Throw Out The Manual

Social Media and Reclaim Arcade

Similar to the recent tech stack of Reclaim Arcade I wrote about I thought it might not be a bad idea to take stock of where the arcade exists online right now and how it interacts with its audience in those spaces. This started as a rant on Mastodon, a

Wool

With a goal of reading more books in 2025, I solicited ideas from folks on Mastodon and mentioned I was enjoying shows like the sci-fi series Silo on Apple TV. Brian Bennett recommended the book it is based on, Wool by Hugh Howey, which happens to be a 3 part

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It's been almost 9 years since I wrote this post praising Disqus and here I am to kick it to the curb. And yet even in that original post, I knew nothing would last forever. Honestly, I don't hate Disqus as a commenting platform as much

The Arcade Tech Stack

I was reminded of a great series Maren Deepwell is doing on her blog about the tech stack she uses while I was reading this epic Call to Arms by Jim to Always Be Commenting and pointing out how hot the blogosphere is right now. It gave me the idea

Zepbound and Down

I haven't talked much about my recent weight loss journey, online or off, until now. When I began last year I stayed silent out of a mixture of fear of failure and judgment. Failure because much of my adult life has been spent trying and failing to lose

The End of October

One of my 2025 goals was to read more and I've hit the ground running with a book recommendation by my wife that she just finished, The End of October by Lawrence Wright. As a book about a novel coronavirus that takes hold on a global scale, I

Booking Bands with Airtable

When we did our big expansion at the arcade back in 2023 one of the things I wanted to do with the additional space was have a flex area that could be used for regular seating most of the time but double as an area for live music on Friday

Building a Breezeway

Last year we upgraded the food truck that we use as a kitchen at the arcade to a 20' food trailer. We had basically outgrown the truck in terms of volume of what we could put out and additionally we were severely restricted by the equipment in our ability

Upgrading to Ghost 5.105

A quick technical post to document a few hiccups I ran into and overcame when upgrading this here blog to the latest Ghost version as of this writing. I run this blog on Reclaim Cloud (big fan!) and used their built in Ghost installer which works a treat not only

Hello 2025

Ah yes, a new year has arrived, and with it, I suppose I can never help but start setting goals. One of those goals is to write more, as there’s so much I experience that I want to document here. Yet, as I look back, I see a single

2024 Checkin

Gosh it's already almost March and here I am ready to reflect on where I am at the start of this year. Time never slows down. I figured I'd update here on the blog with a couple things I have going on, if for no other

Experiments with the Magewell Director Mini

This will be one of those really long posts with a very niche audience of a few people that are interested in the idea of "All-In-One" streaming box setups like Yolobox. If that's your thing, read on for really nerdy tech talk because I'm

Could I be an Athlete Again?

I've had a very on again off again relationship with my body, weightloss, and strength conditioning for many a year. I grew up in a house where my father regularly battled it himself having been so successful in the early years of Weight Watchers existence that he was

This Week at Reclaim

At this point in my life maybe I'm in danger of just replaying all the hits. From DTLT Today at UMW to Reclaim Today at Reclaim Hosting it's not a new or revolutionary idea that using video as a platform to talk about what's

Vertical Live Streaming

I have two projects recently I've started working on that double down on lots of past work involving video, live streaming while playing the games here at Reclaim Arcade, and recording a publishing a weekly update video on what's going on here at the arcade. I&

It's Complicated

I've been thinking a lot lately about the tension in running a business between experimentation and complication. No doubt part of what's driving these thoughts is the current seemingly unsustainable inflation that has been happening globally for years now and has only gotten worse in the

Link List 8/9/23

Only had one link in the queue last week so skipped it on to this week. Maybe the weekly cadence is too much of a push to try and find interesting things in this world. We'll see... Computers Are BadNow you can block OpenAI’s web crawlerNow websites

Link List 7/19/23

Retro TV: Live 24/7 Vintage Cable TV Network on Raspberry PiDuring the pandemic lockdown, an old iPad became the catalyst for a three-year long passion project: transforming it into a 24/7 recreation (and parody) of 8…YouTubeSummer of spamThe internet used to be full of possibility. Now it’

Link List 7/12/23

Watch this massive LED sphere in Las Vegas light up for the first timeThe Sphere has 1.2 million LEDs dotting its display.The VergeWonders of Street ViewExplore the weird and wonderful things on Google Street View87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games | Video Game History FoundationNew study reveals

Link List 7/5/23

ForwardDomain.netDomain Forwarding Service using DNS. 100% free. No trackers.Wildan MThe Man Who Broke BowlingJason Belmonte’s two-handed technique made him an outcast. Then it made him the greatest—and changed the sport forever.GQCondé NastThe Condiment Packet GalleryElectric flying car gets FAA approval for test flights | Boing BoingAlef

Building a Streaming Rig

As I started this post I realized I have a lot of posts with "Building" in the title. I guess I'll lean into it. I'm fairly sure I can credit ds106 at least in part to my obsession with streaming video to the web.

Trading TT-RSS for Inoreader

It's wild that in 2023 we're still talking about Google Reader. But my journey with RSS started there and I remember the thrill of not only being able to follow blogs and sites and have content delivered to me much like an email inbox, but also

Goodbye Reddit

Today I used the Bulk Delete Reddit Posts & Comments History Chrome extension (and happily paid the $8 for full version and support the developer) to delete every single post and comment on my 17-year-old Reddit account before submitting the account for deletion. I went through the trouble to delete

Link List 6/28/23

I'm going to start gathering links from around the web that I've been reading or interest me each week into a once a week post here in the vein of Tom Woodward's Weekly Web Harvest. Enjoy! Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?I’ve been

Video Wall 2: Electric Boogaloo

My previous post about the expansion of Reclaim Arcade ran rather long but honestly I could talk at length just about this one aspect of it, so I figured I'd go into more detail in a separate post (because it's my blog dammit!). I rely a