I am running BOINC and joined up with Pirates, so I am currently getting this real quick 'He;lo' projects. I read about other things, but am unsure how to participate in them, and I have been pursuing the website but not having as much luck figuring it out, so I ask.

What other things can I do to get into some of the other Piratey goodness? I see things like yello, turk (a couple different types?), or anything else that I could help in and how to get them started?


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The best way is to wait, crunch if something is available, try out what can be broken and report it and check any invention, which occasionally appears once in a while.

The Capt'n or any crew members occasionally get an idea, how to make life on ship funnier (like Pirate days or the recent Monkey House day). The main goal of Pirates' is helping with testing of anything and we are trying to do it: screensavers for Einstein, forum software additions (message preview, quotations, uploadable image attachments, reCaptcha Turks) for BOINC and I2U2, apps built under different BOINC client version frameworks, different app graphics techniques (sometimes with very interesting ideas), binding Wiki to BOINC forum using the BOINC user's credentials and skills, monitoring physical conditions (like the Captn's Cabin health), inventing and then sampling various types of historical coins, drinking a lot of rum and fighting for treasure, etc. etc. I've possibly missed a lot.
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Peter .-)

I think Pepo's given a good summary. Thanks.

Right now you may want to check out the Mechanical Turk. Most sites use reCAPTCHA once, to prove that you are a human rather than an automated program. So far only a human can read these, while other CAPTCHAs have been cracked. The novel thing is that the words come from the Internet Archive, or old editions of the New York Times, and each task helps digitize these old documents. See the links there for more details. We recently made a small change to how we display the "top turks".

You may want to look at this list of BOINC modifications which we have tried here. Some made it into BOINC proper, some were just interesting tests. Some were developed to support I2U2. You will find some info and links in the Announcements section of the Message Boards. We may well have more projects to help with I2U2 as time goes on, but no promises. (That page, by the way, demonstrates how we were able to tie a wiki to a BOINC project.) The forum code here is pretty old, compared to what BOINC puts out now. I need to finish documenting all the little features we've tested here, and then bite the bullet and update. And then restore some of the features.

There have been a few things taking up my time recently, so the level of activity is low right now, but new things will still show up eventually. Meanwhile, we encourage investigation, so take a look around and you may find some things I've missed.



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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats