The G07 Kid

I spent much of this weekend digging in on  some Electrohome G07 monitor chassis repair. I have a bunch of games in the bavacade that use this monitor chassis to power the glorious CRT tubes for these 1980s miracles.

All told I have at least 7 cabinets that have a G07 chassis. There may be more, but I’m not sure what chassis all my cocktails are using given I never checked, and there are four total: Rally-X, Pleaides, Galaxian, and Moon Cresta.* Along with the Wells Gardner K4600 (at least 6 cabinets have this chassis) the G07 is the most common in the bavacade. That means part of making this hobby sustainable is figuring out how to work on these models given chassis repairs are a big part of keeping games online. I’ve slowly been getting better, but I remain very much an amateur. But even hacks like me have their moments, and this week was one of them. I got two of the three non-working G07s running again, leaving me with just one non-working chassis that I can use as a donor chassis for parts given all the games with G07s are now fully operational. YES!

Trusting the process means a lot of troubleshooting, and this weekend I was pretty happy to have committed a bit more and pushing myself to do more extensive diagnostic testing of the various components for things like resistance readings, diode readings, checking if transistors are good, voltage test points, etc. All of this was Greek to me just a couple of years ago, so starting to get my head around this basic troubleshooting before replacing anything is long overdue and pretty rewarding.

I already talked about the first successful G07 repair this week in my “bavacade Repair log from 6-29-2023,” noting “I was able to repair the Condor G07 chassis that was dead by doing a cap kit, swapping out a new B+ filter cap as well as a horizontal width coil.” The cap kit was done almost a year ago, but I never got it working. Turns out the recent replacement of the B+ filter cap is what brought it back to life. The horizontal width coil was broken, so I soldered a newer one off one of the other two non-working G07 chassis, figuring better to replace the broken one while the board was out. When I re-installed the chassis in Condor it worked, but there was a slight undulation that was annoying me. So, as a test, I tried it in Robotron and the waviness was gone and it worked perfectly, so that’s where it lives right now.

This means I needed to repair one of the other two chassis for Condor, and then I was golden. The two G07 chassis I had both blew the F901 fuses (2.25 AMP @ 250V ) next to the B+ capacitor, which is the biggest capacitor on the board. After discharging the B+ filter,† I replaced the fuses, which needed to be soldered in, and then tested the G07 that came from Pole Position (I defaulted to this one because I had desoldered the horizontal width coil from the other chassis for the first fix). Initially I thought the Pole Position chassis had an issue with the flyback and/or the horizontal output transistor (HOT) given the symptoms when it originally occurred a few weeks back. But after re-soldering the fuse and re-installing in Robotron to confirm as much, there was a total vertical collapse of the heart

That’s a new one, but I’ve read about it on forum posts innumerable times. I figured I’d have to deal with it sooner or later, so I embraced the challenge to broaden my experience—learning is painful! OK, so the first thing I did was look at some of the basic troubleshooting for this, and from what I read it is possibly linked to a few different things, such as an open circuit somewhere, which requires testing each resistor in the 400 series circuit to ensure there are no infinite (OL) ohm readings. It’s also been linked to the x401 and/or X402 trasnsitors, so you wanna check the values there. I’ve read a few cases where the IC501 chip was bad and needs to be replaced, but that seems less likely. That said, the following G07 repair video did have that issue, and it does a great job walking you through common troubleshooting as well as demonstrating how to test the transistors, which was very helpful:

I tested the transistors, and they were both reading at .570, which seems normal. I then tested all the 400 series resistors and some were lower than the specs, but none were open, so not sure they are the issue. I also compared the results on a working G07 and they were fairly similar, here are the results I got for this chassis:

FR401: 69 Ohm
R401: 99 Ohm
R402: 18K Ohm
R403: 3.3K Ohm
R404: 4K Ohm
R405: 12K Ohm
R406: Vertical linearity trim pot
R407: 4.2K Ohm
R408: vertical Height trim pot
R409: 51 Ohm
R410: 6.4 Ohm
R411: 13K Ohm
R412: 13.5K Ohm
R413: 580 Ohm
R414: 3.1K Ohm
R415: 2.6K Ohm
R416: 8K Ohm
R417: 67 Ohm
R418: 1.3K Ohm
R419: 1.9K Ohm
R420: 6.6 Ohm
R421: 5.5K Ohm
R423: 2.4 K Ohm

Some of the readings are low, particularly for R404, R411, R412, R416, R417,R421, and R423, but I got similar low values for another chassis that works just fine, so I “resisted” replacing any resistors just yet given I didn’t find any open circuits, just issues with value range (assuming a low resistor value would not cause the total collapse, but I’m not positive on this). The next test would be the IC501 chip, but I was not entirely sure how to test this chip, still a blindspot for me, and I don’t have a spare regardless, so I let that sit.

There could also be an issue with soldering joints at the yoke connectors on the board but the solder was fine, but still might reflow those. Beyond that, I tested the resistors for R406 and R408 which adjust the vertical height and linearity, and they adjusting values accordingly, so I was hitting a brick wall. I even checked the diodes in the 400 circuit, but all seemed good.

At this point I decided to step away from the Pole Position chassis, and turn to the other one that wasn’t working. First thing was desolder the horizontal width coil from the chassis I just abandoned and solder it to this one. I already added the new F901 fuse, so with the width coil added and the fuse in I tested it out. The last time it had not powered on at all, whereas this time it powered on and immediately there was smoke coming out of the flyback. It had blown. This, oddly, was very reassuring because at least I knew exactly where the issue was, and I also had an extra flyback that worked. So, I replaced the flyback and tested the game again and voilà this time it worked perfectly, whew! All the work on the other one with no results but a lot of learning, and this one was a simple replacement part swap, I’ll take it every time.

I need another width coil and a working flyback, but once I have them I might even take another shot at the last non-working G07, but given no games are effected I can finally move on to the last chassis repair I need to do, the K4600 for the Centuri Challenger, so until then!

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*I’ve yet to dismantle a cocktail cabinet, but that task will probably be coming soon given some work needed on my Pleiades cocktail cabinet, I don’t trust the adjustable metal legs on that game and want to get them properly lubricated and adjust with the write screws.

† Capacitors are designed to hold a charge, and when you blow the F901 fuse that charge has nowhere to go, which makes these big capacitor dangerous to the touch. Whenever removing this board do not grab it from underneath before discharging the G07 cap. You can do this by using an insulated screw driver that is connected to a ground via an alligator clip to ensure the charge has somewhere to go. To ground it, make sure the screw driver touches the + and – posts, read more on this on the KLOV forums here.

Ian Linkletter’s Call to Action at Reclaim Open

We’re honored to have edtech’s patron saint of resisting student surveillance, Ian Linkletter, join us on July 24th at 12 PM Eastern (9 AM Pacific) to discuss the crucial role of ethical edtech in our current moment. As many of you already know, Ian’s experience battling Proctorio’s SLAPP lawsuit has provided him a uniquely personal perspective on the tremendous costs and dangers of ceding control of higher education’s mission to greedy, unscrupulous vendors. His cause is that of anyone who believes education is not only a fundamental right, but provides the basic toolkit for every citizen to battle tyranny. Join us at https://watch.reclaimed.tech/reclaim-open for Ian’s call to action advocating for ethical edtech in the work we do.

bavacade Repair Log 6-29-2023

This is just a quick update to document some of the work happening recently in the bavacade. It has a been a bit of catch as catch can given how busy the last month has been with the Reclaim open conference the and coming virtual event in July. That said, I’ve been sneaking in work here and there in the mornings, and as usual it adds up. I already blogged about the Yie-Ar Kung-fu custom cabinet project, and will be a summer long endeavor, but it’s very exciting. I also documented some of my work a couple of week’s ago testing various parts I bought in the US in the “Arcade Therapy” post, so things are definitely moving along.

Arcade Therapy

More recently I have been testing some spare boards I have, namely a spare Make Trax board as well as spare Super Cobra board. This was also part of my attempt to start organizing all my parts and spares in the basement and get some semblance of order. I find testing and labeling when things worked saves me a ton of time, and some of the metadata on the boxes noted that these boards were questions marks. Also, I was looking to test a Crush Roller board in Make Trax I was sure I’d bought and brought to Italy over, but turns out I am either delusional or simply left it in Fredericksburg. Either way, because I’m obsessed I bought another Crush Roller board I found for a decent price in Germany along with a spare Moon Cresta board. The latter board is for the cocktail cabinet in Zach Davis is minding for me in Portland, Oregon, and I want to install and test the high score save kit on this one before shipping it back once I am in New Orleans next month.

Anyway, back to the spare Make Trax and Super Cobra boards. The Make Trax spare works, but the sound is noisy. It’s as if the sound pot is not working correctly and there it is too loud and scratchy, so will need to track that down a new potentiometer (pot) and see if tracing the audio gives me any insight. This board will be the first real PCB work (besides my botched Stargate repair attempts) I’ve attempted in earnest, and I’m hopeful it’s the start of some basic board work.

If it goes well, the second project will be Super Cobra, which has an issue with the high score save kit. There are weird special characters in the high score save (HSS) kit and free play is not working. When I substituted the original roms—this board has several ROMs removed given they are programmed on the HSS kit—and Z80 chip from the working board the special characters went away. That said, there was then a strange rebooting issue with the game that did not happen with HSS kit in, so I’m going to buy new chips and  burn the Super Cobra roms (a first for me). After that, I’ll try to track down the random rebooting issue, which is definitely an issue I can isolate to that board, should be fun!

As far as other work, I am making headway on monitor chassis repair. I had the spare Hanterex Polo in Cheyenne sent in for diagnosis given the original is stuck in the US on what’s shaping up to be an almost a 6-month wait, which I’m not thrilled about. I’ll keep pushing on the US repair, but in the meantime if the spare board is fixed here in Italy I can finally get this game back online. If that happens, then I’m just one G07 chassis and one K4600 chassis away from having everything running. I was able to repair the Condor G07 chassis that was dead by doing a cap kit, swapping out a new B+ filter cap as well as a horizontal width coil, and the chassis is working pretty well, but there’s a slight undulating wave that Tommaso tells me is good enough, but it’s annoying me, so I do think I need to replace all the adjustment pots, especially for vertical linearity and vertical hold.

In fact, I was certain I bought spare G07 pots, but I can’t find them for the life of me (part of the quest for order undertaken this week), so I’ve been parting out one of my extra, non-working G07 chassis. I’m also waiting on some 1.25 AMP fuses that should come today to try and get the chassis that came out of Pole Position working again. I think this chassis has either a bad flyback or a bad voltage regulator given there has been a recent cap kit done already. I might also need to swap the B+ filter cap. If that works, it will be put in Robotron, which leaves only the K4600 chassis for Challenger (I put Challenger‘s 4600 into Venture to get that game up and running) to repair. I’m not sure what is up there cause I swapped flyback and there was a recent cap kit, so a bit perplexed, but hopefully we some poking around and testing that will be the final piece of the puzzle. This is where the chorus sings, “Hope springs eternal in the bava heart.”

Finally, I have the Make Trax cabinet totally stripped and with Alberto to add wheels because every game will be on wheels sooner than later in the bavacade. The cabinet, overall, is close to mint save the control panel overlay which cracking. When Tim and I were getting Reclaim Arcade up and running I came across an original control panel overlay for this game and snagged it, it was one of the things that came over with the container so I asked Alberto iof he could remove the old one and add this one, and as he says to everything, “No problem!” He’s the best! He removed the old one, which by all accounts from Tim is a totally nightmare, and got it sanded and cleaned up.

After that, he put on the new overlay and it looks like new! So good. Sometimes those things I bought that I thought “Will I use this” are now almost all in use, and that makes me happy.

I think the next game to go on wheels will be Elevator Action, so will start taking that one apart, and that will mean 16 of the 30 games in the bavacade will be on wheels, and that means I am have crossed the half-way mark, which is encouraging progress! It also means I will have stripped almost every game down to just the cabinet if I manage to get wells on all of them. That’s pretty awesome.

Olia Lialina at Reclaim Open’s Virtual Event

As part of our Reclaim Open online program we will be hosting scholar and artist Olia Lialina. From her early interactive hypertext My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) to her archival work to resurrect Geocities in the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age project. Lialina’s art and criticism have consistently focused on the web as a personal, creative universe to refactor how we imagine space, time, and relationships on the world wide web. She has been a professor of New Media at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart since 1999, and through her teaching, research, art, and writing provides a consistent voice to help us understand early web aesthetics, such the Prof. Dr. Style which highlights the seminal role universities played in the early look and feel of the web. More recently she has been exploring the current trajectory of the web moving “From My to Me.” Her talk at Reclaim, “Seeing 30 years of the WWW through different trajectories,” will map broader design and usability shifts over 30 years of the web through distinct moments and trajectories that highlight the steady loss of agency with monolithic platforms that erase the playful, personal spirit that made this space revolutionary. The talk will be streamed freely for any and all interested on July 17th at 12 PM Eastern (6 PM Central European) at https://watch.reclaimed.tech/reclaim-open

Also, if you’d like to interact with the stream, you can join Reclaim’s Discord instance at http://reclaimed.tech/discord and follow the Reclaim Open channel for live discussion during the event.

Accused! ds106 on Trial

It’s been 12 or 13 years since its inception and I must say it’s kind of wild that ds106 won’t die. That’s gotta say something about how awesome it was/is/will be, right? I guess it really is #4life!

Few people have done more over the past decade to keep this course chugging along than the great Paul Bond. So, when Paul approached me with the idea of putting ds106 on trial at Reclaim Open, I was in. Paul and I have worked together over the years on a few classes, and ds106 was just one of them. We co-taught the True Crime course as well as the Internet Course at UMW, both of which were laboratory experiments in the spirit of the hallowed ds106. So when Paul framed the session as a trial we immediately went back to our True Crime roots.

Paul decided to frame the session as a sensational trial using the Aesthetic of the colonial American trials often predicated on a public display of shame and condemnation. Paul wrote the script, created the awesome trial poster above, and essentially did all the work. He was to be the accused, Martha Burtis the ornery judge, I was type-cast as the boisterous prosecutor, and the audience played the jury. It was really quite fun.

To promote the talk, Paul not only hung the poster in the main conference area during the art fair, but we also staged a short, impromptu performance wherein Paul was seated near the poster and I gathered the attention of the group loudly and started listing his crimes against ds106, while imploring attendees to join the session later that day to find this miscreant guilty of….

• The infiltration and usurpation of the ds106 course
• Unauthorized coat-tail riding
• Slothfulness in the presence of an evolving web
• Remixing without a license
• Engaging in online pirate radio broadcasts
• Promoting “blogging” and other vulgar forms of authorship
• Enabling cultural commentary through media manipulation
• Behavior unbecoming of a well ordered web

I mean, that list of abuses is pretty awesome, no? Paul is pretty awesome, and once again he delivers for ds106 because he’s definitely guilty of being #4life! You can see the entire session below:

Both the impromptu public shaming and the official trial were loose, rough, and a total blast, much in the spirit of ds106. But what was even cooler was the response from the audience calling for more art, dammit. It was even floated that the whole trial was just a ruse to re-engage some of the original ds106 crew to get the band back together. I can neither confirm nor deny any of this, but I will say after seeing what Michael Branson Smith did with the A.I. Levine session at Reclaim Open Paul, Martha, and I decided we are interested in creating a class for Spring 2024 that would essentially be a ds106 course focused on AI. Any folks interested in collaborating on such a project? Any schools willing to throw a course at it? Or have us teach a course for your campus? Let us know.

A ds106 focused on AI means we may be able to coax Dr. oblivion out of hiding to run this course. He was always a staunch champion of interrogating the contested future of digital storytelling, so it may be high time!

A.I. Levine at Reclaim Open

This is the first time I have written about the AI craze that has swept the web over the past 6 months or so. I’ve been intentionally resisting the urge given so many of the hot takes, hysteria, and complaints seem pointless. The only way to start wrapping your head around this post-humanistic beast that cannot die is through art, and so it happened when I was chatting with Michael Branson Smith (MBS) about what he might present at Reclaim Open. We had a wide-ranging chat, as always, and he started talking about using AI to generate a “fake” presentation, all he would need is someone who has written about a topic extensively and we can get access to samples of both their video and audio likeness. I think at that point MBS said something to the effect of, “You know, someone like Alan and his SPLOTs.” BINGO!

The rest is kind of history, I was thrilled to play some small role as a sounding board for MBS’s epic vision. In fact, I almost torpedoed it by suggesting we do it entirely without letting Alan know beforehand. I was fascinated by what his reaction would be after discovering his likeness and ideas were used to present at Reclaim Open without any prior head’s up. I mean it would give him another reason to rail against AI, right? But this was not so much because I wanted to piss him off, but because I think it would underline the blurry ethical lines where open, available content and credit get deeply complicated in the realm of AI generated content. That said, I also recognized that making a statement about AI and ethics was less important than offending a friend, so we looped Alan in, and he provided video and audio for MBS to train for A.I. Levine’s 5-minute talk on SPLOTs.*

The session was amazing, and you can watch it above in all its glorious hilarity. At the last minute we had the idea to loop Alan into the presentation with the idea of him acting irate and faking indignation at the whole thing. Alan, as expected, was even better than his A.I. likeness, and it was really a joyful, thoughtful session that underscored the serious implications of this new technology without being pedantic or sensational. It was also amazing to have Alan play such a powerful role at Reclaim Open from afar and, of course, he already blogged it.

This session also helped me understand the best way, at least for me, to come to terms with the artificial elephant on the web, namely to think of it as a creative challenge to explore the limits and possibilities of this tech. This spawned the idea of shopping around a new iteration of ds106 that’s centered on AI, which a subsequent session that put ds106 on trial cemented, but more on that in another post.

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*According to MBS, the audio and video he found elsewhere were even more effective, and I am hoping MBS will blog a post-mortem in which he narrrates his process, because it was pretty amazing.

Reclaim Open and Dream Teams

YAPARO! or, yet another post about Reclaim Open I’ve been inspired by so many great posts about Reclaim Open, and I’d spend more time summarizing them here, but that’s in the works for Reclaim Roundup, so I’ll try not to duplicate efforts. That said, Tim Klapdor already did a lot of this work in his “Journal – Week 24 2023” post. I love Tim, and he’s one of the many folks we missed dearly at Reclaim Open, but his spirit was very much present, particularly his brilliant thinking in this post about the coming costs of universities outsourcing our IT expertise—I still need to blog it, but let this quote suffice for the moment:

Almost every University now spends millions of dollars every year as a tax to Microsoft and AWS for hardware and a handful of software vendors to run their core business. Without spending that money, the University could not exist. They are now trapped into paying this indefinitely, and because the competition has been eaten up over time, we are now in a monopolistic vice. Over the next few years, we will see the vice tighten and the costs rise.

The only way to exit this state is to escape it entirely. Applying the same ideals as renewable energy – what if the new University set itself up to run independently as a sovereign entity, not reliant on 3rd party vendors and their costs? What if it embraced open-source software and collective hardware, not just as a consumer but as a contributor? What if it then sold those services and knowledge to others?

This outsourcing of core infrastructure and, as a result, staff expertise has absolutely become the rule in higher ed IT. Something folks at OpenETC and CUNY, amongst others, have pushed back on for years, but there is no denying the pandemic accelerated that process. Tim’s idea that the cost vice from these monolithic services will only get tighter and universities need to start considering alternatives sooner than later is right on. His likening that to renewable energy hits on yet another theme from Reclaim Open, and I’m beginning to get a sense that there is a core of edtech thinkers that are converging on some of these ideas and it is exciting to witness (Anne-Marie Scott is another I recently quoted).

And this is where the experience on the ground at Reclaim Open comes in, three days of thinking through this stuff with such awesome people in a loose, congenial environment was the ultimate professional development for the Reclaim Hosting team. Some of the Reclaim crew have only a vague idea of the world wide web of ed tech (whereas others have come up in it), so creating an experience where everyone got to hear, talk, and interact with practitioners in this field was the absolute best experiential learning imaginable.

I mean I hope everyone who came to Reclaim Open had a good time, I sure did, but at the same time this conference was pretty selfish. I wanted this group of passionate, generous educators who showed up to interact with a young, amazing team that’s just getting its feet. I knew the people we had collected could provide a welcome reminder to lead with the heart and the art. Watching the Reclaim team get inspired was the most powerful element of the three-day event. Which was epitomized by the moment when Noah, who started 8 months ago, came up to me after the last day and said “I kept hearing about this Aaron Schwartz guy, so I Googled him and WOW!” That was magic. I knew then and there this was akin to Faculty Academy or Northern Voice during my formative edtech years—I needed that community. Turns out we all do to some extent. Putting together people at different stages in their career provides a longer, inter-generational sense of what was, is, and can be in any field. But particularly in a field like edtech where the story is constantly being hijacked by the industry, erasing the work of many who have been part of a small, human-scaled community using accessible tech for teaching and learning—a noble calling that cannot, as Tim Klapdor reminds us, thrive in the monopolistic vacuum of big tech.

Ok, so there’s that, which brings me to the Division of Teaching and Learning Technology (DTLT) panel that took place during the un-conference.  It was another selfish undertaking that brought together many of the original DTLT staff at UMW that worked on campus at some point between the mid 90s through today. All of the people on that panel I consider both friends and amazing colleagues, and they all had a huge impact on my personal and professional career. I cannot overstate how much I love these people, each and every one. So again, I am recognizing some deep bias here. That said, this was a team that many in the world of open web edtech looked at as a “city upon the hill,” we were brash, we wove the web into just about every course on campus, and we did it ethically and humanely. We worked individually with faculty and students alike, we taught some far-out classes to lead by example, and we built* and maintained the infrastructure where all this happened. We did the work and also had a ton of fun doing it, we were a team of people UMW had invested in for more than 20 years and the proof was in the pudding, things got done, the culture changed, and the possibilities of thinking through the web as a core literacy for the liberal arts was not only floated, but buttressed by an entire group that had the tools at their disposal to scale that vision across departments for an entire campus. What happened at UMW was impressive, people took notice, and there was a sense of anything’s possible. The “Dream team,” if you will, but nothing lasts forever, the pendulum swings back, and as Luke noted in his amazing post reflecting on Reclaim Open:

Much of the past decade has been spent refining, defending, and caring for that space with a cadre of comrades, while helping new generations of scholars learn how to build through it towards their goals. Though that work continues, I’ve watched with growing angst as the public university system all around us becomes ever more susceptible to the neoliberal logics of extraction, surveillance, and control. The work has become more tiring, and I came to Reclaim Open hoping to make better sense of my past and present, and to think more about futures I could be proud of, or even energized by.

It has been a tough decade for edtech, and there is a lot to be concerned about for sure, but I wonder if Tim Klapdor’s vision around university’s reclaiming their centrality by investing in people, not vendors, might be one possible future. And I want to believe teams like Reclaim Hosting model a lot of the values and work that was traditionally the domain of universities, that’s part of the education of this emerging team at Reclaim—to understand the deep connection we have to the universities we support, to understand in so many ways we were born of that system, but have also figured out a way to transcend some of its more internecine tendencies when it comes to the plague of our current generation of incompetent administration. This might be where Luke Waltzer’s highlight of the role of Chip German in the formation and preservation of UMW’s DTLT is quite telling:

The convening launched with a panel featuring the DTLT All-Stars reminiscing about what had been, and trying to identify the ingredients in the special sauce that made that unit such a powerhouse of innovation and experimentation 10-15 years ago. I came away thinking: damn, Chip German is the unsung hero of this story. His perspicaciousness and advocacy cleared the space for the DTLT gang to do their thing, and then he protected it.

How much of our current malaise in edtech is driven by a sense of capitulating both agency and vision for our universities to those that simply want to sell us a solution? I do understand the irony of me saying this as a vendor, but at the same time I think Reclaim Hosting is much more than that, and in some ways the state of the university administration and purchasing economy has forced us into a kind of exile, if you will. Is the only space for a dream team like DTLT in 2023 outside the walls of higher ed? I don’t think so, the work Kathleen Fitzpatrick is doing at Michigan State University highlights a powerful node of resistance, as do the aforementioned OpenETC and the CUNY mafia’s open insurrection. I’m sure there are many others, but the key is connecting those stories and collectively weaving a narrative of resistance and hope to battle the exhaustion and disillusionment. I do think Reclaim is a dream team in the making, but what became abundantly clear at Reclaim Open is that cannot happen in a vacuum, this needs to be a networked, connected ‘movement’ (the scare quotes are for Brian Lamb) that both articulates and creates the future of edtech we want to see. I think Reclaim is doing our part, but we need to do it in collaboration with others—that collective action is the thing that will push that pendulum away from its current parabola towards disconnection. And as Meredith Fierro notes in her forward-looking meditation on Reclaim Open:

I’d love to see more younger voices in our community, sharing their work and awesome perspectives. I’d love to explore how our work can be sustainable too. Working online has its perks, but finding small ways to help the environment a bit, will help keep it around far longer.

Voices like Amy Gay, Ruth Carpenter, Annescia Dillard, Nick Plank, and Alex Carney to name just a few were part of a new community of edtech that I want to hear more from, and I would throw that overseas to Lauren Heywood and Alex Masters in the UK. So many awesome folks. In fact, I see a lot of their fellow travelers in the cast of characters that comprises the Reclaim crew, all of whom were fired up about Bryan Alexander’s talk around the future and the importance of sustainability, renewable energy, and a way towards some kind of punk, whether edu, solar, or hope, they all provide an opening beyond our moment.

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*Is installing WordPress building?

Yie-Ar Kung-Fu Custom Cabinet

I’m embarking on a new-to-me bavacade adventure, namely working with Bryan Mathers to create custom side art for the 1985 fighter Yie-Ar Kung-Fu. This game was the most popular arcade conversion kit of 1985. What’s a conversion kit? It often refers to a board modification that enables operators to convert an older, less popular game into a brand new title—all without buying a new cabinet. It probably made good sense for the arcade owners back-in-the-day, and such conversions helped the industry recover from the video game crash of 1983. But the conversion kits often meant that the cabinets were never really as iconic as their predecessors, and the first thing to go was usually attention to the art, which was definitely the case with Yie-Ar. The side art was a slap on, rectangular image that does little justice to the various characters you challenge along the way.

I got one of those Yie-Ar Kung-Fu conversion kits in a Defender cabinet a few years ago, and recently did some work to clean it up and add wheels. Rather than buying a reproduction sticker for the side art, I thought it would be cool to dream up some custom art for this cabinet. This is something I’ve seen folks do in the hobby, and it can make for an awesome art project. Problem is I’m not a graphic artist, but then I thought of the magical Bryan Mathers, so I reached out and he is game.

So, the cabinet we will be creating the art for is a previously converted Defender cabinet that has a very distinctive shape. When sanding down the various coats of paint the original art work appeared. What’s more, it was in very good shape! We primed over it as a layer of protection in the event someone wants to reclaim this cabinet in the future.

So we know the shape of the cabinet, and Bryan and I chatted about possible side art, and I was hoping to highlight the different backgrounds which are a cave-based waterfall for level one rounds, and a Japanese palace for level two. So using those backgrounds on the side art somehow would be cool.

Then I thought of the side art from the Sidam Explorer,  which features comic panels with an abstracted, brooding astronaut:

So amazing, then the idea brewed that we might do 11 unique panels each featuring one of the various characters you fight. perhaps 6 on one side and 5 on the other. Perhaps highlighting the cave fights on one side and the palace fights on another? I don’t know, but it sounded awesome in the moment. Bryan is planning on using a 3-D rendering of a defender cabinet  to fit the panels together like a puzzle, and then work within those pieces to see how it all looks in glorious 3D, so wild:

I’m not sure if the above model is what Bryan will use, but I really dug the idea of him modelling it all in 3D and building virtually first to figure out how to fit the panels to match the cabinet, see what colors will work,  and get a sense of the design in three dimensions, etc. Once we have that all locked-in, I will find a someone here in Italy who can do a hi-res print to vinyl. So, this is the beginning of what will be my first custom art conversion kit that will be a true one-of-a-kind in the bavacade. YEAH!

Reclaim Cloud’s 1-Click Mastodon Installer

Creating a couple of videos highlighting Taylor’s 1-click Mastodon installer for Reclaim Cloud has been on my to-do for too long, so this week I knocked it out. I did two quick videos, the first takes you through the basic install. While the installer is a Docker container and most of the heavy lifting is done for you, there are still some manual pieces like pointing a domain, creating an admin account, and restarting the container. Taylor’s guide goes through these points in detail, so this is really just a video supplement to the docs.

The follow-up video is focused on where and how to update the environment variables in the .env file. You use the .env file to add details for transactional email like Mailgun, as well as to point the media storage to a third-party S3-compatible service like Digital Ocean’s Spaces. Once again, this video serves to reinforce the guide we already have for doing this, so if the video fails you can fallback on the guide.

The final piece would be to highlight the simple set of commands to upgrade to a newer Mastodon version. I am working with Taylor to make sure that is working as expected, once that happens I’ll be sure to finish off this trilogy of Mastodon 1-click awesome.

Upgrading PostgreSQL Versions on bava.tv

To be clear, it was Taylor Jadin who upgraded my PeerTube instance running at bava.tv from PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 13. I did watch and learn as he worked through the process, so I’m some the wiser, but I’m still wrapping my head around both working in containers as well as trying to understand the particularities of PostgreSQL.

So in many ways this post is simply a redirect to Taylor’s post “Some notes on upgrading PostgreSQL in Docker” where he provides context and a step-by-step for upgrading PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 13, but it probably abstracts pretty well for upgrading a PostgreSQL container more generally.

At this point you might be thinking, “What’s up with you, Groom? Why are you making Taylor update your instance of PeerTube you lazy fascist!” Fair enough, I’m lazy and I do live in Italy, but there are reasons for this beyond those two things.

First off, working together on upgrades like this provides a low-stakes. collaborative opportunity to help us get more comfortable with supporting this awesome open source YouTube alternative.

Secondly, when we make time for projects like this that seem “low priority” it often pushes us to blog it, which is particularly important given there’s not so much help out there for folks tinkering with PeerTube.

So it’s directly related to our bigger push for honing our Reclaim Cloud support game, and Taylor is definitely our lead in that space. What’s more, watching him work not only helps me, but I think helps Reclaim more generally continue to push into the realm of containerized infrastructure. So that is my argument for having him upgrade my PeerTube PostgreSQL version and I am sticking to it!

Thanks Taylor, you rule!

Reclaim Open at the Scale of this Blog

I pretty much knew that my first post about Reclaim Open would be about scale. That was definitely one of the big takeaways from me over that re-invigorating, celebratory 3 day event. Keep in mind I helped organize the event, so I’m owning my bias out the gate. Even better is that Anne-Marie Scott—who travelled all the way from Scotland to join us in Fredericksburg, VA—already got the discussion rolling with her post “#ReclaimOpen – reclaiming human scale.” Anne-Marie is pretty awesome, and her thinking around open infrastructure and understanding scale in terms of augmentation and scaling people’s possibility rather than the metastasizing growth metric it has mutated into as a result of the consolidated social networks that continue to cannibalize any and all healthy cells left to make a buck. The hollowed out corpse was once a vibrant field of discourse. As Anne-Marie notes in the above referenced post:

The drive for scale seems to have become to scourge of our age. Mass education at the expense of meaningful relations and genuine community; AI operating at the scale of planetary effects. I have many more thoughts that I need to sit and digest properly.

The link between our unsustainable relationship with the planet and the ever increasing toxic climate on many of the predominant social networks is nothing new, but it really hit me in the gut at Reclaim Open. And again, as Anne-Marie notes this was a whole theme across sessions, from

Lee Skallerup Bessette challenging us to think about what tech was truly necessary, and Tom Woodward extolling the accessibility and usability virtues of stripping our websites right back.

To Bryan Alexander’s tour-de-force “Thinking about the Future of the Web” (full recording here) that really looked into the abyss with an honest, almost hopeful, take.

Image credit: “Bryan Alexander” by Tom Woodward

But all that while a particulate haze from Canadian forest fires descended on the ‘burg, a kind of Raven for our time. Nevermore, nevermore! It was hard to look away, but it was also helpful to be reminded the stakes are far greater than textbooks and resources when it comes to the open web; we’re fighting for survival in some fundamental ways. Which is probably why things like Hopepunk and Solarpunk were invoked repeatedly (I think I am just re-writing Anne-Marie’s post, is that the ultimate compliment?), as the search for viable alternatives are starting to take on real resonance as the cultural/political lines are being drawn ever more deeply across the US and Europe.

Slide from Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s the talk “The Web was Never Social”

But there was also faith in the seed of blogging in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s pitch-perfect talk about how “We Have Never Been Social: Web 2.0 and What Went Wrong.”

It’s a really brilliant meditation on the “web that was” that remains rooted in the “web that is” and can be with a call to a return to distributed, de-centralized networks. The coolest part of it all is Kathleen practices what she preaches by not only blogging, but helping stand-up one of higher ed’s most compelling Mastodon communities, namely hcommons.social. It’s just this kind of hopeful sense of working with generosity and a purpose that was a necessary adjacent reality to the waves of loss that pervades the social web as we knew it. This uplifting sense that the foundations are still there and the whole reason we got into this thing to begin with: to try to connect and create a sense of community, and that is not something any one platform can take away from us. This message helped balance the competing bouts of pessimism and optimism for what’s to come.

And that is just part of it, but let me stop there and start another post around Rajiv Jhangiani’s meditations on colonization and the open web as well as the UMW reunion session and many, many more. Like with OER23 there is no way I am going to get it all in one post, not need it be, and there are still so many posts I need to reference, so I might draw this out a bit, if even just to hold onto the magic just a bit longer….

Arcade Therapy

I’m back from a trip to both Fredericksburg, Virginia for Reclaim Open and after that Long Island, New York for some extended family time. All of that coming off several days in Lisbon, Portugal, so I was feeling the effects of being on the road for a bit. I have a lot to say about Reclaim Open, and that will begin here shortly, but before that I need to ease back onto the blog, so I’ll highlight some of my recent work in the bavacade.

Turns out the arcade work can also do double-duty as a kind of re-entry therapy. My bipolar gets pretty acute when I’m on the road and away from the family for a while. If I’m not mindful my thoughts can begin to spiral. So for this re-entry—before blogging or jumping headlong back into work—I took some time to tinker on a few games. I usually lug a bunch of arcade parts, repaired boards, chassis, etc. back from the US, and this trip was no different.* On top of the random parts, I also retrieved a few game boards I had shipped during my last trip to the US in February (including Sidam’s Condor, Exidy’s  Cheyenne, and Nichibutsu’s Moon Cresta). On top of that, I took a few with me from Italy, namely a Moon Patrol bootleg board with sound issues, a Bagman with sprite issues, and my back-up Yie-Ar Kung-fu board. So, in short, a lot of boards to be looked at, and below is the tale of the tape for board repairs:

• The Sidam Condor board had a boot issue and missing star field caused by a bad 74LS32 chip. Mike ordered a MN6221AA melody chip and replaced that.  The last problem was that the foreground was shifted to the left, cutting off the “F” in Fuel on the left hand side of the screen. This was fixed by replacing chip 74LS00 at location J4. Seems like pin 6 of that chip was stuck at a logic high and never moved.
• Moon Patrol bootleg- dead sound cpu, replaced but still no sound. Traced sound all the way back to the amp. The problem was the folks who made this bootleg pcb switched the +/- speaker wires on the edge connector. Simply swapping the wires at the speaker fixes this.
• Yie-Ar Kung-Fu – there was nothing wrong, no graphics problems, sound or control issues. This means power is the issue creating sprites, need to test this hypothesis once that cabinet is put back together, more on that custom project setup shortly
• Bagman – the Z80 cpu was bad, but Mike did not report any sprites issues after it was fixed. I had recurring sprite issues and assumed it was a board/chip issue, but turns out it was power, as it always is. +5V DC needed to be raised a tad.
• The issues with the Cheyenne board were linked to the 440 Multi-kit. Turns out the the sound portion of the Exidy kit was causing the no sound condition.The logic portion (the kit) had a problem coming from the GAL chip. Specifically, addresses 14 and 15 were missing and these addresses get generated by the GAL chip.  The game boots and plays fine, but opted to remove the 440 Exidy kit and re-install original Cheyenne chips, now to fix that Hanterex Polo to get Cheyenne back up and running after nearly 10 months of that game being offline.
• Moon Cresta was a strange issue, it was working fine until Zach and I tried swapping out the main CPU chip for a high-score save kit. Once we did that the game just threw garbage to the screen. Turns out the chip (and or high score save kit) needed to be soldered directly to board given the socket was not making contact with the chip’s legs— which seems odd. That said, the board is working again without the high score save kit, so might need to solder the HSS kit directly to board, we will see.
• The non-working spare Dig Dug board was the final one Mike worked on, and that board had a bunch of missing chips, so that was a full blown salvage mission, but it works a treat.

That’s a fair amount of board work, but as of now there are no bad boards,. This will be a short-lived victory, but I’ll take it.

Next up is monitor chassis repairs.  I have two G07 cap kits (Robotron and Condor) I need to do, as well as a K4600 capkit for the Centuri Challenger. After that, the final project is the Hanterx Polo, which has been drawn out way too long, so I’m trying to resolve that sooner than later.

The other work happening has just been some random testing of parts and boards I brought back, such as testing a 15-pin Williams power brick for Make Trax: it works fine. I’ve also been testing boards like Condor (looks and sounds amazing)  Bagman (working again and power adjustment fixed the power-induced sprite issue), Dig Dug (works perfectly), and Zach reported back Moon Cresta is all systems go. So Cheyenne, Moon Patrol, and Yie-Ar Kung-fu are the last boards to test, but two out of the three will need to wait until the games are back online. That leaves Moon Patrol, and I’ll be testing that here soon.

This weekend I fell down a repair rabbit hole. I picked up a degaussing coil in the US, and brought it back to add the final touch to Exidy’s Venture (one of my absolute favs) which had a bit of discoloration on the CRT. The degaussing fixed the issue, but soon after the game was freezing and eventually it seemed the monitor was cutting out. When I adjusted voltage the screen came back, but this time with mono-chromatic colors and it was out of  sync. Major bummer. I started troubleshooting which lasted deep into Sunday to finally learn the monitor’s fine, but one of the chips that controls the color and sync (chip 13C) needed to have the solder re-flowed. I did that and re-seated everything and the game started working again and looking better than ever. That was a small, but rewarding, win.

It all becomes pretty consuming for me (which is true of most everything I do), but I find that focused attention and tinkering to solve small, elusive problems can be just what the doctor ordered when trying to return to a much needed work/life rhythm. Arcade therapy! But not so much playing the games these days as fixing them which is a really pleasurable, if unexpected, consequence of getting into this hobby.

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*I even found all my Dungeons & Dragons maps and guide books feared lost, but that is a post for another day.

OER23 Polaroids, Day 1

Collection of polaroids taken during the first day of OER23. This was more of a mellow onboarding, pre-confernece workshop day. Bryan Mathers ran an awesome workshop that I will be blogging in-depth tomorrow, but for now let the images of the awesome people I crossed paths with today suffice.

Arrival Afternoon in Downtown Inverness #OER23

I did something I haven’t done in a while, I actually posted images to Flickr I took within a few hours and write titles and descriptions, and even tagged them. I know, crazy, right?

In many ways this seemingly moribund practice was resurrected by this discussion with Jon Udell on Mastodon. Jon was generously responding to my post about comparing Web 2.0 and Web3 for a presentation at OER23 this week, and his contributions were insightful (no surprise there) and started me thinking about the way many folks used to blog before the centralized social media sites. It was often for more often, a mix of long and short form, and not nearly as much psychological overhead at the idea of “writing a post.” You were just posting, it could be an image, a quick thought, or an essay, but long and short forms of writing lived together more comfortably, a practice Udell points to mico.blog as helping to preserve. More fodder for the presentation, thanks Jon!

Now, pair this with my recent post remembering the magic of the  blogging conference NorthernVoice, and you might think I am heading for a web nostalgia tailspin. Fair enough, it might be the case, but one thing that was so cool about my looking back on NorthernVoice was the tags in Flickr that allowed me to see and remember the people, spaces, and general sense of that important moment. Many people caught it, and looking back visually was magic. I was like, damn, that’s a cool way to remember.

Scott Beale’s “Northern Voice 2007”

In fact, the founder of Laughing Squid, Scott Beale, wrote a post that included the mage above (forgive the Laughing Squid ads if you click through), providing a textbook example of just this kind of short-form blogging back in the day. He threw up some links to Flickr, quickly let folks know he was in Vancouver at a groovy blog conference hobnobbing with Anil Dash in less than a full paragraph. Not bad for a few minutes work

So, in that spirit, just wanted to let everyone know I arrived in Inverness, Scotland for the OER23 conference that will kick off with  workshops and pre-conference events tomorrow, and then get going Wednesday and Thursday for two full days of re-connecting with some amazing people. I’m not sure what it is, but I am in the conference spirit right now and I am blogging like it is 2007! I will be uploading my pictures from the conference to Flickr with the tag OER23 and will also be posting here on the regular. I might event try and live blog a session or two, can you imagine that! What did Faulkner say? The past isn’t dead, it’s not even the past! Or something like that, that crazy southener!

Inverness was pretty glorious this afternoon.

What Happened? The EdTech Pandemic Podcast

I want to get this out of my head and on to the blog because I had this idea while in conversation with Reclaim’s Pilot Irwin and Occidental College’s Jacob Alden Sargent yesterday, and after sitting on it for more than 12 hours I think it could be interesting. The idea is pretty simple: channel my best Terry Greene and talk to folks about their edtech pandemic stories, and the subsequent fallout. This is a topic that came up again and again while traveling with Brian in February, and it’s no secret the sector was hit particularly hard, and seems many are still shell-shocked professionally (not to mention the broader personal toll). This was already one of the themes I planned on writing about from the road trip given there was a tentative sense of trying to move on.

And yesterday while talking with Pilot and Jacob, the impact COVID had on Jacob’s edtech group came up once again and the stories are powerful and important. Sounds very much to me like folks are still trying to make sense of what happened. So, in that spirit, I would be interested in just talking to people about the the impact of COVID on their edtech affiliated group(s). How did it play out? What was the aftermath?

In other words, “Jim Groom, what happened?” said in my best Dr. Oblivion voice. I understand folks may want to avoid this topic like the plague (pun intended). I also understand this may be a terrible idea. What’s more, someone may already be doing it, or want to do it, and in that case go for it. But if not, and folks are interested, I would love to have some conversations with any interested parties about their edtech group’s institutional story during COVID, as well as get a sense of where they are now. Maybe I’ll have a couple of folks interested from OER23, and I would love to put together a bit of an archive to capture these stories before they get lost in oblivion.

Getting Back in the Conference Swing for OER23

I was wracking my brain before starting this post to ensure I was not wrong before proclaiming that OER23 will be the first face-to-face conference I’ve attended since Domains 2019 —is that possible? Has it really been almost four years since I was at event like this in-person? I’m not entirely certain because my mind cannot be fully trusted, but I think it’s true. We did a Reclaim Roadshow in Los Angeles in November 2019, and I think the next conference on the list after that was OER20, but by April 2020 that conference was forced to pivot fully online in just a couple of weeks. Oh the good old, early days of the global pandemic. Now to be clear I travelled a quite a bit during COVID to help build an arcade in Fredericksburg, VA, but in terms of the professional development and relationship building that conferences like OER23 afford, it’s been all online for nearly 48 months. Crazy!

But next week that all changes because Lauren and I will be heading to Inverness, Scotland to present about the “ACTUAL” Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (spoiler: its containers!) and how Reclaim Cloud provides a powerful space for sandboxing the apps and infrastructure undergirding the present/future web.

I’ll also be doing another presentation focused on what happens when “Web 2.0 and Web3 Walk into a Bar…” or how these two moments of the web might be understood in relationship to one another. Having come up as a blogger during the hey day of Web 2.0 and sticking around long enough to watch the space shift towards more populated, centralized networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., it’s been interesting to see the fediverse emerge as an alternative that’s intentionally resists platform centralization; questions the logic of amassing followers; and sneers at the seemingly inexorable logic of becoming a brand on social media.

That said, I struggle with these generalizations a bit because my introduction to Web 2.0 had much of the same liberatory rhetoric around moving the conversation away from mass media networks and creating independent nodes to publish and syndicate as one pleases with fairly easy to manage tools. It’s these unevenly reported parallels that fascinate me, so I’ll be trying to work through some of the early tenets of Web 2.0 (the social web) and Web3 (the federated web) to understand where there’s crossover and consider some of the realities that served to jettison the early optimism of Web 2.0. I figure it’s worth considering if and how any new instantiation of the web can resist the creep of capital.

Anyway, it’s a work in progress that I’ll continue to plug away at for the next several days. And then, if all goes well, I’ll get to share it on Thursday in a room with other colleagues at OER23 who might have similar questions. I relish the idea of connecting at OER23, it’s been way too long!

Building Community with Discord

Next Tuesday is the start of the free Reclaim EdTech Flex Course focused on building community on the social platform Discord. In the first episode airing next week on April 4th at 12 PM Eastern Lauren Hanks and I will discuss some of the inspirations that led us to using the social platform Discord in combination with the live streaming service Streamyard to run our sessions for OERxDomains21.

That experience was so amazing on so many levels, and it led us to use that same combination soon after to run our Domains Workshop for admins in June of 2021 (still referred to as the Reclaim Roadshow). Lauren built out a template for the work she did during OERxDomains21 in Discord, as she will do, and over the course of the next year we used that for our workshops.

But we felt like we missing out on some of the potential for more sustained interactions and connections Discord offered, so we started imagining what it might be like to hold more regular events for our community in an always-on Discord server to start getting more intentional about outreach and community building. And in April 2022 a whole new division of EdTech at Reclaim Hosting was born using Discord and Streamyard as our primary means for running regular workshops and flex courses. We learned a lot in our first year and we’re planning on unveiling what’s in store for year two of Reclaim EdTech at Reclaim Open, but in the interim you should really join our Discord server next week to see how you, too, can build community in Discord!

Reclaim Open’s Unconference

With just a little over two months before Reclaim Open happens I’m thankful we had the forethought to add a day before the official event to host an unconference. My first event of this kind was back in 2007 at Northern Voice’s MooseCamp, and I have to say it was transformative. If you follow the previous link you’ll see the sessions that were run that day,* and I have to say many of them seem quite relevant 15 years on.

But the thing about MooseCamp that was so special were the souls who showed up and worked together for the first hour or so to pitch topics they wanted to discuss, and as a result a schedule for the day emerged that was for and by the people. It allowed for an informal space for folks who may not have had the time or inclination to submit a formal presentation to share, which made room for all kinds of serendipitous connections, different voices, and impromptu discussions that were timely and relevant.

Image of the wall of sessions pitched the morning of MooseCamp
Image credit: Cyprien Lomas’s “Northern Voice 07 – MooseCamp”

What’s more, it was foundational for my own sense of an edtech blogging community that was thinking more broadly about how these new publishing forms would impact our culture—in many ways MooseCamp was far more memorable that the official event the following day, and part of that was because it took on the shape of those present in that moment in some truly powerful ways. Also, while only remotely connected to him as a result of the NorthVoice events I had participated in, I was really sorry to hear of the recent passing of one of the organizers of that amazing conference, namely Darren Barefoot—his final post in this world tells the tale of a life worth living.

I’ve since participated in other unconferences, mot recently the University API at BYU, and again found this sense of connection, generosity, and community generative for a memorable event, so I figured it was high time to try it for a Reclaim Hosting conference. And, as often happens, the need for it has becoming increasingly more apparent. Just yesterday Shannon Hauser asked about whether we might be able to fit in another panel to our already full programme about web archiving. And while previously we might have had to politely turn it down, as of now we have an entire day wherein anyone can propose and run sessions about anything from web archiving to Geocities to photography to the fediverse to privacy and security, or whatever else folks with a shared interest care to come together and think through. It’s in many ways a huge attraction of Reclaim Open, the ability to show up for a full day where you can share your interests in the moment if you like, as well as support and learn from others who want to do the same. And who knows, you might even find some magic like I did back in 2007.

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*Getting to run a session about using WordPress for “More Than Just a Blog” alongside Candace Nast and D’Arcy Norman remains one of my all-time favorite conference moments. People were truly in it.

bavacade work log 3-28-2023

I’ve been pretty busy knocking out my to-do list for the bavacade. I created a long one after returning from the US, and I’ve gotten through most of it, so might be a good time to create a log with work done over the past month or so.

Back of pac-man painted

• Touched up Pac-man paint with new glossy yellow as discussed in this post, and finally painted the back door and finished that cabinet once and for all—although I may find myself doing one more round of touch-up
• Added the multi-game, high score save kit to the Pac-man board, so now this cabinet has both a modded board that plays Pac-man, Ms. Pac-man, Pengo, Pacman Plus (as well as fast version of those games save Pengo) in addition to the BitKit2 I already installed. I think that puts a fork in Pac-man for now.

Pac-man Multi-game HSS Kit

• Added a high score save kit to the Venture board, so that game is also all but done. I am debating adding another coat of glossy white paint to truly finish it off, but we’ll see.

High Score Save Kit for Venture

• Sent the Cheyenne ROMs out so that the 440 Exidy Mod kit that plays several games can be fixed. Turns out the issue with the Cheyenne board was related to the mod kit I bought, which is kinda lame, but Mike now has the ROMs and should be able to fix that, which would be awesome.
• Extra Condor board that Mike fixed is ready to go, will hopefully have that and the Cheyenne board shipped to Italy together if they’re ready to go here soon.

Cheyenne original ROMs

• There’s a graphical issue at the top of my Joust game, and it turns out it is pretty common and there is no much you can do about it, so was able to cross that off the list, although a Williams FPGA may fix this, but had trouble with that board in this machine.

• Replaced the Big Blue capacitor on the Dig Dug power brick, but that did not solve the loud hum, so this issue is still outstanding, but I did swap the Dig Dug power brick with the one that is in Millipede, and that solved the hum in Dig Dug by transferring the noise to Millipede

Big Blue Capacitor (Atari Power Brick)

• Replaced one of the leaf switches in the 8-way joystick for Venture, and that seems to work well. But I have some extras should I need to to replace the rest.
• Followed-up with Buffett about the Hanterex Polo chassis from Cheyenne he’s working on, that will hopefully be finished up shortly.
• Tried to look at the florescent light in Dig Dug that was blowing tube after tube, but decided to take a shortcut for now and add a 12V LED tube in its stead. It works so well I may need to get some window tint to obscure the brightness a bit, I am using masking tape at the moment, but I can find a better solution.

12V Power Switch for LED Marquee Light in Dig Dug

• Disassembled Millipede, and Alberto is presently adding wheels to that game and doing some minor cosmetic work.

Still to do:

• Got a few varistors from the US that I need to add to the Joust power brick, but this goes in the to-do list
• Need to look at Moon Patrol bootleg sound board I picked up in US. Everything is working except for the sound, so need to figure this out.
• Need to do the cap kit for the K4600 chassis that came out of Venture
• Need to do the cap kit for the G07 chassis that came out of Condor
• Tried to find two additional bolts/screws for the Venture joystick, but the US vs. EU sizes stumping me there, still need to sort this
• Tried doing a remote procedure with Zach Davis to add a high score save kit to the Moon Cresta cocktail cabinet in Portland, but that went sideways. Have no idea why it stopped working when we reverted everything before the surgery, frustrating. Anyway, may need to have that board shipped to Mike to get a second opinion.
• Need to buy an assortment of screw, bolts, wire ties, and more.

A New Milestone with Galaxian

While I did happen to set a personal best on the Galaxian cabinet in the bavacade as my account was being migrated to our newest shared hosting server named after that 1979 classic alien space shooter, that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the amazing work Reclaim’s sysadmin Chris Blankenship has been doing behind the scenes to get our cPanel servers running on Ubuntu. It’s a long story and Chris does an amazing job narrating why we have to move our infrastructure from Centos7 to alternative Linux distros on his blog, but the short version is they killed Centos7 and Kenny, so we have come up with alternatives over the next 18-24 months. Read Chris’s post for the bigger, longer, and uncut version of the story.

via GIPHY

The milestone the post title refers to is running a cPanel server on top of Ubuntu rather than CentOS, the shared hosting server Galaxian located in Frankfurt, Germany is doing just that, and I believe we’ll have another, Galaga, running on the West Coast of the USA. It’s a big deal because we wanted to ensure in 2023 that all new shared hosting servers were were running on Ubuntu in order to future-proof our server fleet. The upgrading of our existing infrastructure will be a big job and we will be doing it over the course of at least two years, but this moment highlights the beginning of that shift, and that is really exciting. Sometimes the work of infrastructure can be not only invisible but thankless given the only time folks are knocking on their door is when something goes wrong. So join me in celebrating the awesome work happening, as hidden as it might be, when something not only goes right, but marks a path for moving our entire fleet of servers into the future. Avanti sysadmins of the world, and avanti Reclaim!