Dreams

There can be so much more. Your mind already created your world. Why be content with just what you unconsciously bricked together? Start imagining. Your wildest dreams live right inside you. There’s no reason to chase them. Start putting them into everything you do. There’s no other way. Recognize that you live them now, and you will find that you are. Take back control. Create your own world, it’s what we all do. There’s no reason not to do it consciously.

Let go

Sometimes life points the fucking flash right in your face and fires it without warning. But when the purple dimples and traces fade from your vision and sight is recovered, the world isn’t at all what it used to be. Well it is, but you see it upside down, inside out, metatranscribed onto a swirling wall, inprinted with esoteric symbols, unreadable but screaming meaning and emotion in your face. And that’s when the torrent starts. Somewhere from the backwaters of your mind, it trickles it’s way from your subconcious, like tickling drops, moving their way forward in constant and rhythmic motion, slowly, barely noticeable gaining mass for each drop you let through. You don’t want to stop it. There is no way you can. As the frequency rises, the drops start interconnecting, becoming an unbroken line connecting you with an essence you didn’t even know you had forgotten, and much less carried with you every time-quantum of your life, from the very moment you was conceived in your mothers womb, to the place you stand today. As you allow the stream to move freely within you, the boundaries break, and pressure is released. The trickle becomes a river, washing over your existence. You move deeper, because you have to, because you need to see the other side, because this is what you were always meant to be doing. There’s only letting go now. This is it.

Oh. Yes.

We’re All The Pirate Bay

from http://thepiratebay.org/special/2009mmtpb.php

The Swedish artist Montt Mardié thought The Pirate Bay needed an theme song, an anthem. So he created one!

We like it a lot and hope you like it too. You can download the torrent here, and watch the video as well.

We also got the audio files so all you TPB fans can make your own version, your own remix!
It would also be cool if you did your own version of the video and post as a video response on youtube. As Montt Mardié put it: “To show the world, that we’re all The Pirate Bay…”

Here’s Monty’s coments about it all:

An artist has got to make a living just like everybody else, there’s no doubt about it. And these are tough times, believe me I know. The thing is though, if I were to go back in time, 10 years or so, and tell the 15-year-old version of myself that over a night, 60 000 people had heard one of my songs, the first question I’d throw back at myself wouldn’t be “how much money did I make?”.
Don’t get me wrong, I love money and I want to make a lot of it. Bathe in it just like Uncle Scrooge. But money isn’t the main reason why I write songs. First and foremost I want people to hear them.
Times are so strange at the moment and a lot of people are angry and upset. Still, for each day that goes by I get more and more convinced that we shouldn’t try to fight the future, we should embrace it. Try to see opportunities instead of catastrophys.

I’ve written a song. I call it “We’re All The Pirate Bay”. It’s free and nobody will ever have to pay for it, though if you incist you are welcome to make a donation!

Take care, Monty

More Montt Mardié at
www.monttmardie.com
www.myspace.com/monttmardie
www.hybrism.com

Donate: paypal account: monttmardie@hybrism.com

Download, re-mix, re-make, re-download!, re-seed, re-edit, re-enjoy!

Download:
Montt Mardie – We’re all The Pirate Bay (single)
Montt Mardie – We’re all The Pirate Bay (Remixkit!)

Apple’s In-Ear iPhone Headset…

Turns out to double nicely as a headset for your Mac! How sweet! Just got myself the in-ear iPhone headset today, and plugged it into my Macbook to listen to some music. I accidentally fiddled with the controls on the headset cord, and lo-and-behold, they actually worked for adjusting volume and play/pause/skip controls. Turns out, the little microphone in the headset is also recognized and connected to the Mac when plugged in, so it doubles as a full headset for Skype/iChat/whatever, even though it’s only plugged into the headphone port. Pure genius.

When you need a little ideology…

Sometimes you just need a simple and comprehensive ideology that will give you the answer to the meaning of life, and make you feel all happy and content inside. But how to choose what pseudo-useful gibberish to erect as a pillar of your existence? Well, fear no more, because I bring you the Ism-Generator Public Beta Technology Preview Release Candidate 1. This nifty little piece of software will have you living strictly within your own unique and personally generated ideology in no time! Go ahead now, I know you want to…

It’s made in Processing by the way, and it’s Creative Commons as everything else I spit out here, so go ahead and modify it. But if you make something cool, please show me. I like new toys.

Hope

Once… Once there was hope in the world. Real hope, that real human beings shared. It wasn’t a naive optimism, or a longing for the tides to change by their own powers. It was the certainty, that together we could create whatever world we wished for. It was trust. Trust in each other. Nothing more and nothing less. And we don’t need anything else. Really. It’s all that matters. Trust.

It isn’t gone though, it’s just very faint. We need to strain our eyes, and firstmost, strain our hearts. We need to start believing in each other again. We need to start believing in the power that emerges when we take each others hands and walk together, instead of walking by ourselves.

There is no external powers controlling us, nothing holding us back, if we dare to believe it.

An example of open culture

One of the stupidest mis-conceptions of our time is, in my opinion, that if copyright laws and the like don’t let innovators claim total and restrictive ownership over their creations, people will simply stop creating. Of course this isn’t true, people have been creating and sharing long before copyright and intellectual property became a reality, and will continue to do so long after these things are abolished. Big Buck Bunny, an animation short is a beautiful example of just this. It’s an animation short, licensed under the most unrestrictive Creative Commons license, meaning the work can be freely shared, remixed and distributed. You can watch it here:

http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download/

Some myths about intellectual property

This is a public domain text I found on the internet that clearly sums up some points about intellectual property. A very good read indeed.

Intellectual property is a hot-button issue these days, and for good reason. In the heat of debate, however, it can become easy for dogmatic assertions to stamp out complex truths. In order to fairly consider intellectual property, it is important that our discussions not be clouded by misconceptions; for this reason, a number of false statements about intellectual property are here listed and rebutted.

Intellectual property is an ancient principle.
Not true. Intellectual property is an explicitly modern notion, having made its debut quite recently. The first patent law was enacted in 1623, and the precursor of modern copyright – the Statute of Anne – came into being in 1710. These early laws were limited in scope and restricted to only a few types of information; the broader interperatation of these principles used today in the western world is quite modern, certain elements having been added only within the last few years.

Intellectual property is recognized worldwide.
As the US’s recent standoff with China demonstrates, intellectual property is not a concept which has worldwide acceptance. Indeed, a major foreign policy objective of the United States has been to force other nations to comply with its own intellectual property agenda – an unwelcome form of intellectual imperialism which is all too frequently ignored by watchdog groups.

Without intellectual property, no one will produce original work.
Given that intellectual property law made its debut in 1623, we may correctly consider any work produced before this time to dispell the myth. Man created for millenia before the advent of intellectual property; he will create for many more millenia after it is abandoned.

Intellectual property is necessary to create incentives for the production of original works.
This intellectual property myth has become the mantra of IP supporters. Often repeated, never questioned, the idea that creativity depends on a government granted monopoly needs no justification in the minds of most IP boosters. Sadly, however, they are mistaken: intellectual property “rights” are not essential to creation, and in some circumstances even deter it. Consider, for instance, the software industry. Free for years from the limitations of intellectual property, the industry flourished, becoming by all accounts one of the most creative of environments in the modern world. With the recent introduction of patent law into computing, however, many individual programmers live in fear of lawsuits from large corporations who claim “ownership” of techniques such as the scroll-buffer. Who benefits from this? Certainly not the creator! Intellectual property law, from its inception, has been about publishers and other powerful firms as much as it has been about creative individuals; the latter often find their interests poorly defended by IP.

Even if people DID create works without intellectual property protections, the quality of these works would be substandard.
Only if “Julius Caesar”, Plutarch’s “Lives”, “The Last Supper”, and Handel’s “Messiah” are “substandard”! All of these, including such pivotal creations as the Bible, the Koran, and the hundreds of Sutras were created in a world without intellectual property. IP boosters claim that weakening intellectual property law means giving up great literature, music, and art; in fact, history shows us that this is not the case.

The “best” creators won’t work without intellectual property protections.
Once again, history proves this to be false. Shakespeare, Plato, Confucius, Hero, Chaucer, Handel, and many others of the finest names in world literature, music, art, and invention worked in an environment free of intellectual property restrictions. Clearly, genius does not require copyright to produce!

To take away intellectual property rights is to deny creators the right to profit from their labors.
This myth is based on the idea that the only way to make money off of creation is to “sell” the ideas which are produced. In fact, this is not true. Consulting, support, performance, service: these are all ways in which creators can make money off of their abilities without appealing to intellectual property rights. Even if there were no copyright, a band could still make money by charging for live performances, for instance; an even better example is found in academia, where a great deal of idea production takes place without the ideas being “sold” to the universities which sponsor their creators. Removing intellectual property rights would not deny creators the right to profit from their labors; it would, however, allow all of society to share in the benefits of their work.

Intellectual property follows directly from the notion of physical property.
Physical property rights are derived from the basic fact that a physical object can’t be in two places at once. In order to keep people from squabbling over material objects, we use a system of rights to say “who gets what”. Information, however, differs from physical property in a number of ways, one of which being that it can be in many places at the same time. Let’s say that Fred gives Barney an apple; after this, Fred no longer has the apple. If, on the other hand, Fred TELLS Barney about the apple, Fred STILL knows about the apple. Fred gave the information to Barney, but Fred still has it! Clearly, then, there is no need for Fred and Barney to squabble over who “owns” the information about the apple: to do such would be to try to treat information like an object, an idea which is clearly flawed.

As the debate of over the future of intellectual property unfolds, it will be more important than ever for participants, and bystanders, to have good information concerning the nature of IP. By removing the myths and misconceptions which surround intellectual property, we can make better decisions as to its proper status in our society.

This document should be considered public domain – please distribute freely.

Free Wifi in Newark Airport

I get a lot of traffic to this page each day, so now that you’re here, why not take a look around at all the other stuff i keep here? Maybe you’ll find something interesting. Be my guest, please

Update: Unfortunately, it seems the fine folks at Newark have fixed this little glitch. It was nice while it lasted!

This will show you how to get free wifi from the Boingo hotspots in Newark airport. It’ll probably also work on other Boingo hotspots, but I haven’t tried it yet. If it works, please post a comment, would be nice to know. Now, read on and I’ll tell you how to do this in-between all my ramblings.

So, I’m sitting here in Newark Liberty International Airport (what a long name), and having a few hours to waste before my flight, I figured i’d try to find some open wireless networks, and have a little surfin’ fun. Unfortunately, as I expected, no networks accidentally left open was to be found, so another route had to be taken. I need my internet fix. So here’s how it works:

Boingo is kind enough to offer free wifi in all of Newark airport, with a little tricking that is. Trying their network from my iPhone, I noticed i had the option to get 15-minutes of free internet time, if I watched a 15-second ad, that is. Nice deal! Worked painlessly and let me browse the interwebs from my iPhone, but when I pulled out my laptop to write some email, I found that the offer wasn’t available when using a laptop. Doh!

So, what to do? All it requires is a little URL trickery. When you first connect to the Boingo network and open a browser, you will be presented with a Boingo “buy-some-access-time-now-you-rich-person-in-need-of-internet-access-for-the-outrageous-price-of-24.99-dollars” kind of page. We won’t do that. Please notice the unholy URL in your address bar. It’ll be something like:

https://www.boingo.aero/(S(j0vp4xi5o1h6fre12cg5hx55))/Home.aspx

Beautiful. To get your nice and free access, just change the “Home.aspx” part of the url to “FreeOfferAdMobile.aspx”, so the URL will look something like this:

https://www.boingo.aero/(S(j0vp4xi5o1h6fre12cg5hx55))/FreeOfferAdMobile.aspx

Hit enter, wait for the little “connecting” bar to finish, and of you go! Enjoy your free wireless internet access!