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.

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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.

The proper CLI incantation to get mplayer/mencoder to clockwise rotate, apply an autolevels filter and re-sample an AVI video is:

mencoder dscf5432.avi -vf rotate=1,pp=al -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1:bitrate=687 -oac copy -o out.avi

131.9 cents per litre is somewhere between surf rats and shipsterns

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.

A French team of mathemeticians and computer artists has just released a documentary that attempts to help us mere math-mortals transcend the three-dimensional space we are trapped in, and visualize regular polyhedra in 4 dimensions just as a Escher tile-lizard might visualize our 3-D world. The two hours worth of videos are very well done, and also touch on fractals, the Juliet Set, complex numbers and topology. This correspondent was only able to catch a tiny glimpse of 4-space, but it was stunning. It looks like an exquisite world, maybe even more beautiful than ours.