Today Jim and I did a stream showcasing a new Ghost installer for Reclaim Cloud that should automate a lot of common setup tasks that people run into when using Ghost. I’m really proud of this installer because I’ve put a bunch of time into making this thing really simple to use for folks who don’t have experience with Docker or Reclaim Cloud, but just want to get Ghost up and running quickly.
A couple of weeks ago I did a quick stream (ok it wasn’t quick, it was almost 90 minutes) on the Basics of the Command Line.
My goal was to start at the beginning, with navigating around files and folders and editing text, while picking up some tips and tricks along the way, as well show why the command line is still so useful and important. I spend a lot of time trying to drive home that you should definitely definitely use the tab key to autocomplete paths as it will make your life easier.
This is a quick little post to document something I’ve found handy! A common way to issue a Let’s Encrypt cert and get things to load on Reclaim Cloud over HTTPS is to use an NGINX Load Balancer. Here’s an example environment, one I use to run Foundry Virtual Tabletop:
The trick is some applications that you run won’t automatically redirect URLs with HTTP to HTTPS, so you have to manually type HTTPS in your address bar.
PeerTube 4.2 is out, and it has all kinds of features I’m excited about like in-place editing of videos, replays of recurring live streams (basically you can have a permanent Twitch-like URL where you can go live and then have a recording of that livestream automatically available afterward), latency settings for livestreams, and a bunch of other stuff.
I wanted to get my PeerTube instance on Reclaim Cloud upgraded, which is a docker-compose setup with the Live Chat plugin enabled, so I stopped the containers, pulled changes, and started the containers again.
I’ve been learning a lot about Webrecorder and specifically Browsertrix Crawler recently as part of a Web Archiving script that I am working on. The goal is to have a tool you could run on Reclaim Cloud (or your local computer using Docker) that you simply give a URL, and it would make a web archive file using Browsertrix Crawler, and a flattened HTML copy of the site using HTTrack.
At the end of the day today I streamed a little bit of me playing around with Kasm Worskpaces on Reclaim Cloud:
The tool seems interesting and it has been on my list of things to look into for a little while. It’s basically a self-hostable Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), like Citrix or Amazon Appstream, but for Linux Desktops and applications. Also, it has a free version!
Under the hood it all runs on Docker, which is how I found out about it.
A very, very, common thing that I find myself doing while working with web stuff is copying a long URL, but only needing the domain name part to paste into a terminal or elsewhere. It’s annoying to carefully select just part of the URL, and even more annoying to manually delete the parts I don’t need:
Your browser does not support the video tag. I love automating and making little shortcuts to simplify repetitive tasks like this!
I use SSH to access different environment in Reclaim Cloud a lot, but one thing that I like to do is use a native terminal app (I use iTerm2 on macOS) instead of the Web SSH functionality built in to Jelastic. Web SSH is amazingly convenient, but web-based terminals like this frequently lack some of the features I am used to using in desktop-based terminals like customizable keyboard shortcuts, organization features like tabs and panes1, etc.
PeerTube is a really nice self-hostable YouTube alternative that Jim has been using for a bit and introduced me to. I wanted to spin up my own install at video.jadin.me and theme it a bit to fit in with this blog site.
The first thing I did was install the dark theme, which I thought would more closely match my blog site as a starting point. You can do this from Administration > Plugins/Themes.
I’ve had this post sitting incomplete in my drafts for a long time!
Foundry Virtual Tabletop is an excellent, self-hostable virtual tabletop tool. You use it to play tabletop RPGs with other folks over the internet, (check the link above out if you are curious). It is a paid, NodeJS application that you can run on your own computer or on a server.
This won’t be a comprehensive tutorial on foundry itself after install, but I want to cover the basics and the Reclaim Cloud specific things that you will need if you don’t want to have to worry about manually starting the foundry application every time you restart a container (foundry’s own install guide doesn’t really cover this).
