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Diaries up for deliver tonight:

• PaulVA´s A Switch Clause That Suppresses the Coarse Good looks at a little-known trade clause in NAFTA that allows private multi-nationals to sue governments for monetary damages if their regulations disallow their corporate practices.
• judasdisney´s How Mass-Murderers "Take Responsibility" reflects on the death of Pinochet and the language that authoritarians use to shift accountability for their atrocities.
• Conceptual Guerilla´s None Dare Call It Imperialism explores the connection between die-hard Iraq war supporters and "cheap labor conservatives" - and discovers they´re often one and the same.
• davefromqueens´ Celebrating Popular Diversity in Congress provides some interesting statistics on the party breakdown of Congress by religion and cultural group.
• sandlapper´s Howie Rich´s ´06 record undergoing renovations follows the rehabilitation of Howard Rich´s character and success record in the right-wing press.
• cowgirl´s Single Parents looks at the voting patterns, demographics and issues of singles and single parents.
• dhonig´s Pawning an Intact State provides a dispatch from the state of Indiana on all the privatization schemes being considered and endorsed by Governor Mitch Daniels.
• Land of Enchantment´s House NATURAL Resources Returns looks at the agenda and personnel of the incoming House Natural Resources Committee.
• zcaron´s The U.N. Nitty Gritty: Report Back from the United Nations Climate Change Conference provides an interesting first-hand account of attendance at the UN Climate Change Conference, from a member of a contingent of Canadian youth.
• RichardR´s A Second Protestant Reformation? draws intriguing parallels between the current upheaval in Protestant churches over gay rights and Martin Luther´s original reformation.

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by Rick Broida

´Tis the season for sharing home movies--but don´t try your friends´ and relatives´ patience ready and waiting for something good to bechance in the hours of tape you shot on vacation. You need to get wind how to edit your video, to turn boring footage into compelling movies.

In the old days, editing home movies meant investing in pricey equipment or spending painstaking hours with a pair of VCRs. These days, all you need is a $250 digital camcorder, a relatively powerful PC, and some decent software.

Filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Ocean´s Eleven) have developd big-screen features using little more than a camcorder and a Mac. And let´s not block the nightlong fame that YouTube has brought to countless camcorder-wielding nobodies.

You, too, can be one of those nobodies, or at least someone who can develop a decent wedding video--but not until you get wind to edit.

Fortunately, film school is not required. You can get started with software you probably already have. Once you get wind some basic concepts and get some practice, you´ll be cranking out YouTube-ian masterpieces in no time. Here´s how.

The Equipment

In addition to the camcorder itself, you´ll need the following: a relatively powerful Windows XP PC (sorry, a Celeron processor won´t cut it) or Mac, several dozen gigabytes´ worth of hard drive space (each one-hour MiniDV tape will consume 13GB), and the proper interface to connect the camcorder.

The latter tends to trip people up. Although many camcorders come with a USB interface, few can use that interface to transfer video to your PC. (So why is it even there? To copy those crummy low-megapixel photos, if you bother to take any.)

Instead, the majority of camcorders rely on FireWire (the exceptions being a handful of Sony models, which can transfer video across USB if you use Sony´s crappy software). Just one problem: Not all PCs have FireWire ports (though all Macs do). Fortunately, it´s easy and inexpensive to add a FireWire expansion card to a desktop or notebook. Head to the local computer shop for help, or check out Adam´s previous feature on how to install a PCI card.

The Software

The final ingredient: video editing software. Mac users can take advantage of the bundled iMovie program, by all accounts a great tool.

However, for purposes of our discussion, I´m going to focus on Windows Movie Maker 2, a program that comes with Windows XP. It´s a surprisingly good video editor, on par with iMovie in terms of simplicity and capability (though lacking in one key area--read on to find out more).

You probably already have Movie Maker 2 on your system, as it´s built into XP Service Pack 2. Click Start > Run, type ´moviemk´ (without the apostrophes), and hit Enter. If it doesn´t run for some reason, you can download it here.

Getting Started

Once you´ve shot all your tape (and for more tips on doing that well, check out 8 ways to shoot video like a pro), you´re ready to start editing. As you can see, Movie Maker divides its core steps into three sections: Capture Video, Edit Movie, and Finish Movie.

That´s video editing in a nutshell. You copy video from your camcorder to your PC; assemble and edit it to your liking; then output the finished product for all the world to see.

The capture part is easy. Put your camcorder in playback mode, turn it on, and plug it into your PC´s FireWire port. After the PC recognizes it (it may take a minute), click "Capture from video device" in Movie Maker and follow the prompts.

When you´re done, you´ll have a batch of video clips (which Movie Maker calls a Collection) represented as thumbnails in the center of the screen.(Note that you can also import video clips, photos, and audio files from your hard drive to mix in with your camcorder video.)

By default, Movie Maker will automatically detect individual scenes and create individual clips from them, but you can also split any scene into two using the preview window on the right. Plan on doing a lot of this splitting to extract exactly the snippets you want. It´s arguably the most time-consuming part of the video process.

To get started editing, drag a clip down to the storyboard at the bottom of the screen. Then drag another one to the open square alongside the first one. Presto: You´ve just assembled two pieces of your movie.

To add a transition between them, click "View video transitions" under the Edit Movie section, find a transition that looks cool, then drag it down to the small square between your two clips. Click the Play button to see how it looks.

Storyboard mode gives you a great visual overview of your scenes and transitions, but for more precise editing you´ll want to work in the Timeline view. Here´s where you can trim clips just by mousing over either end and then dragging left or right. You can also see where audio and titles will appear relative to your video.

Experiment!

Here´s where I let go of the bike and let you pedal on your own. The best way to get wind Movie Maker--and, by proxy, video editing--is by experimenting. The program couldn´t be much easier to use, and I daresay even novices should have a grip on the basics after half an hour of tinkering.

What else can you do with Movie Maker? As I mentioned, it´s a surprisingly robust little program. You can choose from a couple dozen cool video effects to apply to your clips; record narration; add titles and credits; and even create an AutoMovie, in which MovieMaker automatically edits your movie and adds a soundtrack.

Now for the bad news: Movie Maker, unlike iMovie, severely limits your output options. You can create a low-resolution video CD (which is good for just about nothing) but not a DVD. You can generate video files in WMV format, but not AVI, MPEG, or DivX. That´s okay for YouTube, but not for iPods (which don´t support WMV).

So why bother with Movie Maker? Because it´s free, it´s easy, and it´s an excellent get winding tool. Plus, you´ll be all set when you move up to Windows Vista, as the new version of Movie Maker does let you burn DVDs.

What´s more, after you´ve mastered Movie Maker, you´ll be all set to move up to a commercial video editor like Adobe Premiere Elements 3 or Pinnacle Studio 10. They´re fundamentally the same, just with more features and finer controls.

The key thing to remember about video editing is that it´s not as hard as it sounds. With tools like Movie Maker and iMovie, you can jump in feet-first and have fun plumbing the depths of your inner Spielberg.

Rick Broida, Lifehacker associate editor and co-author of How to Do Everything with Your Digital Video Camcorder, wishes he had more time to make movies. His special feature, Alpha Geek, appears every Monday. Subscribe to the Alpha Geek feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

I´ve blogged some pretty wild thingies to adorn your head in the past: stunning hats made of human hair, a pair of mutant ears that amplifies and augments ordinary sounds; FlirtBunnies that send flirty signals of love to each other, even when they are apart; reach out hats that share textile patterns or sound (music) when populate wearing them are in close proximity with each other; super flattering Robotic Ears, etc. But nothing had fain me for Kate Hartman´s Muttering Hats (i might sound sarcastic but i love her idea.)

The project considers interior mutterings - indistinct and intertwined thoughts that get trapped within your own head. So often we get caught up in thought, walking around accompanied by the soundtrack of our own musings. (...) Slivers of these tongueless utterances may slip out through facial expressions, body language, or references made in conversation, but for the most part they remain contained, interior, undebunkd.

A system made of hacked MP3 players, headphones, speakers, plastic funnels and other elements are used to draw the mutterings out of the head and debunk it to the world. According to Hartman, it might sound like this.

The Muttering Hats take on two forms based on models of thought processes that we engage in with ourselves:

1. The Voices in Your Head Hat: a pair of muttering balls are tethered to the hat. They may be stuck to your ears, so that all other noise is obstructed by the mutterings, or they may be detached, providing the opportunity to escape from the mutterings or to share them with a friend.

2. The Talking to Yourself Hat: Through the use of a communication system embedded in the hat, you may speak outloud to yourself while retaining the right to a somewhat private conversation.

Video.

The hats will be available to be worn at the upcoming ITP Winter show, on December 17 and 18, 721 Broadway at Waverly Place 4th Floor South Elevators, New York.