I was recently faced with the task of converting an old home movie into a series of YouTube-esque clips for use on the site Geni.com. Back when I was considering a small video game review blog I had played around with video conversion and editing but ultimately let it slip by due to lack of time. The challenge of converting these old home movies was just enough to push me back to learning the process.

After having the VHS transferred to DVD (something I realized I can probably do at home with my DVD recorder and some creative cable work) I set out on the task of finding the right clip and putting together the first video.

I'm not going to go too in-depth and instead just provide a quick walk through of the process.

The DVD transfer wasn't protected the way most commercial DVDs are so I was able to just browse through the DVD contents in Windows and select the .VOB files that make up the movie. In all there were four so I copied them to my hard drive and then set about researching the conversion process.

Because Windows Movie Maker doesn't accept the VOB files (even when renamed to MPEGs) I had to get them converted to .AVI first. This is where a quick lifehacker search and several downloads came in.

Ultimately I found Any Video Converter to be the best option for making the conversions. It's got a drag and drop interface and allows you to simply set it and forget it. After selecting the four VOB files taken from the DVD I set Any Video Converter to convert to AVI and took a little break. In my case it took about 30m per video to get the conversion done which didn't seem to bad.

For those wondering about cost Any Video Converter is offered in both a free and paid version. I'm using the free version which works just fine.

Once the video's were converted I opened up Windows Movie Maker and just went from there. Movie Maker is a pretty simple tool to use and is included in all versions of Windows. Just import your video and everything else is pretty self explanatory.

Lifehacker's recent System Tray Show and Tell got me feeling really self-conscious about the things that show up on my computer's SysTray. While there are several items that I don't mind keeping an eye on there are a couple of Windows processes that I really don't think need constant monitoring. A perfect example of this is the Windows Local Area Connection icon that sits with a perpetual red X because my laptop is hooked up with WiFi.

Why do I need to see this icon if I never use the wired connection?

I did a little playing around and managed to find two ways to hide the icon. One doesn't appear to work all the time so I'll provide both just to be safe.

Removing the Local Area Connection Icon

This works perfectly for the wireless connection icon but on my machine it doesn't seem to work for the wired one. The first, really simple, option is to completely disable the connection. To do this you can double click the icon to open the Network Connections listing. Once this is done just right click the Local Area Connection item and select Disable.

In the long run this isn't really an ideal solution mostly because it involves completely turning off the wired network adapter. To avoid turning it off you can right click the listing and instead select "Properties."

Under the "General" tab look for the two check boxes and de-select them both. This should disable the icon while leaving the adapter activated.

Last Resort: Hide the Local Area Connection Icon

On my machine this didn't work - it did work to hide the Wireless Network Connection icon though. If you hit the same wall I have a work around that might help both here and in general for hiding icons in the SysTray. To get started right click the taskbar and then "Customize" under the "Notification area" heading.

The next section shows a list of all the items that are currently, or have recently, appeared in the System Tray. Under the "Behavior" column you can change the rules for each of the items - just select "Always hide" to keep the icons hidden.

If you're a Lifehacker reader you may already be hip to this great Firefox extension. Better GMail is a collection of Greasemonkey scripts brought together as a standalone extension. While you can certainly install the scripts individually the extension offers a one stop supply which will work even without Greasemonkey.

Among the additions made by the extension are the ability to create folders in GMail (the one thing I really miss about traditional eMail), a status bar showing the current state of your GMail storage, and the ability to incorporate both Google Calendar and Google Reader into the GMail interface.

Head on over to Lifehacker and grab the extension to see what I mean.

In between, and often alongside, most of my leisurely activities I watch a lot of television and movies. When the season finales of Lost, Heroes and The Sopranos finally came along a serious vacuum hit primetime TV. Generally this is the time of year that I up my Netflix subscription an catch up on old movies - this summer I decided to do something a bit extra as well.

About partway through May I downloaded the internet TV aggregator currently known as Democracy but soon to be renamed Miro.  While I won't get into some of the conversations covering the name change I have to say that this program has become a major part of my nightly routine.  Democracy / Miro makes downloading internet TV shows easy and rivals iTunes for anyone hunting for video content that's easy to download.

Right now I use Democracy / Miro to nightly to download several of the shows I stream to my XBox360.  If you haven't used this great software yet give it a try and let me know what you think.

Last week I wrote briefly about the GMark Bookmarklet I hacked together based on Adam Pash's GMailThis. Up until discovering Google Bookmarks I had mostly been using del.icio.us and Firefox for managing my archived links. After last week's trouble with Browser Sync though, I decided to move all my bookmarks online.

Del.icio.us is currently my main bookmark archive and Google Bookmarks has become more of a short term bookmark inbox. This process has been a great success so far.

I was so happy with the GMark bookmarklet that I decided to add a new one to help with bookmarking to del.icio.us as well. I figured I'd share it here for anyone who might be interested.
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