One of the elements of Reclaim Video that I am most excited about is exploring what is possible through the website. We launched the website as part of the world premier at OER18, and it’s pretty awesome. We had a rough idea that we wanted when we reached out to Michael Branson Smith (MBS) based on the venerable BetaMaXmas site Scott Leslie pointed me to—could it have been more than 10 years ago now?
So, when Lauren, Tim, and I chatted with MBS about the Reclaim Video site, it should not have been surprising how quick and easy it was. Michael immediately understood what were looking for, and in fact had recommended we design the site around the TV and a shelve of movies, which the mobile version of the site highlights gorgeously:
In fact, that same shelf is something we picked up at our local Goodwill for $14 while he was creating it:
But MBS went well beyond that and added the animated GIF posters along with the old school menu of new arrivals and coming soon videos. But they’re not only decorative, we plan on linking the new arrivals and coming soon to recent videos we purchased as well as the release dates through Wikipedia for a given month and year. As for the animated GIF posters, we want to synch those rotating on the site to an actual LCD screen in the storefront that shows the same posters on both the webpage as you would find in person.
But the real work that just seems like sciencefiction to me, was how MBS was able to get the TV be responsive, use the pause/play buttons, and go full screen. Not to mention having the TV play the tape of the tape you click on the shelf. So awesome, and the beginnings of an interactive site—and it’s just the beginning. Hopefully sometime over the next two months we can coax MBS to come down to Fredericksburg, Virginia so that we can start the next stage of imagining, designing, and building in earnest.
So, for example, what if we take his idea for the Modern VHS generator and integrate it into the site, or sync the TV in the Reclaim Video storefront with that on the web? Or start enabling spaces where folks can quickly and easily leave movie reviews that we can sync with our database of films that folks can find when they come to the site? I don’t know, but I would settle for just knowing how he made the Domain of One’s Own vVHS tape he created for the site look so damned awesome!
So, consider the Reclaim Video site an ongoing work-in-progress that well be sharing updates around regularly for the foreseeable future. thanks MBS, you rule!
The road to Reclaim Video has been both an interesting and telling one. Less than a year ago it was still just an idea baby lurking menacingly under the surface of Crystal Lake. The “vision” was hatched while we were renovating our newly leased office space last Spring. The space is part of an 80s strip mall that effectively has two storefronts. The one we were renovating became CoWork, and the other was being used temporarily—but every time I looked at it I couldn’t help fantasizing about an 1980s video rental store. The fantasies were also inspired by the awesome experience of working on the Console Living Room exhibit we created at UMW in the Spring of 2015.
Reclaim Team in NYC Diner dreaming of VHS
I think I first articulated the dark fantasies of Reclaim Video to Tim and Lauren in some kind of thinly veiled joke as early as May, but the intense preparation surrounding the conjunction of both the opening of CoWork and the launch of our first Domains conference meant it was summarily dismissed. What’s more, it was little more then “I want to turn that space into an 80s video rental store. hahahaha.” As brilliant as the idea seems now to just about everyone, hindsight is 20/20 🙂 It was not as fleshed out as one would hope, and while I kept on returning to it over and over again throughout the summer and fall, it did not become a reality until early November (so only 6 months ago). The idea came up again while we were enjoying a Reclaim NYC trip. Tim, who was trying really hard to make heads or tails of the idea, finally made the connection between Reclaim Hosting and Reclaim Video in his mind, namely evolving the record store idea [“Video killed the radio star”] as well as being a way to host a fun marketing campaign for Reclaim Hosting. And, with that, everything moved into overdrive. We all agreed to the idea in NYC over a delicious diner breakfast (pictured above) in early November and by March we had gutted the storefront and created a full-blown video store circa 1984—it took all of 4 months once we committed. And that last point encapsulates my experience at Reclaim Hosting for almost 5 years now. There’s really little in the way of bullshit; we are a lean, mean academic hosting machine and once we decide to do something we lock-in and get it done. #TCB4life!
We’ve documented the process of getting the store up and running over the past few months, and we now have all those blog posts aggregating to Reclaim Video’s blog Room 237. Given that, I’ll spare you re-hashing that process here so I can actually get to my point.
And what’s that, you ask? Well, our coming out party at OER18, of course! I’m not sure when, but at some point in December or January we got the notion of transforming Reclaim Hosting’s sponsorship of OER18 into Reclaim Video’s. The conceit being that this new Ed-Tech start-up, Reclaim Video, was delivering an innovative and timely disruption to the Higher Education market: VHS!!! We approached ALT’s CEO Maren Deepwell with the idea, and she was fully onboard. Those of you who know Maren will not be surprised by this, and I fell in love with the folks at ALT when I spoke at OER16 because I deeply related with how such a small, focused crew could bring so much goodness to so many. After that we decided to do our part to help fund OER17 and now OER18, but we had no interest in the usual vendor trappings—the sordid depths of which Adam Croom’s recent post about OLCInnovate highlights quite brilliantly alarmingly. So, Reclaim Video provided us a way to still do something fun and actually be part of the conversation, even if from 30 years ago 🙂
OER18 took place at The Watershed, an Independent Cinema and “Creativity Centre” in Bristol, and all the presentations were in movie theaters. As luck would have it, this was perfect for what we wanted to do. We had made a mad rush to finish the Reclaim Video storefront in March so we could create a short film that we would debut at OER18. And, we did! I’m not sure what it is titled, but it provides a kind of alternative reality wherein the employees of both Reclaim Video and Reclaim Hosting find themselves in a 1980s era storefront talking VCRs and websites. Synergy baby!
And that was how OER18 started, Maren put the tape in the VCR, lights went down, and 5 minutes of magic ensued 🙂 It was fun, and the fact there really is a Reclaim Video in Fredericskburg, Virginia that will be sending folks all over the world copies of this video on VHS tape over the next 3-6 months makes me smile. Faith in a seed.
We also had a booth, and the amazing crew at Watershed supplied us with a CRT monitor and a region-free VHS player—I think they were the most excited about Reclaim Video’s presence at the conference. The booth was awesome, and it just played films like Blade Runner, Xtro, Amadeus, and more. We also had a stack of shirts and stickers for those swag-minded retrotechs.
Another piece of the OER18 sponsorship was an ad in the program, and, well, we remixed some OG “OER.”
Tim’s design prowess was responsible for the logo, and it’s amazing how much goodness can follow on a solid logo. What’s more, I already mentioned that a major reason for doing Reclaim Video was to have some fun. And, if you think about it, Reclaim Video is kind of a mashup of ds106 and the Living Room Console—which are two of my very favorite things. And while we fully understand Reclaim Video is not a viable business, its value as an indulgent, nostalgia-peppered space filled with fun and whimsy should not be underestimated. The space has already helped us all divert some of the intense work that running Reclaim Hosting requires into a joyous alter-ego company. Reclaim Video is a creative release that the good folks at OER18 did not bat an eye about incorporating into their proceedings—and that’s open education in action! To quote Yo La Tengo: “It’s a waste of time if I can’t smile easily.” Smiling at Reclaim Hosting (and now Reclaim Video) has not been an issue these last 4 years or so—and cultivating that fact should not be an afterthought to any venture
The Reclaim Video website designed by Michael Branson Smith
Oh yeah, we also launched an inspired website that will be a central node of Reclaim Video that Michel Branson Smith brilliantly put together for us. But I am saving that for my next post, cause the website is going to be an ongoing, evolving piece of Reclaim Video that I am very interested in taking some time and energy to think about here.
*This is a problem I have, fantasizing about the strip mall haunts of my past. Intensive therapy hasn’t helped.
The entire Reclaim team has been abroad for the last week, so things have been a bit quiet on the blog—but that’s about to change. There’s much to share from the official launch of Reclaim Video last week, and a post detailing that and more is in the works. But I couldn’t wait any longer to post about some of our recent, rather unique acquisitions for Reclaim Video from the Etsy shop Readful Things—a shop that has some really fun 1980s pop culture art, including an Atari 2600 The Thing cartridge as well as a Creepshow action figure of that lunkhead Jordy Verrill:
Creepshow’s Jordy Verrill and The Thing comes to Atari 2600
The Thing 2600 cartridge may be the greatest thing ever!
The cartridge—is it real?
And to continue on a theme, check out this infected The Thing VHS tape seconds after administering MacReady’s blood test!
Keep it on the couch!
“There ain;t nothing in Room 237, so stay out!!!”
And last, but definitely not least—The Shining VHS tape featuring both Room 237 and the well-used typewriter.
People continue to ask how we’re going to make money on Reclaim Video, and the simple answer is we aren’t—and that’s fine. But if Readful Things keeps on making such awesome VHS art we may soon be running a significant deficit 🙂
The Reclaim Video storefront continues to flower as we bring in more titles.Over the last two weeks we added a bunch of titles such as Losin’ It and Dead Zone to knock a couple of titles off the 1983 wish list, the other three (The Hitcher (1986), Warlock (1989), and Wolf (1994)) came as part of the Ebay lot.
We also got some new technology to track and share new arrivals:
We also scored an uncut VHS version of Cronenberg’s 1983 Videodrome—a foundational film for Reclaim Video. And to add to the vibe of Reagan 80s fear-mongering and paranoia we secured the 1983 made-for-TV gem The Day After.
Additionally, the shelves for our featured video rack (which we scored at Goodwill for $13) arrived, and it is pretty awesome.
So, it’s been an event couple of weeks leading up to the unveiling of Reclaim Video’s website and promotional video at OER18. Reclaim Video is going public 🙂
In a post I wrote a couple of days ago I made a plea for help with a WordPress Multisite issue that was plaguing me. Within 24 hours it was solved, it’s like Reclaim Hosting—but in blog comments 🙂 The issue was after migrating bavatuesdays out from under a WordPress Multisite setup into its own blog, I no longer had the ability to add new plugins and themes through the dashboard. I could do everything else, and I was stumped. I tried adding a brand new admin user with a fresh wp_user and wp_usermeta tables, but to no avail. Turns out, the issue was that related to user capabilities defined in wp_options. Boone Gorges spelled it out the the comments:
It could be that your ‘administrator’ role doesn’t have the ‘install_plugins’ capability. This happens sometimes during the migration from Multisite, since on Multisite administrators cannot install plugins. You can check by examining the wp_user_roles value in wp_options, or with a plugin like https://wordpress.org/plugins/user-role-editor/. You can reset role caps with wp role reset administrator.
And the word on the street is that he looked like this while leaving that comment on his keyboard:
That was it, indeed, and Pat Lockley and Tom Woodward alluded to the very same thing (rich as kings on the bava!). Had no idea about wp_user_roles row in WP_options, and when I installed that plugin I was able to fix everything with a few clicks:
I just clicked and updated delete_plugins and install_plugins capabilities (as well as the install_themes and delete_themes for themes) which fixed the values in wp_user_roles and I was back in business. Thank you Boone, Pat, and Tom for helping me out —you all rule. And now I can push forward with the rest of my blog downsizing.
It’s funny how things align, just the other day Tom and I were chatting about some old presentations, particularly the Ed-Tech Survivalist’s “swamp of knowledge,” and I was thinking this is very much inline with my best memories of talking about EdTech. Then, with the news of radio legend Art Bell’s passing, Brian Lambtweeted about a presentation we did together with Tom Woodward in 2009 that was using an Art Bell-inspired, conspiracy-laden radio show as its motif. The idea was simple: the radio host’s guest is a time traveller from the future who turns out to be selling education insurance to those poor saps from the past. I blogged it back in November of 2009, and it it one of the several presentations we did for NMC that were pretty outlandish, bordering on bad performance art. It was when Alan Levine and Rachel Smith were running the Second Life conferences, and it retrospect they were pretty wild. I mean look at the screenshots below….
A radio show being broadcast from Second Life with a virtual TV monitor representing the Education insurance salesman from the future—as well as the random callers. What’s more, all framed within a sandy, cactus-filled arena that happens to have an old-school pay phone—that’s pretty bizarre. I never thought I would be looking back on Second Life fondly, but there you have it—the passing of time truly warps one’s perception of what was. And the audio is pure gold, trust me 🙂
I listened to the talk again this morning after almost 9 years, and I was struck by a couple of things. First and foremost how awesome the frame Brian Lamb came up with for the whole thing. His fandom for Art Bell paid dividends, and couching the whole thing as a edtech conspiracy radio show was perfect, and his intro and outro set the stage brilliantly.* Additionally, Tom’s whole idea of couching the episode around an education insurance salesman was a really smart way to get at a bunch of issues of the day: the privatization of education; the rhetoric of disruption; the empty promises of open; the danger of massive scaling; the militarization of schools; the insanity of educational costs and access; etc. He scripted most of the key points there, and they hold up surprisingly well.
In fact, it is a good reminder for me that while playful and experimental, it was a pretty trenchant critique of the way in which we were off-loading education to the corporate harbingers of Web 2.0 in the name of convenience and “free.” The conceit was pretty simple: you’ll have to pay sooner or later for the deal with the devil given the ways things will go in the future—so it’s high time to buy education insurance. The funnest part of the presentation for me was constantly returning the conversation back to the fears and needs of the callers: “you invested a lot in your mind, doesn’t it make sense to protect that valuable resource you spent so much money on?” —which then becomes a seamless segueway for yet another pitch for education insurance. I loved that. I was personally convinced of the value of educational insurance by the end of the talk. And when you realize the insanity of the US system that burdens students with student loan debt as high as six figures—none of it seems comical. In fact, the student debt crisis is still hanging over our head, and we still have our heads in the sand about it—and neither MOOCs nor OERs are nearly enough to save us from it.
In terms of alignment, yesterday I invited by Jeff Nugent to talk to the educational technology folks at Colgate yesterday wherein I re-visited some of the practical innovations I was a part of at UMW: the Bluehost experiment, UMW Blogs, ds106, Domains, etc. And one of the things I came away with from that talk was that there was a counter cultural ethos to the ways things were being done more broadly in ed-tech, and that was often linked to blogging and personal spaces on the web. We wanted faculty and students to own their work, and by extension their data, and we wanted that work to be connected in some real ways to both the web and the institutions we supported. So rather than the great purging of personal university webspace and re-branding efforts of Web Communication departments that gentrified the EDU web, we kept alive the spirit of the university as a space where the personal web mattered and was valued. Not sure if this is just more retrospective self-congratulation on my part—it very well could be, and I certainly have a unique tolerance for such reasoning—but it does resist my own tendency to remember that everyone in ed-tech from 2004-2016 was simply caught up uncritically in the social media orgy that was Web 2.0.
Anyway, special thanks to Brian for posting the audio on the Abject, something that I would have given up for lost given the NMC site has been shuttered. But then again, once he posted it, Alan is suggesting he might even have the video—and I am loving the Second Life aesthetic these days:
I just got off a call with Tom Woodward on an unrelated matter, and mentioned in passing an issue I’ve been having after moving sites from my WordPress Multisite mansion into stand-alone installs. He likened it to my packing up and letting go of the big old house and trading it in for a condo in Florida. It would make a fun video, and I could play the old guy pretty convincingly these days 🙂
Anyway, the issue I am having besides the usual back aches and broken links of an empty web nester, is that for the four sites I have moved out from my WPMS setup, I can’t add plugins and themes from the repository for any of them. In fact, the option is not even there:
I tried cleaning out the wp_usermeta table and starting fresh given it seemed like a capabilities/permissions issue for the users, basically not giving them access to the WordPress Multisite Network Admin options. This would make sense given bavatuesdays was one of many sites within the setup on its own network, but even after cleaning out the wp_user and wp_usermeta tables and starting fresh, I can’t add plugins or themes through the dashboard (FTPing them work fine).I turned off blogs.dir and mu-plugins, deleted everything in wp-config.php referencing the mutlisite, deleted sunrise.php, cleaned-up .htaccess, disabled then re-activated all plugins, and after all that still no love. I understand this is kind of an obscure problem, but was hoping someone might have some ideas given I am stumped at this point. I can’t fully enjoy my advancing web years when all the appliances are not working correctly in the new condo.
Update: This will be its own post here shortly, but for now I just want to note it was an issue with the wp_user_roles value in wp_options, as Boone pinpointed it in the comments below. In fact, Tom, Boone, and Pat all pointed towards capability issues with user privileges, and I just didn’t realize that was also handled in wp-options. I can now add themes and plugins from the repository cause of some very awesome folks who still use the web for good 🙂 The plugin User Role Editor Boone linked to made it dead simple to add the privileges for adding themes, plugins, etc. back for specific users, but more on that on the coming post.
Another tool I’ve been becoming more familiar with for sites that don’t have phpMyAdmin to access the MySQL databases is Sequel Pro. It’s an open source application for managing SQL databases on the Mac. I have come to appreciate it in newfound ways after the UNLV migration; it is to databases management what Transmit has been to moving around files via FTP. Anyway, one think I discovered it can do is copy the structure of a database table, such as wp_users:
And then insert it as SQL code in something like PHPMyAdmin:
Sequel Pro does all SQL query structuring for me, which is awesome. Was a nice little bonus to discover, and another trick for the toolbox.
We recently migrated UNLV’s faculty websites to a Domain of One’s Own environment. I learned a lot during that migration which in turn helped motivate me to finally clean up the bavatuesdays multi-network site I’ve been putting off for over a year. Well, dabbling a bit every morning last week and yesterday, that is officially done. All sites on the bavatuesdays domain have been migrated and archived—I can take a short break before going after the jimgroom.net network.
In the mean time I have been working on a talk for OER18 wherein Tim and I will be talking about hosting beyond the LAMP environment. Applications that run in other server environments that require Node.js, Ruby, etc. would be nice to offer, but integrating them into cPanel is not necessarily easy. I played with hosting Jekyl from a Reclaim account, but that does require a bit more command line work—which is often a non-starter. But alternatives to cPanel such as Cloudron that allow you to spin up containers that seamlessly manage the application’s server requirements, so all you are doing is choosing a domain to run it on. But we have also been playing with integrating SPLOTs more seamlessly into Reclaim’s offering, so there are several options, rather than any one way forward. Not to mention, cPanel and CLoudLinux are both working to make it easier to run Node.js and Ruby apps in their environment, so it may not necessarily be beyond LAMP at all—but rather within or alongside.
All of this brings me back to UNLV’s Faculty Sites, which have really paired down cPanel to the absolute minimum: WordPress, the file manager, and backups. That’s it. Minimalist, faculty can choose between WordPress or a DIY old school HTML site using the file manager to upload files (or FTP). It does kind of beg the question that I hear all too often about it being overwhelming, or there is too much to learn. No, it’s pretty much your own instance of WordPress, and those little files known as HTML (and a few links) that made the web possible. So, the future is as much within a LAMP environment, as it is beyond LAMP.
Well, it took a while, but all pages and content on this blog is now forced over https. This was one of the motivations for getting bavatuesdays in its own WordPress install, and this weekend I finally pulled the trigger. it was pretty easy, I installed Let’s Encrypt, added the force https code to the htaccess file, and ran the Insecure Content Fixer plugin. The last one did not seem to get everything, so from command line I ran the following in the directory via terminal to make sure all images load over //
That cleaned up over 12,000 links, and gave me a shiny green “Secure” lock icon:
I’m not entirely sure bavatuesdays needed to be https given no one logs in or out except me (although I guess that’s one big reason), and it’s not highly sensitive material in my mind. At the same time, the idea of encrypting one’s website is reasonable and getting into that habit with all our web properties seems sensible. But Dave Winer’s recent rationale for not going to https makes a strong case for resisting being forced by Google to play their game:
So now Google points a gun at the web and says “Do as we say or we’ll tell users your site is not secure.” What they’re saying doesn’t stand up to a basic bullshit-test. There’s nothing insecure about my site. Okay I suppose it’s possible you could get hurt using it, I’ll grant you that. But I could get hurt getting up out of my chair and going into the kitchen to refill my coffee cup. Life is insecure. When Google says my old site is insecure what they really mean is “This is our platform now, and you do as we say or your site won’t work.”
This, in turn, made me think perhaps securing the bava may be my kowtowing to the peer pressure/stigma to get the green icon in Chrome. I’m not sure this is my revolution when all is said and done-there are points to be made on both sides. Choosing to run an https site versus being forced reminds me a bit of helmet and seatbelt laws for your website. 25 years later we take putting on a seatbelt for granted, there is no fight in me on that front anymore cause it just makes sense. Wonder if that will prove the case for https? Not sure, but for the meantime all content is being served over https, and if not necessary, there is something righteous about feeling secure on the web in this day and age 🙂
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