Magic Kitchen Chinese Takeaway

Before I started my survey of Chinese Takeaways in my area, the Magic Kitchen was the "Chicken of Choice". The food is pretty good and it shares its name with an Andy Lau movie which is always a plus. Anyway, we made an order last night and since I've not yet reviewed it, here's a review.

Pretty hungry after a 20 mile cycle during the day, so we went for Duck Spring Rolls, Mixed Kung Po and Duck in Plum Sauce along with a portion of boiled rice. Came to £15.50 including free prawn crackers (win!). Delivery was prompt and without problems.

The spring rolls were quite fat and there were too of them. Not a huge amount of duck, but pretty tasty.

Mixed Kung Po is an awesome find, no other takeaway seems to have it on their menu, but it's basically Kung Po with all the meats (Prawn, Beef, Char Sui, Chicken). The sauce was sweet and spicy as it's meant to be, loads of meat, cashews, water chestnuts and some green chilli bits, very yummy.

The Duck in Plum sauce was also pretty good, Roast Duck with Pineapple in a sweet plum sauce. Makes a good alternative to Sweet and Sour.

Overall, Magic Kitchen is still one of my favourites, 4.5/5

Magic Kitchen: 60 Manse Road, Edinburgh, EH12 : 0131 3348 288

Riigion Frii Wii

Yesterday I played about a bit with installing the Homebrew Channel onto my NTSC-J Wii in an effort to get region free working so I could buy the new Mario Bros game without having to go through the hassle of ordering it from Yes Asia (Added to the fact, it's more expensive in Japan and the release date is after the UK). Anyway, the Homebrew Channel works with version 4.2 of the Wii's firmware (the latest) and allows you to install SoftChip which can boot *cough* backups and apparently games from other regions.

Full instructions are available here: GBA Temp. You need an SD card and a bit of time. It took an hour or so and the only set back I had was accidentaly re-formatting my Wii and losing all my save games (Nothing to do with the instructions in the guide, just a lack of my understanding of Japanese and clicking one of the wrong buttons in a settings menu [and then clicking OK ... twice]). Anyway, once I had everything set up on the SD card it all seems to work quite well. I downloaded the SoftChip program, popped in Mario Kart (PAL version) and it booted and I can play it, which is quite handy since I lost that ability when Nintendo stopped my Freeloader working.

Just bought Mario Bros. today and it works fine too, so looks like I'm not tied into Japanese games (until Nintendo release 4.3 at least).

Amazon MP3 Download

I've never really been convinced about buying music downloads, ever since the days of iTunes only doing DRM'd songs I've always preferred to buy CDs and get something physical to hold. I like owning stuff, I like being able to flick through CD artwork and if my house burns down my insurance company will pay out to replace physical property but probably won't cover downloads to my computer.

With all that in mind, I was a bit disappointed to be unable to find Toxic Holocaust's 2005 offering "Hell on Earth" anywhere to buy on CD in the UK. Amazon were selling the MP3 download for £6.99, so I thought what the hell.

I have to say, user experience was pretty good, downloaded a small app from Amazon, clicked buy this album, entered my Amazon password, confirmed and I was already starting to download the songs. The Amazon app automatically adds the tracks into iTunes, which is pretty cool and I guess means it's as easy as buying from iTunes itself. (BTW, digging the iTunes taskbar integration in Windows 7).

The whole experience was pretty painless. Although, I didn't realise that the 11 tracks only run to 27.5 minutes, which makes the £6.99 seem a little less of a good deal. The album is good, not as good as An Overdose of Death, but still pretty rocking. I need to listen to it properly, but at 27.5 minutes, I'm sure I can get 16 rotations a day in at work ;)

I did get a bit panicky that maybe it's cheaper in iTunes, after some iTunes connectivity issues I'm glad to report it's £7.99 on iTunes. Although I don't know how bitrate compares and not sure if the iTunes version is DRM'd or not.

Alien marathon

Well, yesterday I watched the first three Alien movies and I've just finished the quadrilogy with Alien Resurrection. I have to say Alien and Aliens are awesome, definitely classics. Alien 3 is a bit disappointing but not as bad as a lot of people seem to say and I actually thought Resurrection was pretty good. With Scott, Cameron, Fincher and Jeunet it's an impressive line up of directors however you look at it.

King Wa Chinese Takeaway

Another Chinese takeaway on Gorgie Road, we've been to King Wa before but I couldn't remember much about it. The don't do Kung-Po King Prawn, so we went for plan B, Shredded Chilli Beef, Boiled Rice, Chicken and Sweetcorn soup and Spring Rolls.

Delivery arrived reasonably quickyl considering it was a Saturday night and cost £13.00. No freebies, but we were probably just under the cutoff for prawn crackers.

The Spring Rolls were mid thickness, not the big fat ones, but not the little skinny ones. One each for Rosie and I and they were pretty tasty, if they'd come with a dipping sauce like Taste Good I'd go as far as to say they would be in that league.

The Chicken and Sweetcorn soup was very hot, but loads of chicken, a fair amount of sweetcorn and not as gloopy as it could have been. Again, very good, things were looking impressive.

Finally on to the main course, the Shredded Beef in Chilli sauce looked a little daunting, the sauce was very very dark. Upon opening the lid we were hit with a pleasant aroma of garlic. Vegetable wise, the usual suspects, lots of carrot and possibly some green leafy stuff, later on I disovered dried chilli at the bottom.

Despite the overly dark sauce putting me off, the initial impression was that it smelled really good. Luckily, it tasted as good as it smelled, sweet, garlicky, a hint of chilli at first (which developed into pleasantly spicy as you ate more) and the beef was actually crispy unlike most Shredded Beef dishes which tend to be a bit chewy.

Overall, King Wa was a pretty good choice. In fact I'm going to say it's the best we've had since I started this regular feature.

Score: 4.5/5

King Wa: 388 Gorgie Rd, Edinburgh, EH11 : 0131 337 5864‎

Asus R2H - Windows 7/Ubuntu Netbook Remix

I've been trying Windows 7 out on my Asus R2H UMPC. I finally managed to get most of the hardware working using the Vista drivers which was pretty cool. The interface for the handwriting recognition in Windows 7 looks a bit better than Vista, but I didn't try it long enough to see if the actual recognition is any better. The machine seemed a little faster, although I'm not sure if that's just because it's a clean install.

The main issue I have is that under Vista Home Premium, I have the Japanese input pack installed which means I can write in Japanese and windows recognises the characters and lets me input them. This is really cool, since it means I can look-up Kanji without having to know the pronunciation and can practice writing Kanji.

It appears that to get the same functionality in Windows 7, I need to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. That's £170 for the full version, £166 for the upgrade to Vista or £105 to upgrade my Windows 7 licence. The annoying thing is that Home Premium gives you text input in your own language plus English, so if I lived in Japan I'd get Japanese and English, but because I happen to live in a country where English is the default language I have to pay £105 to get the functionality included elsewhere.

Having to spend over £100 for something which used to be part of Home Premium seems a little steep, so I won't be installing Windows 7 on my R2H after all. I might re-install Vista though, see if that makes things any faster.

The other issue I have run into though is that once you've dual-booted Windows 7/Vista it is nigh on impossible to delete Windows 7. I can remove it from the boot loaded, but Vista won't let me delete the windows folder even as administrator. Everything I read on the internet says to reformat the partition but there's other data on the partition I need, so that isn't an option.

I tried booting the new Karmic Koala Netbook Remix live CD so I could remove the windows folder and see if Netbook Remix is actually usable. I can't find much about it's handwriting capabilities and whether it can do Japanese let alone support the R2H hardware. In the end that turned out not to matter as the live CD won't even boot on the R2H, after selecting your language you just get a white screen. Seems to be an issue since Intrepid, so it's a bit disappointing that it's not been fixed a year later.

So there you have it, Vista rules supreme for my needs, (at least without spending £100 on upgrades to Windows 7)

Bicycle Maintenance

Just changed the chain on my bike, was surprisingly straightforward. All you need is a chain tool, new chain and a pair of pliers. Got the old chain off and the new one on in about 10 minutes, the hardest thing was not getting oil all over my hands and the carpet, which I guess I could have solved by taking the bike outside ;)