Something I found out today when I decided to make a quick edit to a video taken on my cellphone:  Newer GSM cell phones and devices (such as my now-dated Android G1) now tend to save video in 3GP format. This shiny new multimedia format may have many advantages, but it is not widely supported yet on mainstream desktop software, and also may encapsulate certain codecs that are not free to use. This includes the AMR audio codec, which is patent-encumbered and cannot be freely distributed. Since this is what Android and many others use in their 3GP video output, it has become a common issue.

So, apparently there are people under the impression that you can only read and edit these videos using proprietary software such as Quicktime Pro, sketchy shareware or dodgy apps from questionable code houses. For just making the very occasional simple edit to a cheesy cellphone video, it’s a lot to ask.

Fortunately, there is a good alternative. All you need  little command-line mojo and some patience.

Read the rest of this post »

Add a Comment

The ASUS Eee 1008HA is the latest in the popular line of ‘netbooks’ that are reportedly taking over the world, or at least the consumer electronics portion thereof. We picked one up from Amazon for about $419 as a way to keep in touch during summer travels (because, really, what good is a vacation if you can’t have a daily internet fix), and keep our darling 2-year-old entertained with some pre-recorded digital media during a 5-hour plane trip.
Read the rest of this post »

Somewhere, there are people who had to sit through this being shown on a giant screen at a sales meeting, and resisted the urge to gouge out their own eyes with a spork. My compassion for humanity reaches new highs.

8 really scary predictions from FORTUNE

Marc Ambinder in Atlantic: It’s quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama’s transition teams these days

131.9 cents per litre is somewhere between surf rats and shipsterns

Some things this week:

Why’s Camping for quickie site

Git creative at github for quickie versioning

duplicity for quickie encrypted backups to S3

stackoverflow for quickie answers

Media Plugin for quickie embedding

hadoop for quickie figure-outing.

The minute waltz, non-prime and 120-harmonic-reversed are worth listening to for a few hours on end.

“The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction…

I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity… is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”

– Thomas Jefferson corr. John Taylor, May 28, 1816

Thomas Jefferson, it should be noted, died deeply in debt. He contracted to sell landholdings before the Revolutionary War - but the payments he received were given in paper money after the war, which due to hyperinflation (itself caused by massive issuance of debt by the Continental Congress), were worth nothing. Any similarity to events past or present is purely coincidental.

says a long time Wall St. trader. If only it were so. Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman for the last 14 years, has had to suffer such indignities as cashing only a $40million paycheck, and seeing his Florida home lose about $4million in value during this housing crisis. Did he even notice this change fall out of his pocket? Not likely. In an ideal world, nobody would give these guys any more money, as their own personal risk is essentially nil - they can simply shrug and go back to eating exotic food and complaining about the help. Meanwhile, will we continue trusting our life savings to them? it looks less and less likely that the patchwork plumbing (based on fragile absurdities like Fractional Reserve, and Bretton Woods II) will hold together long enough for us to ever get it back.

If physicists don’t find the God Particle, create Dark Matter, reveal the nth dimension, or develop the Theory of Everything, at least the Large Hadron Collider will have resulted in the lyric “the LHC accelerates the protons and lead / and the things that it discovers will rock you in the head“. That definitely furthers human advancement - rumor has it there is a Neutrino Detector in Antartica called Ice Cube that will soon create its own rap and video, with penguins instead of fly girls.