I’m brushing up on some technical skills and working on a few small projects. One of those is to create a TramTracker app for my Pebble Smartwatch, so I can just glance at my watch to see when the next tram is coming.

As a precursor, I got a handle on the TramTracker data source and made a Python module to quickly fetch the info my watch will need. I’m mentioning it here for the benefit of anyone with similar ideas googling around in the future. It’s on GitHub and in PyPI. I also made another module, pdfpipe, which is a python command line tool that takes text and spits out PDFs. I’ve found it quite useful.

The Pebble App is now up on the Pebble App store. So if you are one of the one (1) other Melbournians I know with a Pebble, go grab it. The source is available as well.

I recently had a reason to want to boot Linux on my Mac which already has a Windows Bootcamp partition. I wanted to just install Ubuntu onto a USB stick or hard drive and boot from that. The first bit turned out to be easy, but getting it to boot was quite arcane. I found lots of conflicting information on the web, and even after drinking from this fire hose of useful information it took a lot of trial and error to get it working.

It is possible – you just have to install like normal but requires a third-party boot loader and bit of jiggling before it will boot on its own. I’ve documented what I did below for posterity and others beating their head against the same issue.

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Today the Abbot government released their cost-benefit analysis of the NBN and their own, mixed-technology model. Not surprisingly (for a report commissioned by the Government), the analysis finds that the Coalition’s fibre-to-the-node NBN is more cost-effective than Labor’s fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) model. The case for FTTP isn’t good, according to this document. The mixed-technology model comes out $16b ahead in terms of value for money.

I discussed this report on the The Project in the evening. Have a watch below.

Setting aside the issue of the impartiality of the study, one can assume they have the costs in the ball-park at least. But what about the benefits? This is where the debate will be, because some of the assumptions about the value to the country of faster broadband are highly questionable.

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In another article for Crikey I described the life of a Parliamentary media adviser. I’m trying to explain as neutrally as possible what goes on in that place, but I think you can tell I found the media stuff a bit exhausting:

Your alarm goes off at 5am. As you slowly come to groggy consciousness, you feel the sense of subdued panic that greets you every morning. You regret staying up until midnight waiting for the online papers to change over, but after watching Lateline you were too wired to sleep anyway. Before you even open your eyes, you try to make sense of what the radio announcer is saying as you reach for your phone to scan the headlines. The professional in you hopes there is a big story and you can start the ring around of breakfast and talkback radio. Another part of you longs for a quiet day and a tap of the snooze button.

Read more here.

Hi there. I’m back from 3 years as a political staffer, working for Senator Richard Di Natale in the federal parliament. It was an amazing experience, working under high pressure but for an amazing boss and as part of a dedicated and united team. I will have more to say on it later on. For now, I wrote about some of what I learned from Canberra’s lobbyists in Crikey last week:

As the 12 new senators who took their seats last week are finding out, being a member of Parliament brings with it both perks and liabilities. Along with the comcar, a plush seat inside the chamber and the discreet lapel pin (red for senators, green for reps) that all 226 MPs receive comes another certainty: a steady stream of lobbyists through the door. I witnessed this during three years as a political staffer dealing with lobbyists of all stripes.

You can read the rest of the piece here.

As somebody with a keen interest in free speech issues, I’m naturally predisposed to skepticism when it comes to government censorship. The system we have in Australia serves two purposes; it provides information to consumers (“MA15+ – extreme nudity and wisecracking animals”) and protects Australians from morally inappropriate material, such as spanking or violent video games. The first job has some merit to it – I’ve often looked at the rating of a film myself to get a bit more information on what I’m about to watch, even if I’m hoping for a higher value. The second I don’t have much time for.

The classification system was conceived at a time when the media Australians consumed was shipped around as physical objects (books, magazines, video tapes) and doled out by gatekeepers charged with enforcing censorship laws (newsagents, movie theaters, video shops). Information could be regulated like alcohol or tobacco; no naughty magazine without ID. In that case, classification-based censorship is at least practical. What do we do in a world where all content is digital? Is there anything we can do?

I was recently involved in preparing EFA’s submission to the ALRC review on the classification system. In that submission, we argue that the classification system simply can’t be made to work in an all-digital world. To me, this isn’t a controversial statement. You are, after all, reading this in a web browser from which you can, in seconds, be watching movies that have never been rated by the classification board. Indeed, many of them wouldn’t be rated by the classification board if they did see them. They would be banned if they were on a DVD.

If the existence and access to all this freely available moral pollution has had a detrimental effect on society, it hasn’t outweighed the benefits that the internet has brought. If you’re using the web, you’re already living in an uncensored world; why don’t we just acknowledge it?

The submission doesn’t appear to be up on the ALRC’s submission page yet for some reason, but if you’re interested you can grab it from this link here.

Earlier in the year I also wrote a more readable article arguing the same thing, you can read that here at the ABC.

If you’re one of my fans (hi, Mum) you’ll have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet recently. Fortunately, I haven’t suffered organ failure of been taken hostage by jihadists. It’s just the usual story where a confluence of professional and extra-curricular obligations have curtailed my writing and blogging activities.

The upshot of my recent activity is a big change in direction, and one I’m very excited about. I’ve stepped down as EFA chair so I can enter the world of of federal politics on the staff of incoming senator Richard Di Natale. I begin when the new Senate starts on Friday, 1 July. As Senator Di Natale’s advisor I look forward to indulging my passion for policy and public debate, not only in the areas of technology and digital rights that I have been so vocal about in recent years, but in the much broader sphere, particularly Green politics.

I’ll no doubt be extremely busy in the near term coming up to speed on an exciting new job. As I lurk in Canberra, I look forward to reporting back on the successes of the Greens parliamentary team and giving some insight into how the