As part of the Stargazing Live event at Cultra last week I was giving my talks on sci-fi weapons. To fit in with the event schedule I had to split what is normally one talk into four, which at least let me cover more material. Turns out I could fill another few lectures quite easily.

Being guardians of public virtue, the BBC were very concerned about scaring or offending some of the audience, so I had to do some bleeping on the soundtracks of clips from Aliens amongst others. I thought this would be easy. It wasn’t, though I admit I may well have missed the obvious.

After a few false starts, I found that the open source Audacity package was the best option for me. Export the soundtrack as an m4a file, import to Audacity and use its tone generator over the offending clip, then save and remerge using Quicktime 7 Pro. Hardly the most elegant option but it did work in the end.

One good thing about these lectures is that all the rewriting gave me a good opportunity to use the new Keynote for a while. So far I have no complaints, but I didn’t use the most complex features of the old release!