The Raspberry Pi Arcade Project: An Interlude

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I’m currently at Part 8 of my Raspberry Pi Arcade project. That is, my own Raspberry Pi Arcade project is at the point of what I have planned as part 8 in the blog series. The blog series itself is stalled out after Part 3. And while the risk of getting too far ahead of myself is there — I don’t keep copious notes, so by the time I write a blog post my own project is so far removed from the topic of that post that I may forget key details — the real threat to the project is coming from what I’m experiencing around my own “Part 8″: polishing the user experience.

I’ve come to realize that while the Raspberry Pi is unequivocally an awesome piece of technology — a complete computer that fits in an Altoids tin, runs on a cellphone charger, plugs into your TV and costs less than $50 — it’s not a powerful computer.

Yes, I always knew it was not a powerful computer. And for a lot of applications it doesn’t need to be. But the main thing you gain by sacrificing that power is its diminutive size. It fits anywhere.

The thing is… for some applications you don’t need a computer to be tiny. And if there’s any application where you can afford for your computer to be huge, it’s a full-size arcade cabinet. I originally had visions of opening up my X-Arcade Tankstick and mounting the Raspberry Pi inside it. That would be cool — amazing, in fact — if I weren’t also mounting the Tankstick onto a full-size cabinet.

So… as I struggle with tweaking settings in my advmame.rc configuration file at the command line, trying to eke every last bit of processing power out of the Pi just so it can render simple early ’80s video games at full screen, I begin to wonder why, and whether or not it’s worth it.

Clearly my emulation dreams would be better served by powering my cabinet with a more robust PC. And the whole thing would probably be a lot easier to set up.

But as I stayed awake last night until well past 1 AM, sitting in front of my living room television, typing arcane commands on a black screen in that classic ’80s DOS font, I realized that this experience is part of what it’s all about. Not just having an arcade cabinet, but hardcore geeking out on Linux. Using a computer the way I used my first computer back in the 1980s.

As much as I’ve embraced the “it (usually) just works” ethos of iOS and modern mobile computing devices, app stores and touchscreens and nary a file system or command line in sight, sometimes I miss computing the old way, when it was a tinkerer’s hobby.

That’s what the Raspberry Pi Arcade project is really about. And maybe it will be the stepping stone to even more creative electronics projects with the Raspberry Pi as their brain. I could see, at some point in the future, replacing the Raspberry Pi in my arcade cabinet with a more powerful PC running Ubuntu Linux, and finding a new, even crazier project where the Pi would be right at home.

The Raspberry Pi Arcade Project, Part 3: Get Raspbian

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Now that you have your Raspberry Pi and assorted accessories, it’s time to get it up and running. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a hard drive… that’s what the SD card is for. The Raspberry Pi includes an ARM CPU, so in principle any operating system that has been ported to the ARM architecture should be able to run on it.

In practice… I’m already in over my head trying to explain CPU architectures. But you don’t need to know anything about that to get your Raspberry Pi running. Several “flavors” of Linux have been ported and modified specifically to work well with the Raspberry Pi but the gold standard is Raspbian, a variant of the popular Debian distro, and the preferred choice for starting out on the Raspberry Pi. If you really know what you’re doing and have very specific requirements, other OSes may be preferable over Raspbian, but if you just want to get your Raspberry Pi up and running with a stable, easy-to-use Linux, Raspbian is the way to go.

Get Raspbian

The first step in setting up Raspbian is to download it. This of course assumes you have another computer to download the disk image to. Any Windows, Mac or Linux PC should do. The key is having a PC with an SD card slot, because you’ll need to use it to get Raspbian onto the SD card.

If you don’t have a PC with an SD card slot, or you just don’t want to mess around with it, you can buy an SD card preloaded with Raspbian for not much more than the cost of the card itself. Note that the preloaded SD cards are probably only going to be 4 GB however, not the 16 GB card I recommended in Part 2 of this series.

Assuming you’re going to install Raspbian yourself, the first thing you need to do is download it. This download link includes a few other options for different OSes that will also work on the Raspberry Pi, so if you are inclined to ignore my advice, check them out!

Install Raspbian on Your SD Card

Once you have Raspbian downloaded, you’ll need to install it on your SD card. The process for doing this varies depending on whether you’re on Windows, or using a UNIX-based OS like Mac OS X or Linux. More detailed Windows instructions are available on the download page I linked to above. Being a die-hard Mac user, I am going to describe the Mac/Linux process, which I recommend doing at the command line.

1. Insert the SD card into your SD card slot.
This should be fairly self-explanatory. On most MacBook Pro’s the SD card slot is on the side near all of the other ports; on other Macs like my Mac mini, it’s in the back. Not all Macs have an SD card slot, e.g. the MacBook Air. If your computer doesn’t have an SD card reader, USB add-ons are available.

2. Open Terminal and become a superuser.
If you’ve never used Terminal before… well, to be honest, if you’ve never used Terminal before, this whole project is going to be a bit of a challenge. But solider on! Terminal is located in your /Applications/Utilities folder. It’s your way to access the command line on the Mac. You’re going to be doing some things that require root (“superuser”) access. The “safer” way to do this is to prepend any of those commands with sudo but I prefer not to mess around with that. Type sudo -s Enter to enter superuser mode. Note the command prompt will change from $ to #. Now you can do some real damage. Consider yourself warned. (And do not, under any circumstances, type rm -Rf / ever. For real.) Proceed at your own risk, or just prepend commands with sudo along the way if the system says you don’t have permission.

3. Identify your SD card in the filesystem.
In Terminal, type df Enter. You’ll get a list of all of the disks (“volumes”) on your Mac. You’re looking for the SD card. The name it displays in the Finder will be shown in the far right column, “Mounted on”. But you need to know what its name is in the “Filesystem”, the far left column. On my Mac mini it comes up as /dev/disk2s1. You don’t need to worry about the s1 part; that’s the partition. We just need the disk number, e.g. /dev/disk2. Make note of this for future reference. Now you need to unmount the volume so you’ll be able to write to it. Take a look at the disk name under “Mounted on” (starting with /Volumes/). Type umount -f [disk name] Enter, replacing [disk name] with exactly what was listed under “Mounted on.” Important: if there are any spaces, you’ll need to edit the name and put that portion, between slashes, in quotation marks. For example, if the name is /Volumes/My Awesome SD Card you’ll need to type umount -f /Volumes/"My Awesome SD Card" instead. And if this doesn’t work, check here for another tip on unmounting the volume.

4. Identify your Raspbian disk image.
Now you want to switch to the directory where your downloaded Raspbian disk image is. This is likely to be the Downloads folder in your home directory. If so, then in Terminal you’ll type cd ~/Downloads Enter. Then type ls -al Enter to see a list of the files in this directory. You’re looking for one with a .img file extension. In my case it’s 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img. If you don’t see that, but you see something similar with a .zip extension, you just need to unzip it. Type unzip [filename] Enter (using the real filename, of course) and then type ls -al Enter again, and you should see another file with the same name but ending in .img. That’s the one.

5. Write the image to the SD card.
Now that you know the name of your Raspbian disk image and the disk you’re writing to, you can run the dd command to copy the image over. This command includes a lot of different options for setting the block size, etc. The kinds of technical details about computers most of us haven’t thought about since the early days of MS-DOS, if ever. In my experience these settings don’t appear to matter here, however, as I was able to prepare my SD cards with only the basic parameters of if (input file) and of (output file). Here’s the command I would use in my exact situation. Adjust your if and of according to your results of steps 3 and 4 above.

dd if=2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk2

Then hit Enter and… wait.

And wait.

And wait.

This is the command line. You will get no feedback that any progress has been made, or that anything is happening at all. So just leave Terminal open and go about your business. Some substantial amount of time later (in the realm of a half hour, in my experience), the process will have completed, and you’ll get your command prompt again. That’s how you know it’s done. Now, go back to the comfortable confines of the Finder and see if the SD card is showing up as a mounted volume. If it is, eject it. Now you can take out the SD card and insert it into your Raspberry Pi. You’re ready to power up!

Next time… powering up your Raspberry Pi with Raspbian for the first time.

The Raspberry Pi Arcade Project, Part 2: The Essential Gear

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The first thing you need when building your Raspberry Pi Arcade is… well… a Raspberry Pi. When they were first released, they were hard to come by, but now they’re readily available in the U.S., for about $45, on Amazon.com.

Unfortunately the Raspberry Pi, by itself, is completely useless. Fortunately, the other stuff you need to make a Raspberry Pi work is also fairly inexpensive and readily available on Amazon, so with an expenditure of about $150 and a few days’ wait for UPS to drop everything at your door (and a TV, which I’ll assume you have), you’ll have your complete Raspberry Pi set-up.

While this blog series is focused specifically on building an arcade cabinet powered by the Raspberry Pi, this post will serve well as a general introduction to the basics you’ll need (or at least want) to put together a core Raspberry Pi setup for any purpose.

The bare minimum you need to use a Raspberry Pi is:

  • Raspberry Pi
  • 5V 700mA (or greater) Micro USB power supply
  • HDMI (or RCA video and 1/8-inch stereo audio) cable
  • 4 GB or larger SD card
  • USB keyboard and mouse
  • Ethernet cable

Practically speaking, however, you’re going to also need the following:

  • TV or monitor with HDMI or RCA audio/video input
  • PC or Mac with an SD card slot (or get your SD card with Raspbian Linux preinstalled)
  • USB WiFi adapter (instead of Ethernet)
  • USB wireless all-in-one keyboard/trackpad (instead of separate keyboard and mouse)
  • USB hub (at least 3 ports; powered is better)
  • A case

I strongly recommend HDMI instead of RCA video if possible, as HDMI delivers an all-digital signal for a much clearer picture. I have not tested the Raspberry Pi with RCA video output, so from here on out we’ll just assume you’re using HDMI.

While you don’t need a case for the Raspberry Pi, it sure looks nicer (and will be better protected from damage) inside one.

Get the Goods

As noted above, everything you need is available on Amazon, which is where I got all of my components. My preferred options for each are shown below, but bear in mind that a lot of these exact parts and suppliers come and go, so the links may not continue to work in the future. Where this is especially a concern, I have included general notes on what to look for when picking an alternative.

This list cuts to the chase, and includes the things I think you need, including the WiFi adapter, wireless keyboard/trackpad combo, and USB hub.

TV not included.

(All images shown here are from the respective Amazon product pages. And, full disclosure, all of the Amazon links herein include my affiliate code. It won’t cost you any more, but if you use these links Amazon will throw a few pennies my way. Thanks!)

raspberrypiRaspberry Pi
There are a few different options for the Raspberry Pi itself, but don’t mess around: get Model B Rev. 2.0, which adds Ethernet and a second USB port missing from Model A, resolves a couple of technical issues with the first versions, and bumps up the built-in RAM from 256 MB to 512 MB.

power5V 700mA Micro USB Power Supply
There are lots of different options for these power supplies, many of which seem to come and go quickly on Amazon. But don’t sweat it. This is a de facto standard charger for many cell phones these days. As long as the charger is 5 volts with at least 700 milliamps and a Micro USB connector, it will power the Raspberry Pi, regardless of the brand or what devices it is advertised as working with.

hdmiHDMI Cable
Don’t get me started on HDMI cables. An HDMI cable is an HDMI cable. The only thing you need to concern yourself with is how long it is and whether or not your Raspberry Pi will be that close to your TV. Well, that and whether or not you’re dealing with a reputable seller. That’s why I like to go with the Amazon Basics cable. It’s cheap, it works, and it’s direct from Amazon.

sdcardSanDisk Extreme 16GB SD Card
Unlike HDMI cables, there is a difference between SD cards. You want one that’s fast, reliable, and spacious. 4 GB is considered the minimum for a Raspberry Pi, but I like to go with 16 GB, since it seems to be today’s best balance between size and affordability. (Translation: the price difference between an 8 GB and a 16 GB SD card is much smaller than the price difference between a 16 GB and a 32 GB.)

wifiEdimax EW-7811Un USB WiFi Adapter
There are a few options here as well, but I love this particular adapter because it’s cheap (about ten bucks) and tiny… which is essential for the Raspberry Pi. Don’t worry about software. It just works… or at least, it will once you get Raspbian installed (see my next blog post for that) and run the included WiFi setup app.

keyboardLogitech K400 Wireless Keyboard/Trackpad
OR FAVI Entertainment SmartStick Wireless Keyboard/Trackpad
It didn’t take long after I got my Raspberry Pi to realize two things: 1) I want as few wires connected to it as possible, and 2) two USB ports get filled quickly. The second is mitigated somewhat by using a USB hub, which you’ll eventually need for the X-Arcade Tankstick in the MAME cabinet project, but even if you’re not doing that, without a USB hub, the only way to use a Raspberry Pi with WiFi is to get an all-in-one keyboard and trackpad.

For practical purposes, the full-size keyboard of the Logitech K400 is the only way to go. The K400 is cheap plastic, but hey… it’s only about $35, and it works. I love it.

On the other hand, if you’re really trying to stay true to the micro-sized spirit of the Raspberry Pi, the FAVI SmartStick or something similar may be the only way to go. About the size of a TV remote control, the SmartStick includes a reasonably usable thumb keyboard and built-in mini trackpad, with the added bonus of a laser pointer so you can mess with your cat when not playing with the Raspberry Pi. In practice I’ve found the SmartStick is a bit touchy… thumb typing on it often requires looking down, and sometimes key presses infuriatingly don’t register. But it’s still fun to have.

hubBelkin USB 2.0 4-Port Powered Ultra-mini Hub
This is the one item on the list that I don’t actually own, as I am relying on an older USB hub I already had lying around. But if I were to buy a new hub specifically for this project, this is probably the one I’d choose. In practice, so far I have been able to do what I need to do with an unpowered hub, but a lot of what I’ve read on the subject suggests a powered USB hub is preferable for use with the Raspberry Pi, to keep the Pi itself from overheating.

caseSB Raspberry Pi Case (assorted colors)
There are a ton of Raspberry Pi cases out there, but this one is my favorite, because it’s nearly indestructible, it’s super-tiny, the Raspberry Pi snaps snugly into it with no tools, it includes slots for all connectors plus two mounting screw slots, and best of all comes in a variety of translucent colors, plus black and white.

I currently own two Raspberry Pi’s, and I have one of these cases for each, one in pink and one in orange.

The Bottom Line

So, how much is all of this going to cost you? I created an Amazon “Listmania!” list (with only the Logitech keyboard, not both), and the subtotal is $143.86. Not bad for all of the essentials (except a display) you need to run a reasonably capable general-purpose Linux computer.

Next time we’ll take a closer look at the SD card, or more specifically, what’s going to go on it: Raspbian, a modified version of the popular Debian Linux distribution that’s been tailored for an optimal experience on the Raspberry Pi.

Update: It’s come to my attention that the Belkin USB hub I have recommended actually is not powered. I will update this post in the near future with an alternate, powered hub recommendation.

The Raspberry Pi Arcade Project, Part 1: Introduction

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If you’re bothering to read this, I probably don’t need to explain either the Raspberry Pi or emulators (specifically, MAME and Stella), but for the sake of completeness, I will.

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny, inexpensive Linux-based computer that, after years of anticipation, was finally released to the public last year. It’s designed to be versatile and to encourage creative, educational programming and electronics projects.

Emulation Software

Emulators are software programs designed to run on modern computers that emulate the physical hardware of older, simpler video game and computer systems. When combined with ROM files, the programs that ran on those old systems, it is possible to play near-perfect recreations of those classic games on modern equipment.

Of course, while the emulators themselves are (usually) perfectly legal, there is a (charcoal) gray area of legality regarding the distribution and even the possession of these ROM files. Legally, you should only possess ROM files for games you physically own. In the case of home video game consoles, that would be the original cartridges or disks. For arcade games, that would be the actual hardware cabinet with all of its electronic guts… or, at least, the ROM chip from said cabinet that contains the actual game program. (I do actually own an original Asteroids arcade cocktail table, and a very large collection of original game cartridges for the Atari 2600, 5200 and 7800; the Intellivision; the Nintendo Entertainment System [NES] and others. These will be the focus of my efforts with this project.)

There are numerous emulation programs, representing dozens of arcade and home video game systems, and most have been ported to a variety of different modern platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. My interest primarily lies with the classic games of the late 1970s and early 1980s; specifically, arcade coin-op games which are emulated by the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) project, and the Atari 2600 which is emulated by the Stella project.

One of the dreams of many aficionados of early arcade games is to own a “MAME cabinet” — a real arcade game cabinet (or modern recreation thereof) with a modern PC and display inside, programmed to work with an arcade-style control panel, and loaded with emulation software.

The Project

I’ve wanted to build a MAME cabinet for years. The biggest hurdle for me has been a willingness to dedicate an expensive (or even semi-expensive) and significantly overpowered PC to use solely as the “brains” of such a cabinet.

I’ve also been interested in the Raspberry Pi ever since I first heard of it. The idea of a credit card-sized Linux computer that could be embedded in a creative electronics project sounded amazing! But possessing a woeful lack of knowledge of the circuit board-level details about electronics, and being equally woefully inept at either soldering or construction, I wasn’t sure what I could really do with it.

But then it hit me… I could build a MAME cabinet! What’s really great about attempting a project like this today is that you don’t really need to solder or build anything. The X-Arcade Tankstick is an (almost) plug-and-play, arcade-quality control panel, and the Xtension Arcade Cabinet is a prefabricated arcade-style cabinet designed to work perfectly with the Tankstick, the PC of your choice, and a 22-inch TV or LCD monitor to create a MAME cabinet that’s still a fun DIY project without requiring the same levels of skill that have previously made this kind of thing unapproachable for me.

The Road Map

I am already well underway with this project, but from the beginning it has been my intention to create a series of blog posts detailing the process, so others who, like me, have an intermediate-or-better level of knowledge of command line Linux; a rudimentary understanding of electronics — at least, which plugs go into which ports; and above all a deep and abiding love of classic ’80s video games, can make this kind of thing happen.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Shea Silverman, who is several steps ahead of me in working with and blogging about using the Raspberry Pi for emulation, but whose blog posts come with a tad steeper of a learning curve than what I am hoping to lay out for the readers of these posts. I’ll tell you what I think you need to know to make this stuff work, but for a more in-depth exploration of the details, please check out his blog.

Now then, here’s an outline of the posts I intend to include in this series. (I’ll update this page to make each a clickable link as the posts get published.)

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Essential Gear
Part 3: Get Raspian
An Interlude
Part 4: Up and Running with Raspbian
Part 5: Emulator Set-up — Stella
Part 6: Emulator Set-up — MAME
Part 7: Configuring the X-Arcade Tankstick
Part 8: Polishing Your User Experience
Part 9: Preparing the Cabinet
Part 10: The Finished Product

How to keep Internet Explorer from displaying your site in “Compatibility View”

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Fortunately this is an edge case for me, but… there’s a time for everything. And that time was today.

If you build websites using modern, open standards-based techniques, the last thing you want is to have your Internet Explorer-using visitors see your site in the dreaded “compatibility view”. This monstrosity was created by Microsoft with the advent of IE8, to allow sites (mostly corporate intranets) that require the quirks of IE6 to still look like they’re supposed to when viewed in IE8.

The problem is, IE6 sucks, and it makes modern sites look terrible. So if your users accidentally view your site in compatibility view, it’s going to suck too.

The good news is, it’s easy to force IE8 and later to display your site the way you intended. You can disable compatibility view with this simple meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9; IE=8; IE=7; IE=EDGE" />

(Source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/10365780)

How to get iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) apps to stop defaulting to iCloud when saving

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Ever since I semi-fully embraced iCloud, I’ve found that the iWork apps — Pages, Numbers and Keynote — always default to wanting to save every new document in iCloud, which I never — well, OK, almost never — want to do. It’s fine that it’s an option, but I want the default to be saving to my local hard drive (which, actually, means saving to my Dropbox account).

It didn’t take much effort to find this thread on Apple’s support forums, but the first suggested solution — turning off “Documents and Data” in System Preferences → iCloud — seemed draconian. With this option you can never sync your documents to iCloud.

A little further down the thread I found the “real” solution, courtesy of “Bernie_uk”, which was important enough for me to want to share here.

It requires opening up Terminal, but it’s not too scary. You just have to run this command:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

This command doesn’t turn off anything in iCloud; it just tells the system that your default should be saving files to disk, not to iCloud. Note that since this is a global setting, it will affect not just iWork, but any other apps that use iCloud’s “Documents and Data” syncing. (I guess.)

Fixing background “bleed” on elements that use CSS3 border-radius property

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It’s kind of funny that I never encountered this problem before… it must just be extra-noticeable because of the colors on this particular website I’m working on. Anyway, I found that the nice buttons I was creating with CSS3 border-radius were displaying an ugly “bleed” of the background dark blue color beyond the edges of the white border. No good.

before

A little googling led to Mike Harding’s solution, a simple background-clip property in the CSS. (Yet another of the preponderance of new properties in CSS3 that I’m finding it harder and harder to keep up with.) If w3schools.com is to be believed, the vendor prefix is unnecessary. Let’s just go with this:

background-clip: padding-box;

Ah, that’s better!

after

How not to update a WordPress plugin

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The meaning of this post’s title is twofold: 1) how, as a WordPress user, to avoid having a plugin show up in the built-in updater; and 2) how, as a developer, you probably should not approach releasing a major update to your plugin that is incompatible with earlier versions.

The scapegoat here is Elliot Condon’s excellent Advanced Custom Fields, which has become one of my essential go-to plugins for building highly customized WordPress websites for my clients. I don’t mean to pick on Elliot Condon. He’s clearly a tremendously talented developer and I have a ton of respect for his work and what it has allowed me to do in my work.

But I do feel that he handled the 4.0 release of Advanced Custom Fields poorly. I’m not sure the fault is really his, however, as it is just as much or more the fault of how the built-in updater in WordPress works. (Especially since at least some of the changes he made in version 4 were done solely to conform to changes in the official WordPress plugin requirements.)

Here’s the problem: WordPress has a central Plugin Directory that makes it easy to install and update approved plugins. Perhaps too easy. Because if an update of a plugin is made available, and it’s newer than the version you have installed, it appears as an option in the updater. Yes, there are links to information about the update, which you really should read before doing anything else, but it’s all too easy with a few clicks to just run the update and move on.

Most of the time, it just works. Which can be dangerous. Because users — even “experts” like me — come to assume it will always “just work.”

As it happens, the version 4.0 release of Advanced Custom Fields was made available while I was on a weeklong vacation out west with my family, with only my iPad (and SLP’s MacBook Air) along for the ride. And, based on my own recommendations, a client with a relatively newly-launched website went ahead and ran the update. This particular site is heavily dependent on ACF, and the update broke it.

The official ACF website offers a migration guide that makes it (somewhat) easy to convert your existing version 3 implementation to work with version 4. But it’s not a “click-it-and-you’re-done” kind of process. It takes time, and you need to know what you’re doing. Which is nothing like the general experience of using the built-in WordPress updater.

I was able to temporarily solve the problem for this website by rolling back to an earlier version (which required some hunting to locate, given the limited Internet access I had with hotel WiFi). Which leads to my first tip:

How to prevent a WordPress plugin from updating

How does WordPress know when a plugin has an update available? Well, it’s easy for it to check the Plugin Directory to see what the latest version of any given plugin is. But how does it know which version you have installed? Also easy. Each plugin’s main PHP file includes a comment block at the top, with information WordPress parses both to display in the Plugins area of the admin interface and for added functionality (e.g. knowing when there’s an update available). For Advanced Custom Fields, the comment block looks like this:

/*
Plugin Name: Advanced Custom Fields
Plugin URI: http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/
Description: Fully customise WordPress edit screens with powerful fields. Boasting a professional interface and a powerfull API, it’s a must have for any web developer working with WordPress. Field types include: Wysiwyg, text, textarea, image, file, select, checkbox, page link, post object, date picker, color picker, repeater, flexible content, gallery and more!
Version: 3.5.8.2
Author: Elliot Condon
Author URI: http://www.elliotcondon.com/
License: GPL
Copyright: Elliot Condon
*/

This is essentially a set of key/value pairs. Version is what WordPress reads to see which version you’re running, and compares it against the master version in the Plugin Directory to see if updates are available.

So how do you keep it from running the update? Simple: Change the version number to something higher. I like to prepend it with “999” so I still know what the “real” version number is that I’m running, like this: 999.3.5.8.2. This way the WordPress updater thinks the major version is “999”, which is almost certainly higher than whatever the real current version is.

Simply change this version number, save the PHP file on your server, and you’re done. The updater will never trigger for this plugin (as long as its real version number is less than 999). You may also want to update Description with an explanation of what you’ve done.

Bear in mind this is a temporary solution. You really should do whatever you need to do to get your site compatible with the latest version, then restore the original version number and let the updater do its magic.

How, as a developer, not to create this mess for your users

I have submitted a few, very simple, plugins and themes to the official WordPress repositories, so I have a bit of experience with this, but I’m no expert on the process. However, what is clear to me is that if you submit changes to a plugin as an update, the built-in updater will pick it up and make it available to any users who have an older version installed. This is dangerous. If your new version includes such radical changes as to make it incompatible with earlier versions, you have to assume that most users will not read your notes, and will believe they can just run the updater with no problems… especially if you’ve made a habit of releasing frequent incremental updates to the plugin in the past that “just worked.”

The only real solution I see to this is to submit the new, incompatible version to the Plugin Directory as an altogether new plugin, instead of an update to the existing plugin. The risk here is that you lose visibility. Your download count and ratings/reviews reset to zero, and anyone who’s using an older version may never know about the new version. So, it’s bad for marketing.

But an incompatible update breaking sites for unsuspecting users is bad for marketing too. It’s going to cause your ratings to take a hit, cause a lot of bad publicity, and turn off your loyal users. The migration is going to be work for them anyway; making them do it after they clean up a mess created when they unsuspectingly ran the update is even worse.

A few specifics as pertains to Advanced Custom Fields

Again, I don’t mean to pick on Elliot Condon for his work with Advanced Custom Fields. I will continue to be a loyal (and, yes, paid) user of this plugin. It’s brilliant. Nonetheless, it’s created a hassle for me this week. After returning from my trip, the first work-related thing I did was go through every client site that’s running ACF and apply my “version 999” trick so those clients won’t run the updater until I have a chance to migrate their sites to version 4.

The biggest challenge I had in rolling back was simply getting my hands on the old version. Sure, I had it on some of my other sites, but I access almost every client site via SSH/SFTP, and the hotel I was staying at had port 22 blocked. Luckily the site I needed to fix was one of the few I access via regular FTP, and port 21 was open. But I still needed to get a copy of version 3.x to reinstall on that client’s site.

As I found along the way, the WordPress Plugin Directory hides old versions under the “Developers” tab, where every previous version can be downloaded as a ZIP file or checked out with Subversion. Previous versions of ACF are available here.

Where’s the option to change the “uploads” path in WordPress 3.5?

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Thanks for nothing, WordPress.

It’s not often that I complain about anything in WordPress, much less get genuinely angry about something I think is downright stupid, but today it happened.

I build a lot of WordPress sites for clients, and I frequently post them in a staging area on my server. Rather than having dozens of separate installations of WordPress filling up my server’s disk space, I set up a single installation (but with a separate database for each site), with some simple customizations to the wp-config.php file that tell it which database to use based on the domain name.

Please don’t bother to mention that I should “probably” be running WordPress-MU (or MultiSite or whatever they call it now). Ultimately these sites are going to be hosted elsewhere as standalone WordPress sites so I need to keep their databases separate.

One key to making this arrangement work nicely has always been the simple setting in WordPress that allows you to define a special directory for uploads, instead of dumping them all in the main uploads directory. By setting this to a subdirectory under wp-content/uploads named to match the site’s theme folder name, it was easy to keep everything separate.

It’s been a while since I’ve set up a new site on the staging server, at least since before I updated to WordPress 3.5. But I was doing one today, and I had to do a sanity check as I scoured the settings to try to find where in the hell you set the custom uploads path. I was sure it was under Settings → Media but I couldn’t find it there.

Because they took it out.

Yes, they took it out. Why? Well, apparently there’s a rational explanation, but frankly no explanation would satisfy me because it seems incredibly disruptive to take something like this out, even if it was a bad idea to implement it as it was in the first place.

Fortunately, there’s still a way to do it. You just can’t do it in the admin interface anymore; you need to edit the wp-config.php file directly to add a constant. No problem, I’m already doing that anyway.

Here’s what you need:

define('UPLOADS', '/your/custom/path/under/wordpress/root');

If you’re just putting your uploads into a subdirectory under the main uploads directory, like I am, it would look like this:

define('UPLOADS', '/wp-content/uploads/yourdirectory');

Just remember, if you’re doing this because you’re running multiple sites from a single installation like I am, this constant should be set in the same conditional where you’re setting which database the site should use.

Easy. Not as easy as it was, nor as easy as I think it should be, but…

Light, pollution, memory

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Light pollution

I remember the first time I ever observed light pollution. I didn’t know what it was, and I’m not sure it even had a name back then.

It was 1993. I was in college, and I was home for Easter. In fact it was early Easter morning. My uncle was staying with us, in my room, which was in the process of becoming the guest room. He always stayed in my room when he stayed with us. Eventually I would stay in that room, as a guest room, not my room, once I was no longer a resident of the house, but a guest.

At the time, though, I was not yet a guest, though no longer quite a resident. Nonetheless, he was visiting, so he got my room and I was relegated to the couch in the family room. The family room, which had been added on in 1987, when I was 13, had two skylights. One was directly above the couch, so when I was lying on the couch I could look directly up at the sky.

When I was growing up, cities, at least the small town in which I grew up (which I always thought of as a city, despite its modest population of 26,210 — which was no longer the population, but had been the population in the 1970 census, and the city could not yet bring itself to acknowledge the loss of over 10% of its population in the subsequent decades, so it still appeared on the signs as you drove into town) had not yet switched over to sodium-based street lights. However this particular small town/city had made the switch in the brief time since I had gone off to college at an even smaller town — one small enough that even I could make no pretense as to its being a “city.”

I awoke in the middle of the night. Technically, the early morning, Easter morning. It was overcast, and as I now know well, in a city illuminated by sodium streetlights on an overcast night, it is never truly dark, never truly nighttime. Instead, the best you get is an eerie orange twilight, which is what I observed for the first time in my life, that early Easter morning in 1993, 20 years ago.

It was perhaps 2 AM, and as I awoke, then arose, and walked to the kitchen to get a better view, I beheld the city aglow in an unnatural orange luminescence, and… well… it freaked the shit out of me. I had never seen anything like it, and I didn’t understand what could be causing it. Being Easter morning, and being highly impressionable, especially to my own half-lucid, half-dreamlike fantasies, I was sure Armageddon, or… something… was nigh.

Of course, it was not. And eventually I made the connection between the reference to sodium lights I’d heard on Sting’s The Soul Cages album with the eerie orange light, which has since become commonplace in my mostly urban adult life, where I am usually far too busy or distracted or just simply tired to bother to look up into the sky at night and think the kinds of existential, philosophical, cosmic, spiritual, infinite thoughts I used to dwell on so much between the ages of 5 and 22.

But tonight, for a brief moment, I lingered at my back door in south Minneapolis, with a glass of scotch in one hand and my iPhone in the other. On that late night/early Easter morning 20 years ago, I’m not sure which of the two would have seemed more out-of-place in my hands. Surely both would be just as out-of-place as apocalyptic paranoia in my 2013 brain. But still, the connection to that moment half a lifetime ago was there, and I was transported back to a place where I can stare into the sky at night, silently, and wonder.