Today my 4 year old asked me about what I was working on. And I said “I’m working on a project, a website.” She then asked “What’s a website?” 🤯🤯🤯 … like of course she wouldn’t know that, but I had very little idea how to explain that to her! I also of course found the question hilarous. I said “it’s some thing that you use on a computer, phone, or tablet....

I am prepping for next week’s Workshop for DoOO and WordPress Multisite Admins, and I wanted to create a plugin that could display an error page for the purposes of showing how to troubleshoot a broken WordPress site caused by a problematic plugin. In the past I’ve asked folks to “imagine” a site was broken, but its a little more fun to break stuff for real. <?php /** * Plugin Name: Really cool neato plugin * Description: I am gud programmer....

This is a quick follow-up on a post from two years ago where I talked about making a button on my Stream Deck that automatically launched OBS and started the Virtual Camera feature. I tend to use the Virtual Camera feature quite a bit, particularly in Slack Huddles, which don’t display my camera properly1. Since then, I wanted to make the button a toggle, so if OBS was already running it would quit....

One of my big goals for the year at Reclaim was to really beef up the video platform we use at Reclaim for our streams, as well as flex courses and workshops. We do publish stuff to YouTube, and we’re certainly not leaving that behind, but I wanted self-hostable and federated stuff like Peertube and Owncast to really feel like first-class citizens for us. I think getting into all the tools we are using and the surrounding workflow would be a good topic for another post, but for now I wanted to document how I’ve been customizing the UI of Owncast to fit our needs on reclaim....

I was hacking up Reclaim TV a bunch the last few days to integrate our Discord chat onto the page and this came in handy to quickly start streaming a video file to Owncast for testing purposes: ffmpeg -re -i MOVIE.mp4 -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -c:a aac -ac 2 -f flv 'rtmp://STREAMURL/STREAMKEY' I needed to stream to Reclaim TV so I could test the chat functionality, which only works when you are live, so I decided to stream Beatlejuice which I have a rip of on my server, so the command looked kinda like this:...

While I’m not completely averse to using Google stuff, I stopped using Google search a few years ago, just to make sure all of my data eggs aren’t just in Google’s basket. They already get my email, most of video watching, lots of work documents, and so many other things. For the last few years I’ve been using DuckDuckGo, which I honestly really like, but I will admit that at times its search results can be subpar compared to Google, or at least that’s my perception....

Jim beat me to blogging it, but on Friday he and I jumped on a stream and migrated a test instance of Mastodon he has that he installed the manual way, over to a new dockerized install using my 1-click installer on Reclaim Cloud. Things went super smoothly and this should make future upgrades and maintenance super painless. Because the server uses an S3 bucket for its images, really all we needed to do was dump and restore the database, and then fill out the ....

I was watching this Action Retro video where he installs Red Hat Linux 5.2 on a Pentium system. Its cool stuff! That being said, the real gold for me was him referencing this search engine that he runs for use with retro computers, FrogFind! It loads over plain old HTTP, and has a simple layout, so it works with ancient browsers, but even cooler than that, when you click on a result it loads in a simplified version of the page right, this way you can actually read the content of modern websites from an old browser!...

A couple of weeks back I did a stream with Amanda and Pilot where I showed off what I’ve been learning about moving WordPress Multisite and Commons in a Box setups to Reclaim Cloud. I’ve done a few CBOX Openlab migrations, most recently for SUNY Oneonta and University of New Haven, so I wanted to document what I’ve been learning. The great thing about CBOX Classic and CBOX Openlab is that they really are just WordPress Multisite, and so not too much special was necessary above and beyond moving any other Multisite....

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m finally getting around to writing about Reclaim Open. Reading Tim’s post on his pinball streaming rig for Reclaim Arcade has inspired me to start with the streaming / recording setups we used for Reclaim Open and how that all came together! This post has become so long that I’m positive no one will read it, but hey it will be useful for me to look back on!...