Coming soon. Carbon Tax.

One thing I love about Australians is our ability to joke about almost anything.

In Australia we have a government run media group. It’s called the ABC, and it encompasses 4 TV stations, numerous radio stations and an excellent web presence.

On the TV arm there is a news program called 7.30. While this program provides excellent reporting, my highlight of 7.30 is the weekly comedy segment by John Clarke and Brian Dawe, where they make light of recent news topics.

This one is about Australia’s impending carbon tax. You will probably only understand it if you live in Australia.

Something unexpected: A cool government website

Governments are not known for their cool websites. In fact every single one I have ever had the privilege of visiting has made me consider gouging my eyes out.

This changed last night when I found a cool website from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to promote this years census.

Basically you put a minimal amount of info into a nice looking interface, and it explains some stats relating to you. It also creates a nice info-graphic so you can show your mum. Mine is below. You can do it for yourself here.

So you want to convert a video.

“Hey Tim, I’m going on a trip overseas and I have some videos that I want to convert so that I can play them on my iPad.”

“Hey Mate, I have an Avi file that I need to convert so that it will work in a powerpoint im giving in 30 mins. Can you help?!”

“I have an XBOX, and apple TV, an iPad and a Galaxy Tablet. How can I get my videos on all of these devices?”

These are all questions that I regularly get asked. The second issue is the most pressing, and the most stressful for people. Mainly because of the time constraints associated.

Thankfully I’ve been able to help everyone that has ever asked me for assistance. This is mostly because, in my last job I had to be responsible for the weekly organisation and production of video for a church in Sydney. While there were many aspects of the ‘video’ side of my job, one thing that I had to get sorted was the conversion of video.

I work on a mac, and for the first half of last year I had to make content that would work on a mac (Keynote), a PC (powerpoint) and also for the web.

All of these platforms require different things from video. Keynote will play most things (because it gets it’s codecs from quicktime. A plugin called ‘Perian‘ makes this possible), powerpoint is mostly useless (because with each version microsoft change what type of video it supports. Why do they love ‘wmv’ so much?) and video for the web have their own needs.

I came up with a few awesome tools that would let me convert videos into whatever format I needed. Most of these were free, and they all did an ok job. In these free versions there would always be some kind of bug associated with a particular video format. For example, handbrake stopped supporting .AVI and Evom never quite did an .MP4 video properly.

Recently I decided that if I wanted to find an app that will be able to do everything well, I would probably need to pay for it. In my searching I found a brilliant app that could do everything perfectly. It’s called Permute, and it is properly brilliant. All you do is drop the video into the app, select which output you want, and it quickly converts the video for you. Simple. It’s really quick too, and you can can convert batches of videos, saving you a whole heap of time.

If you need to convert videos to play on your different devices. Give permute a try. You can download a trial from their website, and you can buy it on the Mac AppStore for under $20. Bargin!

Video: Killing the net

I use the internet for alot of things. Every day I use the net for things like this website, facebook, twitter and all of my college resources are available on the net.

The other day I was reflecting on what it would look like if the internet got shut off. The internet is free and open right? Well maybe not.

Video: Meet Glencore

I am an extremely privileged person. I live in Australia.

Not that living in Australia is reason enough to feel privileged. But reasonable health care, electricity, a car to drive around in and having plenty of food to eat contribute to provide an environment in which I am both well looked after and equally ignorant about where all these things come from. I’m also ignorant about the processes and companies that provide all of this for us.

Recently I spotted this video about a company called Glencore. It kind of shocked me.

Glencore from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

Suffering and the Sovereignty of God

A couple of weeks ago Kirsty and I had the pleasure of heading away with our Church for a weekend away in Galston. It was a great time of fellowship, and time around the bible.

The weekend was themed around the topic of “Suffering and the Sovereignty of God”. Our speaker was Steve Covetz, Steve is the lead pastor at The Point Community Church.

Everyone will suffer at some point in their life. Suffering can take almost any form that you can think of, you could experience physical suffering, like a long term illness or something more short term. You can also experience persecution from others, which is also a form of suffering, and that persecution might even incorporate some kind of physical suffering. You can download all of the talks for free here.

I took a great amount away form the weekend, some of my notes are summarised below. (you can download my full notes here)

  • Because God is Sovereign, suffering does not surprise him.
  • Suffering is a by-product of sin entering the world. Jesus dying on the cross was a one in history event to deal with that sin, but we still wait to enter heaven, where suffering will be abolished.
  • Just like in the exodus. Being a Christian is about being in the desert with 2 million people, with no food and no water, with impending danger, and being able to say to God, ‘I trust you’.
  • If sin wasn’t a problem for God, then he wouldn’t be God worth following. A perfect holy, just, righteous God.
  • In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus says that he will always be with us. This gives us confidence that we do not endure suffering without his knowledge.
  • We can’t lie that our suffering is better or sufficient over Jesus Christ.

1 Timothy 2:1-7 – Edwin Ngubane

Last weekend at church we had the pleasure of having a brother from Africa come and preach. His name is Edwin Ngubane, and he is a bishop in the Anglican Church in South Africa.

He has a truly amazing life story, and an even more amazing story of how he came to believe in Christ. You can learn more about him in this video.

From ancestors to Jesus from Sydneyanglicans.net on Vimeo.

He preached the second sermon in our series on prayer from Paul’s first letter to Timothy, the specific section was chapter 2, verses 1 to 7. He was challenging us to think about how, People in the household of God, should act. I found it to be a really helpful sermon, so I thought I would share it.

He also challenged Kirsty and I to think about going to work with him in ministry to students in South Africa. He told me that Moore really should set up an exchange program with GWC. Cheeky.