Sometimes I feel quite sorry for Gordon Brown. I have plenty of fundamental problems with his politics but sometimes he just can't catch a break. Thankfully I'm rational enough not to base my vote on how lucky the candidates seem to be. Brown has joined a long line of politicians …

As the nights draw in again it's time to hit the lecture circuit. Cambridge is pretty well served with public lectures as well as a number of other organisations that organises talks in return for a small donation on the day or subscription. Last night I went to the IET's …

There are literally hundreds of scripts and tools for encoding stuff to various compressed video formats. However I was never able to find something that did exactly what I wanted and until recently just did everything from the command line with mencoder. Eventually I got tired of the copy and …