bavatuesdays | a "b" blog _Business

bavatuesdaysa "b" blogSkip to contentbavablogbavacadebava.tvbavaweeklybavacoursesthe internet coursetrue crimehardboiledds106bavafilmfestbavaghostbavatumblr← Older postsThe bava LibraryPosted on June 7, 2022 by ReverendI mean Chump’s getting one, right? What are they going to stock the shelves with, gold-plated nudie mags?I’ve been thinking a bit about what I want to try and build as part of Tom Woodward‘s Form of Awesome Flex Course dedicated to building things with Gravity Forms. The first live session is this Thursday, June 7th, at 3 PM, and I just spent some time creating a new WordPress instance with Gravity Forms installed at library.bavatuesdays.com. My thinking is that my project for the month will be to create a form-driven site that allows for entering data for books, VHS tapes, laser discs, DVDs, vinyl, CDs, and sundry other formats. I’ve accumulated a fair amount of junk over the years, and at the end of the month a container-full of it will be arriving on Italy’s shores.Reclaim Hosting offices filled with stuff to be shipped before… pic.twitter.com/AG6XgxXeU7— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 3, 2022I am trying to make my time this month learning Gravity Forms relevant, so I’m setting a goal of building a fairly simply form to record the various media and then make it discoverable according to certain categories, tags, topics, etc. I’m also wondering if I can find a way to scan and pre-propulate data with bar codes and ISBN codes like the app Libib does for Reclaim Video‘s collection, but that seems a bit advanced at the moment. Just having a site to make my kids do mindless data entry would be a perfect way to prepare them for their inevitable futures….I know Libib already does all this and more, and I could just use that app instead, but a) it’s yet another monthly subscription fee and b) I like the simple frame of a basic cataloging system in WordPress for this project. It’s easy to conceptualize; I already know most of the metadata needed; and I can probably hook into some cool existing libraries to get quick screenshots to make the visuals fairly easy and dynamic—but that might be wishful thinking. Regardless, it will give me a framework to understand what is and isn’t possible through Gravity Forms—which is really the endgame. So, I now have my site, Gravity Forms installed, and a bitchin’ project to work through, I am ready to go!Posted in bavalibrary, Reclaim Edtech|Tagged Gravity Forms, gravityforms, library, reclaimedtech|Leave a commentJoining the 600K Club on GyrussPosted on June 6, 2022 by ReverendAfter Pac-man, Gyruss might be my favorite golden age arcade game. I picked one up last Summer for the bavacade, and I have not looked back. I recorded a couple of high scores wherein I finally broke 400K last August, but the bummer was that I wasn’t able to install the hi-score save kit until last month. With that finally set, I now know every time I play is a chance for bavacade fame. But with travel and work taking most of my time over the last month I hadn’t really locked-in for some serious play time until yesterday, and that’s when my Gyruss game went up a notch!Gyruss hi-score 6-5-2022631,850! I was kinda surprised myself, I knew I was having a good game, but when I was approaching 500,000 with seven ships left I had an idea I would not only break 500K for the first time, but maybe even chase 600K in the same sitting—and lo and behold it happened. This was one of those games where everything breaks in your favor and you can feel the perfect blend of dumb luck and brute force experience paying off, I want to thank my wife, my children, the academy, and all the hordes of bava faithful. This is the apex of my career!*Gyruss hi-score 6-5-2022Funny enough I had stopped playing Gyruss this month in order to focus on trying to get better at Robotron (trying to break my personal 200K ceiling), which is not going well. So, in order to re-invigorate my confidence, I somewhat reluctantly sat down at Gyruss and the rest is bavacade history….for now._______________________________________*To put this in context the all-time hi-score is 1,304,100 set by Richard Marsh in 2004. So, no victory laps for me yet, but I am coming for you Richard, cause I can hold my breath for a long time! Update: Well, my pipe dream dream didn’t last long after learning that the new world record is actually 70,736,950 set by Danish retro-gamer Kim “Kanonarm” Köbke in a 62 hour game. How ridiculous is that? They even made a film about it!Posted in bavacade, video games|Tagged bavacade, gyruss|Leave a commentds106.club SSL NotesPosted on June 3, 2022 by ReverendWhenever I have some downtime I inevitably end up playing with one of the many silly sites I have accumulated over time. This morning it was the throwback Apache server ds106.club. If the logs are correct, I return to it once every two years or so to make sure the domain didn’t lapse and/or the server didn’t go down. As I checked in on it this morning I noticed the site was not loading over https, which set me down a path which ends with this post ?The site is running on a VPS with Ubuntu 16.04 installed, which is getting a bit long in the tooth. When I tried to follow these instructions to issue a new Let’sEncrypt certificate, I got an error that the PPA had been deprecated. You can see all the details through the URL they provide.Turns out you need to install and use Snap to get the Let’s Encrypt certbot installed on your VPS, so that was what I did. It wasn’t already installed on my VPS, so I ran the following commands to get Snap installed:sudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install snapdAfter that I needed to run the following commands to make sure Snap was up-to-date:sudo snap install coresudo snap refresh coreTurns out that my server needed the fuse package for Ubuntu to be installed, so I did that with the following command:sudo apt-get install -y fuseIt was also recommended to remove any previous certbot certificates, so I ran this command for that:sudo apt-get remove certbotAfter that I was ready to install the certbot:sudo snap install --classic certbotBut when I ran the above command I got an error that the snap command “cannot communicate with server.” After finding a similar issue someone else had, it turns out you need to make sure snap is running.I checked the status:systemctl status snapd.serviceIt wasn’t running, so I used this command to start it:systemctl start snapd.serviceAfter that I re-ran the install certbot command:sudo snap install --classic certbotIt worked, and the following command makes sure the cert will run correctly:sudo ln -s /snap/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbotAnd finally ran the command to issue the certificate:sudo certbot --apacheAfter that you want to confirm the certificate will update automatically with this command:sudo certbot renew --dry-runSo, ds106.club is now loading securely over https, not that anyone would notice or care but me. I like tinkering on small, zero-priority sites because they allow me to figure stuff out without any repercussions if things go wrong. For example, during my troubleshooting I decided to clone the environment and redeployed Ubuntu 18 to see if that would solve my Snap issues, but that over-wrote all my files—so I trashed the original environment and worked on manually installing Snap on the clone. Having a quick clone tool in Reclaim Cloud and a bit of freedom to experiment and destroy stuff that I can immediately get back up and running by pointing to a new IP address makes all the difference for this kind of work, especially when you are always on the cusp of your understanding like me.Posted in Reclaim Cloud, sysadmin|Tagged ds106club, reclaimcloud, sysadmin|5 CommentsForm of a Blog Post about ds106, RSS, and morePosted on June 2, 2022 by ReverendI am getting ready to map out my goals for this month’s Reclaim EdTech’s Flex Course on Gravity Forms, and after reading Tom Woodward’s post about using Gravity Forms to pull RSS feeds into FeedWordPress I was reminded how much the open standard web made building something awesome like ds106 possible. Gravity Forms was in many ways the next step for an Edtech steeped in WordPress to move beyond the “it’s more than a blog” rhetoric into actually building small, powerful integrations on top of WordPress.ds106 Assignment BankIn fact, it could be argued that the ds106 experiment demonstrated what some creative integrations with RSS and Gravity Forms could make possible thanks to the likes of Martha Burtis, Tim Owens, Tom Woodward, and Alan Levine. The ugly and rudimentary Daily Shoot syndication experiments I built were certainly pathetic, but I want to believe they led those smarter than me, namely Martha, to create the truly groundbreaking Assignment Bank that used categories for syndicated assignment posts to turn the blog into an assignment-centered social network. And leveraging Google Forms to allow the broader ds106 community to submit assignments on the fly. A project that inspired Tim Owens to build The Daily Create in January 2012 after the Daily Shoot site was shuttered, but rather than Google Forms on this site Tim used Gravity Forms which pushed the envelope that much further. This was also an early sign that Tim and Martha were a dynamic duo and their integration chops would soon be applied to transforming Domain of One’s Own from a pipe dream into a reality.Image of Daily Create siteI know this is old territory in some ways, ds106 is almost twelve years old, RSS remains on life support, and the emergence of new standards around JSON and APIs for integrating data always seem just a programmer or two away from working easily. Hope springs eternal. But given I still have a hand in ensuring ds106.us stays online, I remain amazed that all this magic is rooted in that old technology that easily allows folks to add their RSS feed (I spent countless hours in 2011 manually adding 500+ RSS feeds to FeedWordPress as ds106 took off), or even the ways in which the Daily Create became a syndication site using FeedWordPress as well as a form-driven site for new Daily Create suggestions anyone could submit.Giffing.net siteAnother little know form-based site that was not directly related to ds106, but in many ways built of the same cloth was Martha Burtis’s Giffing.net—I blogged it here. It is a brilliant site used for the UMW Freshman Orientation since at least 2015 to get students playing with Photoshop to create GIFs that they would then submit via Gravity Forms.* This is one of my favorite DTLT sites from my final days in that outfit, and Martha was fully locked-in to creating these small, assignment-based teaching tools with a ridiculous amount of creativity! In fact, the students created two GIFs, the second was masked to fit on the Convergence Center’s video wall—how sick is that? Featuring student work for all to see.So, in many ways all the pieces of what my goals are for this month-long Gravity Forms Flex Course are immediately apparent: I just want to be able to do what Martha and Tim did in 2011 and 2012! I am playing catch-up ?_____________________________________*I called it WP Toolkit in 2015, but Gravity Forms was part of that collection I believe.Posted in digital storytelling, Reclaim Edtech|Tagged ds106, gifs, reclaimedtech|Leave a commentReflecting on the Domains 101 & 201 WorkshopPosted on May 30, 2022 by ReverendI’m glad we had the foresight to record a reflection of our recent Domains 101 & 201 workshop the day after running it because it’s already fading into memory. We set aside a couple of hours on Thursday afternoon to record a Reclaim Today episode about what we liked about the workshop, getting into a rhythm as a team, assigning production tasks, and a bit on how we managed the online delivery as well as some tech-spec talk given it was a new twist on our previous remote workshop setup. While we still had all participants joining remotely, three of four Reclaimers were on the ground in De Pere, Wisconsin producing the workshop in-person.The hybrid approach to this workshop highlighted the ability to work seamlessly with our remote Reclaimer, Pilot, as well as with folks who joined the stream to do some impromptu sharing and/or co-present. It helped that the audio setup Taylor put together in the studio was absolutely amazing—it was a real step-up from the bavacrypt acoustics here in Italy ?Reclaim EdTech Domains 101 & 201 Workshop SiteIt’s also worth noting that the headless site we created for OERxDomains21—and then parleyed into the Virtual Roadshow last Spring—remained relatively invisible for participants despite the fact it was actively integrating Streamyard. YouTube, and Discord viz-a-viz the dynamic, scheduled presentation site. Invisible is always good for presentation tech, so I count that as a win!Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Edtech, Reclaim Roadshow|Tagged Domains101, Domains201, reclaim, reclaimedtech, reclaimroadshow, Roadshow, workshop|Leave a commentMigrating Ghost from Community Image to Docker Engine Installer on Reclaim CloudPosted on May 20, 2022 by ReverendWhen sending out the April installment of Reclaim Roundup we ran into a glitch wherein the instance was faltering sending an email to all subscribers once that number topped 500. I assumed it was an issue with our third party email tool Mailgun at first, but after investigating it was apparent Ghost was not communicating with Mailgun at all. Turns out this was a database issue with the official community Docker image for Ghost that others have reported over a year ago. Seems SQLite balks at sending out emails once the number tops 500+, and without seeing a fix in the Github repo on the horizon Taylor Jadin took matters into his own hands ?I’ll let Taylor share all the details on the new Ghost installer he built for Reclaim Cloud’s marketplace—how awesome is that?—but being excited I figured I would spend part of this week trying to install Taylor’s new flavor of a Docker image running Ghost with MariaDB to help battle those pesky email issues. So, a couple of things to frame the differences between the existing Docker image we were using and the new image might help set a bit of the context. Since January I was playing with installing the community image of Ghost directly from Docker Hub and putting an Nginx load balancer in front of it to deal with mapping a domain, SSL certificates, etc. You can see that process documented on this here mighty bava. This worked pretty well, to be fair, and the first real issue we have had was this SQLite email bug, but given we are using this as a newsletter, that is kind of a big bug.That’s when Taylor took the initiative and flexed some of his Docker muscles to look for a viable alternative for the broader Reclaim Cloud community. I can’t speak to all the details here, but from what I have heard and experienced he abstracted Docker out from a single container into several that are running within a Docker Engine instance. So, four containers within a containerized, stripped down Alpine operating system. So kinda like a container barge carrying other container ships ?So, in Taylors recipe he has Docker Engine that is then scripted to spin up four containers that communicate with each other as an enclosed stack. One manages the application, that is an Alpine container running the ghost files, one is a MariaDB database (or maybe MySQL), a third container deals with the reverse proxy web server through Nginx, and finally a Let’s Encrypt container to manage the SSL certificate. I like this because it highlights the fact that containers can represent all these things in on single image or, as demonstrated here, they can be independent containers that communicate within an abstract enclosure of a containerized Linux server a la Docker Engine. As you can see I am trying to explain this in an attempt to understand it, but I am sure there are limits—so tread carefully.Anyway, this represents some interesting challenges for my own Docker understanding because when everything is within a single container I know I can SSH into the container and access various .env or docker-compose files, but with this setup you SSH into Docker Engine, and then have to independently login to each container separately, should you need to. This helped me understand the utility of two Docker commands, the first is docker ps which lists all active containers:After that, you can use container IDs listed in the above command to access each individual container with the following command:docker exec -it bashThis will allow you to login to each individual container, which made me feel awesome because I thought I needed this to edit the environment file for the Ghost instance I was setting up for migration, but turns out I didn’t—so Taylor made it even easier for newbs like me. Turns out I could access the .env file directly from the ghost directory in the root of Docker Engine, and add the Mailgun variables as well as the URL for the instance. It’s worth noting that adding the variables for the single community Docker image for Ghost we are moving away from did not require SSH access at all. You could change those variables within the Reclaim Cloud Variables section, making that access easier.Variables editing in Reclaim Cloud settingsTaylor has been thinking through making his installer instance even easier, and has already figured out a way in his environment to allow folks to assign a mapped URL that automatically assigns a SSL certificate, removing the need for using the Nginx load balancer in our previous setup, which is very slick.It even provides some contextual support telling folks to point their domain A record to the appropriate IP:He also believes that he can do something similar for Mailgun’s variables to integrate that mail service with Ghost for sending newsletters, which would be amazeballs!Anyway, I am getting far afield, but documenting this stuff for future reference has never disappointed, so I’ll go on. The point here is that I installed Taylor’s Ghost instance, did an import/export of all posts and pages using Ghost’s built-in import/export tool. After that, I figured out how he was running various container of Docker Engine, and figured out the .env file and docker-compose were in the ~/ghost/ folder and I could edit the .env file to plugin in the Mailgun settings that we were using for Reclaim Roundup, as well as the URL while I was there, but Taylor’s Addons for the URL, SSL cert, and maybe even Mailgun settings directly from within the Reclaim Cloud GUI settings area would remove that need for anyone to access the .env file via SSH at all.Once I updated the URL and Mailgun settings I needed to spin down all the containers and then spin them back up so the new environment settings would be implemented, that is done with these two commands:docker-compose downdocker-compose up -dAnother command that might be useful that Taylor turned me onto was the following to track error logs across all running containers, which would have helped when I was troubleshooting one of my docker-compose typos.docker-compose logs -fAnd with that the final piece was syncing all the files and settings in ghost/content from the original Reclaim Roundup to the new and improved Ghost running Roundup. I should have done this using rsync, but that is harder than it should be in Reclaim Cloud, so I resorted to zipping up the original /content directory, downloading it, and uploading it to the new environment (renaming it ghostdata to match Taylor’s conventions). I did need to fix permissions on that directory after the fact, and I needed Taylor’s help to figure out what he called ghostdata was essentially the same thing as content. Additionally, he informed me that uploaded objects such as images, media, themes, etc. live outside of any of the existing containers running the stack. The Docker Engine is essentially acting as a volume for storing any uploads, themes, media, settings, etc. and they live outside the four running containers listed above. Which means if containers are destroyed you can simply re-create them and all content would still be there, and that is also the case with the database.So, as of yesterday morning we had Reclaim Roundup migrated to a new Docker image and my learning around Docker— thanks to playing with Ghost—continues. I am ever so thrilled to remain somewhat focused on the bigger prize of Reclaim getting comfortable with Docker and containers so that we can continue to support this quite cool stuff for our broader hosting community.Posted in Ghost, reclaim, Reclaim Cloud|Tagged docker, ghost, installer, reclaim, reclaimcloud|2 CommentsForm of Awesome: Wonder Twins ConundrumPosted on May 17, 2022 by ReverendIn this installment of “Form of Awesome” Wonder Twins are cornered by evil Crypto Bros in a dark alley. The Crypto Bros are trying to sell them NFTs and will not take no for an answer. Zan and Jayna need to transform to battle these evil doers! What forms should they take and how will those forms help them defeat these crypto creeps?Intrigued? Click on this link to take the Form of Awesome and battle the Tech Bros.Wonder Twins ConundrumLooking for some inspiration? After you submit your entry you’ll be able to see a list of solutions other super friends have submitted. Turns out the more fun the solution, the more damage is done to the Tech Bros. File this under more things you can learn to do with Gravity Forms at next month’s Form of Awesome Flex Course created by Tom Woodward. If you’re interested, sign-up here to activate your Wonder Twins power!Posted in reclaim, Reclaim Edtech|Tagged reclaim, reclaim edtech|Leave a commentHelping to Save a Donkey Kong JuniorPosted on May 16, 2022 by ReverendI’m on a bit of a bavacade blog roll to document some of the work done on a few cabinets, namely Condor, Bagman, and finally—for now—Donkey Kong Junior.Funny enough I thought Donkey Kong Junior was the least beat up of the three initially, it had some gouges at the corners, a broken lip where the T-molding fits, and the bottom pedestal was crumbling a bit—but overall the cabinet looked solid.But in the following image you get a sense of not only some issues with the rounded corner but also the black pedestal crumbling:Turns out the entire base was extensively water damaged and needed to be replaced. The sides are made of 5/8″ particle board rather than plywood, which made me think it might have been replaced, but according to this forum thread on KLOV that was the building material for cabinets made in the US*, as opposed to the plywood cabinets being from Japan. The things you learn on the internet.Anyway, I went to work dismantling Donkey Kong Junior, and given this is the fourth game I have stripped down to its bones, I’m getting quicker and more efficient. But, as always, I took ALL the photos just to be sure, as the album on Flickr above confirms.After taking it apart Alberto picked it up and got to work on replacing the pedestal and fixing any gouges. I also asked him to add wheels like he had for Bagman given I loved how they functioned. After a couple of weeks he finished up and reported it was a bit of a beast to restore, but he is awesome and it looked pretty awesome.In the image below you can see part of the front panel beneath the coin door was cut out and replaced. It is noticeable from the bottom corners of the front panel that angle to the bottom corners of the space where the coin door goes. A sign of the beast Alberto was struggling with.Alberto even made me a custom coin barrel given the original was missing, which is freaking awesome:In the image below you can see the bottom sides have been repaired, and that it was, again, more extensive than either of us imagined:You can get a sense of the clean up on the back, upper corners as well as the reinforcement of the T-molding groove from the following images:And once I got the cabinet on its back in preparation for being painted, you have a good look at the new pedestal built with 2″ x 4″s as well as those awesome hidden wheels that Alberto installed:I documented the paint job pretty well on twitter, because that is always fun:Second coat on the cabinet made a big difference, so thinking three will seal it pic.twitter.com/KhPNt75zmP— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 8, 2022It ultimately took four coats to get rid of any signs of the work. What’s more, after finishing coat number four I realized I got matte rather than glossy paint, which is what I technically should have used to be truly faithful. So being OCD, I tried a transparent gloss spray paint but that looked uneven, so I just added a fifth coat of the matte and called it a day.Some final glossy transparent spray paint sealer, and the orange for the Donkey Kong Jr cabinet is done. The on to black trim… pic.twitter.com/W3vHoDUDJf— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 10, 2022Previous to adding to the brown paper covering on the side art shown above, I applied masking tape and cut around the side art with an Exacto knife:After the orange on both sides were done, I turned to the black trim and that came out pretty well. But it did bleed through the masking tape barrier in a few areas so I needed to do some clean-up. If I were to do it over, I would have started with the black trim and then done the orange, given black hides more than orange.Finished up black trim on Donkey Kong Jr cabinet this morning, which means it’s now time to put it back together. pic.twitter.com/kodJMSPaTX— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 12, 2022The end result was pretty awesome!Fired up with how this one turned out. It’s like it just rolled out of the factory in 1982! pic.twitter.com/3ZMYMitglD— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 12, 2022The trick now was to put it back together, and that took a couple of hours and I did consult my teardown album quite a few times. But despite my nerves, it turned on without an issue. Look mom, no smoke!All back together, but promised I would wait until after lunch to try turning it on as to not kill that festive Friday feeling if shit goes south pic.twitter.com/SAvZ3vu33S— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 13, 2022Dear reader, it worked! pic.twitter.com/ev63xmNaJV— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 13, 2022The happy ending here is that a local store owner had expressed interest in having Donkey Kong Junior on display in his store. I told him I was working on a restoration, and Saturday morning Miles and I delivered the goods, and this gorgeous Donkey Kong Junior is now on site and can be played at the hip clothing store 5 Tasche here in Trento.Miles and I released Donkey Kong Jr out in the wilds of #Trento at the hip clothing store 5 Tasche pic.twitter.com/0syXowIKUC— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) May 14, 2022I have to note that along with the Scramble restoration, this was a really rewarding project given how beautiful this cabinet turned out. Perhaps not as next-level as Scramble given that required stenciling the side art, but the orange and black combination of Donkey Kong Junior is really magical. Also, this wraps up all the cabinet work to be done with the existing collection in Italy at the moment, which clears the deck for the incoming 15 14 games that will need a fair amount of TLC.___________________________________*These cabinets were made specifically in Redmond, Washington.Posted in bavacade, video games|Tagged bavacade, Donkey Kong Junior|Leave a commentBagging the BagmanPosted on May 15, 2022 by ReverendMoving on from “Saving the Condor,” the next restoration project was for the 1982 arcade cabinet Bagman. This golden-age game was created by the French arcade company Valadon Automation, and licensed to Stern in the US and Taito in Japan. Valadon followed-up with Super Bagman (1984) that I have yet to see or play in the wild, but I must say the original Bagman is difficult enough!I bought this cabinet here in Italy, and I choose it because it was in good shape and almost entirely original—not to mention a bit off the beaten arcade path. The glass bezel is the only original piece missing, and I must say the comic margins add a nice touch:I’m considering getting the original image embedded above printed to the glass bezel fitted to the cabinet, but first I have to find someone who does that work. Not essential, but that would truly be the finishing touch.Anyway, the cabinet did have some water damage towards the bottom, similar to my Scramble project but far less extensive. I stripped the cabinet of all its internal parts, control panel, coin door, marquee, etc. so that all was left was the bones so that Alberto could take it and do his woodworking magic. I documented all the parts removed and various connections so I would remember how to put it back together, although for this one I really didn’t need the photos because the game board and power supply are all housed together in a drawer at the bottom of the cabinet.The Flickr album with all the photos I took of each of the various Bagman parts removed and the various connectors might be useful should someone out there find themselves trying to so something similar.The teardown went surprisingly smooth thanks to all Duke’s hard work ?And after removing the marquee light and monitor the game was out the door. I got it back a couple of weeks later and had previously matched the yellow at a local paint store.Alberto not only cut out the water damage and replaced the base, he also added some really elegant hidden wheels to the bottom of Bagman that lift the game about a quarter inch off the floor. You would never know the game is on wheels, but castors like this definitely make moving the game around the basement a lot easier. The wheels are not lockable, but I find the game remains stable when leaned against and only moves when pushed with some force. That said, I do think keeping a game with these wheels flush against a wall would avoid any possible issues. I liked them so much I had the same wheels added to the Donkey Kong Jr cabinet, but more on that in the next post.You can see the original wheels for tilting the game back to move it are still there, but having castors for moving the games around is really the way to go with a home arcade:After covering the Bagman side art and the existing T-molding with masking tape, I gave the cabinet a clean coat of yellow paint on the sides and back, and touched up the black on the front panel. This is my favorite part because it’s really the only thing I can do ?And once I did a few coats and made everything beautiful it was time to rebuild:Again, it went quite quickly and I was left with a gorgeous specimen! I love the monitor on this machine, it is running a spiffy G07.And with that I have bagged the Bagman cabinet, and it is looking brand spanking new!Posted in bavacade, video games|Tagged bagman, bavacade|1 CommentSave the CondorPosted on May 14, 2022 by ReverendSometimes the blog post titles just write themselves…but on with the show.Over the past month or so I’ve been fixing up several cabinets in the bavacade that have cosmetic issues. I’ve been pushing hard on this because I want to ensure the current games in the collection are in tip-top shape before the next wave of games invades in June ? So, I’ll start a series of posts talking about some of the work that’s been happening to make sure it’s all documented. First up is Condor, an interesting bootleg of the venerable Phoenix arcade cabinet by the Italian game company Sidam. Condor is basically identical save the music and fuel gauge that makes it infinitely more difficult than Phoenix. I picked this up in March and it is all original but there where a couple of gouges in the back of the cabinet.The other thing is the edge connector which connects the game board to various other parts of the cabinet like the control panel, monitor and power supply was a total mess, so that needed an overhaul.I did some repair soldering on the edge connector, but I know it needed a total overhaul, so that was on the list. The marquee light was also not working, so I went ahead and added an LED marquee light that worked well, and I took a quick video describing that process.The fun thing about these refurbishing projects is you really have to strip the cabinet down to nothing, which often means documenting every piece so that you know how to put it back together again. This might make the camera on the standard smart phone the greatest thing for how-to DIY projects ever—not to mention the flashlight.I have started making albums in Flickr with all the photos for each project that requires dismantling a cabinet so that I have an easy reference for re-assembly, and here is the Condor prepped for surgery:And here is the cabinet after Alberto, the woodworking magician, cleaned up the gouges:It is perfect, I do paint the cabinets when needed, but Condor needed some black touch up paint, so Alberto did that and it basically came back to me ready to be rebuilt immediately.I was also able to get the edge-connector cleaned up with some help of another local electronics miracle worker, Roberto, you’ll notice a theme emerging here wherein I am doing next to no work. Forbo, as they say in Italian.The final pieces on this game’s revitalization project was getting some wing nuts to secure the control panel, which was loose. The other was getting the spare board fixed given it was throwing garbage when I tested it—despite the fact the seller noting “it works fine!” Gotta keep your spare boards in good shape, you never know when one is gonna blow. Mine extra Condor board is still be looked at back in the US, but hoping to retrieve it when I am back in the Midwest two weeks from now.Nonetheless, this project is finished and it sits comfortably between two of its similarly minted out brethren to make for a gorgeous trinity of Sidam bootlegs in the bavacade.Posted in bavacade, video games|Tagged bavacade, condor, video games|2 Comments← Older postsWatch the bava blog trailer!about is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...Testimonials:Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.-Joe McMahonEverything Jim Groom touches is gold. 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