action Restructuring

I was reluctant to remove the original Taito art, but I decided to commit to a complete overhaul. The classic Taito side art stencil is on order from This Old Game and I’ll be matching the colors so it will remain consistent in spirit, if not original in fact. Additionally, the control panel overlay for this game is a terrible reproduction, so I bought a new metal control panel on KLOV and a control panel overlay from This Old Game to try and raise the quality of the entire machine. The board, bezel and marquee are original, but the side art and control panel will be more recent, high quality additions. This will be a project for sure, but should be done in the next month or two—all things being equal.

Jungle Hunt/Elecator Action Original Back Door Lock Mechanism

Jungle Hunt/Elevator Action Original Back Door Lock Mechanism

After Elevator Action is done, that leaves just Cheyenne, Pole Position, and Scramble to put on wheels (not including the Sidam games). I can see the finish line!

Speaking of Cheyenne and Scramble, the original power supply issues continue. I was able to get a switching power supply with a Stern adapter for Scramble to fix that game while Roberto looks at the original power supply. Turns out Super Cobra is using the same switching power supply, which means the original Stern board for that game might also need to be repaired.

Scramble Swirching Power Supply

Stern switching power supply for Scramble and Super Cobra

Last week I finally got one of the two Hanterex Polo chassis back, which was the last step to getting Cheyenne back up and running. But, alas, when I turn it on the game it keeps blowing the 5 AMP slo-blow fuse on the power supply, so I need to figure out where the short is happening. The Exidy power supplies are an absolute nightmare, so not sure how this will end, but it does dampen the prospect of bringing Cheyenne back online in the immediate future 🙁

Centuri Classics

Centuri Classics

Beyond that, the only thing between Cheyenne and a fully functioning fleet of games is a K4600 chassis cap kit for Challenger, and I’ll try and get that done sometime here soon. I’ve been circling perfection for two years now, and I’ll never give up until that box is checked—if only for a day.

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade, video games | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Remember to Reclaim September

Posted on September 25, 2023 by Reverend

It’s been a month, the new semester is in full force and I am just coming up for some air. I’ve a bunch to share in more detail, but this post will be a bit of a summary of highlights to help me get get back in the groove (and doubling as a blog to-do list). So anyway, time to blog!

Thank you, Reclaim

Lauren Hanks has left the Reclaim building! After eight amazing years, Lauren is moving on and we’re thrilled for her and the new adventures that await. That said, anyone who knows Lauren understands how big a loss this is for Reclaim. She was old gold Reclaim through-and-through and her presence will be missed terribly. There’s more to say on this, but all I can say for now is thank you, Lauren, for showing up every day and ruling all.

ReclaimPress Logo

I think I’ve been using the development of a forthcoming product, ReclaimPress, as a way to avoid dealing with Lauren’s departure. Intense work cures many a woe, and ReclaimPress has been a lot of fun to play with.  In short, ReclaimPress is just WordPress. If you want to get up and running with a just WordPress without the overhead of cPanel, this is a great solution, and I think we can price it so that the costs are comparable with shared hosting. What’s more, from this space you can scale from hobby project to enterprise grade without ever moving your instance. Containerized WordPress hosting with a slick user interface is coming to Reclaim, and that is a beautiful thing.

Bryan Mathers Art for the Win!

And as always, we have Bryan Mathers doing his magic with the art. That needs to be its own post given it will help me flesh out ReclaimPress a bit better—as his art always does—so stay tuned for more.

ReclaimPress Dashboard

Part of how I play with any new platform we stand-up is moving as many of my own sites to the new space as possible. This helps me work out any kinks and generally get a sense of the experience we’re providing our community. So, as you might have guessed, this blog is now hosted on ReclaimPress, as is both ds106.us and daily.ds106.us. You can see from the image above I not only have this blog running in two regions (bavamulti-1 on the West Coast of the US and bavamulti-2 in Canada), but now ds106.us is also running as a multi-region—progress!

bryanmmathers.com was the first of the three to come over

After getting comfortable with my own sites in ReclaimPress, I started working with some select folks to help me test the new space. In particular, Bryan Mathers was intrigued while creating the art work, and he has a few sites running on our shared hosting that could use a performance boost. So, we moved them over to ReclaimPress and it seems to be a very good fit thus far, plus his sites are so beautiful!

The great Visual Thinkery site now hosted on ReclaimPress

One of his sites (ulster.visualthinkery.com) was using WooCommerce, and ReclaimPress has a special hosting package just for that plugin, so we tried that out as well, and by all reports it is doing the trick for his Ulster zine project, which is just another stroke of Mathers genius.

Bryan Mathers’s Zine project to focused art on Ulster

After figuring out those sites, we have started the process of moving larger managed WordPress instances from Reclaim Cloud to ReclaimPress, so things are in motion for sure.

National Geographic GIF featuring penguins migrating

In fact, a big focus for Reclaim Hosting this month has not only been on managing the September rush, but also getting a plan together for a bigger migration project of all of our servers off CentOS 7 to Ubuntu. A huge project for sure, but this month we’ve started to dig in our broader plan into action so we can start chipping away at the migrations each day, week, month for the next 11 months. When it’s done our entire infrastructure will be not only have been migrated, but also upgraded in the process. Many of which are security enhancements that will go a long way towards future-proofing our fleet.

There is a lot more on the Reclaim Hosting front for sure, but the above underscores how much of the  focus has been on ReclaimPress and our server migration project, not to mention beginning of the semester!

Posted in reclaim, ReclaimPress | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

On This Day

Posted on September 4, 2023 by Reverend

I was recently reading John Johnston’s blog, and I noticed he had an “On this day” tab that led to a page that lists all the posts he had written on that day over the life of his blog. He then went on to note:

This page uses Alan’s wp-posted-today: WordPress plugin provides shortcode for displaying posts published on current day. I find it fascinating, it also allows me to do some digital gardening, mending broken images and links as I wander through my past.

So cool, after seeing it on John’s blog I vaguely remember Alan programmed this bit of magic, but in my rush to the next thing I never stopped to install it. What’s more, John’s notion of using this plugin to help weed his blog garden and keep his archive in order seemed like an eminently practical way to keep things from degenerating entirely. One of the things that haunts me about this blog is the thought of all the broken images, defunct links, and Youtube videos long since taken down. The significant toll of not-that-much time on the web is a stark reminder of its fragility. So, I decided to install the plugin and use it not only to be reminded of ideas past (that very well could have been written by someone or something else), as well as to use it as a daily reminder to clean-up the archive. I’m hoping the little-by-little, day-after-day approach over the next year is less intimidating than trying to do it all in a few weeks.

The ‘on this day” page linking to post from the bava archive written on this day, plugin thanks to Alan Levine

So after installing the plugin this morning I went to the “On this day” page and saw the following:

There are 13 posts previously published on September 4th

  • 2021
    • Robot Tour of Reclaim Arcade This morning I streamed and recorded a tour of Reclaim Arcade via the robot. It’s always fun to do this kind of thing, and hopefully this video gives you some sense of the space.
    • A Quick Tour of Owncast I spent some of yesterday and this morning playing with an open source streaming software called Owncast. Mo Pezel told me about it last month, and when I saw Digital Ocean had a marketplace app I decided to try and … Continue reading ?
  • 2017
  • 2014
    • Creating GIFs with Text in GIMP Here is a quick screencast showing you how to add text to GIFs in GIMP. And keep in mind, GIFs don’t necessarily need text for the summary assignment. And here’s a GIF with text ?
    • Wire 106: S01E11 “The Hunt” Meredith Fierro, Jessica Reingold, Paul Bond and I discussed Episode 11 of Season 1 of The Wire: “The Hunt.” This was special for me because it’s the first time we had UMW students enrolled in ds106 join the discussions about the … Continue reading ?
  • 2013
    • What I’m up to…. Think of this as a placeholder post until I can get around blogging each one of the points below in some detail. We’re already midway through week 2 of the semester and I’m desparately trying to keep my head above … Continue reading ?
  • 2011
  • 2010
    • Child Bride (1938) So, I recently got the latest issue of Filmfax (my favorite magazine in the world) and it was a good one. As soon as a I got it I was heading directly for the article on Peter Hyams’s NASA conspiracy … Continue reading ?
    • Rosemary’s Baby: A Retrospective This is a quick and fascinating retrospective on one of the great horror films of the late twentieth-century: Rosemary’s Baby (1967). It’s interesting to hear what Polanski thought of as the best scenes and shots, and even wilder to realize … Continue reading ?
    • Blood Meridian: Some Quotes 224:”…the bull had planted its feet and lifted the animal rider and all clear off the ground…” Image source: “Six versions of Blood Meridian” I’ve been reading and re-reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian most of the Summer, and I don’t think … Continue reading ?
  • 2009
  • 2008

Crazy, I wrote 13 posts on September 4th since 2008, and this one will make 14. It’s interesting to see some of the trends of this blog, there’s a fair amount of earlier blogging about movies, such as Bad Boys, Mildred Pierce, Broadway Danny Rose, and Rosemary’s Baby. Most of those early film posts are relatively brief, and some just have links to videos (long gone now).  There is a real sense of the blogosphere before Twitter took over given the short posts that could garner 4 or 5 long, thoughtful comments. Or even folks using one of my  posts as inspiration to write their own, as Antonio Vantaggiato does in response to the Broadway Danny Rose post. And then there’s a post like Child Bride (1938) which was a throw away reflection on an article in Filmfax that has become one of my most regularly commented upon and regularly read posts over the last ten years. It’s a post I cringe about in retrospect given the subject matter, and then the comments have turned into a strange genealogical fishing expedition that’s taken on a life of its own.

Several of those posts housed long-broken links to videos that I’m not entirely certain were from my terminated Youtube account or not. I took the liberty to update them with videos I believe I originally posted, but then again I really can’t remember. Did the original Bad Boys scene I included feature Sean Penn using a pillowcase full of soda cans to defend himself? Or was it the opening robbery scene? I have no idea, and that is one of the strangest things of having a blog for so long that you poured endless hours laboring over, 15 years later you have little to no idea what you were thinking.

After the movie posts, there are some ds106 posts, which is not a huge surprise 🙂 One was an instructional screencast for making GIFs with text, and the other a wire106 video conversation with ds106 students—including Reclaim’s Meredith Fierro!—reflecting on a specific episode of the HBO series The Wire. Unfortunately, both the screencast and the discussion video were uploaded to UMW’s short-lived Mediacore service, which was not renewed and many of those videos seem to have been lost.* Appears linked video is the most fragile piece of my archive, and I’ve been trying to rectify that by preserving as many videos as I can on bava.tv for posterity.

“EdTech transmissions: We Control the Vertical and the Horizontal” at Maricopa College

There is also a reflection post on my presentation at Maricopa Community College in 2011, which brings back amazing memories of Northern Voice 2011 and the legendary Sanctuary jam session, as well as the subsequent trip to Phoenix with Cogdog to not only present on the magic of ds106, but also to head to Strawberry and spend some downtime with the blog king himself.

What I’m up to….

Possibly the most informative snapshot post from this list is the “What I’m Up to…” written in 2013 (ten years ago to the day!) that highlights a series of projects, including the then newly-formed Reclaim Hosting. After that, there’s a couple of Reclaim-related posts, such as this one about accessing multiple hosting accounts in cPanel via the WHMCS API or this one about playing with Owncast on Reclaim Cloud.

Robot Tour of Reclaim Arcade

And to top it all off, there is the robot tour of Reclaim Arcade in 2021 (long before the renovations), how crazy is that?

It’s hard to fully express all the different feelings going through my mind browsing this list of 13 posts. I think there is something to this attempt to document one’s work on a blog, if for nothing else than to remember it 🙂 Thanks for the inspiration, John, and thanks for the plugin, Alan, it made my Labor Day! And hopefully it will prove to be the fitness program this blog’s archive has long needed.

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*I am currently downloading backups from S3 of my computer from around that time to see if I can salvage anything, but I am not hopeful.

Posted in Archiving, bava.tv, bavatuesdays, blogging, plugins, WordPress | 2 Comments