 Welcome. Welcome. Thanks for joining me, Meredith. Yeah. Welcome. Welcome. Happy New Year. It's the first Friday of the year 2024. Yeah. Yeah. We're I'm kind of excited. It was it was a good energizing break for me, a holiday break for me. Was it was it for you or was it kind of too packed tight with stuff? Yeah, there was a lot going on, but good things. Lots of driving, driving back and forth from visiting family and all that sort of stuff. But New Year's was very quiet, which was really, really fun. So I was glad, glad to have that as we restarted. So it's all good. That's the best we went when you can kind of have that. I like a quiet New Year personally. I've kind of always been like that sometimes my wife and I joke my wife and I first met in high school. We've known each other a long time. So sometimes we'll joke. We're like, yeah, you know, we're not we're not that going out type anymore, you know, whatever. And then I'll think about it more and I'm like, I've never really been that type. So but yeah, we actually spent New Year's Eve with our daughter, Nat, in a cabin and it was really nice. Oh, awesome. Yeah. That's super funny. You know, we we Brandon, I love to cook. So we decided to go grab a really nice steak and grill it. And then we had like potatoes on the side. So it was delicious. And we watched movies. And then I don't even think we honestly made it to midnight. We were so tired. So I think we were asleep by like 1130, honestly. We're so I did by a technicality, honestly. It was like, all right, midnight bedtime. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, this is this is not going to be a packed with technical things stream, necessarily. It's not one of those. But we really thought it would be nice to kind of start the new year with a new stream kind of chatting about, you know, our like hobby stuff, honestly, you and I, but also looking at kind of the year ahead for reclaim, at least a little bit. We're going to look look through sort of what's been going on. And yeah, we got we got a handful of little things to talk about that I'm kind of excited to go through. So before we get into maybe like the hobby ish stuff, I want to quickly and I'm trying to share my screen while talking at the same time, which is always a good and easy thing to do. But I want to quickly take a look at the year ahead at reclaim a little bit. So if in case you didn't know if someone's watching this and you didn't know, community dot reclaim hosting dot com, that's your landing page for all of the stuff we're doing like this. You know, that's community focus. So from here, you can go to the ed tech channel and look at the calendar coming up. We have a lot of actually things on the calendar for January already. So we've got this welcome back stream today. Next week, I think pilot Amanda and myself, maybe others are going to talk about obsidian. We talked about obsidian a little bit last year in a stream and we kind of wanted to follow up on how we're using that note taking tool. We've got a community chat on the 17th talking about your campus in the cloud. And, you know, big dot edu website hosting and sort of the ecosystem and pitfalls and all kinds of things around that. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that one in particular. It's always it's kind of cool to see like how campuses like host their their big websites like that for sure. Yeah, I'm excited about that one too. And I think there's it's really interesting because it's it's actually pretty diverse, like in terms of how people do that, right? Like some people, some some schools host it completely on on campus, like on hardware they own some it's, you know, in most cases, it's some combination of, you know, of things and a lot of more and more schools are going to kind of modern cloud based setups that are fast everywhere in the world. And yeah, we'll we'll we'll get way into that and on the community chat, but I'm excited about that one. On the 19th, we've got Reclaim edu, which is sort of going to be our pitch for our take on your campus in the cloud. And so that's going to be a Friday stream like this one. And we'll kind of talk about what we're cooking up in that space. So that'll very much supposed that this is very much an intentional alignment of topics here. So on the 26th, and this is a tentative date, but at the end of every month, we've got our roundup coming up. So this is just a reminder that you can subscribe for our monthly newsletter and all kinds of stuff in the roundup. Every month, we'll talk more about the roundup in a second. And then the last stream of the month, we're we're thinking about talking about Edgeport, which is a a we're calling it. I like to call it like an industrial DNS tool, but it's it's more than DNS, but it's a tool that we've been using more and more. And we're really excited about which enables some of this stuff we're going to talk about around Reclaim edu. It's very similar to Cloudflare, if you know about Cloudflare, but it does more for WordPress sites in particular. And it's very exciting, pretty cost effective tool that we've been. We've already we're already using in our infrastructure in various places. So yeah, so that's the the upcoming calendar for January. And I'm also going to mention here, you know, we've got this link to the Reclaim ed.tech blog. And, you know, we just wrapped up in December, starting at the end of November, technically, but wrapped up in December, our open publishing ecosystems flex course. And so if you are at all interested in, you know, sort of alternative tools for publishing OERs or really any kind of resource, we went did a deep dive on various tools that we think are really interesting at Reclaim. So that are all self hostable and, you know, really put you in control of the content that you're creating or, you know, the group of people you're working with. And so I really highly recommend checking that series of videos out if you haven't already, you can click on each of these sessions on the website and it's got links to all the things we talked about. But of course, the watch session videos button will also bring you to the the TV guide watch site that we use for these. And so you can go in there and, you know, we had guests for all of the last three tools. So the first one was sort of the first session was Amanda and I focused on Hedge Dock and just sort of kicking off the course. But then the other three were really the more publishing focused tools. And we had guests from involved in all these projects with those. So I really highly recommend checking those out. Yeah, it was it was a good time. We just wrapped it up and now is not a bad time to catch up on it because we're still we're still kind of talking about it internally and a little bit in discord, too. So yeah, absolutely. And while we're actually on this page, Taylor, let's talk about the blog that we just launched to blog reclaim hosting.com. We are taking it back to the blog for announcements. So similar to the roundup where you can subscribe, you can subscribe to this blog for any sort of announcements about all things reclaim security announcements, events. We just did festive karaoke a couple of weeks ago and announced that on the blog, too. So you get an email each time we post on this particular page, too. Yeah, I'm full transparency making a note that we need the link to the blog on the community site. We have this announcements button that does go. It pulls in blog posts from the team. Yeah, we need to kind of rethink this. I think this should probably feature feature our new blog here and then have maybe a separate space for the team blog posts. But yeah, that's at blog.reclaimhosting.com. And there's already quite a bit here. So yeah, watch that space. We're going to be using this more and more. And yeah, I'm excited about it. It's it's really funny because before this, and I always found this kind of curious, but I can see how this happens is the old reclaim announcements blog, which is part of our normal website. But by the nature of that, it's actually kind of hard to find. So we really thought it needed its own, you know, space that could really make it feel like a first class citizen here. So yeah, watch that space. And I'll get I'll get these this page updated for that soon. So a couple of the things that I want to highlight here. The we already mentioned the roundup a couple of times now. It looks like I need to fix this. I got this is just great. I got a new year, new new new projects, new problems. But I'm sure that that's actually I know it. I now know I know what this one is, is we just updated our roundup to a new posting situation. So yeah, I need to fix that in bed. That's how that goes. But yeah, so the roundup, you know, if you don't know about it, go to roundup.requiemotion.com. Or if you're on this community site, you can just check out the previous issue button and you'll get to the roundup and you can subscribe here, get your email updates. We do one one a month. I don't know that we've missed one since it started. So, you know, we're pretty consistent with it. And Pilot kind of heads that up. And it's it's honestly remarkable how like I think how much is in this every single month from amazing gifts to highlighting blog posts that have happened in the community or, you know, from the team at Reclaim, cool tools that have we like like to highlight all kinds of things. So this is always it's always amazing to me what this shapes up to be by the end of every month. So absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, that's again, community.reclaimhosting.com. That's the place to go and we'll kind of link you out to everything. You know, you can also look at the event calendar from here and look further out because we do have stuff lined out past January already, too. So the last thing I wanted to really mention is in February near the end of February on the 21st and 22nd, we've got an upcoming admin workshop that is focused on one day on Domain of One Zone and one day on WordPress multi-site. This is the first time we're doing this format where we're covering sort of both back to back. And so you can register for one day or the other. Or if you want, you can register for both at a discount. If you have interest in learning about both or you already have setups for your school at both. You can go right on the event calendar and get tickets. The pricing is listed there. And if you have any questions, just feel free to shoot us an email at support at reclaimhosting.com and we can help you out. Yeah, we're really excited about this one. Yeah, I think this will be really fun. This is more I want. I want to say we're doing this as a beginner admin sort of deal. So if you're if you're a new Domain of One Zone, new managed hosting user with WordPress multi-site, definitely recommend signing up for this because it gets a good base of how to manage and administer your specific your specific setups. And we take questions. We have a panel within that, too. So that's always really fun to hear from people in the community about what they're working on and all of that stuff, too. And it's really handy to have it all in one sign up from events at reclaimhosting.com for sure. I think that's really nice. Yeah. And, you know, I I really encourage folks who want a refresher, too. Like, so this is great if you're new to things. But, you know, we are we're always retooling this every single time we do it. We don't we don't just like play back the videos. We're always kind of thinking through what's the latest version of this. What's our latest best advice? And I know in particular, we're doing a lot right now to think through, you know, last year was really the first school year that we offered much in the way of WordPress multi site training. So but those were offered over a month. And while we did have a lot of folks signed up and participate in that, and that was great, we do think that the the format of just like a daily intensive workshop works really well for people because it's less it seems like less of a time commitment in that they can just kind of say, this is the day I'm doing that. And then fully immersed in it. So we're trying this, which is new for WordPress multi sites kind of how we've done domain and one zone trainings for a while now. And I'm I'm really excited to see what, you know, what what we can learn from doing the two back to back as well. We already do have some people sign up for both days. So I'm I'm curious for feedback from folks on that. But, you know, we're always retooling this training, trying to make it relevant. It's a great refresher if you are wanting to, you know, get back into the swing of things in terms of admin stuff for the spring or maybe doing spring cleanup. So yeah. And I also think it's a great way to connect with other admins to who are doing this stuff at other schools. Highly encourage you to check that out. So that's the event calendar, kind of what's upcoming. But, you know, we thought it would be kind of fun to take an opportunity to talk about like hobby stuff, maybe holiday things and just, you know, just kind of ease back into the new year. Like, I mean, left to my own devices. If it's a stream with just me, I will go and try to like do Docker stuff. And I'll just try and fail for 45 minutes. And that's not how we want to start the new year. We thought we'd keep it light and fun, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I this idea kind of came up actually from our water cooler channel. We were talking about these little handheld devices. Oh, my screen is going to be blurry. Let me change my video really quick that the background will the background is going to be blurry. But you have to see that my office and all its glory now. But these little handheld game devices called me use. I always like, I never know how to say it. It's a me or me you. I think me you is how I've heard in YouTube videos. I have one as well. We both have the purple. We have matching, yeah. And this little thing is honestly the best. Like device that I've had like in 2023. And I'm really excited to like keep playing games because I love Game Boy Advance games. Loved DS games back in the day when I was a kid and wanted to figure out a way that I could start emulating something some of this on my part of my PC itself. So I think Taylor, you froze. So I just want to make sure I'm still online. Oh, you're good from my end. OK, cool. I've been having network issues, so I just wanted to make sure. And I was really looking forward to trying to figure out how to play all that sort of stuff on my PC and going through like this box of memories that I have. I found my original Pokemon Ruby from my Game Boy Advance on like in a cartridge still. And I just was like, I have to play this, but I don't have a Game Boy Advance that works. So my husband actually surprised me with this. He found this. He bought this on Alibaba actually, or Aliexpress. So he went and bought a two pack. So he has his own, he got this one. And I was, I no clue what it was. And until I opened the box, but then realized how much, how many games and emulators they have on, it's like over 5,000 games of anything from the Atari up to the Game Boy Advance. And even like, there's so many. It's a ridiculous, fun little device. And I do kind of want to chat. You know, we'll chat about the device itself. And then I also kind of want to talk a little bit about just like emulation and handhelds and stuff in general. But this thing is honestly, you know, I got mine, there was a Black Friday sale around that time, you know, on Amazon for it. And I want to say I got it for like 60 bucks, basically. And then free shipping, you know, from Amazon. It's not very expensive in the whole realm of gaming devices. Like the price of an actual game these days. Like, yeah, for sure. So it's kind of amazing from a technology standpoint that that's where we're at with these little chipsets, right? Like this is a lot of, it's not a Raspberry Pi, but it is in that vein of like, it's a small low power processor. And, you know, these types of arm is the architecture, the processor architecture are all over things. Like your Wi-Fi router probably has a chip kind of like this and all kinds of devices. But we're now at a point where these things are getting so cost efficient that companies can put this kind of commodity hardware in here, but then build a nice device around it with like a great little screen and like good controls. Like I'm pretty picky about like E-pads and how those feel on classic games in particular. Like try playing Mario, like Super Mario World on like buttons that barely work. It's not a good time. So this feels great. It's absolutely tiny. Like, you know, to my memory, it's like the size of a Game Boy, but it's actually much smaller than most of the Game Boys. I still have my old Game Boy color and Game Boy, which by the way, it's a pretty close color match for my Game Boy color. I should have brought it up to my basement somewhere. But much, much larger in the hand than that thing. This thing is small enough to go in my like front pocket. If you, you know, if you have like pockets that are large, you know, large enough, but it's such a nice little thing. And there's also like a cool community around it too. Like I found out about these just from like a couple of YouTube channels I follow. And there's a lot of little handheld emulation devices like this, but people really like the Miu stuff in particular because they typically put really good screens on their devices. They're not too expensive and they are just, they're like decent quality basically for what they are. Yeah. And the chance to like upgrade things if you need to, like we bought bigger storage capacity, like SD, mini SD cards. And then upgraded this speaker is actually a couple of weeks ago. So it's... Can upgrade the speaker? Yeah. Okay. I did not know that. I'll have to send you the link after. And we're able to like, honestly, and it's so cool, like the box, they like set a screen protector in with it too. And you can get like little different like accessories. Like I have like a travel case for it. And it like literally reminds me of like having my DS when I was like, when I was a kid, like bringing that around with me. So that's, it's super cool. I think I played, I started with Sapphire. I don't know why I have Ruby, but I was like, you know what? I'm just going to play Pokemon Sapphire. I've played for like 15 hours already in it. Yeah. And like, you know, you and I both have like gaming PCs. And I do a lot, most of my gaming, like gaming is probably my biggest hobby in terms of time spent and what I feel like knowledgeable about and what I care about and stuff. But returning the classic games on like a, like in my case, like a 32 inch gaming display, especially if it's like a Game Boy advanced game, it's not great, right? Like if those games don't look great blown up like that. They also don't like sound great either. Like they're kind of designed for little tiny speakers in these devices. And I found it much more enjoyable to return to like say like old Pokemon games and stuff like that on something like this, especially because I can, you know, like, I think you and I both have the, there's a community custom firmware that is out there. I don't know if you have this installed the onion OS thing. Yeah. Yeah. I have that installed on mine. Yeah. Yeah. So I installed that too. And that, if you are tracking on this stuff on YouTube, everyone's like, yeah, get the miu mini plus, put onion on OS on it immediately because it's just a, it's a community maintained custom firmware for this thing. That's really good. Like it, it's really slick and polished and easy to use. And it has a lot of really cool features like sleep. So you can basically have a game open, just hit the power button. It'll turn the screen off and lock all the buttons. And then like after 15 minutes, it'll actually power down. But when you power it back up, it'll resume right where in the game that you had left off playing. Yeah. Like I literally just turned it back on after like maybe a week off and it's right back where I saved it. Yeah. Which is a game changer for, especially I think retro games and Pokemon games because I'll say like as a dad too, because like I will pull this thing out and play for 10 minutes. And then like, like Nat will need something. I don't want to like have to be like, hold on. You know, like it's really great to just be like, yep, cool. And I'll return to that later. It does not matter, you know? I love that, especially because a lot of older games don't have, aren't saving all the time for you. Like they often didn't have that, Pokemon's actually the exception, but a lot of other games, it's like, no, you have to like beat three levels before you can save again. It's like I don't have, I don't want to dedicate that kind of time to a game that's 30 years old. And we can talk about like, you know, like, well, that's a choice, right? Like I make that choice to play them that way. But I've just found myself like tearing through like a back catalog. I don't have an actual like spreadsheet or anything of this, but I have an internal in my head of like, these are classic games I never really played that I've always wanted to return to. Like right now I'm playing through a bunch of SNES things. Specifically though, Super Mario World 2, Yoshi's Island, which I just never got to. My first game console was a N64 and for handheld, it was a Game Boy Color. So I just missed that stuff. But, you know, SNES stuff and older, beloved, right? Like people love those games. So this is kind of my first time playing, I mean, I've played a lot of these games before, but I'm finding more time for that stuff now because of how convenient this thing is. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think they play on the nostalgia factor too a lot with the like the, I've mainly only seen them on YouTube channels. So like as the creators that like have them themselves, like I think that they definitely take that nostalgia factor with them, which is super cool. Jim in the chat says he got Doom and Duke Nukem running on Miles' 3DS at one point and linked his blog post, that's super cool. Yeah, I was actually playing through Doom 2 on this because there's like a port. Well, you could play like various console versions of it, but on here, but there's, they actually, someone ported it natively to the MIU so it has like slightly better controls. I'll say still a little hard to control, but that was pretty fun. And yeah, like they definitely play on the nostalgia factor, like this custom firmware, I have mine, you won't, if I can get my camera. Mine's running a theme that looks like Mac OS 9. That's super cool. Which is just like unnecessary, but like that was just out of the box or it was one of the themes that I could pick from once I installed that onion OS thing. Yeah, it's so cool. Even like, I'm really bad at particularly like platformers. So like I said, I'm playing a lot of like SNES era Mario stuff that I haven't actually played. Like I love a link to the past, one of my favorite games. I can play that game all the way through. Give me a Mario game. I'm below average at those. So the fact that like, I don't know if you've messed with this, but you can rewind too. So you can actually hold this, this little middle button is a hot key button or I don't know what to call it, but it's a shortcut button. You can do things like do save states. You can fast forward, which would be really handy for Pokemon if you're trying to like level up really quickly. And you can also rewind. So if I've found myself like, if I'm getting to the end of a game, it's really difficult. And I'm just like, I've tried this level five times and I can't beat it. I can actually like, all right, just rewind back when I get hit or something like that. Which is kind of cool. And I know we're both just kind of gushing, but which I mean, I'm fine. Like that's kind of what we came here to do. But I think it's really amazing kind of the confluence again of like this stuff getting cheap and then companies being able to do something really, like make an interesting product out of that basically. You know, a few years ago, it was not really a category that even existed, these tiny little devices. This even gets like good battery life and has by the way a replaceable battery. Like there's a little pack and obviously this is rechargeable, right? Yeah, recharges USB-C like anything these days, yeah. But the fact that this is a pack that I can just pull out and could buy a new one in a couple of years when that battery no longer charges to the same capacity. So great, like I wish my phone had a replaceable battery. I remember when phones did, but yeah. So that's super cool. And I think there's a lot of it just, I don't know. I think that that's really fascinating to see the technology get to that point and handheld stuff in the gaming sphere is huge. I had a huge year, I feel like even though like you were talking about like Game Boy Advance, like Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance were my handhelds as a kid and I dropped off around DS. Like that's, I just never got one of those. So, but it's been fascinating to see like even though, you know, Nintendo has the Switch right now which of course is also handheld but there's no dedicated handheld only thing from basically any of the companies right now. And meanwhile, these have been getting super popular. The Steam Deck for handheld PC gaming has been, I have one of those is probably my favorite device of last year and I still use mine like multiple times a week. I love that thing. And like it's just been crazy to see how much I really think the Switch kind of kicked a lot of this thing, this stuff off from Nintendo but how big handhelds have been getting even though there's no like successor to the 3DS or DS anymore really. Yeah, I think that's funny you mentioned the Steam Deck. We were looking at the Asus or- The ROG? ROG, yeah, the Alem. It's Asus is the company though. Yeah, yeah. And I think that extension of it is super fascinating because it legitimately is like a whole computer in your hand because you could run Steam games on them. I'll be right back in a second. Okay, and it's just super cool. Like the Mew is like Linux based, which I find is super like, I'm just like starting to really see like the difference between like all these like softwares and computers and machines and just all sorts of stuff these days. Like, I'm getting more into like seeing how they all inner work and to like making all sorts of like our lives run essentially. Especially working at a web hosting company, you are very intimately familiar with Linux and command line. Like we all at this company have to do that stuff from time to time. Obviously our infrastructure team are like our experts, but we all do that. Like if you've asked Reclaim to do a migration for you, we've probably done something at the Linux command line. I'm literally doing this on the side. Like before we sat down, I was on, I'm in terminal like getting ready to for an arcing command and stuff. And like having that experience in Reclaim for so long, like I didn't realize how like, I guess I don't know how to like put it, but like now I'm seeing other things. I'm like, oh yeah, I've worked with that before. Oh yeah, like I know like this much of like a wide range of things. But that's all it takes, right? Like that's, you start recognizing these tools and they pop up again and again. Like we, you know, you just mentioned Arsync so I have been really, one of the reasons I liked the Mew specifically is because it's a Linux based, I have been messing around with emulation on Linux devices in some fashion for a while now. Like the first thing like that is I have had an original Raspberry Pi years ago running RetroPi, which is also Linux. And I had that backing up my game saves to my computer so that I could, you know, basically play something on the Raspberry Pi and then pick it up and play it on my computer in a different emulator. Because like you mentioned, I think near the start of this conversation, like you can emulate all of these things. You don't need a dedicated device. You can do these things on a computer, but it's really nice to do it on a dedicated device. Like it's fun, especially from, I think probably you and I where it's like, well, I know you and I specifically both have a desk that serves dual purpose for work and gaming. And that's great until you're like, you know what, I spent eight hours there. I'm gonna not be in my office for a little bit of that. I don't wanna spend another four or five playing something else, yeah, yeah. So, but I love the flexibility of like, well, but you know, maybe I want to have, you know, picked up that game later or maybe just have, make sure I have a backup of these game saves. I'm kind of weird about that stuff. So I use R-Sync on my MIU, not on the MIU, but I use R-Sync to connect to the MIU and back saves up off of it. And my first time learning R-Sync was for doing that on a Raspberry Pi when I was just out of college. That was my first experience with R-Sync. And now I use that like literally every day here. So like, I have like a script on GitHub that I use to keep track of that stuff. And I'm now trying to learn, or it's not, I know how to do it, but I need to do the same kind of setup for my Steam Deck. And I grabbed this from my backpack just to compare these things. This is, you were talking about the ROG Ally and that runs Windows and is a whole PC. This is a whole PC too, but it runs Linux, Demo-S specifically. And for a size comparison, very different. I bring this thing almost everywhere if I feel like I may have time for a game. This is mostly doesn't leave my house, to be honest with you. This is something I play on the couch from time to time. But I love both of the things. They're both Linux. And so my next goal is, can I back up saves from both of them? Because this thing can emulate consoles that this little guy can't. So my next one is I want to try doing GameCube, which I still have a GameCube, but I want to get some of that emulation happening on that portable device. That is so funny. I just stole, my parents know I took it, our GameCube from my parents' house for Christmas. That's actually really funny. And they were like, why do you want to, it doesn't work anymore. And I'm like, I'm going to fix it. You're going to work in. I want to play the Pikmin and. Pikmin's one I've never played. That's on my list of I need to. I never had it as a kid. But people love that series. Yeah, it is really fun. And then there's an Animal Crossing version that I want to play. But it's just the collector's factor of it at this point. It's super cool. If I can get it working, that's even better. Yeah, my GameCube still works. But I want to do, the cool thing about the GameCube is it has a, so a lot of retro consoles, if you hook them up with the analog output to a modern TV, they look like absolute garbage. They just look terrible. And there's even the input lag that is sometimes pretty noticeable, depending on what you're playing. And so to hook them up to an old TV, CRT is probably the best case. But I don't currently have a good like CRT. I have a PC CRT, which I had reclaimed open. I hooked up, you and I hooked up a retro PC and I have something like that. My Mr. is currently set up for that in my basement. But I don't have anything to hook up old consoles to. The GameCube has a digital out port and there are people now making little devices that will go right from there to HDMI. And they're not too, it's like $30. It's not nothing, but to get a great looking output out of that now 22 year old console is really cool. Yeah, that's super cool. So yeah, I could talk forever probably about this kind of stuff. But it's been really interesting to see to like the convergence of, like I said that low price, but pretty fast for what it is. Processor Linux enables this stuff. You and I are always dealing with Linux stuff because of reclaim. In some ways I could draw a line between me wanting to back up GameSaves and now working at a web hosting company, I think if I really needed to. I'm not gonna say that I like had my backup GameSaves on my resume, but like if it came up and like, do you have any experience with R-Sync? I'd be like, here's my most impressive R-Sync project. Related project. But it's so cool to see the stuff break into the mainstream now too. Like just literally like you posted in Watercooler your picture of the MiUmini. And I was like, I got mine a week ago. Like just got mine. And then I swear to God, three days later, a friend of mine was like, have you heard of the MiUmini? This person I follow on TikTok has like videos of like mods they do and it looks really cool. And I've never, apparently you can like emulate like she had not done emulation or didn't really know that was possible. And so like her introduction to that as an idea was this device. And she got one too, also of course purple transparent. My Christmas present to this friend was I cloned my SD card that was fully set up with all the roms and everything for her. That's not really a Christmas present. But like, you know, anyway, it's so cool to see that break into the accessible, I think, to people. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's always super cool to see all that sort of stuff. It's super fascinating too. I'm the same way I could talk about it for a while too, but yeah, awesome. We're gonna take a hard pivot and I can try to make a transition here, but I wanted to, while we had a couple minutes here, I've been kind of thinking about a lot of stuff related to my personal web presence and like mastodon and things like that. And I guess if I'm gonna try to make a segue, we'll talk about the accessibility of and cheapness of Linux devices like this. And that transition is happening to web hosting with containerization technologies. And we've talked before about, this is a rough transition, we've talked before about this product that we're gonna be launching this year called ReclaimPress and how we can offer a lot of the, not a lot of all of the benefits of something like Reclaim Cloud for containerized hosting, it's super fast and reliable, but at a pretty low price and is also easy to use, that convergence is happening in the web space too. That's my rough, the reason to talk about this, but what I'm thinking about is I did this, I've been a couple of things. So I've been following, Kathleen Fitzpatrick has been on a blogging role recently. And if you're in our Discord, she's one of the people that signed up for our RSS thing. And one of the things I love about Kathleen's site, and she uses a tool called 11D for her website. It's a static site generator, so it means that she has this on her computer, probably uses, I think she uses Git to like backup stuff, and then we'll build the site out and then it's hosted on her, I believe domain of one's own account. One of the things I love that Kathleen has done is she's integrated, first of all, this has a commenting tool that's kind of interesting called HiverTalk, I've not heard of that, but she has web mentions, which is an indie web thing, and basically lets people who also have web mentions on their site like like a post or comment or repost them, but she also has experimented with, and maybe this is not the case. Okay, she may have pulled this off of the site, but at one point she also had a Macedon integration. So when Macedon posts were coming in, or replies, they would show up on her blog posts, and I think that's really cool, and I really like that because I've been kind of enjoying Macedon as a space recently, and right now my website is similar. It's using a tool called Hugo, which is similar in that, like I write posts on my computer and then Hugo makes the site, so it's a completely static site. It's not WordPress right now, but one of the problems with it is I really would love my site to be to have some Macedon integration with like Activity Pub, and a lot of the stuff we've been talking about recently with PeerTube has Activity Pub integration, Macedon does WordPress itself now does too, which is really exciting to me, but right now the only way to comment on my site is using Discuss, which is like a third party tool that I bring in, but Discuss is, they make money by selling ads. So I don't love that. There aren't literal ads on my website, but they use data to basically sell to ad networks. Don't love that. And it's gotten to a point with me where my now default by default, my Firefox blocks Discuss. I could turn this off and have my comments, but I'm like, I really don't like that stuff. And the fact that my browser of choice has decided that Discuss is no longer an acceptable tool, yeah, this is time for me to visit something new, maybe Activity Pub based, I don't know, right? And this is also converging with this ReclaimPress stuff. So I'm now looking at this and being like, I think it may be time for me to move my blog off of Hugo and onto WordPress, which I've never had my blog on. Bringing it back. Well, so I've never used WordPress for my primary blog. My blog predates me even knowing about this stuff because I started using Jekyll, which was hosted on GitHub pages, but you had an upbringing through Domain of Unzone in sorts from UMW, right? And I didn't know about, well, I mean, I knew what WordPress, I'd heard of it, but I didn't really know what it was or how to use it or really that whole web hosting world or Reclaim, any of that stuff until I was a few years out of college, basically. So I don't have a ton of posts, but I have some and they go back to like 2018. So like I said, I haven't really been blogging, I don't think as long as you've been using WordPress. So I guess this is like, but on the other hand, I do like my website. I put a lot of time into it. I have some custom design to it and... Yeah, I love that like beginning portion of it where it like looks like you're in a terminal window. Yeah, I made this so long ago. This has persisted as part of my website since its first iteration, which was not even using this tool, it was using like Jekyll and GitHub pages and stuff like that. Yeah. So, but I basically took a web course from a friend actually who was doing like these little small group, like learn about HTML and CSS and a little bit about JavaScript. And I took his course that he like sold very inexpensive, but basically it was like a little peer group for learning web development kind of. And maybe development is not the right word because we were learning from the very beginning, right? And he recommended Jekyll and my like project was I wanted to make this little terminal looking things because I thought it was cool. And I saw someone else's site that had something kind of like this. And so this has persisted. So now I'm like, you know, I'm sentimental about not only my site, but the technology that it's based on in some ways. But I'm looking at what I want. And I had this blog post last year that I need to find really quick that was like a to-do list. Oh yeah. And it's like, oh, I'd love to pull in posts from Mastodon. Oh, I'd love to get rid of disgust, which I still haven't done. Right now I don't like the way cover images work. Basically, I can't put captions on them. I should make an about page. Well, that I could do. I just haven't done. And I'd love to have activity pub integration. I'm like, all of these things I know how to do in WordPress because I work with WordPress every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And at the time I had not used it. Well, you know, again, when I first started having any kind of web presence, but I, and for a long time sense, I've been like, well, it's kind of neat that my own site is something different for me and that sort of fun. But, you know, I don't know. I guess I don't really have a question, but I'm sort of like, convince me. Or not, I mean, you obviously use WordPress for your site, right? Yeah. Yeah, I've used WordPress for 10 years now. And pardon if you can hear my dog Dexter in the background. There are people at my house working on it, working and he's whining because he's like, I can't, I'm not in seeing people. Anyway, I've been working with WordPress for about 10 years and started fresh from scratch on more of a blog role going through readings and college and stuff like that and reflections and that sort of thing. And then I wanna say I moved into more of like a portfolio base when I started taking art classes too. So like a more image based and media focused, which was really cool. And then actually the last two years, I took a little bit of a break over the last couple of months, but I've been helping build out a non-profit website for a group, a mission group in Nicaragua that I've worked with as I worked with them in high school and then volunteer with them now. So it's turned into more of not just work, but more of like a hobby sort of thing, but like using Elementor to build out the pages for the non-profit and everything, which is super cool. And I really enjoy the aspect that it's open source. So if something's broken, you can fix it. Like you're not behind the like, I'm gonna name drop Squarespace and Wix and Weebly and all of those. You have options, right? Whereas your option, if Squarespace doesn't do it, your option is, okay, I have to not use Squarespace. Yeah, exactly. Of just all sorts of ways that you can build different tools in the same way that you have the MiiU as like another avenue to be able to play games. Like you have so many different resources online. And I've always really enjoyed the fact like Domain of One Zone and like even reclaim in general is the emphasis on like the ownership of like your site that you don't like, you're not stuck if you like wanna leave the particular platform, like you own the content, you own what's behind the blog and what you say on your blog that it's, you can take it with you if you wanna move it instead of like, oh, I'm stuck on this proprietary software where I can't move it. Yeah, and for a lot of those same reasons, but from a different angle, that's how I wound up using static site generators in a similar way. Hugo, the thing Kathleen Fitzpatrick uses, 11D Jekyll, which I used before that. And I know Amanda has some experience using Jekyll as well. Like a lot of us at Reclaim have dabbled in these static site generator tools and there are benefits in that there's no database. It's really kind of neat that it's just my entire website is a GitHub repository technically. And in fact, like it's a public one, which is unnecessary and kind of weird, but I sort of like that literally my entire website is, my website itself is open source in some ways, right? But this doesn't offer me much to be honest with you. Like it's not like I actually expect anyone to go here and be like, oh my God, like I'm gonna like dig through his GitHub repository. Like there's not anything mind blowing in here. I'm mostly just using Hugo as it's intended. And so if anyone wanted to make what I've done in the way I've done it, you would just go to the Hugo website and the same theme as me, which is called, I think it's the most popular theme. Yeah, Paper Mod. That's the one I'm using. It's literally at the top of the page. So it's not like I'm doing anything crazy customer unique. Like Pilot mentioned, like maybe I could re-implement this little terminal thing. I absolutely could. That would be so easy. In fact, it would be way easier to do in WordPress than in Hugo in some ways, because I would probably now use the site editor add a custom HTML block and be done. Whereas this is like, I technically like forked, not forked, but I made a custom version of the homepage for this theme. It's not that hard to do, but like, you know, it would be not any harder to do in WordPress, I think. But, you know, on the other hand, I'm conflicted because one of the things that I loved coming out of the open publishing ecosystems course we just came up with, Man and I both talked about our love of plain text. And this is that and WordPress isn't really that, but there's so many benefits. You know, I'm talking about all of these things about Activity Pub and I really do think that's the future of the web is this sort of connected social tissue that lets people, you know, use something like Macedon and just go sign up at Macedon.Social. It'll be fine. But also for people that wanna claw back ownership and maybe they wanna host it themselves or go on a smaller instance, like Jim hosts DS106 social that I use. And I love that that's like, I don't know, like 50 people on that server or something. It's not a lot of different people. I think those tools and the connective tissue between them is where we're going or at least I hope it's where we're going, you know? And so I feel like between that and all of the cool stuff we're doing with ReclaimPress, I probably need to make the switch. And especially one of the big things and I'm gonna bash WordPress for a second is I've always been bothered. I don't like my web, I want my website to be fast as possible. And you've got a large WordPress site and you're not paying much to host it traditionally. It can be slow and I'm not talking like, oh, it takes 10 seconds. I'm talking, I'm being real picky here. I'm talking about like, I don't like when a page takes two seconds. You know, when you, I've got a lot of images on this page, kind of. And it's very slow. And this is on our absolute cheapest option that you can pay for at Reclaim Hosting, right? Like there's, you can't go lower. But I will say I've been playing around with ReclaimPress so much that I think I wanna do the same thing there and do our cheapest option there. It's not launched yet, so I'm not gonna talk price. But it'll be about the same as what this account costs. And it's faster actually, even though it's WordPress. So I don't know. I think I gotta at least try and now I have to figure out how I'm gonna make that transition. I think there probably are ways to like import stuff but I may honestly just manually move it over because while I have a lot of posts, sorry, while I have some posts, this is not Baba Tuesdays, you know. That's a feat and it's on to move around. And if, Jim, you ever leave WordPress, like we gotta talk, like something's wrong with WordPress. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So yeah, I don't know. I think this is my project for the years to transition my personal site into a WordPress site that I can be, that I can get into some of the social web stuff. And if anyone is also looking for more to talk about, I would highly recommend. I wanna say this was Neil Dash. And I wanna say this was in Rolling Stone. I've been going around the blogosphere recently, the web, the internet is about to get weird again. Oh, okay. I would totally recommend giving this a read. And this has kind of been a catalyst for my thinking here of, none of this I didn't know about. We've been talking about Macedon and things like it and the Fediverse here at Reclaim for a while and many other much smarter people than me have been talking about it for a long time. But I don't know, this really framed it for me. And it was kind of particularly interesting that this was in Rolling Stone, like a pretty mainstream place. So I'd really highly recommend people check that out. But yeah, I think it's been great, Hugo. But I think this is the year I may need to ditch it and switch over to WordPress, which will do all the things I want it to do. And hopefully encourage me to blog shorter. Another goal I have this year is, I guess a new year resolution is, I don't want all my blog posts to look like, well, this is actually a pretty short one. I don't want all my blog posts to look like this. This takes me too long to write. And I need to be blogging more and shorter, I think. And I'll be honest, doing my website in a GitHub repository is not conducive to that. Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah, I'm right there with you with shorter blog posts. I have been meaning to write a blog post about my last trip in Louisiana for WP campus in New Orleans. And I've been waiting to write the blog post since July, and it's sitting in my draft folders. But because of how long my brain is making it seem, I haven't done it. So we are all about the short blog posts, like two, three minute, two, three minute reads, Max. I like how Hugo has the- I was hoping people want to read too, yeah. Exactly, exactly. Like how Hugo has that estimated time read on yours that says like three minute read or something like that. That's part of the theme I'm using. They're going in some JavaScript thing that does that. But the cool thing is basically anything I can do in Hugo is at least possible in WordPress, because there is no database or server-side processing happening here. When you request a page on my blog right now, you're just getting an HTML file. And so there's gotta be some piece of JavaScript that is part of the theme I'm using that does that estimation. I don't even know how it works, to be honest with you. But my point is I'm confident that either I could go and look at how that works on this site and port it over to my WordPress site manually. But honestly, I'm pretty sure there are WordPress plugins that just do this for me. So I'm kind of excited about like, most of the plugin research I do right now is for solving needs of our customers. And that's great. And I've learned so much about WordPress in the two years I've worked at Reclaim now. Like obviously I worked with it before, but like I'm pretty comfortable with WordPress now in a way that I wasn't say three years ago. And I'm excited to maybe do that research for myself. Like this morning I found one that lets you sync a GitHub repository with WordPress. So maybe that would be a way that I would get my Hugo posts into WordPress quickly. Yeah, that's cool. Or I found one that basically it's like the classic editor, but for Markdown. So you can switch between Gutenberg, the block editor and writing in Markdown. And you can go back and forth. So you can take a post that was written in one and go to the other and it transitions pretty seamlessly. And I love Markdown. I just talked about that. We just talked about that in open publishing ecosystems. So maybe that would be something I could do. But sometimes when you're publishing a website, you get limited by Markdown when you wanna do fancier things. And then my only solution is to then do it in HTML, which is fine. I love HTML too, but sometimes I need to do something quicker than that, you know? But anyway, thank you for indulging my rant and... No, this is great. But I don't know, I think this, maybe this stream is a good space for, you know, digital identity therapy. 100%, 100%. Yeah, pilot mentions short blog posts, unthinkable, maybe we need a blogathon. I think that would be a super fun pilot. I think we could totally, totally plan something like that. Yeah. Like think like hackathon, but the vlogs. That would be really interesting to like have, you know, maybe as a community thing too, if people would be interested, but like a day or not even a day, but like give people like an hour. I'm saying like, all right, start now. Start your blog post now. You can't have started it beforehand. You only have an hour and that's it. Like... Creative restraints are always fun. Well, and it just, you know, it breaks through, it's so easy to make blog posts into more of a thing than they need to be. Like if you look at, like people have been blogging a long time, they often complain about this too. And they'll be like, you know, blogs are so long and like medium, you know, medium has kind of, it's not just medium, but like has spawned a genre of blog posts that are these huge think pieces. And it's like, but blogs used to just be like Twitter, basically, you know? And I actually want to get somewhere between those two things for my site because I spend too much time thinking about writing and not enough time doing it. So. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I hope this was a, at least somewhat interesting kickoff to folks in New Year that are watching. I certainly had fun. Meredith, I hope you had fun too. And... Yeah, this was awesome. Yeah, and we'll see people around the Discord and check out the community site to keep up to date on everything we're doing. And yeah, happy Friday, everybody. Happy Friday. See y'all.