DropDV: Convert MPEG to DV

More than 10 years ago, Apple added MPEG playback to QuickTime. In order to work around QuickTime not having support for bi-directional difference frames, and some issues with MPEG's format being a bitstream rather than a byte stream, this was done my making it a special media type rather than showing up as separate video and audio tracks. As a side effect of this, exporting audio from MPEG movies didn't work. This was one of those features that was annoying to few enough people and just enough work that it has been continually deferred from release to release (hey, I spent 6 years there and never got to it either). There have been MPEG stream manipulation tools from Sparkle onwards, but they have always needed a deep understanding of the format, a degree in computer science and lots of patience to use.
Now that there are video cameras and digital cameras that record MPEG directly, this is suddenly a lot more annoying, but fortunately there is an answer:
DropDV: Convert MPEG to DV: DropDV is a Mac OS X droplet which converts MPEG video into DV video streams. This allows the video to be edited in iMovie, Premiere, Final Cut, or any other DV video editing system.
Features
Handles both video and audio
Uses high quality bicubic scaling for the best video image
Decodes in YUV color space, other tools use RGB.
Supports both NTSC and PAL output
A Simple, drag-and-drop interface

At least pick a socialist who can write

A clunky new version of some classic prose via the C of E::

The more usual 'Give us this day our daily bread', from the Lord's Prayer, becomes: 'You are giving us our daily bread when we manage to get back our lands or get a fairer wage'.

'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.' has been removed from the 23rd Psalm in favour of 'Even if a full-scale violent confrontation breaks out I will not be afraid, Lord'.

George Orwell, in Politics and the English Language warned about this sort of thing:

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. [...] It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" -- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.

Social software arbitrage

Jonas:

As seen on eBay - we've gots 'em. Nine brand new, shiny, gmail invites are sitting in my inbox waiting to further dilute the value some people are apparently willing to assign to this...

It's not free, however. If you're interested in one, comment here and let me know what you're willing to do for it. Not to me (though I am more than ready to trade for a few good massages), but to someone else. A random act of kindness, maybe? Work in a soup kitchen? Help out at a needle exchange? Or maybe you're doing that already - you'd be the ideal recipient.