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Life without Google, youtube edition update

Posted on February 2, 2012 | Comments Off

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m trying to host my own streaming video. while it still isn’t perfect, I was making it harder than it has to be. WordPress does handle videos using the HTML5 <video> tag. So with the WordPress Android app, I either shoot a video, open WordPress and insert the video into a post, or I just open the WordPress app and press ‘Quick Video.’

For that to work, I did have to create a php.ini file (Bluehost is kind enough to provide instructions and a button in cPanel) to increase memory size and upload limits with the following settings:

memory_limit = 128M
upload_max_filesize = 64M
post_max_size = 64M

For most users, that's a deal breaker, but if the administrator of a WordPress multi-site installation handles, it won't be a problem for individual bloggers.

With those settings in place, I can shoot a short video on my phone and upload to WordPress as easily as to youtube, and the video's on my own server. With the Advanced Category Excluder plugin, I can keep short videos off the front page and out of the RSS feed (H/T D'Arcy Norman), and with the WP to Twitter plugin, WordPress automatically tweets my daily update.

And it works, except for a few (minor?) problems. First, the the video window is too wide for my theme, and it looks ugly (fixable, I know). Second, the 720p video my phone shoots is too big to stream smoothly on all but the fastest of connections. The third and biggest problem, though, is that my phone records using h264, which Firefox doesn't support. Daily Updates play fine in Chrome (which does support h264), but that's a Pyrrhic victory if I'm trying to avoid Google.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged chrome, firefox, google, h264, HTML5, Project Reclaim, video

Life without Google: youtube edition

Posted on February 1, 2012 | 4 Comments

Among other things, I’m trying to find a streaming video substitute for youtube. Ideally, in the spirit of Project Reclaim, it would be self-hosted. Since I’ve got unlimited storage and bandwidth, why not?

Videopress looks interesting, and has nice features, but despite being open-source, it doesn’t look like there’s an easy way to install it on my hosting account and save video locally. Instead, it requires a $60 annual fee and a wordpress.com account to host the actual video files, with a 3 GB storage limit (expandable for a fee). Today’s daily update was 12 MB for 30 seconds; even if I only do daily updates, I’d burn up my 3 GB in less than a year. So much for videopress.

Next, I tried JW player for WordPress. It’s free, and it stores video locally. I ran into several problems with this one: first, my hosting account has a default upload limit of 10 MB, which is less than 30 seconds of video. I had several “500 Internal Server” errors trying to upload a post before I figured out it was a php error, and then had to figure out how to change the php configuration. Not for the faint of heart. After all that, the video wouldn’t stream. I’ve spent too much time futzing around already; so much for JW player.

Finally, I’ve installed All-in-one video pack from Kaltura. It’s open source, and it’s free, both plusses. On the other hand, my video isn’t hosted on my site (it’s not entirely clear where it goes–somewhere on one of Kaltura’s servers) and the video resolution isn’t great. But the biggest feature: it works without configuration or futzing around on my part. It doesn’t seem to work with the WordPress android app, though, so I don’t know that it will be a solution for posting ephemeral videos.

The search continues.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged google, kaltura, Project Reclaim, video, youtube

Life without Google?

Posted on January 30, 2012 | 1 Comment

cc licensed flickr photo shared by dmixo6

As I’ve said elsewhere, Google’s new privacy policy gives me the creeps. I’m also surprised how much I’ve let my digital identity be subsumed by Google. As a result, I’m considering whether I can get by without Google. Even making an exception for the search engine, it looks like closing out my Google account will be challenging. (To be fair, Google does provide a way to get data out and they do have an option to delete your account.)

Email was relatively easy–I’ve got a hosting account already, so I just added an email account. A few emails to contacts with my new address, and a few hours changing email addresses for online accounts, and I should be free of Gmail well before March 1.

The real challenge is going to be my Android phone. I wiped the user data this weekend and re-flashed the ROM, so that my phone is no longer connected to my Google account. Although Android asks you to login to your Google account at setup, the phone will operate without doing so–at the cost of reduced functionality. The first challenge is apps: you can’t get into the Android Market without logging in to Google. My first mistake was backing up only my paid apps (with Titanium Backup) before reflashing–if I’d flashed them all, I wouldn’t have needed the Market so soon.

I did find several options. First, repositories of open-source Android apps: F-droid had several useful apps, and there’s also A-opensource. Next, alternate app stores: Slide me is one option, but what I’ve used most so far is Amazon’s app store. Sure, now Amazon’s tracking my Android purchases (and their labor policies are pretty atrocious), but they don’t track nearly as much of my data as Google. The Amazon store doesn’t have as many apps as Google’s, but it has a good selection (including K9 mail, which is far superior to the native Android mail app for using IMAP mail, and gStrings).

The next real challenge is a calendar, which I haven’t quite worked out yet.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Amazon, Android, data liberation, f-Droid, google, privacy

Crazy Train

Posted on January 30, 2012 | 2 Comments

I approve of this cover:

via Fred Woo

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged bluegrass, Iron Horse, music, Ozzy, video

Cowboy vest

Posted on January 29, 2012 | Comments Off

My son’s class recently celebrated their 100th day of school by dressing up as cowboys, and he has a very specific idea of how cowboys dress, so we spent about a week putting together his cowboy costume. Two pieces of the costume were particularly tricky: the vest and the shirt. I found a pattern for a cow-spotted vest online, and simplified it just a bit. The original directions called for cutting out a single back piece and two front pieces from white felt and then gluing seams at the sides and top of the shoulders and gluing black spots all over the vest.

To make our vest, I went to the fabric store and found a fleece print that would work. They didn’t have a cow print, but they did have a black/grey/white camo print that satisfied the exacting standards of the costume director, so I bought one yard of fleece and two packs of black embroidery floss. To make the vest, I taped the front pattern to the back along the side, giving a pattern for half of the vest. I then folded the fabric in half and pinned the center edge of the pattern to the fold, yieldinging in a single piece of fabric that required sewing only two seams at the top of the shoulders. I hand stitched them with embroidery floss and then did a whip-stitch around the edges to complete the vest. I wound up with enough fabric left over to do another vest if I had wanted to.

The other issue was the yellow shirt with a red grid pattern. We couldn’t find anything even close, so we bought a yellow shirt and a red Sharpie, and I drew the grid pattern on the front and back. It turned out pretty well, even if I didn’t do a great job of matching along the sleeves.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged costume, cowboy, projects, sewing

Keep calm and lie to Google

Posted on January 25, 2012 | Comments Off

cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by .dh

Now more important than ever.

haystack.org

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged google, haystack, privacy

Configuring WordPress Multisite with Subdomains in cPanel

Posted on January 6, 2012 | Comments Off

I’ve been using blogs for my online classes for several years now, first using free WordPress.com blogs, then moving to a self-hosted wordpress installation with a certain currently unpopular hosting provider who shall remain nameless. In August, when my hosting contract, ran out I decided not to renew and to move my domains elsewhere. I used iwantmyname.com to manage my domains, and used free services (posterous and tumblr) to host my blogs. It worked OK (and was certainly cheaper than paying for hosting), and I was even able to set up subdomains for my different class blogs (blog.domain.com, not domain.com/blog), which my old provider didn’t allow.

After a semester of free hosting, however, I was ready to go back to hosting my own installation. I went with Bluehost on the recommendation of friends, and also because they allow subdomain WordPress installations. Their tech support was helpful in matters of basic setup, but weren’t very knowledgeable about how to set up a multiple subdomain sites within WordPress. In fairness, their support only extends to getting WordPress installed, which went flawlessly. The problem I had, though, was that even though the main blog was easy to set up, I couldn’t access any of the subdomains. I read several pages about using a wildcard domain in cPanel, but none of them were clear enough for someone with skills as rudimentary as mine (so now I’m going to spell it out).

Two sets of instructions finally got it through my thick skull: Joe at aboundmarketing sent me to the cPanel subdomain page, and the WordPress Codex finally allowed me to figure out where the wildcard needed to point (NOT the default “wildcard” folder that cPanel wants to setup).

Joe writes “For ‘Document Root,’ type in the folder where your WordPress installation is located,” and the Codex writes, “Make sure to point this at the same folder location where your wp-config.php file is located.” I should have figured it out then, but it took me a bit more poking around. Elsewhere, the Codex writes, “make sure that both the site address and the WordPress address are the same.” In other words, WordPress has to be in the public_html directory, and the wildcard domain has to point to public_html. (It’s a basic syllogism, right? WordPress must be in the public_html directory; the wildcard must point to the WordPress directory; therefore, the wildcard must point to the public_html directory.)

tl;dr: Point your wildcard subdomain to public_html, not a subdirectory of public_html

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Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged Bluehost, multisite, wordpress