Biro Sketchbook

If Harvard offered a PhD in deceit, this would be it. Award-winning magician Brian Brushwood takes viewers on an inside tour of bar tricks, street cons, and scams. If you watch carefully, you'll never have to pay for a drink again!

John Gruber today opines that there is no GUI interface for the command-line tool for converting Quicktime movies into the OGG Theora format — a very handy thing to be able to do if you want to serve video to Firefox-type browsers using HTML 5’s <video> and <audio> tags. Since this is something I do a lot — wrap command-line tools in Automator wrappers, that is — I thought I’d whip up a GUI method for doing this. So here it is.

My father was a design engineer who specialised in heavy earth-moving equipment, writes photographer Anthony Oliver, so I grew up around iconic names such as Kenworth Trucks, Caterpillar and Oshkosh (the most powerful trucks in the world – not kids’ dungarees).