Briefly: Aussie Election Facebook Blocking, Amazon Elastic Transcoder

Brief news items of note for Lifehacker readers, including how to block unwanted election stuff from Facebook and the Amazon Elastic Transcoder.

[credit provider=”getty” creator=”Patrick Riviere”]

• We imagine you’ve heard that the next Federal election is set for September 14. If you don’t want to spend the next nine months watching political arguments on Facebook and Twitter, check out our guide to removing unwanted political posts on Facebook.
• Amazon has added a new Elastic Transcoder feature to its suite of AWS services. The service converts video files from one format to another, with charges based on length. Note that the conversion happens in US AWS regions, so if you’re using Amazon’s local AWS instances to store the converted files you’ll also be hit with data transfer charges.
• We have official local pricing for Office 2013, but the price-cutting has already started. JB Hi-Fi is selling the Office 365 subscription for $112 (rather than $119), with an additional $15 off if you buy it in conjunction with a new PC. (That deal doesn’t apply online.)