Newsnight has launched a weekly 25-minute video podcast. It’s a round-up of the best stories from the nightly show.

This seems to be one of the first downloadable files that the BBC has offered in MP4 format, so it’s iPod-compatible. Indeed, the podcast is already number one in the iTunes UK news chart and in the top ten on the worldwide news chart.

Despite the sceptics, I definitely think people are going to watch video on the move. On the train coming here I caught up with some TV I had recorded. It makes the four-hour journey much more bearable.

But the price of portable players needs to come down and the most successful ones in future will be those that play all the popular formats: Windows Media, XVid, DivX, Flash and MPEG as well as Quicktime and they will be based around removable Flash memory cards.

The new high-capacity cards that are coming along, which can deliver the data as fast as a hard drive, will revolutionise the portable player market. Hard-drives are too fragile, cables (for transferring) are annoying and no one wants to be limited by a fixed-capacity internal memory.

I’m up at the house near the England/Scotland border. The back overlooks fields, hills and crags and has always been a prime location for some spectacular sunsets. I recorded 30 minutes of one tonight and then reduced this footage down to the 30-second-long time-lapse movie that you see here.

If you want the technical how-to-do-it: load the video into VirtualDub (free software). Go to the menu Video > Frame Rate. There, set Source Rate Adjustment: Change To 1250.00 frames per second and Frame Rate Coversion: Decimate by 50. This will speed things up by 50x (this is working with 25fps PAL video).

Render the video out as a new AVI in the usual way.

For quite a while I’ve been looking around for a good feed reader. I was using the one that is built into Opera, but the slow-down while it updated the feeds every so often bugged me when I was busy looking at web pages at the same time. Sadly this is just one of the problems with Opera lately. I’m using Firefox much more these days.

I tried quite a few RSS programs then, finally, found the humorously named RSS Bandit. It’s open source (free).

I like the way it presents the feeds and file enclosures and it has a nice integrated, tabbed, web browser.

Almost a third of Americans (30%) can’t remember what year 9/11 happened…

They should have called it 9112001. But, if they had, 30% of Americans would have thought it happened in Beverly Hills :-D