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....

Have a cozy holiday! - The Jadins

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....

It is so cool to see how far MuseScore has come. When I was in college, using the open-source MuseScore was fully not an option between its bugs, and the quality of playback and the fiddliness of making anything legible. The idea of using it for anything serious was practically a joke. Even for simple stuff like I was doing, it would have been a huge time sink, so I saved up for a copy of Finale....

This site is amazing if you ever need to compress an image or need to make it into one of the new fancy formats like WebP. The only trouble is its URL is too cheeky for its own good and I never remember it or spell it correctly. I’ve got it in my Raindrop bookmarks now, but I figured I’d blog it, so I REALLY don’t forget it. Also, maybe other folks will find it handy....

I got the beta invite for Arc and I think I’m going to kick the tires on it for a week as my main browser. So far, I’d say it has some really smart ideas and genuinely useful features, but I think some of its opinions on browsing workflows probably won’t stick with me long-term. I like the way the address bar and pinned tabs work, Easels are genius, and Boosts have a ton of potential....

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 process 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....