Feature Request

I got an idea.

The Domain Name System has been the focus of interest from censors lately. The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks have both had their domain names yanked out from under them, and this type of thing happens a lot to smaller sites as well. That's also been the proposed implementation of some of these anti-piracy bills.

So I started thinking about a P2P replacement for DNS, so that it is more difficult to shut down websites this way.

Here is my proposal: We have a distributed database that works like the Bitcoin block chain.

Here's the details.

We've seen censorship of the internet in many countries lately. We're seeing poor regulation of the internet in the US. In order to fight this trend, we need to have the people own the network.

Enter Wireless Mesh Networking. People can buy low-cost wifi routers and keep them in their homes. Flash them with a special firmware based on OpenWRT and they can become a mesh network of their own. Communicate with friends and neighbors over the radio.

I sometimes use rhythmbox to download music from other people's daap shares. I wish I had a better interface to the download queue. Right now, there's just a progress bar. I want to see what songs are being downloaded. If a share suddenly goes down, I want to be able to delete those things from the queue without stalling the rest of it. Or set things to pause and resume later when the share comes back online.

I have a weekly freeform radio show on WCBN. I've had this show for a number of years. Every week, I put a playlist together. I like having them around for historical purposes, but now my list of playlists in rhythmbox is quite long.

I wish that I could create a playlist folder to store all my old playlists, and I could choose to show it expanded or not.

So, "I" have a lot of computers at my house, and each of them has a part of "my" music collection. I opened up the daap port on my firewall and I have it go to the daap server on one of "my" computers.

But I want them ALL.

itunes music sharing protocol (the old one that we know how to use, not the new one that was created as a hostile attack against us) has the ability to serve ratings with its export.

But Rhythmbox doesn't seem to be able to read those ratings. That would be useful. Ratings are important to me, cuz I have too much music to keep in my head at once.

Rhythmbox also doesn't have the ability to serve those ratings out.

mt-daapd, also known as "Firefly Media Server" is super-excellent. It's a daemon that lets me share my music over the itunes sharing protocol. Having it as a daemon is a good move, I think, because it can be serving regardless of whether I happen to be running rhythmbox at that time.

Also, it lets me have a machine that lets me serve my music and does little else. There's no reason to marry the serving of music with a GUI.

There is a terminal application for Mac OS X called iTerm. It's pretty excellent. If you're using Mac OS X, this is the terminal to use. It's got tabs and transparency and all the good, modern stuff.

But if you're a real person like me, you use Linux, and you use gnome-terminal. Or, I'll concede, you might use Konsole.

You may have noticed from some of my previous posts that I'm the kind of guy who likes to use the command-line, even when there's a perfectly good gui solution. In fact, I almost regard a gui-only solution as a non-solution to many problems.

And one rather shocking probelm that I haven't seen a non-gui solution for is this one: PHP Debugging.

In a previous post, I talked about my command-line program that opens files in the same manner as gnome would if you had double-clicked it in nautilus.
I have another piece of integration that I'd like to see: Clipboard integration.

The Problem

I'm always editing text files in vim, or viewing them in less, in a terminal window. Sometimes, though, I want to take that file and copy it to the clipboard so that I can paste it into, say, a textarea in my web browser.