Status-Q

My friend Pete Naughton is in Buenos Aires. There's a lovely snapshot of life there in his blog today.

Got 100 quid in your pocket and just have to buy something with it - doesn't matter too much what it is - for the sake of the 'retail therapy'?

I guess there are such sad people in the world, and they may be grateful for Burning A Hole.

40 years ago, the world's first ATM was installed in Enfield, London. John Shepherd-Barron, its inventor, tells the story to the BBC.

Many thanks to Frazer for the link to this rather sweet binary adding machine:

Converting video between different formats can be a challenging experience, particularly since it's also rather time-consuming. You may have to wait hours to find out that what you were trying didn't really work, and you have to start again.

Of course, there are lots of expensive high-end software packages which can do marvellous things, but there are also many utilities which can make the job easier at little or no expense.

These are some of the favourites in my toolkit, some of which will also work on non-Mac platforms:

• Perian is a free QuickTime component which will allow you to play a variety of formats in anything that uses the QuickTime engine, including, of course, the QuickTime player, but also including FrontRow. I often download things from BitTorrent for viewing on a Mac Mini connected to my TV, and this is invaluable.
• VLC (not to be confused with VNC!) The media player from the VideoLAN project will play almost any format out there, and is the thing I immediately turn to if QuickTime is defeated. But it has a lesser-known feature: it can also do conversions, and write the converted video to disc instead of playing it on the screen.
• Handbrake rips DVDs to MPEG4s. Simple and efficient.
• VisualHub brings together a bunch of conversion libraries into one, nice, simple package. Select the format you want and drop the files onto the window. The default settings are generally pretty good. You can get this functionality elsewhere for free, but the ease of use is well worth the $23.
• CocoaJT is really designed as a viewer for streamed media from around the world, but I've never really used it for that. For me, the important feature is that it can also record those streams to disk. If you know the URL of a stream and want a local copy, this is the app for you.
• Vixy.net. Flash Video (FLV) is becoming the dominant format on the web. 'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis, 'tis true. One way to get those YouTube videos into another format, for example to play on a phone or iPod, is to use the online conversion service Vixy.net.
• JW FLV player. If you need to embed a Flash movie in your page but want more control than you get from things like YouTube and Google Video, you can do it yourself. Create an FLV file using VisualHub and then get hold of Jeroen Wijering's Flash applet, which you can embed in your page and point at your FLV file. Free for personal use and very cheap for commercial.

I used a combination of the above, for example, to make my recent talks 'Changing the Face of the PC' and 'The Paper Renaissance' available here when they were previously only available in a streamed, Windows-only format elsewhere. I hope others find the list useful!

OK, so despite telling a friend yesterday that I was trying to cut down on 'social networks', I've been persuaded that Facebook is now a socially acceptable forum even for people over 20. So here's my shiny new profile.

As with LinkedIn, though, I'm going to restrict my list of contacts to people I've actually met. Or at least spoken to on the phone...

Let's see how it goes.

Why do you do what you do?

I like this story, which I've seen attributed to David Byrne:

A woman is asked why she cuts the ends off a ham before baking it. She explains that her mom always did so. Her mom explains that she learned it from grandma. And grandma says, "Silly, my pan was too short for the entire ham."

I have a confession to make. When I visited the Forbidden City in Beijing last month, I went to a little café there.

Found while emptying out my wallet.

Want to edit binary files on your Mac? Hex Fiend looks neat.

At a recent business meeting, an acquaintance referred to "The Flying Saucer Company of Peterborough". I assumed that this hypothetical company was one he had plucked out of the air and given an amusing name for the purposes of illustrating his point.

But no, there really is a company making flying saucers in Peterborough. Small ones, at present, and battery powered, but the little video clip on their front page gives the impression that they've managed to make them work pretty well. Stability has been one of the problems to plague similar projects in the past.

Their site says:

The craft will be most useful in urban environments, where its ability to hover and fly close to and within buildings will enable close quarter surveillance and intelligence gathering. Having no exposed rotating parts, brushes with walls etc., do not compromise the craft's flight.

There was an article a couple of months ago in the Daily Mail which includes some more information and links to a video clip giving a better idea of how it works. Of course, being the Mail, they focus on the fact that the US military is interested, and how the inventor "set about turning his workshops into his own mini-Area 51s"! Good God. I can't believe I actually referred readers to the Daily Mail. Standards are slipping. I apologise. Will attempt to rectify.