Author: Taylor Jadin

File this in “blog it before I forget it.”
Recently I was making a GIF for Lauren based on an idea she had related to Multi-region WordPress Hosting. I have a bunch of different tools that I use when working with GIFs, and I sort of think of them in three categories:
Taking a pre-existing video and making it into a GIF Making tweaks to a pre-existing GIF Video editing tools If I had to break it all down the way I GIFs can be summed up into: Turn something in to a video, then turn that video in to a GIF.

Today I did a quick stream attempting to get WriteFreely working on Reclaim Cloud. WriteFreely is an interesting tool that I wanted to play with, and I was able to get things working with some poking around and help from Tim who was watching and pointed out a bind setting in the config.ini file. More on that below. Things kick off at around 2:51.
Basically, I followed the instructions on their install page with a few additions and caveats.

Today I did a stream where I attempted to create an Owncast installer live in about an hour. I have used Owncast before, and used Jim’s blog post to set it up manually, but that’s mostly all the prep I had done beforehand. Having just come off of setting up a Mastodon installer, greatly helped as I learned a lot from that experience, and was able to re-use a lot of stuff from it.

I’ve been busy with Peertube stuff lately. After getting my own instance at video.jadin.me upgraded to 5.0, I also wanted to set up object storage so I could utilize Amazon S3 or the alternatives. In this case I wanted to use Backblaze B2, as I’m already using Backblaze’s Personal backup for backing up computers in my home, and generally a fan of the simplicity of B2 compared to doing stuff in the AWS dashboard.

Here are some notes I made on how I upgraded various Peertube installs (video.jadin.me and archive.reclaim.tv, mainly) to version 5.0. Version 5 came with some big changes, and required some a new config for nginx, as well as a required setting in a new to me production.yaml file. Here are some quick notes if you are having trouble upgrading to version 5, and you are using a docker-compose based setup. There were some notes in the GitHub release for this new version that informed my notes below, but it did take me a little figuring and experimentation to make sense of all of it.

Two weeks ago, I did a stream on HTML flattening with a tool called HTTrack. I’ve been wanting to show this off for a while as I think it makes the processing of flattening a site relatively easy, plus it works across macOS, Linux, and Windows. I’ve been a little behind on blogging this one, as I didn’t have the video available on video.jadin.me until recently. This video was my test case for setting up my Peertube instance to store its videos on Backblaze B2, which is a lot like Amazon’s S3 storage, but even cheaper for many use cases.

This week I did a stream to document how I use hugo, the static site generator, for this blog that you’re reading right now!
The point of this post and stream were to show how I use this tool, but all of this is really not a good starting point if you are looking to start with hugo, or you just want to see how it works. For that, I’d recommend checking out the hugo quick start documentation!

I recently needed to back up a bunch of files, about 6GB, from a Reclaim Cloud node so here are some notes on how I was able to connect directly to the Node. I like using the Reclaim Cloud SSH Gate for SSH or SFTP access to containers most of the time, but in my case because I had so many files to sync, I wanted to use rsync, which as far as I’m aware won’t work with the SSH Gate.

In addition to the stream on a new Ghost installer, Jim and I showcased the streaming tools we used to put together the Reclaim EdTech Understanding Containers flex course as well as discussed the format of the course and future offerings for Reclaim EdTech.
And here are the chapters if you want to skip around the video:
0:00 – Intro 3:50 – OBS demo 7:09 – vdo.ninja demo 17:08 – reclaimed.