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I work at Reclaim Hosting as our Community Instructional Technologist. I am passionate about educating and empowering people who want to make cool stuff on the web.

I blog on this site, post on Mastodon, and occasionally write code. You can also find links to my public pbookmarks, my PeerTube site for videos and streaming, and an archive of my slides and presentations here.

Hacking on Owncast's UI for ReclaimTV

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 would 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....

November 23, 2023 · 7 min

A one-liner for using ffmpeg to stream a video file over RTMP

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:...

November 1, 2023 · 1 min

Trying Out Kagi Search

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....

October 28, 2023 · 4 min

Migrating Mastodon from a Source Install to a Dockerized Install

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 ....

October 28, 2023 · 2 min

FrogFind!

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!...

October 28, 2023 · 1 min

Migrating WordPress Multisite setups to the cloud!

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....

October 5, 2023 · 5 min

Building a Streaming and Recording Setup for Reclaim Open

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!...

July 20, 2023 · 12 min

Spinning Up an Even Older WordPress Site Using Docker Compose

Following up my last post, I realized that I wasn’t looking through the tags on Docker Hub properly, and the earliest version available as a pre-built container is actually WordPress 3.9! I had to take a closer look at the logs and make some guesses, as it turns out the environment variable for pointing WordPress to the right database host is different, and its hard to find info on using 8 year old docker images, but I got it working:...

July 12, 2023 · 1 min

Spinning Up a Pretty Old WordPress Site Using Docker Compose

UPDATE: I got WordPress 3.9 working too! For reasons, I needed to spin up a very old WordPress site using Docker today. I’m writing this blog post mostly just to jot down the compose file so I have it handy in the future. Digging through the oldest tags for the wordpress image on DockerHub it looked like 4.1 was the oldest version available, so I went with it. For the database, (after some trial and error) I ended up using the last version of MySQL version 5....

July 12, 2023 · 2 min

Our Disney Trip

June 11th through the 17th Abby, my parents, Nat, and I all took a trip down to Disney World, and I’m finally getting around to posting some pictures here. Nat absolutely loved it, and it was amazing watching a 4-year-old experience all this! Monday: Magic Kingdom On Monday (our first day in the parks) we went to the Magic Kingdom. We did quite a lot on our first day. Nat got to meet several Princesses, which she was over the moon about....

July 3, 2023 · 2 min