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Piracy, drones and dreaming.

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As controversial as they may be, I have to hand it to The Pirate Bay, they certainly keep themselves at the forefront of technology.

Our data flows around in thousands of clouds, in deeply encrypted forms, ready to be used when necessary. Earth bound nodes that transform the data are as deeply encrypted and reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours.

All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing. The site that you’re at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us.

via The Pirate Bay – The galaxy’s most resilient bittorrent site.

It used to be said that the pornography industry drove innovation, but I would say for the past few years it’s been the file sharers.

The Pirate bay have looked into hosting their sites on a series of flying drones, that operate over international waters. It sounds incredible (in the, “that must be made up, it’s too incredible” sense of the word), but it’s quite achievable. In fact, they wouldn’t even be the first to do it.

I’ve longed imagined a distributed form of web server, which is a step beyond even what they’re doing here–where the web server software doesn’t even live on one computer, but is shared around the world.

On the one hand that seems inconceivable to most people right now. And while what they’re doing may be questionable at best, I choose to keep thinking the undo-able can be done, I think with the flying drones, and the metaphors for deity.

If we stop dreaming, we stop creating.

Let’s make stuff instead.

Easily search and replace throughout a (smallish) MySQL database

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Every now and then I need to search through an entire MySQL database, to change a word, term, URL, or some other string.

Rather than searching through the entire database to make the change, I just use phpMyAdmin to export the whole thing as an .sql file, which is of course just plain text.

Open it in a text editor, find and replace in there, then re-upload to phpMyAdmin.

In short, I get it done easily in a bout 45 seconds without having to worry about a typo in an SQL query destroying my data.

Facebook’s Spotify privacy settings, for dummies

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I listen to a LOT of music. It’s not often you’ll see me without a pair of headphones on (which might have something to do with why I’ve got a hearing test this afternoon!).

Some of it is undeniably wonderful, and some of my tastes…well…let’s just say it’s not often that I give out my last.fm profile.

I’m also big on sharing, and like to share playlists or tracks with friends on Facebook, but found whenever I did they were coming up with the “only me” privacy setting, which is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

With Facebook’s seemingly fortnightly changes to it’s privacy management, it’s not always obvious where you fix something like that.

Here is exactly how you fix precisely that:

How to Edit Facebook’s Spotify Privacy Settings – For Dummies.

Donate monthly via Paypal, and HTML

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BINGO! This is just what I needed tonight. I was starting to create a PHP solution that would enable me to set up monthly donations (rather than a subscription) to Paypal.

But then I thought, “Paypal must have a more elegant solution for this, and if not more elegant, than certainly simpler”.

And while they didn’t, a quick Google search revealed someone else had. In HTML.

Monthly Donations Button | PayPal.

Create custom RSS feeds in WordPress

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I couldn’t quite work out how best to do create a custom RSS feed in WordPress.

My task seemed simple enough, to make an RSS feed of news articles from popular news sources…but the RSS feed needed to link back to the original source, NOT the article in WordPress.

Writing the PHP script to generate the RSS was simple, but the final step was getting WordPress to serve that feed.

Here’s the documentation I used, in addition to a custom field:

Create custom RSS feeds in WordPress | Tips4PHP.

Quality, not quantity (unless you’re @markhoppus)*

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I used to think that having lots more followers on Twitter than people you followed made you look good, that the ratio was important.

And perhaps at a cursory glance it does. But with so many services devoted to getting your stats up, (twiends being a case in point) it all starts to become a bit meagingless.

It makes me wonder, how do I want to use Twitter?

Is it just a feather in my cap, proving that I can be popular (incidentially, I’m, not yet)? Frankly, I’d rather let my body of work speak to my successes.

I love community, and conversation. I want discussion. But I don’t want that discussion hampered by a endless supply of tweets clogging my feed from people I’ll never interact with.

A good community of people makes for a useful experience. People who talk to each other, to debate and share.

And it’s not just a matter of lists. Any leader is in part defined by his/her followers. When people look at my list of followers, I want them to see quality people they might want to interact with too.

EXCEPTION=FOLLOWERS>2,000,000
If you become popular enough, you can stay popular just for that reason. Get enough people following you, and your list of followers isn’t indicative of your peers anymore, but just that you’re a social trend. See @markhoppus for an example, albeit a funny one at that.

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