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Easily copy or move a WordPress blog

I was looking for an easy way to make a development copy of the Many Tricks blog, which (like Robservatory) is powered by WordPress. In the past, I've done this manually, but it's a bit of a pain to get the required edits done correctly and make everything work at the new URL.

So this time, I went searching for a plug-in, and found Duplicator. Borrowing from the plug-in's description of itself…

Duplicator gives WordPress administrators the ability to migrate, copy or clone a site from one location to another. The plugin also serves as a simple backup utility. Duplicator supports both serialized and base64 serialized string replacement. If you need to move WordPress or backup WordPress this plugin can help simplify the process.

Once installed, usage is pretty easy: You follow a simple three-step process that creates a new package. Move that package to the new location, expand it, and then run the installer.php file. (I had to rename the three files from the package to remove everything except the filenames; the plug-in adds a bunch of identifying text in front of each filename.)

The installer asks questions about the new site's URLs and database connection info, then does its magic. I had a clone site up and running in minutes, saving what (for me) is usually an hour or so's aggravation. Duplicator should work equally well for moving a WordPress installation to a new host, too, though I haven't tested it in that situation (yet).



A tale of two remotes

Update: Thanks to John for pointing out the obvious: The old remote works with the new Apple TV. So I guess I can go ahead and replace the one in the bedroom.

We recently changed how we use some of our rooms (eliminated a kids' play room), and as a result, decommissioned a television set. With that TV was a new Apple TV; at first I thought "Great, I can replace the old Apple TV in our bedroom."

Then I remembered the remote. For a device that I often use either while running on the treadmill (yea, it's in our bedroom) or in the dark while going to sleep, the new Apple TV remote is unusable: The touch pad is a nightmare to try to use while running, and it's tricky to use in the dark. It's also nearly impossible to tell which side's up in the dark.

So no, new Apple TV, you're not going to replace the old one in our bedroom. I'm not sure what I'll do with the new one; we have another TV it could go on, but there's no open HDMI port (it's an old TV with just two HDMI ports, and it's got an Xbox and a Blu-ray player). Time for an HDMI switch box?

I'd love a non-touchpad remote for the new Apple TV, but I don't see Apple going that direction at all.



Useful site: Find and use fonts at Font Squirrel

I recently tweaked the look here a bit, greatly simplifying the fonts and lightening the visual weight of the site quite a bit.

As part of that process, I wanted to find a larger lighter yet highly legible font. So I went back to Font Squirrel, the same site I used in my 2014 redesign.

They offer a huge assortment of fonts, all licensed for free commercial use, with a nice set of categories and search engine. And free…though the tradeoff is a fairly heavy advertising load. After much looking and testing, I've got the site running on three font families: Open Sans for most of the content and sidebar, Open Sans Condensed for headlines, and Ubuntu Mono for code snippets.

As part of the cleanup, I was able to remove 40+ font-family and font-size statements from the CSS, and the site should scale a bit better on small-screen devices. (I'm still not completely happy with things, so expect minor changes going forward.)

Font Squirrel not only has a great collection of fonts, but they offer a free web font generator. Using the generator, you can create fonts that are embedded in your page, so that they're available even when users don't have those fonts installed locally. Just upload a font you're licensed to use, and Font Squirrel will create a web font, complete with CSS. Upload the converted web fonts to your server, copy and paste the CSS bit into your CSS master file, and you can use the fonts on your site.

There are 20 web fonts on the site now (two forms of 10 font faces across the three font families), and in total, they're 200KB in size—or less than the typical "larger" image I often post here.

There are lots of sites that offer free-to-use fonts; I really like the assortment at Font Squirrel, and the web generator is an added bonus.



Center embedded tweets on WordPress sites

WordPress has a neat built-in feature that, when composing a post, if you put the URL to a specific tweet on its own line, like this…

https://twitter.com/rgriff/status/827901296258584576

…then WordPress will automatically convert it to a tweet link, like this:

By default, though, the embedded tweets will be left-aligned. I wanted them center aligned, as above. And because I just wasted 15 minutes figuring this out, I'm documenting the solution here to save myself future aggravations…

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Podcast appearance: The Next Track

This week, I made a rare appearance on a podcast other than our own The Committed podcast. I was a guest on The Next Track, a podcast about music and related things, hosted by iTunes AppleScript guru Doug Adams and my regular The Committed podcast cohost Kirk McElhearn.

We spent 30 minutes discussing ripping Blu-rays and DVDs to the Mac. I know, a real stretch topic for me, given I've never written about it!

Anyway, it was a fun show, so if you'd like to hear the voice behind these words, give it a listen.



Safari and the YouTube 4K video problem

When I posted my 787 takeoffs and landings video, I ran into a weird problem: When embedded here, the video would play in Safari at 4K (2160p), but when viewed on YouTube, the max resolution available was 1440p. After failing with web searches, I asked Twitter about it…

…but didn't hear anything back. I pretty much gave up on the issue until today, when I stumbled across this article, which describes the exact problem I'm having. The summary of the article describes both the problem and the apparent cause:

What appears to be Google's shift to the VP9 codec for delivering 4K video on the YouTube homepage is preventing Safari users from watching videos uploaded to the service since early December in full 4K resolution, but not from viewing webpage-embedded videos in the same resolution.

Bingo! Google seems to now be using the open and royalty-free VP9 codec for 4K videos viewed on its YouTube site, but reverts to the H264 codec when those same videos are embedded on other sites.

Note that this issue only affects videos uploaded after December 6, 2016:

Videos uploaded to the service prior to Dec. 6 in 4K resolution can still play back in full 4K resolution on Safari from the YouTube homepage.

I was curious about which macOS browsers this issue affects, so I thought I'd do a little experiment…

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Add Drafts to WordPress admin sidebar

One of the things that annoys me about WordPress' admin side is that to get to draft versions of posts, you have to first select Posts > All Posts, wait for that page to load, then select Drafts. The majority of the time, when I'm headed to my posts, I'm headed to the drafts section to work on an upcoming post.

This little modification adds a Drafts entry to the Posts sidebar item, as seen in this before-and-after view:

The change is relatively trivial, requiring only a simple edit to your theme's functions.php file. David Walsh explains it all in this thorough post. I've recreated the bit of code in the remainder of this post, just in case the linked site ever goes away. (It's all under the MIT License, so there are no restrictions on copying.)

But really, just go read David's post, he explains it very well. I've added this to the admin page on the three sites I run, because it's just so convenient.

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WordPress plug-ins, take four

This is the fourth (one, two, three) in an occasional series of articles that explain which plug-ins I use here, in case others who run WordPress blogs might be interested…and it also helps me document why I use certain plug-ins, so it's a double-purpose post.

Since the last installment two years ago, I've retired Dashboard Commander and ELI's Related Posts Footer Links and Widget, and added seven new plug-ins. Here's what each of those does:

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Hardware: Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 document scanner

In mid-2015, I decided I wanted to get rid of the mass of paper we'd been accumulating for years. Much of it could be recycled, but there was still a substantial stack of important yet rarely looked at paper that we needed to keep. If anything was ripe for a digitization project, it was this stack of paper. But there were thousands of pages to scan, and that's not something you're going to want to do on your $99 all-in-one printer/scanner/coffee maker.

After talking with some people and reading some reviews, I bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 document scanner. This was not an inexpensive purchase—it lists for nearly $500, though typically sells for just over $400.

Note that there are two versions of this scanner: The PA03656-B005, which is what I have, and the newer PA03656-B305. The newer one is actually less expensive ($415 vs $490 as I write this), and apparently the sole difference is the bundled third-party software. I haven't seen the newer scanner's bundle, though, so I can't comment.

I've been using this scanner pretty much every day since October of 2015, and I can say it's one of the best pieces of hardware I've ever purchased. (The software is also very good, but the UI is far from lovely.) So far, I've scanned over 8,500 pages with this scanner, and I haven't had any issues with it at all. If you're interested in document scanning, read on for my thoughts on why this Fujitsu is an excellent tool for the task…

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The ridiculous economics of Real Racing 3

I used to play a lot of Real Racing 3 (RR3), an iOS auto racing game. Like, quite a lot. At one point, I owned all 132 cars available at that time, and had completed all the events.

To reach that point, I spent about $60 on in-app purchases—RR3's in-app purchases were really expensive. And yes, that's a lot, but I didn't own a console at the time, and I judged the app worth the cost of a console racing game. (I also took advantage of some programming glitches that enabled occasional free in-app purchase items; without these glitches, I doubt I would have made it as far as I did.)

Once I'd spent $60 and could go no further without spending more, I stopped playing; $60 was my limit. I did keep my iCloud save game file in case I wanted to revisit it someday. That someday was yesterday.

Since I left, the game has grown a lot: There are now 171 cars available, or 39 more than when I stopped playing. To finish the game again, I'd need to acquire (and upgrade) all of those cars (and race a huge number of new races). I thought "maybe it's OK to spend another $60 or so; it's been a few years."

But as I looked into what it might cost to finish the game, I found that the economics are still absolutely ridiculous. How ridiculous? About $3,665 ridiculous. Yes, I estimate it would cost me $3,665 to finish RR3. At that spending level, though, there are some other purchases I could consider…

Instead of finishing RR3, I could purchase a commercial-grade 48" gas range. Or I could buy a loaded Touch Bar Retina MacBook Pro with a 2.9GHz Core i7 CPU, 1TB SSD, and upgraded graphics.

The third option, though, is the best comparison: For $129 less than what I think it would cost me to finish RR3, I could purchase all of the following:

That's a full console-based driving setup, including a 65" 4K TV, for less than what I'd probably have to pay to finish (temporarily, until the next expansion) Real Racing 3. Yes, I'd say that's ridiculous.

But where do my numbers come from, and how could I possibly think it'd cost that much to finish the game?! Read the rest if you'd like the nitty-gritty on my $3,665 estimate.

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