Dictionaries

I was at a conference last week designed to make connections between Gaelic, Gaelige and Welsh organisations.

One of the points was translation, it was suggested there should be an effort too create Gaelic-Gaelige-Welsh dictionaries.

The taken approach to this was a University funded project. This jarred with me, having experiencing the sucess of open collaborative projects like the English Wikipedia.

The Wiktionary is a sister project to the Wikipedia which features ~300k legitmate articles compared to the million plus of the wikitionary.

The Gaelic, Gaelige and Cumrish wikipedias are all about the same level of 5k articles. With their sister wiktionary projects are in infancy.

Theses projects are built to allow you to navigate easily between languages. I believe that if a community can be formed around these projects, it would be of greater benefit than a traditionally University led project, as the content would be openly licensed and I believe that it could be achieved with little capital investment

The question is how to stimulate activity?

Video Editing – Ubuntu vs OS X/Windows

I’ve been playing about with video from DVD for work and have realised that Ubuntu is far superior compared to either Windows or Mac for built in software or free to download.

iMovie and Windows Movie Maker just chokes on VOB files and have no built in conversion software and Movie Maker only outputs WMV

Compare this with the powerful ffmpeg on the command line with Ubuntu and Kino for editing.

I would like it if ffmpeg had more output options but I suspect that is because I don’t know how to add codecs?

Any of the video I exported and tried to play with Quicktime in OS X – it complained of errors. So I installed VLC on OS X which plays it straight off.

Copy of an e-mail sent via TheyWorkForYou.com

Dear Angus MacNeil,

Thank you for the response to my previous letter. I would have
appreciated it more if you had responded to my email with an email
especially as my subject was conservation.

As you agreed with me that their is much much we can do in practical
terms, through energy saving light bulbs and insulation, I am now
writing to ask for your signature in support of the Early Day Motion
2656 ( detailed in full below ) which 42 of your fellow MPs have signed
including your party member Mike Weir.

I think that this small step will have large positive effects and help
to bring about a situation where our power requirements are better
satisfied by renewable sources. I look forward to reading your response
via email.

EDM 2656: That this House notes the problems caused by increasing
energy demands, including rising energy costs, reduced energy security
and climate change; recognises that improved energy efficiency is the
cheapest way for the UK to reduce energy demand and carbon dioxide
emissions; welcomes the Ban the Bulb campaign, which aims to increase
the use of compact fluorescent light bulbs; and calls on the Government
to help main-stream energy efficient lifestyles by granting energy
saving goods and services the same 5 per cent. VAT rate as condoms,
strengthening UK building regulations and making energy efficiency a
key criteria in all Government procurement.

Suggestion submitted to skype support

Hi, I am writing to ask you to add Scottish Gaelic as a choice on the language options in Skype profiles.

Gaelic is spoken by about 100,000 people world wide and I know personally personally organisations and groups who are using Skype to communicate in Gaelic.

It would be great if you could those people the ability to show their language of choice and encourage other people by being able to search by that language.