The Listening Pirate

There have been several Pirate Party election candidates to date, but Jeff Coleman is notable for two reasons.

The Canadian appears to be the first to stand for a national election outside of Europe: he’s contesting the Winnipeg North seat in a by-election next Tuesday.* (A by-election, like a special election in the United States, fills a vacancy outside of the usual nationwide election cycle.)

He’s also going beyond the traditional Pirate Party platform of intellectual property law reform, a free internet, and the right to online privacy. Instead Coleman is appealing to local voters through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to come up with policies on local issues, a technique the party describes as “a crowdsourced listening campaign.”

According to Coleman, the aim is to “provide a voice for all residents of the riding, irrespective of their political leanings and election results.” And to give credit, it’s certainly true that he’s talking to people who don’t exactly appear to be natural supporters of a technology-based party:

Indeed, if you assumed the Pirate Party was a purely high-tech operation, you’d be wrong. The campaign has also involved a very old-school, analog take on the “remix”:

Coleman isn’t the first person to stand for election on a platform of using tech to listen to the people. Denny de le Haye stood as an independent candidate in the United Kingdom elections last year with the sole policy of running online polls to decide how he should vote in each Parliamentary debate. It appeared locals didn’t go for the idea of closer involvement: he received just 95 votes.

* In the interests of balance, the full list of candidates in the Winnipeg North election is: Kevin Chief (New Democratic Party), Jeff Coleman (Pirate Party of Canada), John T. Harvie (Green Party of Canada), Julie C. Javier (Conservative Party of Canada), Frank Komarniski (Communist Party of Canada), Kevin Lamoureux (Liberal Party of Canada), Eric Truijen (Christian Heritage Party of Canada).





Make This Sweet Atari Punk Recipe Box for the Holiday Season


So maybe you don’t have enough time to do this before Thanksgiving, but I can’t think of a cooler way to keep your recipes than this Atari Punk recipe box. From Make:

Hey, you want to make some chunky 8-bit music? In a recipe box? With Atari paddles? Using a Dremel tool? We thought you might. The “Atari Punk Console” is the name given to the wonderfully retro-sounding stepped tone generator, designed by hobby electronics pioneer Forrest M. Mims III. It is a 556-based timer circuit oscillator that generates a square wave. More importantly, it sounds like Atari 2600 music and is fun to build into a cool enclosure.

That’s pretty sweet.

[Make an Atari Punk Recipe Box]

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Darth Vader vs. Lord Voldemort: Fight!

I don’t know about you, but the geek inside me screams at the injustice behind the outcome of this battle. WTF Indeed.

[Via Nerdbastards]

Boba Font [Pic]

Fonts used: Arial, Myriad, Futura, Helvetica, Gill Sans, Comics, Rage italic, Maiandra GD, Scala Sans Exp Black, Daxline Pro, Bauhaus, Fago, SF Transrobotics.

[Via | Source]

Apple computer gets 320-fold price rise

When the iPad went on sale, a few people complained about the idea of paying several hundred dollars and then having to stump up some extra cash for a case. They should count themselves lucky.

An Italian man has just paid more than $200,000 for an Apple computer without a case. And this time we’re not talking a carry case: the machine literally had no casing.

To be fair, this wasn’t the latest MacBook Pro. Instead it was an original Apple-1, the first machine Apple ever sold and one of only 200 units ever made.

The device, which was only on sale for a year before being discontinued, originally retailed for $666.66. (Insert your own anti-Steve Jobs gag here.) Yesterday Marco Boglion paid £133.250 (approx $213,600) at a technology auction to buy an Apple-1, complete with original components, such as 8K of RAM, packaging, and a letter from Jobs.

Not only was the Apple-1 the company’s first computer, but it’s birthing process was a perfect microcosm of the company’s success over the next 23 years. Steve Wozniak came up with the idea of building the machine, while friend Steve Jobs had the idea of selling it to the public.

Ironically for the company that went on to popularize the tablet PC, the computer didn’t ship with a keyboard. Then again, it didn’t ship with a screen or a power supply either. But as the auction listing notes, it did still offer a nod towards a casual audience, albeit in a very comparative sense: “Because the motherboard was completely pre-assembled, it represented a major step forward in comparison with the competing self-assembly kits of the day.”

Among the other items on sale at the auction were an Enigma (a German encryption machine used in the second world war) and papers belonging to computer pioneer Alan Turing.