Got a great result from my crowd-sourcing last week, as I struggled with the XP version of Windows Movie Maker, and its inability to edit MPEG2 video files (that is, the format favoured by most of the new-generation hard drive cameras).

Reader Ross Brown pointed me to Converio, a piece of French shareware that converts MPEG2 clips to Movie Maker-friendly AVIs (and more besides).

As Ross warned, post-installation set-up required a series of back-and-fourth visits to SourceForge and similar sites to collect video, audo and effects codecs, and I had to make a couple of visits to Google Language Tools to decipher the Francophile menu labels. But in the end it functioned relatively simply and, as Ross said in his original email "works a treat".

Speaking of Google's translation engine - yes, sometimes it amuses with its inadvertantly hilarious translations, but it also frequently amazes me.

Try this. Go to the website of the French newspaper Le Monde. It's all in Frog, of course, but cut and paste its address (http://www.lemonde.fr/) into the "Translate a web page" dialogue on Language Tools, click Translate then, voila, you've got a workable English version of Le Monde's home page. Magic.

I pointed this trick out to a friend, who found it really useful for booking travel for a European jaunt. Nothing like a bit of Google auto-translation to access local language (and local price) versions of travel sites.

Posted by Chris Keall at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Telecom's worst nightmare - IT & Communications Minister David Cunliffe - is in line for promotion to the front bench when the PM announces her new cabinet line-up at midday. The Herald is tipping Cunliffe to get Education [whoops, might want to erase that link now]. Question is: will Cunliffe keep IT & C on the side, implying the main broadband charge is over? Or will a fresh face pick up the portfolio, and see through the unbundling reform so we end-users start to see some impact from the radical changes at the top of the food chain? And who will that be? My broadband was unbelievably slow last night, so the thought of Telecom's CEO having to face off against Trevor Mallard did hold momentary appeal (I'm sure there's a political heavyweight joke in there somewhere).

There are two interesting possibilities for IT & C. One is Clayton Cosgrove, who before joining the current govt was an exec with Clear (now TelstraClear), so of course has a ready appreciation of facing Telecom on the front lines. The other is fast rising star and braniac Charles Chauvel, who is relatively young (I'm just assuming that always helps with appreciating the internet), and has the legal eagle background necessary to do battle with your favourite telco's squadrons of lawyers. But both are tipped for other things, according to today's papers. Answers at midday ...

Dateline 1.40pm
Well, that was not my favoured outcome. Cunliffe will take over Health but keep IT & C on the side. Health is a mighty, mighty big vortex. Let's hope he doesn't disappear into it.

Cosgrove got the earthy, old-economy Sport and World Cup portfolios, which for better or worse have far, far more kudos than IT & C (I would say worse unless your key economic infrastructure issue is not broadband, but the state of car parking around Eden Park during the month of October, 2011 - but that's just me!).

The demoted Mallard gets Broadcasting among his consolation prizes - though, again, in the PC World universe this portfolio is anything but second-tier as New Zealand transitions to standard digital TV and HD digital TV broadcasting for all - a complex operation in itself, and one with important flow-on effects for wireless internet access.

Chauvel was not even mentioned in dispatches. New ministers and portfolios are listed on the Beehive site here and the full line-up on Stuff here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Remember ye olde olden days, back in the 1990s, when Lotus used to have an office suite that seriously competed against Microsoft Office? Lotus SmartSuite died a while back, and is still dead. But Lotus's latter-day owner, IBM, has reinvigorated the Lotus brand by releasing a new office suite, which you can download, or save your data cap and install full and free from PC World November's cover DVD (on newsstands today, old media fans). It's called IBM Lotus Symphony, and essentially it represents the efforts of a group of programmers that Big Blue set to the task of putting some polish on The Microsoft Office-compatible OpenOffice.org. Both the Windows and Linux versions are on our disc.

Our Nov cover DVD also features a full and free racing sim created by BMW. Yes, it does feature the sponsor's cars. But Reviews Editor Scott Bartley's team of hardcore racing enthusiasts give this rip around the Nürburgring Grand Prix circuit two thumbs up.

Spring clean
Like the air after a thunderstorm, there's nothing like that new PC feeling. Everything feels fresh and snappy ... and then slowly but surely it declines into gluggy-ness as new programs, utilities, adware, spyware, malware and whateverware slow you down, and make unrequested changes to your settings. If that sounds like your PC, then make sure you also check out our November issue's "Spring clean" special. In print we take you through the apps you need to scrub your system, then you can install them from our cover DVD. Synergy, innit?

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

This afternoon's YouTube NZ launch didn't add much to what I previewed this morning, bar some slightly creepy loneygirl15 trivia (keep reading); the fact there's no big local content initiative equivalent to YouTube & Google's combined original effort to cover the Aussie election in new-fangled multimedia fashion; and the fact there's a paucity of local content partners compared to YouTube Australia. The three in NZ are TVNZ on Demand, a tourism campaign from 100% Pure NZ (hmm, not sure if that qualifies as a content channel) and Sky News. Even TVNZ on Demand's stuff is really just teasers designed to drive traffic to tvnz.co.nz; certainly nothing close to the scale of the BBC's YouTube tie-up.

Three Kiwi super-users were trotted out and interviewed onstage, which was cute (pictured above on my cellphone, left to right - musicalkiwi13, Lord Sardonic and wizardneedsfood).

However, the US-based YouTube staff hosting the event seemed wholey unaware that made-it-big on YouTube sensations Jessica Lee Rose (aka lonelygirl15) and Flight of the Conchords had NZ origins.

There were also two Aussie users onstage, and three of the panellists (and other users in the audience) filmed absolutely everything - including, in multicontextual post-modern mayhem, their own YouTube clips being shown to the audience - so I'm sure the vids of the vids are already appearing on the site if you're keen.

I did get told one piece of trivia at the drinks afterward (and here was me worrying I'd have nothing to put in my notebook): all of YouTube's conference rooms in the US are named after super users, and the first ever conference room was called ... lonelygirl15.

I asked if there were any plans to cache popular videos locally, so they might serve a little faster. Nothing immediate, but it's something they're thinking about.

I also asked if any NZ super users were about to get a little slice of Google's multibillion profits - as has started to happen to a limited degree overseas - but, no. Well, I'm pretty sure. We had accent issues. Grown-up channel partners like the BBC and TVNZ do get a slice of the revenue from Google ads placed around their YouTube clips - though it's a tiny, tiny fraction of the sort of dosh they're used to from commercials screening on broadcast television.

Incidentally I had a brief word with TVNZ on Demand's Jason Paris on the way out. By his count, the service is going great guns, with 170,000 clips downloaded last month.

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

A localised version of YouTube is set to launch at 2pm today. The Googlistas won't reveal anything in advance of that time.

But based on the launch of YouTube Australia yesterday (priorities, Google!) and the content that's already up at nz.youtube.com, it looks like the main feature is local videos being featured strongly on the front page.

I know you thought YouTube was all about skateboarding dogs, lonelygirl15 and that guy who can put 200 T-shirts on at once - but there you go, it is in fact about national identity - and, whisper it quietly - a local ad platform for this Google-owned property.

I see the Inland Revenue Dept is already in there with a student loan campaign. Watch out for more ads around YouTube all round as Google starts to supplement its traditional text ads with semi-transparent "overlays" that appear a few seconds into a video (and which have been gradually weeding their way through the site since August).

At its Aussie launch, YouTube also announced a number of local media partners, including SKY News, ABC, Network TEN, Seven Network and Fairfax Media (read the Sydney Morning Herald's full report here). If anything interesting happens on this front in NZ, I'll let you know after 2pm today ...

Cunliffe set to upload
There's an unfortunate consequence of Steve Maharey's resignation from cabinet. The NZ Herald reports today that it sets the stage for IT & Communications Minister David Cunliffe to be promoted (as initially predicted by Peter Griffin in October NZ PC World's Internet Power 20 list).

I can see why the PM has earmarked Cunliffe for higher things; after years of inertia, he took over the IT&C portfolio and immediately started turning Telecom on its head (even if end users won't see much of the effect until next year). Still, if he does lose IT&C, it'll be a pity.

Clear Communications (now TelstraClear) alumnus* Clayton Cosgrove is the other minister tipped for a promotion. Read the Herald's report here.

* No email, please, Latin freaks

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Vodafone sent out a press release today saying it was "taking the mystery out of mobile roaming" by consolidating "400 different price points (depending on the country and service provider) to just 4 Zones". To wit:

Zone 1: Australia - standard domestic rate for outbound calls
Zone 2: Europe - $2 plus standard domestic rate per minute for outbound calls
Zone 3: North America & Asia Pacific - $3 plus standard domestic rate per minute for outbound calls
Zone 4: Rest of World - $5 plus standard domestic rate per minute for outbound calls

High profile IT entrepreneur, blogger and frequent traveller Rod Drury had already taken violent exception to the new plan, however.

"I don’t get why the telco’s treat customers like this. This pricing is ridiculous and just drives people more to Skype which is getting better and better", Rod says, rather hitting the nail on the head. Read his full blast here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

After quite some time attempting to finagle Microsoft's freebie Movie Maker software into accepting files from my JVC Everio hard drive camcorder, I've just discovered that only the version of Movie Maker that comes with Vista Home Premium can be used to edit MPEG2 clips (that is, the format used by most hard drive and DVD cams). The Windows XP version doesn't support many MPEG2 codecs, including my JVC's (though XP's Media Player will, if the Everio's .MOD file extensions are judiciously renamed).

Suddenly, with the cost of a Vista upgrade in the offing (though even that's unlikely as Fairfax Towers' IT dept is committed to XP), Movie Maker doesn't feel so free anymore. Stink. With no ambitions beyond a couple of simple snips, I had been hoping to avoid Adobe Premiere's 747 control panel.

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 4 )

The last post about my US sojourn - I promise. But I just had to include this snap I took in our hotel. It's of a Bloomberg machine, which was on display at the financial conference running in parallel to the massed gathering of PC World editors.

In a world ruled by web freebies, PCs, and open everything, this closed system seems like some kind of 80s relic (check out the toy keyboard!). Yet Bloomberg LP, owned by New York mayor and financial services billionaire Michael Bloomberg, will only let you access its market data - at least to full effect - through one of its custom-built terminals. The best bit (for Mike): you don't even get to own it. Instead you lease one for around $US1500 a month, and there are around 250,000 "Bloombergs" installed around large financial companies. No wonder wags call them "Money Machines" (insiders simply call it "The Terminal").

I found the Bloomberg's graphics rudimentary, and its news display and other data scrolled at a speed only viewable by dogs and teenagers. The snazzy dual-screens aside, most of it looked like it could be replicated on an old DOS PC. Though its interface is certainly simpler: to get where you want to go, you simply bash the right colour on the keyboard.

Posted by Chris Keall at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Do you hate flying economy? How about when the person in front of you leans back?

At a reception here I meet a colleague from PC Advisor who's famed throughout the IDG world for his pioneering use of Knee Defender. It's essentially a couple of tiny plastic struts that you can discretely deploy to prevent the passenger in front of you from reclining.

Simon says that despite the propaganda on the Knee Defender website, the widgets are in fact visible, so he initially draped a newspaper over them. Now he just places one of the struts. The person in front can still lean back, but it in wonky fashion that makes them assume their seat's broken, so they return to the upright position for the rest of the flight.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:57 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

There's no more emphatic an expression of America's high-tech dominance than The Sharper Image. Some pics from my visit to the chain's Boston store:

Microsoft coffee: 10-cup brewer with LCD screen displaying a real-time weather forecast, courtesy of MSN.com.

Oregon Scientific Action Camera ($US129), which can be strapped to your head while snowboarding or similar to capture VGA-quality video.

This R2D2 robot can navigate by sonar and respond to voice commands. Or at least that's the idea. Out of the box, it refused to follow any human. Note the well-toned Sharper Image rep in red.

Speaker phone with iPod dock.

An alarm clock with wheels, the better to escape when its motion-sensor detects you're trying to turn it off.

Weight loss.

A turntable with a USB port, the better to rip your vinyl to MP3 (I've seen these from time to time at Dick Smith back in NZ).

This season's look in golf ball-finding eyewear is blue, and suddenly sophisticated.

Unhelpfully I didn't put anything in this shot for scale, but this Pocket Mod Vapor Electric Scooter is the size of one JD rides in Scrubs. Like the bike, the price is amazingly low: $US289.

Left the store now. This baby was on display at the JFK Library. It's Bobby Kennedy's actual phone, as used in his office when he was Attorney General back in 1962. Very boss it looks too. This was in the days before conference phones had iPod docks, of course.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:57 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Or at least according to a splashy front-page article I read in USA Today as I pass through LAX on Friday. Apparently a bunch of US companies have declared Zero Email Fridays to encourage people to talk to each other again, but also to get inboxes under control ... which leads to a second alleged trend: declaring "email bankruptcy" and deleting everything in your inbox.

An IDC wonk says it takes four minutes to refocus on your work after every time you check your email - which explains my lack of career progress since 1994.

And according to IDC figures, 39.5 billion person-to-person emails are sent each day worldwide, not counting spam. So, essentially, that's four minutes times 39.5 billion, which equals ... nobody getting any work done at all, anywhere

You can read the online version of USA Today's story here, complete with an unironic link for emailing it to your friends

In the American Airlines terminal, where I'm reading, there are a number of people on their notebooks, quite possibly spending their Friday morning email (for there are power plugs and ethernet ports for any economy passenger to get online). A couple are emailing on Treos or BlackBerries. Most though, are demonstrably not doing any Friday email. They're too busy txting ...

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:56 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Travelling again. Among other things, I'm going to great lengths to review my new BlackBerry Curve 8310 ($999, Vodafone), which has GPS and Google Earth and Google Maps.

On Friday, before I left, I could use my Curve to pinpoint my location, then display a zoomable satellite map of Auckland, or switch to a local street map on its huge screen. Although you do have to wait a number of beats - and notwithstanding that the Curve is restricted to GPRS bandwith (call it 2.5G) - it still displayed my position and the relevant maps noticeably faster than my usual phone, which happens to be the only other phone on the market with GPS: Nokia's N95, which enjoys 3G Broadband (3.5G). BlackBerry's more closed system is just better at tweaking data and optimising it for a mobile phone screen. A colleague emailed me a 2MB pic and, bang, seconds later it was on my Curve's 320x240 screen. Hitting LAX, I asked for a PDF of a section of our new Gear Guide publication to be sent to me. A minute later, there the pages were on my BlackBerry (you can also read files created by any Microsoft Office app).

In New Zealand, you use Google Earth and Maps proper, though with some useful shortcuts, such as a BlackBerry menu command to flip from satellite to street view. Here at my final destination, Boston, there's a special, BlackBerry optimised version that's even faster. There's also a trip-planning app.

I know the BlackBerry Pearl has proved popular, with its more cellphone-style form-factor and keypad. But the BlackBerry's raison d'etre remains its push email-function (synching your PC's email and calendar with your hand-held in real-time) and for writing email I prefer the Curve's full QWERTY keyboard. The Curve 8310 does make some concession to consumer-dom, however, with the addition of a 2 megapixel camera (something notably absent from the business-mind BlackBerry family until the advent of the Pearl).

I do have my Nokia N95 on me this trip too, and it has actually proved worth its salt.
Its 5 megapixel digital camera and pretty-good video mean I haven't bothered packing a separate camera. And its wi-fi (lacking in the BlackBerry) means I can access Google Earth and Maps, or of course anything else on the net, wherever I've got free wi-fi (my hotel, anywhere there's a chump without security enabled, Starbucks). Nice. This phone has grown on me.

My hotel's broadband, by the way, is $US10 a day for unlimited in-room use, and unlimited wi-fi around reception and the meeting rooms, though I actually get it completely free as part of my package deal (I'm here for a global meeting hosted by PC World's publisher). And you can get a static IP if you want. Best deal I've come across.

Posted by Chris Keall at 2:12 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

Earlier this week I received an email from our Technical Guy columnist Juha Saarinen, explaining his companion pressed the wrong button on their garage door remote control, then "I made the situation worse by yanking at what seemed like the manual opening cord, but which was in fact the dislodge-the-lot lever".

But the really 2007 bit is that I initially learnt about Juha's predicament when he updated his Facebook status. With a long wait for his new home to be wired for broadband, our Frying Fin has been posting from his Windows Mobile phone. From anywhere.

Including, I guess, his garage. I'd like to say that Facebook performed a Lassie-like function in this instance (knew it was good for something) and that Juha was immediately freed. But I don't know. I've been pretty busy lately, what with travelling and all. If you're driving through Devonport and hear muffled shouting, but all means lend a hand.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Gah. Okay. A couple of people have pointed out that this morning's post about batteries and memory loss applies to older nickel cadmium batteries rather than lithium ion batteries. But the Li-ion situation still looks pretty ugly for laptop owners, and does indeed explain why that 8-hour battery life promised in the ads soon fades into history.

Wikipedia says:

At a 100% charge level, a typical Li-ion laptop battery that is full most of the time at 25 degrees Celsius or 77 degrees Fahrenheit will irreversibly lose approximately 20% capacity per year. However, a battery stored inside a poorly ventilated laptop may be subject to a prolonged exposure to much higher temperatures than 25°C, which will significantly shorten its life. The capacity loss begins from the time the battery was manufactured, and occurs even when the battery is unused. (Read the full post here.)

Other sites concur that lithium ion batteries degrade with age - and alarmingly rapidly.

I wish I'd shelled out for a 9-cell spare, so I got longer life in the first instance. At the time I was too cheap, but now I'd appreciate the extra juice (the lithium ion battery food chain being, in order of life-span: 3-cell, 6-cell and 9-cell).

I had actually been quite looking forward to Toshiba's laptop fuel cell, which promised twice the life, and would be topped up by a pour of methanol rather than a recharge at the wall. All the tech seems in place (it was demonstrated at CeBit back in March 2003), but alas the whole no-travelling-with-liquids on airlines thing nixed commercial release. Bit big, too, but I'll trade heft for longer life any day.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Leaving Singapore, I was again impressed by the tech, but crimped by The Man.

The impressive bit was the free broadband at Changi Airport: not the internet kiosks (though there were those, and they were actually working - take that, Sydney) but the profusion of desks with ethernet jacks and power points. So if you wanted to jump on the internet using your own notebook, you could. Very useful if, like me, you're using the slovenly pig dog that is Lotus Notes, with no web mail option. Or for anyone who wants the security of logging on with their own PC, and none of the cut-down browser nonsense of public kiosks.
Like everywhere nowadays (even, finally, Auckland), there was free wi-fi in the business lounges - but this faster, cabled broadband was public, gratis for the great unwashed. Nice.

Drown the pilot
Shortly after, I got crimped at the final security check. My hand luggage was searched and the bottle of water I bought just meters away at the airport convenience store was confiscated. I had unwittingly violated the new rules about carrying liquids onboard, almost undermining the War on Terror. Next time I'll know to only buy one of the liquids that travellers are still allowed, such as duty-free alcohol (a bottle of which is not only highly flammable, facts fans, but can be broken in half to create a weapon that's a whole bunch more exciting than a pair of nail clippers).

Handbags at 10 paces
Speaking of terror, Peter Gutmann has finally responded to US bloggers George Ou and Ed Bott, who so ferociously (and in Ou's case, emotionally) attacked the Auckland Uni researcher's theory about Vista security undermining performance. Start following the flame trail here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 4 )