Watched the latest daily show, and was struck by how we really are complicit in the treating of employees in Chinese factories. I feel pretty helpless, as electronics do feel completely integrated in our modern lives. But one thing I thought I could do, apart from pray, is send feedback to Apple. You can watch the clip and see my message to Apple below. You can send your own feedback to Apple here, or find your preferred electronics company and send something similar.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I have been using Apple products for many years and as I’m sure many people have told you, your design and your products are the best around.

I am very glad for the leadership Apple has taken on it stance on the environmental impact of its products, and has gone beyond what is legally required.

I would like to add my request for you to take a similar stance on the use of Foxconn and other manufacturers in China. As you may be aware, conditions in those factories are often far less than ideal, so it would show real courage and integrity if you were to extend your care for the environment to a care for people employed by your outsourcing partners, either by pressuring the manufacturers to improve conditions, or choosing manufacturers that treat their workers better.

I hope you take seriously this request, as I believe it is important for our values as people that live in parts of the world with more freedom, to seek that freedom for our other fellow humans.

Yours Sincerely,
James David Low

I switch auto-lock on and off a lot, and I wish they combine the auto-lock setting with the brightness setting, and make a new “screen” setting. This would make it far fewer clicks to turn auto-locking on and off.

You can do as search for issue #10661356 at https://bugreport.apple.com if you want to add your support.

I love the simplicity and that things are just. Love the Michael Kelly Hybrid Special and the Fender Super Champ XD.

Details
- Input/output jacks wired into the Pedal Train Mini
- Stereo input, one side goes to the Fulldrive 2, the other to the Fisherman Aura – a must for anyone using a piezo pickup.
- The Fulldrive is pretty old, ’99 model, serial number around 2000.
- Built in Footswitch for the Fender Super Champ XD.
- Straight jack-jack connector between the Maxon AD-9 and the Fishbone Overdrive Supreme, a Zendrive clone.
- 1 Spot power supply with right angle daisychain – these really make the wiring neat.
- Custom stereo cable from Acoustic Engineering Hong Kong with Amphenol connectors.
- Changed the stock pickups to Dimarzio Air Classics on the Hybrid Special.

Links:
http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=379147&page=2
http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=793223&page=34

For those of you who want Google Safe Search enabled all the time:

http://www.safe-search.org

One thing I’ve done is scan in my Park ‘n’ Shop and print it out on paper sticking it to my Octopus:

At Onoko, I’ve been using Quercus to run PHP applications on Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon’s scalable Java stack.

Quercus is great, although I’ve found I have to work round some of its unimplemented methods or implementation differences from PHP. I test on a plain Linux/Apache/PHP server though, and wanted a way to detect Quercus so I can conditionally use different work arounds. You can do this with the following PHP:

$IS_QUERCUS = strpos($_SERVER["SERVER_SOFTWARE"],’Quercus’) !== false;

This WordPress plugin allows you to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service to host your media for your WordPress powered blog.

It is an extension of the Tantan S3 plugin adding support for setting a CloudFront distribution for your files.

Get it from WordPress here

Database Read Replicas is a WordPress plugin that extends the built in database class to support MySQL Read Replicas so that you can scale your database to support more users.

Get it from WordPress here

This is my first WordPress plugin in a while. Its a modification of the Force User Login plugin that extends it in two ways:

1) It works with WordPress multisite, so that you can set on a per site basis if a site requires login to view the content.
2) It allows you to set a minium user level to view content, so for example, only Editors and above can view the content. (This is useful when you have automatic user registration set up or on a multisite where users may have access to multiple sites.)

Get it from WordPress here

This is mainly for people that I know, at least that I’ve met through Shatin Church.

Some of you may have heard that Anna and I have decided to move on to another church. This has been a long and painful decision, not least because I’ve been there so long, served there so much, and like a lot of you a lot!

Its been hard because I can’t explain all the reasons why I feel its right to move, but I want you to know:
- I have no ill feelings towards anyone currently at Shatin Church.
- While I have been hurt about things in the past, I also know my reaction to things has been less than perfect too
- God has used everything I’ve been through, being hurt, burnt out, depressed to grow and mature me
- I love God more than ever, even though at the same time I realise more than ever, how much I still have to grow and mature
- I do feel that there is a hope and future for both Shatin Church and myself, only that now the future is different for both of us

I want you to know I enjoyed serving with all of you, and have great affection for you and the times we spent together, especially in Solid Rock. I want you to know you’re still my friends and the last thing I would want is for you to feel you can’t ask me about this.