Memoirs to Kidhood with Songs Along the Way

Posted on March 23, 2021 by bavaradio
Tracking Time on #ds106radio – Memoirs & Kidhood

I woke up at 3 AM this morning and had no hopes of returning to bed, and so I jumped on ds106radio for a 3 hour and 15 minute show that truly tracked time. It started as a 8-12 songs with some brief interludes of chat, but then slowly gave over to self-indulgent reflections on my formative years and finally was salvaged by re-airing three segments of of GNA Garcia‘s awesome Kidhood show which, as Giulia Forsythe noted, originally broadcast 10 years ago on this self-same station.

I figured there was no better tribute to tracking time on this little radio station than to dig into the archive and pull out a gem. And the fact that GNA and so many other folks tuned in who have been part of this community for a decade was special. It was a good morning on the radio!

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In the park with a dog throwing a bone live on #ds106radio during a pandemic

Posted on March 22, 2021 by bavaradio
Live broadcast from a park while walking my dog during a pandemic in Italy on #ds106radio

The title pretty much says it all, the few minor details I would add is that I could also record and add metadata to the stream from my phone while also mixing in music. Pretty amazing, really. In fact, I did this using the iPhone app iziCast which I was turned onto a year ago when the pandemic started to hit hard here in Italy and #ds106radio became a haven for many of us. I did a few live casts from the vineyard, but I never really played with any of the settings. But today I brought my AirPods (something I seldom do) and was listening to music, and then I thought I wonder if iziCast will let me stream what I am listening to. Turns out it does, but it just can’t be through Apple Music or Spotify but rather playlists and songs you have locally, and luckily I had quite a few.

So I tried broadcasting a mix of 80s song a friend put together for Anto’s birthday and it worked. What’s more, iziCast let me mix in my audio with the musci, which was slick. The one thing I needed to do in the settings is enable Bluetooth for the AirPods and change the CODEC from AAC to MP3, and it worked perfectly. The sample rate was 16000 and the bit rate 64. I was pretty impressed how easy it was.

Turns out I did have one listener in Chahira, the only one that matters! She =could hear me, and while the audio wasn’t perfect, I think the general experiment was a success. About 30 minutes in I am chasing Duke down to a stream where he was going to drink and I was afraid he lost the new Kong bone I bought him, it is a bit comical, and I dug the broadcast if only for that snippet of reality that only a impromptu, in the wild broadcast can.

It was a lot of fun, which can be more generalized to my experience of #ds106radio these days. Between the radio and dreams of the arcade, I am finding it easy to fill my days with fun ?

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Vinylcast #47: Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast

Posted on March 21, 2021 by bavaradio
#vinylcast on #ds106radio: Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast
Another day, another #vinylcast on bavaradio! It’s been a good week for me on #ds106radio with 3 #vinylcasts and a few impromptu broadcasts spurred on by the fact that the radio has been en fuego after more than a year of lockdown, which is really something. I was feeling so pumped up that I decided to pull out some Heavy Metal to rock the airwaves, and few 80s albums measure up to the Satanic verses of Iron Maiden‘s Number of the Beast!
I did my usual spiel of playing the record and then doing on-the-fly “research” on Wikipedia and winging the rest. I am having fun, and I may have even had a listener or two, which is a treat. Paul Bond even came prepared with his Eddie mask. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when #ds106radio is popping it is a particular kind of joy few things can match in this crazy world.
It was also nice to have JR Dingwall along for the ride, love it when unexpected listeners pop-up and say hi. He was a Maiden fan as well, and even linked to this amazing Iron Maiden animated album cover:
And of course the back cover detail with the Hieronymus Bosch-inspired art was a must for the Twitters, as was the record sleeve with photoshoots of the band members. The second side of this album really is a doozy, and the guitar on Hallowed be Thy Name is ridiculous, big fan!
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Known Issues with the Web Garden

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Reverend

I was looking through the UMW Living Room Console site while writing about the new posters for Reclaim Arcade. While doing so I came across a few broken links in the inventory, to my chagrin. Links such as this one  (which is not broken anymore) were pointing back to my Known instance that I ran for 4 years or so and then archived as HTML with site sucker.

Turns out all my images from Known were broken, and I think that has something to do with how Known writes those images (but will look into that in more detail this weekend). In the meantime I wanted to resurrect those images and luckily I kept an archive of my files and database, so I set that back up and everything was loading again. And that’s the story of how I temporarily fended off some link rot in my small corner of the web. Felt like the battle at Helm’s Deep.

The living room has loomed large in my mind these days with the opening of Reclaim Arcade, so making sure these images were available was important to me. But it was also interesting because while I was doing this Olia Lialina‘s article “From My to Me” has been resonating deeper and deeper. As Downes already notes, it is a great article and comes highly recommended, in fact my next post will be a deeper dive on the article given I even have a small cameo, but read it regardless of that oversight on her part 🙂 One thing she discusses is the harm the appification of the web has done to a broader sense of exploration, creativity, and wonder on the web, which is a sentiment I was discussing with Boone Gorges a couple of weeks ago when recording his session for Domains21. In fact, I am feeling a broader sense of ennui and general dissatisfaction with the mainstream web we have right now, it’s a real theme throughout the Domains21 recordings, which made me think Lialina’s article may be a kind of call to action:

Don’t see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don’t participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation.

Your resistance should not simply be a return to a Web 1.0 that never was in the spirit of “netstalgia,” but rather thinking creatively about what a return from me to my might look like when it comes to the spaces we inhabit on the web. For example, I would offer up Michael Branson Smith’s ridiculous beautiful HTML/CSS-based animated movie posters as a creative liberation of the form.

https://mbs.nyc/posters/vertigo/

This in turn made me think about Lialina’s comment about WordPress being a horrible development for the state of the link on the web, which is something I have to follow-up on, but seeing that Known does not even link to image files which in turn broke the Living Room Console inventory gave me a sense of the legacy of broken links and dreams many of these apps hath wrought. I won’t go as far as to say it never should have happened, but with WordPress killing the classic editor by the end of this year I am looking to test my long-standing statement that the beautiful thing about my data in WordPress is it is portable, where can I put all the content in the bava.blog should I finally decide to test out my own claim before year’s end?

Posted in Internet of Attractions, reclaim | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Vinylcast #46: Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love

Posted on March 19, 2021 by bavaradio

With this #vinylcast I started to feel a bit more in #ds106radio shape. It helps that you have an album as amazing as Kate Bush‘s Hounds of Love to stream and chat about, but more than that to still regularly hear people on ds106radio a year on in the pandemic is inspiring. I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but this small little station has been chugging along picking up new DJs all the while and living up to its spirit of sharing in the name of joy. My tweets below tell the tale of the tape, and thanks Alex Masters for throwing some welcome support and banter along the way #4life!

ds106radio: Kate Bush’s The Hounds of Love #vinylcast

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Cheyenne Begins the Bavacade Rodeo

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Reverend

On Tuesday I got the first of hopefully many 1980s arcade cabinets delivered to casa bava. I played a bit of a guessing game on Instagram when it came all wrapped up. I’ll venture to say I’ve never seen a game so well wrapped before, and I have received quite a few for Reclaim Arcade:

The joke was on me though, because after getting it in the foyer, I still had to get this 6′ tall 250 pound monster down a spiraling set of stairs to the bavacrypt:

Well thanks to my healthy living and super human strength I managed it all alone without the help of paid professionals who knew what they were doing…. see!

And it is so beautiful! One of the most pristine games I’ve seen yet. Seems all original, and while there are some ROM errors on the checksum diagnostic, it plays perfectly. I will need to get the PCB serviced (not to mention a spare one) but Cheyenne is officially the first arcade cabinet in the bavacade! Cheyenne is effectively a Western shooting gallery, and I’m not sure its themes and cast of characters would (or should) be reproduced today. It’s also pretty difficult, but the light gun is compelling, and it has smiliar gameplay to another Exidy classic Crossbow, which game out the year before in 1983 and now I kind of want to get. You can see almost 50 minutes of Cheyenne gameplay here:

After doing some measurements I think we can get another 10-12 cabinets in the bavacrypt, and I have two more waiting for me in the US: namely Pac-Man and Joust:

So, if that’s 3 games, what would the other 9 be? Let me make a quick wish list below, so I can look back and see how I did:

  1. Asteroids: turns out this is one of the games in Reclaim Arcade I play the most besides Pac-Man
  2. Galaxian: one of the very first arcade games I ever played, and still holds a special place for me
  3. Gyruss: we currently have a non-working cocktail version I bought last year that I think can be fixed up and shipped, so this might be a lay-up and this is absolutely a grail game for me
  4. Robotron: 2084: Tim and I both love this one, and I am not great but decent, but it is right up there with Defender and Joust as all-time greats
  5. Defender: like Robotron and Joust it is hard but awesome. In fact, Williams has so many awesome games it is kind of unfair
  6. Venture: this is another Exidy game and I got one for Reclaim Arcade that is a project cabinet that should arrive soon, I haven’t played it for decades, so it may not pass the test, but for now it makes the list
  7. Scramble: I loved this one when I played it at Nunley’s growing up and we are soon to be the proud owners of its sequel Super Cobra at Reclaim Arcade. And like with Venture that will allow me to swap PCB boards and try out Scramble to test drive again before I buy.
  8. Phoenix:  Another game we already have at Reclaim Arcade that has stood the test of time. I really enjoy playing this one, and like Pac-Man, Asteroids, Gyruss, and Galaxian it’s in heavy rotation when I am at Reclaim Arcade.
  9. Elevator Action: There is something about this game I really love, the noir elements, the idea of working your way through an apartment building to get the secret plans, the car you drive away in, I don’t tire of it. And the colors are gorgeous. The only Taito on the list.

Also, interesting there are no Nintendo games and very few Atari games. I would consider Star Wars and Battelzone, though

Worthy of honorable mention (maybe alternates?) are the following, they didn’t make the first cut cause they are a bit harder to find or PCB replacements are steep (looking at you Ghosts n Goblins) or may in fact make the A-list given a couple on there (like Venture and Scramble) may not be what I remembered.

  • Yie-Ar Kung-fu: a definite favorite at the arcade, and I do think I need a good kung-fu game
  • Ghosts n’ Goblins: a good knight-fighting demon scroller that deserves to be played at length at home
  • Double Dragon: my two-player of choice beyond Smash TV, and that game is too big for the bavacrypt
  • Rally-X: the cocktail in Reclaim Arcade is a sleeper classic, and one of my favorites so it might have to be included, dammit…15 games in the crypt!
  • Wizard of Wor: a recent acquisition for Reclaim Arcade that has me smitten, I would do it!
  • Missile Command: another Atari that I would squeeze in, it’s hard as hell (like many of these classics) but the compact cabinet is gorgeous and the nuclear theme is important above and beyond the great gameplay

I’ll stop there for now, but you get the idea of how hard this is gonna be for me. A note here that there are no real rare games in the list. They’re all fairly affordable and pretty readily available, in fact I am tracking an Asteroids and Phoenix right now, and technically already have Scramble, Gyruss and Venture that I can try and score from Reclaim Arcade, so, as the saying goes, “if you will it, it is no dream!” I’m getting the shipping container ready as I write this!

Posted in bavacade, bavarcade | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Reclaim Cloud’s Got GLAM

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Reverend

I’ve been following Australian historian and hacker Tim Sherratt on Twitter for a while now, and his work with the GLAM Workbench is inspiring. GLAM is an acronym for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, and the workbench provides a series of tools Tim has stitched together to enable research across numerous collections in Australia and New Zealand so that scholars and students can do things with data.

I saw a mention of this work a few weeks back that piqued my interest, and the following tweet spurred me to follow-up on installing GLAM Workbench in Reclaim Cloud, so I gave it a shot.

I have to say it was quite easy to get up and running, and the documentation around this project is so robust that it also helped me finally get my head around how applications like Jupyter Lab, Datasette, and Voyant Tools might work together, which is huge for me.

It really was that simple, I created a new environment and used this script to import the YAML file with all the instructions for getting the custom Jupyter Lab notebook spun up. Literally one-click, which he has since integrated into the documentation so you can do this right from Github into Reclaim Cloud, which is so slick.

And as I noted, the JupyterLab was all set up and ready to go (it was behind a password given that was part of the customizations he built into his container):

The thing about the GLAM Workbench that pushed me beyond the straight install into exploring the app was the amazing documentation they created that seems to just be getting better.

I was able to wrap my head a bit around using Jupyter to run the Trove Harvester, which is essentially the tool that search across collections and brings back results, and then allows you to harvest text, images, and even PDF versions of the articles. All this is spelled out within the Jupyter Lab, and it allowed me to start digging in.

I did a search across the collections for references to home video rentals and got a solid 8000 hits. I’ll try and do a follow-up post about some of the awesome articles about home video in Australia, but let this page (and a few pull-out ads) suffice for now:

The article on silicon is pretty fascinating, but the ads tell a compelling story of the rise of the mom & pop video store. And this is just one of thousands, and tools like Datasette (which you can work with right from the GLAM Workbench) puts the search info into a database format, and something like Voyant Tools would enable you to visualize, so I actually started to wrap my head around this suite of tools.

This is amazing, but even cooler is that Tim has been hard at work and has updated the GLAM Workbench documentation to include a Launch in Reclaim Cloud link so that  script runs and you are up and running with GLAM Workbench in Reclaim Cloud, so cool.

And in all his copious spare time, he posted the details of his work creating an installer for GLAM Workbench on Reclaim Hosting’s Community forum which provides all the details, so thank Tim—this is above and beyond!

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Vinylcast #45: The Alarm’s Eye of the Hurricane

Posted on March 15, 2021 by bavaradio

Another #vinylcast on #ds106radio, making it two days in a row. This one was in honor of the fact we have gone into a 3 week lockdown, which is reminiscent of the year-long radio revival. Today’s vinyl was not a crowd favorite, not that we ever have much of a crowd, but here are a few reactions:

Yeah, it was a tough crowd, but the criticism was fair. The Alarm doesn;t age all that well, and while I am a sucker for anthem’s, there duping of the U@ style is painfully apparent.

That said, I did enjoy the I.R.S. Records insert, and being on the radio is always fun, so there’s that.

There was a cool “Campione Gratuito” (free copy) hole punched into this Italian vinyl which I found pretty cool, but does this mean they couldn’t give it away in Italy? Not so sure given the Italian record stores I have been to have a healthy supply of UK new wave, in fact it is probably the easiest thing to get here, North American punk a bit harder—but wonder if that has more to do with labels and distribution back in the day more that anything else.

vinylcast: The Alarm’s Eye of the Hurricane #ds106radio
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Mall City and PeerTube’s Lessons for Resisting the Mallification of the Video Web

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Reverend

Following-up on my previous post about PeerTube as a video archiver, I just remembered that I hadn’t grabbed a copy of the early 1980s documentary Mall City currently making the rounds. It’s the product of a NYU student film crew documenting social life at a mall on Long Island, in particular Roosevelt Field in Garden City. This is of particular interest to me because that was my childhood mall of record. I know the stores; I feel like I know the people; and I definitely sunk more than a few quarters in that arcade. So, anyway, it’s a pretty interesting document of a time and a place, especially now that we seem to be living in a post-Mall America. You can watch it on YouTube at the link below (for as long as that lasts):

But I wanted to use this film as an example of what an import of a video on YouTube (or Vimeo or just about any service) looks like using PeerTube.

I go to the “Import with URL” tab on my PeerTube instance and copy the YouTube URL to my personal channel (http://bava.tv):

After that I should get a screen highlighting all the videos metadata (this did not work with UbuWeb, but there may be the ability to scrape that info):

After that you simply click import and the video is on your channel in seconds with all the metadata and the ability to be shared with other PeerTube instances, downloaded, etc:

The embeds also work well with WordPress as just an oEmbed link, but there is embed code as well. The one thing that might be tricky is storage can get heavy for your cloud instance, but turns out that it’s pretty cheap. That said, if you’d rather have the videos on a hard disk Youtube-dl code can also do that using their command line tool for PeerTube, so this app can just be a way station on the path to archival heaven.

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PeerTube, Sonic Outlaws, and UbuWeb

Posted on March 14, 2021 by Reverend

https://twitter.com/ubuweb/status/1370825664258056192

Over a week ago Tim got a one-click installer working on Reclaim Cloud for PeerTube. He got the details up on the Reclaim Hosting Community site already, so you can read more there.

PeerTube in Marketplace

PeerTube in Marketplace

Getting one-click installers working for a wide variety of apps is a big bonus of Reclaim Cloud, and between Azuracast and PeerTube we have the vertical and horizontal pretty well locked-in. I wrote a bit about my explorations with PeerTube already on this blog so feel free to follow that linked rabbit hole for more. But the long and short of this application is that you can upload videos to your own instance of a fairly robust Youtube-like interface. It has a growing peer-to-peer network, and one killer feature is that it can upload and archive just about any video on the web with a URL. I use it regularly to archive videos I watch online given the broken web copyright creates as a result of YouTube take-downs which highlights the worst of the service-centralized internet.

https://twitter.com/ubuweb/status/497146715582246912

In fact, while Tim and I were working through the PeerTube installer I was watching the 1995 documentary Sonic Outlaws by Craig Baldwin. The copyright bugbear has been with us well before YouTube, and Sonic Outlaws focuses on the fallout of Negativland‘s  decision to parody U2.

Within days after the release of Negativland’s clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music.

Craig “Tribulation 99” Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an “electronic folk culture” in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.

So, long story short, I wanted to see if PeerTube could use the YouTube-dl code to grab and upload the copy of Sonic Outlaws on UbuWeb, and turns out it can, the only thing is the metadata was not included, but that was fairly easy to fill in.

After that I got to thinking about the initial Tweet of this post from UbuWeb about downloading videos and not trusting the cloud.

https://twitter.com/ubuweb/status/1370825664258056192

I wonder if an application like PeerTube might help bridge that gap a bit by re-decentralizing the cloud so that folks could download and share collections like UbuWeb across numerous servers and local machines in order to not only build their own collections, but share them, and hopefully circumvent the copyright trolls that come with the territory of a centralized video service such as YouTube.

Posted in copyright, reclaim, Reclaim Cloud, video | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment