Painfully Obvious.

I wanted an easy way to power the system on or off without going through a menu. I managed to do it with a hardware add‐on and a simple Python script.

All the stuff I wish I’d known about RetroPie and MAME that wasn’t written down in one specific place.

Before your attention flags, I want to wrap up the hardware portion of this series and move into the software. But first I need to cover some odds and ends.

Last time I told you a story of how I built an arcade cabinet out of a couple sheets of MDF. The part I left out was the making of the control panel — the MDF board that will hold the buttons, joysticks, and other controls.

In part one of a too‐many‐parted series, learn how I turned a couple of sheets of MDF into an arcade cabinet with several pounds of sawdust as by‐product.

I don’t have the patience to learn new skills for their own sake. Most of what I know about computers, including everything I do at my day job, was something I learned because I needed it to do something cool. In 2001 I needed to learn PHP to make a…

Last time, I treated you guys to some Solomonesque baby‐splitting between Steve Klabnik and DHH, and then spent two dozen paragraphs talking about how Gowalla’s API was pretty groundbreaking and how Scott Raymond was like the Lou Reed of hypermedia APIs. To balance out all this ridiculous self‐praise, I’ll talk…

Before I convince myself it’s a bad idea, let’s take a retrospective look at the Gowalla API (which, by the way, was started in 2008–2009) and see how it measures up against a hypermedia rubric.

The recent mailer from the U.S. Census Bureau struck a chord with two of my hobbies: information design and open government. Today I’ll be redesigning a piece of paper that looks mundane but has an astonishing impact on the amount of money our country is spending to conduct the 2010 Census. Sometimes good design can solve large‐scale problems.

If you don’t know about Raphaël, you’d better ask somebody. It provides a vector drawing API that works in all major browsers (by abstracting between SVG and VML). I’ve been working on a JavaScript charting library called Krang. Krang is designed to take a data set and produce any chart…