Chored Blog

Mountain Bike Orienteering

2011-04-10T21:46:00.000+01:00

One of the guys at work sent round a link to Scottish Mountain Bike Orienteering website who are running 6 events, one a month over the summer months. The first was today in the Pentlands. I would probably have entered in a team with Neil, but he was unavailable and I was thinking of entering on my own for a laugh, but somehow talked Rosie into being my team-mate (it was surprisingly easy). She's just got a new bike, so it was a good excuse to take that out.

The idea is that the organisers put out 30 checkpoints and you have 3 hours to go to as many checkpoints as you can, each checkpoint is worth a certain number of points and the individual/team with the most number of points wins (teams have to stay together, so if anything it's a bit harder than being out on your own). If you take longer than 3 hours you start to lose points and after about 10 minutes, that loss becomes pretty rapid.

So Rosie and I rocked up at Currie Rugby Club in Balerno, unsure of what to expect. We had the vague notion that we would just go for however many points we could get and not worry too much if we came last. Rosie reckoned we would be pretty good at map reading, but we weren't really too sure about the first checkpoint, so that wasn't a good start. In fact, we didn't even find the first one we headed for (it was pretty close to the start, so we thought we'd just pick it up on the way back. Suffice to say that didn't happen). We cycled on a bit, down a path which was marked on the map, which was actually quite a nice little descent with a rooty technical bit at the bottom (Rosie didn't think so) and onto the water of Leith where we got our first checkpoint.

The section checkpoint came halfway up a little steep section off the water of Leith, (another bit that would make a nice descent). We spent a bit of time running about trying to find the checkpoint and discovered it hidden behind a bridge. This is when we realised, part of the challenge is finding the things as well as navigating between them and cycling up and down hills.

From there, up another horrible climb (would also make a decent descent) where we got checkpoint number 3 and eventually up through a farm onto a well deserved descent. We picked up another checkpoint and headed back to the water of Leith for our 5th. (Another deviously placed one that had us running around like lunatics). From there, we followed the water of Leith back down to Colinton and began the climb back up towards the Pentlands. After a bit of searching we did eventually find another checkpoint and continued up the road to where a crossing was marked over the bypass. Turns out, this road is marked on both google maps and the O/S maps, but doesn't exist. We eventually found a way over the bypass, but had lost a lot of time and were a bit lost. This is where things started to turn to shit. Once over the bypass we struggled up a path, then up a steep hill which we had to push up, eventually after much effort coming out on the path from Bonaly up to the Pentlands.

This is a path I've had a run in with before and I hate it, so more pushing up to the top of that, then another push/struggle through a forest with mainly tree roots under foot/tire. By this point Rosie was more than a little puffed out, but I urged her on. We managed to get another checkpoint as we left the forest and headed back down onto a proper road. The plan was to get another two checkpoints on the way back, but time was running out and we decided to take the shortest route downhill and head back up the water of Leith to the finish.

We arrived back at the finish 10 minutes late which cost us 20 points. Overall, it was a good day out and I really enjoyed it, but was a little knackered. I think I could have gone a bit further, and I can't imagine the state I would have been in if Neil was there as whoever is leading the climbs tends to set the pace a bit hard.

With the full results now out, I'm glad to say while we were pretty poor, we weren't the worst, coming joint second last in our class.

Nintendo 3DS

2011-03-30T20:38:00.000+01:00

I always mean to blog about things like these, but usually by the time I get round to writing down my thoughts, it's pointless because the moment has passed. So I thought I'd blog my thoughts on the 3DS even though I've not yet had it a week.

I'm not even sure when the idea to buy one popped into my head, I'm going to go out on a limb and blame Chris. After playing the Professor Layton games on my original DS, I was thinking of getting a DSi to replace my aging silver behemoth but Chris pointed out that I should really just wait and get a 3DS. So, I placed a pre-order on Amazon, safe in the knowledge that it would be released just after my birthday, so I'd have the cash.

I'm a bit of a 3D sceptic, while I appreciate the effect, I find 3D movies add very little to the experience and am unconvinced that any film in 3D is much better than plain old 2D. Therefore, I wasn't really too bothered about the 3D aspect of the 3DS and was really just looking for a new shiny DS.

First up, the unit itself, I got the Cosmos black one, it's probably a similar size to a DS Lite, maybe a little thicker, but smaller than my old school DS. The top screen is a bit bigger than the bottom and in addition to the usual controls/ports there is a slider to control the extent of the 3D effect and a slot for an SD card (2Gb card was included).

The 3D effect works, but you have to hold the unit in a very specific sweet spot. I have a habit of moving it about as I play, so sometimes you lose the effect and get a nasty blurring effect. I don't know if I'll get used to not moving the unit about, but it should be ok.

Game wise, the 3DS has a couple of built in games, Face Raiders is a whacky AR shooting game where you take a photo of someone's face and it is morphed into the game and onto floating heads you have to shoot.

In addition to that, I got Monkey Ball 3D and Pilotwings Resort. Monkey Ball 3D is ok, but seems a bit limited. Pilotwings Resort is really good and great fun.

JLPT

2011-03-02T17:18:00.001Z

The results for the JLPT are out and somehow I managed to pass Level N4. I thought I'd get about 50%, but in the end I got 58%. What I didn't realise is that the pass mark is only 50%, so that was enough. Think it's going to be a few years before I attempt N3.

New Year - New Films

2011-01-02T20:59:00.000Z

Well, that's 2010 gone and in terms of film watching numbers it was a fairly average year, 175 in total, 1 more than 2009 and even then only because of a last minute push to watch all the HD-DVDs I've had sitting around for ages. My plan to finish off the 101 Gangster Movies You Must See Before You Die list didn't really come to fruition.

Hopefully 2011 sees a few more reviews and the completion of at least one of the now 8 film lists I have on the go. Got off to a good start with a Lord of the Rings trilogy marathon on New Year's day.

Anki - Flashcards

2010-12-23T18:19:00.001Z

I first learnt about Anki (http://ankisrs.net/) from a blog about learning Japanese which suggested it as one of the top 5 applications for learning Japanese. I started using it to prepare for the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficency Test) which I took earlier this month.

The application allows you to create virtual flashcards containing a question/answer or more generically, just the front of the cards and the back of the card. You can then go through the flashcards and indicate if you know the fact and if so, how well. This allows Anki to schedule when it will next show you the card. For facts you don't know, the card will show up again soon, and for cards which you do know, the time until they next show up are based on how well you indicate you know the fact and how often you have previously known the fact.

I quite liked the the learning style with Anki, so I started using it when revising for the Core Spring 3.0 Certification exam which I sat this morning. As I was going over the material I would just add questions into Anki covering that material. This let me review material quickly and check up on what I knew, it also let me drill the facts I was having trouble with.

Where it really came into its own though, was the day before the exam once I had all the facts I needed in Anki, I used the "cram" mode which reduces the time in-between questions, this lets you go through all the cards at once, constantly being asked the ones you are getting wrong and delaying the ones you know well until later.

An useful feature which I wasn't able to take advantage of was the Android/iPhone apps which would have let me review cards on the move.

Overall, Anki has been a useful tool, both for my Japanese studies and in other applications, if you have something you need to learn that can be distilled into simple facts, it might be worth giving it a go. One thing I would suggest is to start using it as soon as possible in your studying and the constant learning element of it means you are reviewing material before you've finished learning everything.

Treasure Cottage Chinese Takeaway

2010-12-19T10:56:00.000Z

It's been over a year since my last Chinese Takeaway review, where does time go? Anyway, we came back from holiday and had a couple of fliers through the door, one from Treasure Cottage which we hadn't heard of before. The pictures looked pretty good, so we decided to make an order that night.

In a break from our usual Kung Po Prawn and Crisy Shredded Beef order, we branched out and went for a couple of dishes from the Chef's Special menu, Su Zhou Duck and Beef in Garlic Black Pepper Sauce as well as boiled rice and duck spring rolls. The whole thing came to around £15.

Delivery wasn't amazingly fast, but it was a Saturday night, so they were probably quite busy. The food was nice and hot when it did arrive though and we got free prawn crackers and because it's December, a free calendar.

The spring rolls were 3 medium thickness ones, I was a bit dubious at first because I'm not massively fond of the fatter spring rolls, but these ones were crispy and tasty.

The Su Zhou Duck came in a big round foil dish and in addition to a duck breast, there was also char su pork and prawns. The sauce was savoury and contained a fair amount of vegetables, mainly brocolli and mushrooms. There was a hint of ginger in there as well. Overall, pretty tasty.

The Beef in Garlic Black Pepper Sauce was super peppery and also very savoury, the sauce contained lots of vegetables, including more mushrooms.

All in all, Treasure Cottage was a hit, both the dishes were nice and a little bit different, however if we order from them again, I would be tempted to go for one sweet dish and one of these two as they were both very savoury.

Score: 4/5

Treasure Cottage, 54 Saughton Mains Gardens, Edinburgh : 0131 455 7638

Spiderman Cartoon Maker

2010-10-17T23:40:00.000+01:00

Back in 1994 when we got our new Windows '95 computer, one of the many useless pieces of software it shipped with was the Spiderman Cartoon Maker. This allowed you to make terrible Spiderman cartoons. (This is a typical example). This piece of software had a really annoying sound effect of a cop radio broadcast which goes something like "785 code six, 105 north avenue, 52" (see 1:50 in the above video).

The problem is, 16 years later this sound effect keeps haunting me because it seems anytime a TV show or film need some background radio chatter sound effect, they just use this one. I noticed it most recently in The Town and tried to find out more information about it online, but most places seem to just be message boards where someone tries to explain it and someone else says "That annoying clip from the Spiderman Cartoon Maker?"

Why has it become so ubiquitous? Maybe I should start a catalogue of everywhere I hear that stupid sound clip.

Edinburgh Fringe 2010 : Chef!

2010-08-29T14:31:00.000+01:00

Last night we went to the see the Korean martial arts/breakdancing/beatboxing comedy, Chef. Similar to shows in previous years (e.g. Jump, Breakout), Chef! is physical comedy which uses martial arts, dance and beatboxing to tell a story. In this case, the story is that of the Korean dish Bibimbap. We start off in the past where a martial arts master's strength and prowess is attributed to his secret Bibimbap recipe. When two evil fighters try to steal his dish, he travels forward in time to a modern day kitchen where a group of Chefs are trying to make their own Bibimbap. He arrives just in time to teach them the art before the evil duo from the past turn up and start to cause trouble.

Chef! is both hilarious and awe inspiring. Some of the beatboxing is ridiculous, the martial arts show a lot of gymnastic prowess and the breakdancers are also very talented. This makes for a show with never a dull moment, you're either laughing, or gasping in amazement.

This show is must see, especially if you enjoyed Jump or Breakout, which were both excellent as well.

5/5

Hot Hot, Home Street, Edinburgh

2010-08-21T16:04:00.001+01:00

Last Thursday we were out in town and looking for somewhere to grab some tea, we had initially headed for the Lee-On Chinese restaurant in Bruntsfield to stuff ourselves on their ridiculously good value set meal. But while walking up Home Street, we noticed a place we must have walked past hundreds of times but never thought of going in.

Hot Hot serve a kind of Chinese hotpot, each table has a heater on it on which is placed a large bowl of broth (we got a special bowl split into half normal, half spicy). You are then brought a lot of raw food and you cook it at your table in the broth. It costs a flat fee (around £15 per person) for as much food as you can eat. The food provided ranges from reasonably normal to the exotic. Thinly sliced beef, lamb, pork, raw prawns, scallops, razor clams, kelp, tripe, mushrooms, potato and all sorts of other stuff I can't remember. Once cooked in the broth, you take it out and dip it in a range of special sauces.

The whole experience is great fun and the broth and sauces made the ingredients taste amazing, even if there was a fair amount of stuff I would probably never think of ordering.

Overall, something a bit different, but still tasty and you get a lot of food, Hot Hot is worth a try if you want something a bit more fun than other restaurants.

Score: 5/5/

Bonsai, West Richmond Street, Edinburgh

2010-08-10T12:59:00.000+01:00

After the show yesterday we thought we'd head out for something to eat and as we were over at the South side, we decided upon Japanese from Bonsai. Bonsai was one of the first places I'd had Japanese food in Edinburgh and I think it's also one of the oldest Japanese places in the city. I hadn't been for a while mainly because I'm not over that side of town very often and so Sushi-Ya on Dalry road and Tang's on Candlemaker row are both a bit more convenient and are both pretty good anyway.

So, between the four of us we ordered up a feast consisting of Dragon Roll, Sashimi Platter, Teriyaki Beef, Yakisoba, Prawn and Salmon Nigiri, Wasabi Peas, Char-Sui bun, Mixed Tempura, Rice, Kim-Chi and Okonomiyaki. Everything was excellent and although the sashimi pieces seemed a little small, we were still pretty full once we'd eaten everything. I can especially recommend the Char-Sui bun and the Okonomiyaki. We followed this up with desserts (I had a chocolate torte).

Overall, Bonsai is pretty good and definitely one of the best Japanese restaurants in Edinburgh, it's just a shame it's over the other side of town from where I live.

Edinburgh Fringe - Inside

2010-08-10T12:41:00.003+01:00

Last night we went to see Inside (Zoo Roxy - 18:25), described as physical dance theatre revolving around themes of violence and incarceration within the prison system, the production sees 5 male dancers tell their story on stage.

You might think that this doesn't sound like the kind of thing I'd be interested in ... you'd be right, if not for the fact that the whole thing has a live musical accompaniment by none other than 65daysofstatic.

I have to admit, the dancing didn't really interest me and I didn't have a clue what was going on for the most part, but 65dos sounded amazing and it was worth going to see just for that.

Overall 3/5

House Season 1

2010-08-09T16:49:00.003+01:00

We've just finished watching the first season of House. After seeing a couple of episodes from a later season on Sky 2, I thought we should start from the beginning and so got hold of a copy of the Season 1 box set which contains 26 episodes of the show.

The show follows a team of diagnostic doctors led by the enigmatic Dr. House (Hugh Lawrie). House hates patients and often takes a line of treatment which is morally ambiguous but he always gets results. Each episode the team get an interesting case and after about 5 diagnoses, eventually get to the root of the problem.

While it can be a bit repetitive with each episode following a similar template, the drama and character elements make for interesting viewing and even after 26 episodes, I think I'm ready to start of Season 2.

3.5/5

Highland Wildlife Park

2010-08-05T21:31:00.003+01:00

Amur Tiger, originally uploaded by chored.

Last Saturday Rosie and I attended a Go Wild Scotland Photography Event at the Highland Wildlife Park near Kingussie.

For your money you get entry into the park for the day, accompanied by professional wildlife photographer Arron and his wife Kirsty. Arron is on hand to answer any technical questions you may have about photographing the animals and Kirsty has a wealth of knowledge about the animals themselves. There is no tuition per se and I felt I should have made more of Arron's expertese, but didn't really know what to ask.

The big attraction of the day out is that you get closer to the animals than you would as a normal visitor to the park. The tour started off by visiting Mercedes the Polar Bear, she is in an enclosure which you can normally only see from the car when you drive round the park, but we got to walk in and get right up to the fence. This all happened before the park opened and we gotto see her at feeding time, so got some great shots of her eating sweetcorn and swimming.

A similar setup is also in place for the Japanese Macaques where at feeding time you get to go through a gate and get a bit closer to the fence. I found the fence on the Macaque enclosure harder to get shots through, but it was still nice to get in there.

The other animals you get to see in close quarters are the Amur tigers, again you get through a fence and it is literally you on one side of the fence and the tigers on the other. The fence has nice big holes as well, so there's no problem with having to shoot through the fence to get good photos.

Rosie and I shared the A350 and the A700 on the day and I was surprised that there is little discernable difference in image quality between the two, some of my best shots were taken on the A350. I still prefer the A700 since it has a bigger viewfinder, screen and more buttons to access things like white balance etc. as well as more control over ISO etc. but the A350 is still nice to shoot with.

We were also trying out a lens I borrowed off my brother, the Tamron 70-300. It performed really well and is so sharp at f/8 which we had little trouble shooting with at ISO 400. I even managed some shots with my Sigma 400mm which came out really well, I think my feelings about that lens were dampended a bit when trying to shoot handheld in low light wide open, but stopped down in good light, it's sharp and manageable. If only it still had working autofocus.

If we're going to do this kind of thing more often, Rosie and I really need another zoom with a good range and I'm torn between getting the same Tamron as Neil and going for the Minolta beercan which almost every Sony Alpha owner seems to crave.

Overall, a great day out and worth the money if only for the special access to the animals. If I go on a similar course again, I need to get some tips from the Pros though as you are paying for their time as well as the access.

Brew Dog

2010-07-28T19:44:00.002+01:00

Last night we took part in a Brew Dog beer tasting at the Whisky Society. I've had a few of their beers before and while I find them a bit too bitter to drink a lot off, they're very nice to have a couple of bottles of, of an evening.

Co-founder James took us through the beers and gave us a bit of history about the company. He knows his stuff and is very passionate about what they do, but I'm not sure I agree with everything he said (especially his disdane for all other UK beers).

Overall, we got to taste 7 beers, 5 of which I hadn't had before. First up was Punk IPA which I was pretty familiar with. Beer No. 2 was 5 a.m Saint which I hadn't had before and really enjoyed, will be looking out for that one in the shops. Next up was Hardcore IPA which was very nice as well, at 9.2% it's pretty strong but it doesn't taste as strong as it is.

After some dinner we got to try two Paradox's, Imperial Stout aged in an Arran whisky cask and an Islay Smokehead cask. I'd had the Arran Paradox before, but not the Smokehead one. When I'd first tried the Arran one, I found it a bit much, at 10% it's pretty strong, but last night I really enjoyed them both, maybe you need to build up to a beer like that.

Next up was the controversial Tokyo, at 18% it's a beast, but it's also very nice. Our table of 8 had 2 bottles to share between us and we were served it in whisky snifters. It's definitely one I fancy getting another bottle of, especially since Rosie enjoyed it too, so we can share a bottle.

Last up was the ice-distilled Tactical Nuclear Penguin. At 32% it's more like a spirit than a beer. We each got served a shot, again in a whisky glass and I have to say I wasn't convinced. It was no match for a nice whisky, but too much like a spirit to work as a beer. I can only imagine what the even stronger ones are like.

Overall, an enjoyable night, some nice beers and some interesting chat.

Headset Maintenance

2010-07-28T19:33:00.002+01:00

The rust coloured stain which would come out the bottom of my headset after riding in the rain and the fact that sometimes it would seize up and need a few twists to loosen off properly should have been a warning sign, but after last week's trip to Glentress and a ride back from work in the rain the day before, my headset was sounding even worse. There was a distinct grinding feeling when moving the handlebars and on my commute, the bike sometimes wanted to keep going straight on and required a bit more effort than normal to turn.

So I had a go at removing the forks to see if I could improve the problem. Step one is to undo the cap at the top and remove the stem by undoing the two bolts on the side, then you just have to remove the spacers and you're ready to take the forks off. Most of the websites I read said the forks should just drop out, or a sharp knock with a mallet would loosen things, but this didn't seem to be happening for me, even after hitting the steerer tube as hard as I was willing to. I later discovered that there is a rubber wedge in the top of the headset which keeps everything down, prying it up a bit with a screwdriver meant that the forks could drop out easily.

A little too easily it turned out, I ended up holding the forks in one hand and the frame in the other, a situation which could have been remedied if I had a workstand, or if I had taken the wheel off first. There's not really anywhere you can stand a set of forks with a wheel on the bottom and I couldn't but either part down to sort things out. To make matters worse, the bottom bearings had fallen out and a few were now rolling about on the floor. After a quick call to Rosie I managed to sort myself out and take the wheel off. Then I just needed to find the bearings.

Problem was, there was one missing ... after a good bit of searching I realised that the bearing retainer had been bent and there wasn't one missing at all, there was just one jammed somewhere it shouldn't be, I assume that's what the grinding noise was!

Changing the who headset sounded like a bit of a worrying task and buying individual bearings doesn't seem to be possible (added to the fact that the headset on my bike doesn't seem to be available for sale anywhere) I resorted to trying to bend the retainer back into place. This was quite easily accomplished by getting Rosie to bend the retainer back into place with a pair of small pliers. I then degreased the bearings to remove most of the rust, put it all back together with a liberal amount of grease and took it out for a spin.

Everything seemed to work fine (after I tightened up some loose parts) and it's still working now. Definitely needs replacing sometime soon, but for the moment it's doing the job. I hope everything is ok for tomorrow when I hope to head back down to Glentress.

Arduino board

2010-07-04T20:56:00.002+01:00

Arduino board, originally uploaded by chored.

I had seen these little boards before and Neil and I had been talking about the possibilities, but I hadn't really thought of any project to justify buying one, but last week Neil mentioned that the Sony Alpha shutter release trigger is activated quite simply by shorting two wires and so it's possible to set up timelapse/sound triggers quite easily.

So ... I had a look about for some way of controlling electronics easily from a PC. This is pretty much what two thirds of my fourth year disseration was at uni, but at the time, the easiest way to interface with the PC was via the parallel port, which has died a death in the years since. So after looking for some solutions on line, it became clear that one of these little microprocessor boards would be ideal and would also give me a little more flexibility.

I went for Arduino simply because I had seen it before and knew it was open source and had seen some cool projects.

I got the board in a starters kit from oomlout.co.uk/, which comes with the board, a breadboard for prototyping, and some basic components (LEDs, resistors, switches, potentiometers and a photo resistor). Oomlout shipped the device the same day and I had it yesterday morning.

Downloading the software is simple enough and the development environment is easy to use and easy to sync with the board and also includes some examples to get you started. There are some annoying things about the code editor, but they're not major.

After playing with the blinking LED programs and getting the switches to trigger events, I had run out of stuff to do with the limited set of components I had. I had also been unsuccessful in finding the right bits and bobs to connect the camera up to test the shutter release cable, but hopefully I'll get some more components next week and be able to do some more things with it.

I have managed to knock up a little game which pits two players against each other in a test of responses. It involves waiting for a light to come on after a random interval and then having to press your button, the first to press the button wins. It's pretty easy to make, with 4 LEDs connected to for of the Arduino's digital pins and two switches connected up as well.

Source Code if anyone's interested. Hopefully with some more parts I can make something a bit more interesting.

EIFF 2010 - Day 5

2010-06-21T19:49:00.002+01:00

Another day at the film festival and another full lineup. We started in the Cameo for the Japanese animation Mai Mai Miracle which could have been better but was alright. After a Red Bull to stave off my tiredness, we caught the amazingly funny Jackboots on Whitehall which is like a British World War II Team America. After a break giving us enough time for dinner, we went into French gangster movie 22 Bullets which was Jean-Reno-tastic. With only a 10 minute break it was straight into Snowman's Land which was completely different from what I thought it was going to be. Finally, we had to rush back to the Cameo to see documentary Superhero Me

EIFF 2010 - Day 4

2010-06-20T11:10:00.002+01:00

Our first full day of films and with 5 to get through it proved to be a bit of a marathon. First up was New Zealand comedy Boy which was excellent. This was followed by the 1930's period piece The Red Machine. Third film for the day was another excellent movie, Monsters which is as much an emotional road trip tale as it is a monster movie. After a short break for dinner it was time for gritty prison drama R and then on to the pretty awful Outcast.

EIFF 2010 - Day 3

2010-06-19T10:35:00.002+01:00

Day 3 and another 3 movies, first up was the massively disappointing Huge followed by yet another slow paced foreign film (in a good way). This time round it was Iranian drama The Hunter. We finished the evening with madcap Greek Zombie movie Evil in the Time of Heroes.

EIFF 2010 - Day 2

2010-06-18T13:12:00.003+01:00

3 films yesterday at the second day of the Film Festival. First up, a slow paced family drama from France, Family Tree. Second, a slow paced drama from Hong-Kong questioning memories and identity, Fog. And lastly, a Dutch horror which although pretty generic, still had a few scares: Two Eyes Staring.

Another 3 films today, so hopefully some more interesting ones.

EIFF 2010 - Day 1

2010-06-17T14:44:00.002+01:00

Last night was the opening night of the 2010 Edinburgh International Film Festival, it signified the start of a marathon run of 17 planned movie viewings over the first 5 days of the Festival.

With the public screening of the opening Gala not starting until 21:45, Rosie and I decided to make use of the Hotel du Vin deal with offers 15% off food and drink during the Film Festival (exclusions apply). The food was excellent, I had ribs marinaded in Innis and Gunn with steak to follow and Rosie had smoked salmon
followed by Lamb. I was pretty stuffed afterwards.

We then headed off to see The Illusionist which was a fitting start to the festival, if not entirely to my tastes. 3 films tonight should get us in to gear for the weekend when we have 5 films planned for both Saturday and Sunday.

South Park Season 7

2010-06-15T13:39:00.002+01:00

Another excellent season of South Park and as with previous seasons, it just gets better. Season 6 was the last season I had seen in entirety, so it was nice to see some episodes I had never seen before. There's a good mix between the completely ubsurd and the introduction of a new technique whereby the show takes a hot topic issue, splits the town in half on it and resolves it by saying that everyone should find some middle ground and that the solution isn't simply black and white. Top notch comedy.

Score: 4.5/5

Rome Season 1

2010-06-07T12:30:00.003+01:00

HBO's Rome is, like many other HBO shows, produced to almost feature film like quality. The show follows Gaius Julius Caesar during a period in which he returned from Gaul and set about overthrowing the Senate and becoming the supreme ruler of Rome.

The overall plot arc stems from history, and the events are shown to the viewer as witnessed by two Roman soldiers, Lucias Verenus and Tito Pullo. This makes for a plot which is both interesting and informative.

The sets are vast and detailed and looks amazing and the plot is interspersed with enough action to keep things moving. The acting is reasonable and the setting of ancient Rome believable.

Overall, well worth watching, for both entertainment and to learn a brief overview of Roman history.

Score: 4.5/5

Levens - Thai Fusion

2010-06-07T12:18:00.005+01:00

Levens in tollcross sits in what used to be Favorit, the restaurant has a big glass frontage with further seating in the back behind the bar. Modernly decorated the interior is bright and well presented.

While the menu is a little short, there were still a number of options which caught my eye, I opted for Umbrella Prawn to start followed by duck in red and green curry sauces. The starter consisted of a massive prawn served with a fried tofu sheet for the umbrella. There was a helping of some kind of sweet crunchy noddles on the side, overall very tasty.

The main course was more impressive, the dish was served in two halves, one with the red curry sauce and one with the green curry sauce. Each side had a helping of perfectly roasted duck breast as well as aubergine, pineapple and grapes. A portion of rice sat in the middle. The duck was excellent as were both the sauces which were different enough to warrant the separation and serving of both, highly recommended.

The dessert menu had the usual ice-cream/sorbet as well as some other desserts. I opted for the Taro creme brulee. The creme brulee was excellent and the layer of Taro (An oriental root vegetable) on the bottom complimented the sweetness of the top well, although there was a little too much of it for my liking.

Overall, in an area of town with a fair few Thai restaurants, Levens comes recommended, their blend of Thai and Western cuisine makes for some interesting dishes.

EIFF 2010!

2010-06-05T16:53:00.002+01:00

12 days or so until the Edinburgh International Film Festival opens and I just picked up my tickets today. Got 18 films planned which is higher than most years, but not the most ever, 10 of these are all in a single weekend though, so hope I can survive my two 5 film days!

PSI Metallica Cover?

2010-06-05T10:42:00.002+01:00

Just got £2 free Amazon Mp3 credit and while trying to decide how to spend it, I came across a Pitchshifter track on a Metallica tribute album (The Blackest Album 4: An Industrial Tribute to Metallica). Pitchshifter covering St. Anger, bit strange, but ok.

Shilla Korean Restaurant

2010-05-16T18:43:00.004+01:00

Last Wednesday, Rosie and I went out for a meal for her birthday. We thought we'd try somewhere new and so I booked us a table at Shilla on Dundas Street. This Korean Restuarant is modernly decorated and seems to have a fair number of tables. At 7pm on a Wednesday it was quiet, but not completely empty.

The first thing that struck us was how extensive the menu was, I would happily have ordered pretty much any of the mains, and I feel like I have to go back to try some of the other options. We had grilled dumplings and Prawn skewers to start followed by a spicy prawn dish and some kind of noodle dish to follow. All the food was excellent and extremely tasty, my prawns were especially nice.

Overall, I highly recommend this restaurant and definitely want to go back to try more of the menu.

South Park Season 6

2010-05-15T12:47:00.002+01:00

I've now finished watching another great season of South Park, highlights from this series include a Lord of the Rings parody, the Death Camp of Tolerance and a Black Hawk Down homage featuring Santa's sleigh being taken out by an RPG over Baghdad.

With Kenny's permanent death at the end of Season 5, the boys have to find a replacement for him and a number of other characters step in, including quite a lot of Butters.

Again Trey Parker and Matt Stone show that they can create comedy which covers all bases from gross out to social commentary. Both utterly stupid and clever at the same time.

Score: 4.5/5

Things I learned today

2010-05-02T19:47:00.002+01:00

Things I learned today:

* If you are 28 miles from home and you get a puncture, having a spare inner tube and a pump is not that helpful if you don't have tyre levers to get the tyre off.
* A key is not strong enough to replace a tyre lever, it will just bend and snap.
* In an pinch, a key-ring bottle opener can be used as a tyre lever, but you risk damaging your rims and with only one it's still a pain in the ass.
* Even if you can change the tube, there's no guarantee that you'll get the new tube inflated.
* Walking 4 miles with a bike with a flat tyre isn't much fun.

At least next time I'll be better prepared.

Decent Hi-Fi system

2010-04-30T20:22:00.002+01:00

I implore everyone to listen to music on a decent audio setup every now and then, I listen to 90% of my music on my iPod and the other 9.9% while sat at my computer using a speaker system which only has the right channel and that is placed off to one side and some 4ft above my head when I'm at the computer.

But tonight, I'm sitting in front of my TV with my laptop listening to music through a reasonable amp and some decent speakers and I can't believe how much better it sounds.

South Park Season 5

2010-04-29T18:14:00.000+01:00

Just worked my way through South Park Season 5. Some classic episodes in there, including the introduction of Towelie and Butters' own episode. I think this was where South Park became a bit more serious and a bit more wacky. On to Season 6 soon.

Score: 4/5

Red Dwarf - Just the Shows

2010-04-24T12:07:00.004+01:00

I got the Red Dwarf - Just the shows boxset for my birthday back in March. It contains, all 52 episodes from seasons 1-8. We've just finished watching them all, as a big Red Dwarf fan back in the day, it was great to watch them all again. Watching them in order and in such a short space of time made me realise how things developed as the show went on. In the first couple of series, the entire show focuses on Rimmer and Lister with the cat as a comedy joke rather than a real character. But when series 3 starts, Kryten comes back and the Cat becomes more of a member of the crew, bringing the show into the classic set up of the main 4.

Another problem with watching them all so close together is that it becomes obvious that there are only about 4 different templates for an episode, especially in Seasons 2-6, these usual revolve around the crew finding something which causes them to think they are somewhere else. This plot device does allow the show to get out of the simple setting of 4 men alone in a spaceship, but can get a bit repetitive if you watch a lot.

Overall, this is a great boxset, even if Season 8 is a bit rubbish.

Score: 5/5

New ATR!

2010-04-23T21:32:00.004+01:00

Shows how not in the loop I am, but ATR have released a new track, available in WAV here. Only just listening now, but it sounds pretty damn good, pretty much old school ATR, Carl Crack's replacement sounds ok too. I am pretty excited about seeing them live in Amsterdam on the 3rd of next month.

Edit: MP3 if you don't want to download a 30Mb WAV.

Cramond Storm damage

2010-04-15T20:48:00.002+01:00

I went for a cycle after work today, a little route my brother and I sometimes do after work which takes us down to the seafront at Cramond and back. I hadn't heard about this and was totally confused about the scale of the damage. I couldn't work out if it was deliberate vandalism, dodgy work by the council or what, I still can't really believe some of the massive pieces of the sea wall were moved just by the power of a storm, it must have been pretty wild.

Also, nice to see that Edinburgh Council are on the case and the place still looks like a bomb site some 2 weeks after the event.

iPod - every track rated

2010-04-15T20:46:00.002+01:00

I've spent the past 6 months or so trying to rate every single track on my iPod. Just managed to finish the task this week, it's going to be strange going back to choosing what to listen to rather than working my way through my entire CD collection one random track after another.

Sigma 400mm f/5.6 (Sony A700)

2010-03-14T18:20:00.002Z

Sigma 400mm f/5.6 (Sony A700), originally uploaded by chored.

In a moment of madness on Thursday I bought this Sigma 400m f/5.6 off eBay. Not sure why. Anyway, it turned up yesterday.

First impressions are mixed. It's not massively sharp, although I've taken a few test shots which are definitely acceptable at the kind of resolutions I would ever need. It's a bit of a pain because it's so long (600mm equivalent on my A700), so you need to shoot at a pretty fast shutter speed. On the other hand, the zoom is ridiculous.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to try it out in the real-world sometime soon. At the latest, Rosie and I are going on a photography course at the Highland Wildlife park in July. Just hope it's nice and bright that day :)

Exif Woes

2010-03-07T11:37:00.003Z

I have a local web script I use when uploading photos to Flickr so that all the information I add (e.g. title, description, tags etc.) is stored in the Exif of the photo, meaning if I ever move away from Flickr I still have all the extra meta-data I've added for each photo.

One of the things I wanted to do was tag which lens the photo was taken with, I had just been trying to work it out based on the focal length and aperature (e.g. if it's less than f/5.6 at certain focal lengths I know it's my Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 rather than the Sony kit lens and anything over 70mm has to be the Tamron 55-200mm). This works to a point, but e.g. anything taken between 17mm and 50mm at f/5.6 or higher could be either the kit lens or the Tamron.

Neil had claimed that the lens information was stored in the Exif, but I wasn't convinced as I hadn't seen it for any of my photos, I wondered if maybe only the newer Sonys contained this information, but after checking on Flickr, sure enough there it is "Lens Type: Tamron Lens (255)". I'd assumed I'd just missed this, so yesterday when I came to upload another photo I thought I'd give it a try and update my process.

The thing is, that the "Lens Type" field isn't one of the standard fields returned by PHP's exif_read_data() function. It's actually buried inside the "MakerNote" field which exif_read_data() returns as a big block of binary data. As well as exif_read_data, I'm also using the PHP Exif Library (PEL) to write Exif info back into the files. It's pretty powerful, but Exif is a bit of a crazy format, so finding the exact bits you need to extract the data proved problematic. In the end, I could get hold of the binary data for the MakerNote field, but couldn't find a way to parse this as another TIFF container to get at the underlying information.

There's some good information about the layout of this data here, and I did contemplate trying to parse it myself. I found another PHP library (PHP JPEG Metadata Toolkit) which claims to be able to parse Sony MakerNote information, but I didn't have much luck with getting it to run.

In the end, I stumbled across a Perl library for reading Exif data (Exif Tool), this handles the Sony MakerNote field flawlessly and comes with a sample script which can parse the Exif for a photo and return it in a variety of formats.

In the end, I just wrote a wrapper round this script which executes the script from within PHP, getting the results in JSON format and then converting that to a PHP object and returning it. Seems to work flawlessly and the information returned is even better than Flickr, giving the complete name of the lens rather than just "Tamron Lens (255)".

If I get time, I plan to try and work out how Exif Tool decodes the MakerNote and see if I can replicate this in PHP (probably using PEL) but in the meantime, the hack seems to work and now my photos have the lens automatically tagged on upload.

Hopefully, someone trying to do something similar finds this information useful, at least in terms of where to start looking.

Flickr Stats API

2010-03-04T20:42:00.002Z

I guess, this is what Twitter's for, but anyway. Interesting development from Flickr; (Stats API). Now I can add more useless graphs to my website!

Band of Brothers

2010-03-04T19:46:00.003Z

I got Band of Brothers on Blu-Ray for my Christmas, I had never seen it before but had heard good things and after recently finishing the series, I'm pleased to say it lived up to expectations.

The 10 1 hour episodes follow a paratroop regiment during the Second World War from their landing behind enemy lines on D-Day through to the end of the War. It plays out much like a 10 hour Saving Private Ryan, with movie quality production values, sets and action sequences.

The Blu-Ray presentation is pretty good, a lot of the scenes shot in lower light are visibly grainy, but some of the action sequences looks stunning in Hi-Def.

Overall, well worth watching on either DVD or Blu-Ray.

5/5

Ice Factor - Kinloch Leven

2010-03-02T21:26:00.002Z

Just back from a weekend away, we were staying in Fort Augustus, but seemed to spend most of our time driving between Ballachulish and there and back. On Sunday we had a 2.5 hour ice climbing lesson booked with Ice Factor in Kinloch Leven.

Kinloch Leven is in the middle of nowhere, 7 miles down the side of Loch Leven from Glencoe village. There used to be a large aluminum factory there but that has since shut down, now there is the Atlas brewery and the Ice Factor which boasts indoor climbing walls and a high wire course. Perhaps most interestingly though, they also have a large indoor ice climbing room. Basically a huge freezer where the walls are covered in ice, so for £48 each we got to spend 2.5 hours in the freezer hanging onto the ice with ice axes and crampons.

It's great fun and our instructor was very friendly and helpful. All the equipment is provided and if you're into climbing, this is a great introduction to ice climbing, I want to go do it outside now!

Broken Chain(s)

2010-02-17T12:30:00.002Z

OK, so it seems my short lived ability to maintain my own bike has come to an end. Yesterday I got about 10m away from my work when the chain snapped due to my poor maintenance at the weekend. No problem though, after walking half way home and getting Rosie to pick me up, I set about fitting the new chain that had arrived in the post.

Managed to bend one of the links trying to fit that. Then this morning, it broke on the way to work. To make matters worse, the back brakes keep getting jammed as well, so this time, I'm taking it to a bike shop to get properly repaired by someone who knows what they are doing.

Bicycle Maintenence II

2010-02-13T22:57:00.003Z

Spent the day cleaning/fixing my bike. Due to a complete lack of cleaning over the winter period, the front mech was so jammed that even taking it off and scrubbing it failed to unjam it, so I had to replace the whole thing.

Replacing it was pretty straightforward, thanks to This Guide. The only problem I encountered was when I took the chain off, I pushed the pin too far and it popped out the other side, I had to remove a link to get the thing back together, but I've ordered a new chain from Merlin, so that should be sorted soon.

Front gears are now shifting cleanly and I'm back to a full complement of gears (or at least I would be, but the rear mech won't change down to the bottom gear at the moment, leaving that adjustment for another day)

Life - Blu Ray

2010-02-02T18:56:00.001Z

I got Rosie Life on Blu-Ray for Christmas and we've just finished watching it. Some of the photography is pretty amazing and there is a lot of cool, interesting information about strange animals which inhabit our planet. I'm not usually one for too much natural history documentaries, but Life was thoroughly enjoyable.

4.5/5

Lost Parodies

2010-01-09T13:07:00.002Z

These Lost parodies on You Tube are pretty funny (First Episode). Digging the voices, especially Sawyer's spot on stupid nicknames. Worth watching all 10 of them if you have time.

Miller's Crossing - Bomb 20

2010-01-07T22:21:00.003Z

Just watched the Coen Brothers' film Miller's Crossing. Just in-case anyone has seen it was wondering where they've heard the piece of dialogue "Something I try to teach all my boys" before, it's sampled (complete with the deranged screaming) in the Bomb 20 track "One in the brain" from the "Field Manual" album, now I just need to watch enough movies to find out where the sample at the end comes from. I guess it makes sense since Tom is told to put "one in the brain" when he is sent to kill Bernie.

I don't actually think many people will be familiar with the track and happen to watch the movie, but you never know.

Movie Challenges

2010-01-03T17:37:00.002Z

In my quest to watch every movie worth watching, there are a couple of lists I'm trying to completed. The 1001 movies you must see before you die and the ImDB top 250 being the most important at the moment.

The editor of the 1001 movies ... book released 4 slightly smaller books last year, 101 n Movies you must see before you die for values of n in {Gangster, Horror, Sci-Fi and War}. I've just bought the War and Gangster books to get my hands on the full lists so can now track my progress on these as well. The 101 subsets include films not on the larger 1001 list, so there are far more films I have to watch now than previously.

As it stands at the moment, I've seen 29 from the Gangster list, 28 from the Horror list, 38 from the Sci-Fi list and 21 from the War list. Neil and Gwen are hoping to complete the Sci-Fi list by the end of 2010, so I think I'm going to go for a similar challenge and try for the Gangster or War lists (Probably the Gangster list as there are less left to see on it)

The Wire Season 5

2010-01-02T12:19:00.004Z

Shortly before New Year, we finished the fifth and final season of The Wire. At only 10 episodes, it's much shorter than the previous seasons, but contains some good drama as the show makes its way to the finale.

The story follows the Baltimore Homocide department as they finalise their attempt to bring down drug kingpin Marlo despite increasing pressures from those above in terms of reduced budget. These pressures force McNulty to take extreme action to get the case solved.

The alternative viewpoint in this series comes from the journalists at the Baltimore Sun. Again, series 5 isn't as good as the excellent first two seasons, but is still worth watching and a fine end to the show.

4/5

1000 miles

2009-12-23T17:07:00.002Z

1000 miles! That's how far I've cycled since I got my new bike in May. Just passed the 1000 mile mark on the way home from work today, made going out in the snow almost worthwhile. I think the first year I had my old bike I only did about 700, so I'm obviously cycling more than before. Here's to another 1000.

The Wire Season 4

2009-12-23T09:27:00.001Z

Just finished season 4 of the Wire and by this point there isn't much to say. Season 4 is good, but nowhere near as good as the first 2 seasons and feels more like filler between 3 and 5. Not all that much happens plotwise, although a lot of the characters are fleshed out more. Overall, worth watching if you've seen the first three, but nothing amazing.

3.5/5

S.W.S. Chinese Takeaway

2009-12-16T12:34:00.003Z

We received a flyer for S.W.S. through the door and since we didn't have time to go shopping at the weekend and it's almost Christmas, we thought we might as well have a mid-week Chinese takeaway.

We ordered Kung-Po King Prawn, Crispy Shredded Beef and Boiled Rice. The order came to £12.30 and it's that time of year where free calendars are given away.

First impressions of the dishes were that the sauces were quite dark. The Kung-Po was good, but not the best so far. The sauce was sweet, spicy and there was quite a lot of garlic in there. Vegetables definitely included some carrot and the usual suspects.

The crispy shredded beef was also pretty good, again sweet and full of garlic, with the beef being slightly crispy.

Overall, a good solid takeaway, but not quite as good as the better ones I've visited so far. 3.5/5

S.W.S.: 8 Stenhouse Cross, Edinburgh, EH11 : 0131 455 7804

FM

2009-12-15T20:55:00.003Z

I caught a couple of episodes of this on ITV a while back, and thought it looked interesting, so sought out the full series. It's only 6 episodes, so I'd actually seen about half of it.

FM is a sitcom revolving around 2 radio DJs Lindsay (Chris O'Dowd from the IT Crowd) and Dom and their Producer Jane (Nina Sosanya from Teachers). O'Dowd plays a similar character to that of his IT Crowd persona Roy, Lindsay is a bit of an awkward character who constantly gets himself into trouble. The trio work well together and there are some hilarious situations that they get into. Cameos from bands/celebrities occur each episode but are subtley woven into the plot rather than to overtly thrown in there.

Overall, worth watching. 3.5/5

Amazon MP3 Download II

2009-12-15T18:11:00.004Z

Amazon are obviously trying to aggressively expand their MP3 download side of things as they've just given me a free £2 to spend on MP3s because I bought a £7 album last month. Not one to avoid being persauded to spend money to save money, I just purchased another Toxic Holocaust album, getting it for the bargain price of £5. The 12 tracks only run to 30 minutes again, but it sounds good so far, despite being an earlier record, I think the recording is slightly better quality than Hell on Earth which had a bit of an echo to it.

Also picked up the opportunity to get "Killing in the Name of" for 29p for no other reason than it will be funny if it gets to be Xmas number 1.

Amazon seem to be doing a thing at the moment where if you spend money on CDs you get money off downloads, £5 gets you £1 back, £10, £2 and £15, £3. Might have to order a couple of CDs just to get the free MP3s :)

Time Trumpet

2009-12-07T19:34:00.004Z

Originally shown on the BBC in 2006, I had never heard of this series from Thick of It creator Armando Iannucci until Amazon recommended it to me. It sounded pretty good so I took a punt and it payed off.

Set in 2031, it's basically a satire of these horrible TV shows you get where a group of celebrities talk about the top 50 movies or the top 50 events of the noughties etc. It consists of people ostensibly from 2031 looking back at events in the years shortly following 2006 and talking about things that happened then. These events include both current affairs based things like winning the war on terror and the time Tesco invaded Denmark as well as celebrity based things like the time Charlotte Church vomited herself inside out.

The talking heads are interspersed with fake footage and interviews from "fake" versions of our celebrities (e.g. old versions of Ant and Dec). The setup is quite good and there is a lot of really funny material in there. Some of it misses the mark and the 5th episode seemed a bit weak, but there are some comedy gems to be found in there.

Overall, really worth watching and probably something which will make less sense as time goes on, so watch it soon.

4/5

Once Sent from the Golden Hall

2009-12-05T15:17:00.003Z

Once Sent from the Golden Hall, originally uploaded by chored.

Just received some stuff from Amazon this morning, including the album "Once sent from the Golden Hall" by Amon Amarth. Didn't realise I was getting the special remastered edition which comes with a strictly limited edition pop up guitarist! If you collect the 4 remastered versions, they contain pop-ups of the whole band :)

Magic Kitchen Chinese Takeaway

2009-11-22T21:21:00.002Z

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

2009-11-22T21:12:00.003Z

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

2009-11-08T22:51:00.003Z

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

2009-11-08T22:48:00.003Z

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

2009-11-08T14:52:00.002Z

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

2009-11-07T18:32:00.002Z

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

2009-11-07T13:53:00.001Z

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 ;)

The Wire Season 3

2009-10-27T22:26:00.002Z

Just finished another season of the Wire, Season 3 sees McNulty and the special investigations team back investigating big drug players in the area. When the Major of the Western district creates an unofficial and unsanctioned drug amnesty provided dealers stick to one of 3 areas, the ripples are felt across Baltimore.

Season 3 isn't as focused as the first 2 and lacks a solid single case at its heart which provided the intrigue in the other seasons. Having said that, the end does feel less disappointing and more wrapped up than in previous seasons.

Overall, great characters, some interesting plots, but could have done with a better driving force for the plot.

3.5/5

Liverpool

2009-10-26T23:54:00.004Z

Not updated in a while and in a bid to stop this becoming a blog of tumbleweed again, I'm going to write some crap about my weekend. Rosie and I travelled down to Liverpool to visit Neil so at least there is something to write about.

I finally finished Deathnote on the train down, it's only taken 2 years!

Saturday we saw the sites of Liverpool (Photos) including a helicopter display from the Royal Navy! We had dinner in a nice place in Chinatown called Jumbo City, food was good and the portions were so large we didn't manage to eat it all (well I managed mine, Rosie struggled a bit with her noodles). After dinner we caught the new Chan-Wook Park movie Thirst at the cool FACT cinema (2 seater sofas for cinema chairs!). Movie is excellent btw.

Sunday morning we watched Young and Dangerous 4 and 5 and ate bacon rolls before catching our train back north. A quick stop in Preston where we met Hannah and Ross before catching another train back to Edinburgh. I finished the book I started on the way down on the way up as well (Foundation by Isaac Asimov).

So overall, a good weekend, but tiring

Pedals - Update II

2009-10-19T23:32:00.003+01:00

Finally got round to going to pick up my new pedals from the Post Office. Have to say, Merlin dealt with the problem very well. They shipped the correct ones out as soon as they received my return and they were with me next day. Just need to fit them now.

Google Charts API

2009-10-12T21:53:00.003+01:00

I was chatting with Neil today at work about displaying the data from the IMDb top 250 list in some sort of chart, was originally thinking of adding it into Munin which we use for server stats and just linking the image onto a page on my website.

We had a quick look at the Google Charts API to see what it could do. We've thought about using this at work for a while, but never got round to adding it into any of our projects.

Neil knocked up a quick chart for some film lists on his site and it seemed easy enough. This evening, I've stolen his chart and used it with my data to add a progress chart to the bottom of my film 2006-2009 pages (also 200 film which is pretty much just film 2005). It was a bit fiddly to get the chart exactly as I wanted, but once you begin to understand how the API works, it's not too bad.

I've just knocked up another page, Film Charts which overlays each of the 5 years on top of each other. A bit trickier than I thought at first. With 365 data points for each year and the image retreived from Google through a get request I quickly ran into the URI length limit imposed by the browser. So instead of plotting all 5 series on separate graphs, I've created 5 different graphs and using absolutely positioned divs and some transparency got them to render on top of each other.

A little bit of Javascript allows the user to turn different years on and off, so you can see how badly I'm doing this year :)

New Lens - Update 1

2009-10-11T11:48:00.002+01:00

Big daisy like flower, originally uploaded by chored.

Yesterday we went for a bit of an exploration of Midlothian. First stop was the newly opened Springfield Mill wildlife park just outside of Loanhead. While we didn't see much "big" wildlife, I got some close-ups of flowers and insects.

The Tamron 17-50 seemed to handle everything pretty well. The maximum magnification is similar to the 70-200 but you can get a lot closer to the subject (27cm minimum focusing distance) which makes taking close-ups really easy.

After Springfield Mill we headed down the road to Roslin Glen to take some more shots. Pretty happy with the lens so far. Seems good even wide open. At 17mm, close-ups aren't that sharp, but I'm thinking, that maybe I should be shooting close-ups that wide :)

Still need to test it out on bigger subjects though.

The Wire Season 2

2009-10-10T16:06:00.002+01:00

Season 2 of the Wire follows up where Season 1 left off. McNulty has been sent to work in the marine unit and the rest of the detail involved in trying to bring down Avon Barksdale are spread out the Baltimore police department.

When 13 dead girls turn up in a shipping container at the docks, Bunk and Freeman are tasked with clearing the case, but they soon realise they can pool their resources when Lt. Daniels is given a detail to investigate the head of the dockworkers union.

As they get deeper into the case, everyone involved begins to realise that things go further than they could have imagined and the usual management bullshit starts to hinder their investigation.

Season 2 starts of even better than the first season, the number of sub-plots and characters make for interesting viewing without getting overly complicated. It's a setup which wouldn't have worked without the first season laying the groundwork in terms of introduction of many of the characters.

The change of scenery from the streets of Baltimore to the docks keeps things fresh but still familiar.

Like Season 1, Season 2 is well shot, written and has some great perfomances from the lead actors (of which there are now a fair few). My only critiscm is that like Season 1, the end is a little bit disappointing, setting itself up for Season 3 without bringing about a satisfying conclusion to all the events of Season 2.

I've already got the Season 3 DVDs ready to watch, so hopefully 3 is as good as the first two.

4.5/5

I-Ching Chinese Takeaway

2009-10-10T15:34:00.002+01:00

Nearly two weeks since our last Chinese takeaway and being a Friday night, who can be bothered cooking? We went with the I-Ching on Slateford road, literally a couple of hundred meters at the most from Taste Good. It's somewhere we have ordered from in the past, so thought we'd try it again in our quest to taste them all.

Our order consisted off duck spring rolls, spare ribs (we've not been feeling the love for the chicken and sweetcorn soup recently), crispy shredded beef and boiled rice. Total cost just over £16. No freebies.

The food arrived very quickly and we tucked into the duck spring rolls. They were pretty good, although not as good as Taste Good. A pot of sweet and sour sauce was provided for dippage, again the Hoi-sin from Taste Good is better, but the spring rolls and sauce were still tasty.

The spare ribs came coated in BBQ sauce and there were a lot of them, possibly meant as a main rather than a starter. The were tasty as well, although very messy to eat.

The crispy shredded beef was ok, not amazing, it wasn't really to my taste (could have done with being a bit sweeter). Also, there wasn't quite enough sauce and the rice seemed a little soggy.

Overall, good starters, ok main, nice enough but not the best we've had.

Score: 3/5

I-Ching: 83 Slateford Rd, Edinburgh, EH11‎ : 0131 337 9898‎

Pedals - Update

2009-10-10T15:33:00.002+01:00

Merlin said if I send back the pedals, they'll send the right ones out and refund my postage. So far so good ...

DMR V8 Pedals

2009-10-08T21:26:00.005+01:00

The DMR V8 pedals are great, I've had them on my bike since I bought it back in May and they're big and chunky, ride smoothly and are very grippy. The only downsides are that the paint doesn't seem to last long and if you get one in the shin, it's gonna leave a scar (trust me, I know) [and some people don't like my garish purple ones on my red bike].

Also, they don't have any reflectors, so technically aren't legal for riding at night. So, being the safety conscious fellow I am, I ordered a pair of these from Merlin cycles, look like the DMRs, but with reflectors and half the price. Sorted, or so I thought.

Just picked my package up from the post office (Obviously I'm using the royal I which means Rosie) and to my surprise, Merlin have sent me a pair of DMR V8s instead. £24 worth of pedals for £12, which would be good if I didn't already own a pair of V8s which I want to replace due to the lack of reflector situation!

They always say a true test of a company is how they handle problems [By they, I mean Gav and me but I'm sure others say it too], so we'll soon find out if Merlin are just good prices and fast delivery or if there's someone nice in the customer support department to back that up.

I guess, if their customer support is shit, I'm still £12 up and can replace the garish purple with the nice black ones.

Site update

2009-10-07T18:23:00.003+01:00

Added cute little Social Networking icons from komodomedia.com, seen on Chris' blog (steelskin.net).

I've also added proper RSS integration into the reviews page, so that it shows up in the browser rather than being hidden away on a need to know basis.

Twitter

2009-10-06T12:51:00.002+01:00

Everyone loves Twitter, so I now announce movie reviews via twitter. 140 characters is more than enough to critique any film, so if you don't have time to read a full-length film review, why not read my Twitter Movie Reviews

Website - Redesign

2009-10-05T22:40:00.003+01:00

Well, I've been meaning to do it for a while, but I finally got round to redesigning wilkiewideweb.com. I've gone for simple and clean, and hopefully the slightly smaller font means I can get more information onto the page. I've only tested in Firefox 3.5 and IE 8, so I hope it works in other browsers.

All my code is now in subversion, so I can develop locally and then update the live site easily once I've committed, so it should give me the motivation to update more often.

Website - New pages

2009-10-05T12:44:00.002+01:00

I've just updated my site with a couple of new pages, the pages have been there for a while, but only just added them to the menu :) EIFF shows a list of all the films I've seen at the Edinburgh Internation Film Festival since 2004 including links to my reviews. IMDb Top 250 shows the top 250 movies from IMDb with those I've seen/reviewed highlighted. I'm up at 128 out of 250 at the moment (99 reviewed) hopefully, there's a bit of overlap with the 1001 movies you must see before you die list.

New Lens

2009-10-03T12:37:00.002+01:00

My new lens arrives, originally uploaded by chored.

So I gave in and bought the Tamron A16 (17-50mm f/2.8) on Thursday, so that Amazon could ship it and it would come today (I love Amazon Prime), turned up this morning. (I'm even feeling little animosity towards City Link today).

I took some photos of the lens to compare it to my other Tamron and a couple of test shots and everything looks pretty decent. Need to try it in real life now rather than taking photos of crap in my flat. Hopefully will get some good shots in Berlin at the end of the month.

Taste Good - Chinese Takeaway

2009-09-28T22:49:00.002+01:00

After coming back down from Ardtoe, we couldn't be bothered going to the shops and had no food in the house, so we decided to get takeaway. We didn't have any cash on us, so went for the one takeaway we know where you can pay by card when you order.

Taste Good on Slateford Road is one of the more up market Chineses in Edinburgh and has a sit in restaurant as well as the takeaway section. We ordered duck spring rolls, chicken and sweetcorn soup, Kung-Po King Prawn and Boiled rice. The whole thing came to around £13 and there were no freebies.

The spring rolls were probably the best spring rolls we've had from a Chinese Takeaway so far. 3 of the smaller thin kind, filled with duck, they came with a portion of Plum Sauce for dipping, definitely on to a winner there. The Chicken and Sweetcorn soup was a little tasteless, a fair amount of chicken though.

Finally, the main course, the Kung-Po King Prawn; while they have to be commended for the wide variety of vegetables and a huge portion of peanuts, the sauce itself is not as thick and sweet as we like and could have been a bit spicier. The odd pieces of celery in the dish also makes it a bit of a minefield if you (like me) aren't too keen on it.

Overall, awesome spring rolls but disappointing main course, nothing wrong with it per se, but not entirely aligned with my tastes.

Score: 3/5

Taste Good : 67-71 Slateford Road, Edinburgh : 0131 313 5588

Dave Gorman

2009-09-27T21:22:00.004+01:00

Comedian Dave Gorman is doing this thing where he is cycling from the most Southern point on the British mainland to the most Northern, taking in the most Eastern and most Western on the way up. On Friday he did a gig in the Sonachan hotel, Ardnamurchan which lies 3 miles away from the most Westerly point. Since Rosie's family's cottage is only 30 miles or so away from the point, we though we'd go up and head along to see the show, camping in a field at the hotel.

I thought it would be fun for Neil and I to cycle out to the point from the cottage, it's a 30 mile journey and was quite tough, definitely on par with the Glasgow to Edinburgh ride despite being 20 miles or so shorter.

Dave's show was excellent, a great laugh throughout with some absolutely hilarious material. I'll not say too much about the content for fear of giving anything away, but if you get the chance to catch the show, I highly recommend it.

Saturday morning we were getting ready to leave and Dave came by in a van and asked if we'd like to ride back with him and his human sat-nav Scot. We figured we'd be struggling to keep up on our mountain bikes with our fat tyres (and lack of fitness), but went along anyway. Luckily we did manage to keep up, the ride back being a bit easier than the ride along. After leaving Dave in Acharacle Scot and he were going on to Glenfinnan, another 30 miles, I'm not sure I could have kept up with them for much longer :)

Anyway, a great weekend away, and I got to cycle 60 miles and see a great comedy show and we got a mention on his blog.

Samurai-X

2009-09-21T22:11:00.000+01:00

I watched the 6th and final episode of Samurai-X tonight, I didn't have a clue what was going on for the whole 6 episodes, very confusing. Nice animation and it was strangely captivating, but none of the plot made any sense to me. Maybe I should have been paying more attention!

Max von Sydow

2009-09-21T13:32:00.004+01:00

Strangest thing ever, I'd never heard of the actor Max von Sydow before about 3 weeks ago when I watched the pretty shonky Stephen King adaptation Needful Things.

I've just written a review of the latest film I've watched, 1957 Ingmar Bergman drama Wild Strawberries and had noticed that it had a cameo from the main character in the last film I reviewed, 1957 Ingmar Bergman drama The Seventh Seal (There's been a lot of Ingmar Bergman in the past couple of weeks). I went to check it was the same actor, and find out that not only was he in Needful Things as well, but he was also in The Exorcist which I watched on Friday.

So in the past 3 weeks I've seen 4 movies which he has starred in and didn't even know who he was or that it was the same actor (the movies were from 1957, 1973 and 1993 so his appearance changed quite a bit between each film).

Anyway, he's a pretty good actor and I must congratulate him on a career in cinema which has spanned such a massive time period and led him to be a part of so many great movies (and Needful Things).

Bizarre!

Vane farm photography course

2009-09-20T19:51:00.002+01:00

A hoverfly on a holly leaf, originally uploaded by chored.

Just spent the day at a one day Beginner's photography course at Vane Farm near Kinross in Fife. A lot of basic theory was covered which I was pretty much aware of, but where it was really interesting was hearing a professional photographer's hints on how to get great shots (in this case specifically wildlife shots).

We had the opportunity to go and take some photos, there wasn't a huge amount of birds to be seen, but we did get a few good shots and we were forced to shoot entirely manual, so it was good experience of getting to use my camera properly.

Overall, at £30 for the day, it's well worth doing if you are a beginning photographer, although for those well versed in basic theory, it's perhaps less useful.

I did realise how great my A700 is, in the morning session I had the A700 with our Tamron 55-200 and was able to get a range of good shots, some of which are impressively sharp (well at least to my eye). In the afternoon, Rosie had the A700, so I had the A350 with the 18-70mm kit lens and I just didn't get any good shots. Not enough reach for the smaller wildlife and not enough sun for the landscapes and every photo I took was a little soft.

The strange thing is in the past 6 months we've had the Tamron, I've found the kit lens on the A350 to be a much more practical walk about lens, so I don't know if it's just that wildlife photography is a different application to what I'm used to, or if the A700 with the Tamron produces so much better photos that the A350 with the kit looks a bit rubbish in comparison.

Oh well, at least it's a justification for buying the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 I quite fancy.

Rob Zombie: String Tribute

2009-09-19T14:11:00.001+01:00

This has to be one of the weirder string tribute albums, Rob Zombie String Tribute. Apocalyptica have a lot to answer for!

Monopoly City Streets is back

2009-09-19T01:58:00.003+01:00

Well, Monopoly City Streets is back after the reboot. Can't say it worked out very well for me, they seemed to start again in the middle of the night, so when I logged in at 8:30am all the good streets had gone.

Add to that, a weird issue I had choosing my username and I'm beginning to think the reset is a sign I shouldn't bother at all.

They've also added a really weird tax system which doesn't work in the way of any tax I've heard of before, it basically forces you to limit the number of streets you have. Your first 5 streets are tax free and then for every street you have above that you get charged 3% tax on your total income. So if you have 38 streets you get taxed 100% of your income and won't get any cash. Seems a bit crap to me.

Derren Brown : Part 2

2009-09-19T01:52:00.003+01:00

Derren Brown's show tonight was as disappointing as last week. He claimed he'd use the power of suggestion to glue us to our seats. Well it didn't work for me and the sceptical side of my nature doesn't believe it worked for anyone else. This entire season seems to be a bit of a disappointment.

1001 Movies you must see before you die

2009-09-19T01:50:00.003+01:00

Just got the 2009 edition of the 1001 Movies you must see before you die. As usual, a bit more adding and removing this year, with notable inclusions of The Dark Knight, Wall-E, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and rather randomly, Korean Action adventure The Good, the Bad and the Weird.

Luckily, the changing about means I'm now 4 movies up with a total of 223 viewed in the new book.

South Park Season 4

2009-09-15T21:33:00.003+01:00

Well I've worked my way through another South Park box set and I have to say, Season 4 has to be the best season yet. The introduction of Timmy, some great episodes like the South Park one, the Terminator/Akira/2001 spoof episode and the Great Expectations re-telling were all pretty good and even the token Mr. Hankey Christmas episode wasn't too bad.

From what I remember things only get more ridiculous from here on in, so here's looking forward to Season 5.

Score 4/5

Panaracer Uff Da

2009-09-14T18:23:00.003+01:00

I've only ever ridden a Mountain Bike, despite 90% or more of my miles being the 3 miles to work and back. The reason for this is because I think Mountain Bikes are cool, although I like to hide behind the excuse of I can take a Mountain Bike on the road, but I can't take a road bike off-road. An excuse which has more wait to it now that I've been to Glentress a couple of times.

Anyway, that leaves the question of tyres, I've always ridden big chunky off-road tyres to do me 30 miles a week from home to work and back. While in training for the Glasgow to Edinburgh event, I thought it was maybe time I bought something less knobbly.

That's when I saw the Panaracer Uff Da, £10 or so each from Merlin Cycles. They're big and chunky (2.3") tyres designed for urban use (probably more extreme use than my daily commute, but the look pretty cool). Fitting them on the bike, I was surprised how much quieter and smoother they ride on the road than the Maxxis Ignitors that came with the bike. The rode pretty well on the Glasgow to Edinburgh, so look like a good purchase.

Pedal for Scotland

2009-09-14T18:21:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I spent nearly 5 hours cycling 51 miles between Glasgow and Edinburgh as part of the Pedal for Scotland event. It was a pretty amazing day, warm and sunny all the way and although I was quite tired last night, I like to think I could have gone further :)

I can't believe how many people took part, for the whole 51 miles, the roads were packed 4 abreast or more with cyclists. Who says Scotland is the heart-attack capital of the world ;)

BM - Chinese Takeaway

2009-09-12T10:34:00.002+01:00

The closest Chinese Takeaway to our flat and we haven't ever ordered from there, so last night we put and end to this and gave them a phone. We ordered: Crispy shredded beef, Chicken and Sweetcorn Soup, Spring Rolls, Boiled Rice and two cans of Irn Bru. Total cost £11.40, but no free prawn crackers (maybe a good thing though since me eating an entire bag of prawn crackers is never going to be a good thing).

The spring roll was the first thing that caught our eye, wrapped in a grease soaked paper bag, we unpeeled it from its oily wrapper to be met with something that looked a bit burnt and possibly refried. Taste wasn't much better, a lot of bamboo shoots and a bit of meat (according to Rosie). Also marks off for there only being one and it being one of the big fat ones.

Next up was the Chicken and Sweetcorn soup, it looked a bit funny, but seemed to have a lot of chicken in it. That's about all that was going for it though, it tasted of very little, even the chicken didn't taste of much, we hardly ate any of it between the two of us.

Finally, we opened up the Crispy Shredded Beef. At this point, I wanted to hate it, but to be fair to BM it was actually pretty good. Big chunks of beef with onion and peppers in a fairly spicy sauce (only minor niggle, there could have been more sauce). The beef was crispy rather than chewy and the sauce was very tasty. The main dish saved the meal.

Overall, a bit of a dip after our strong run, avoid the starters, but the mains seem to be ok.

Score: 2.5/5

BM : 193 Balgreen Rd, Edinburgh : 0131 346 1834

Tonight's TV: Derren Brown The Events

2009-09-12T00:26:00.004+01:00

Saw a thing on Boing Boing about Derren Brown's new TV show. I missed it on Wednesday, but apparently he did a thing where he "predicted" all 6 of the numbers in the national lottery. There was a show on Channel 4 tonight purporting to explain how he did it. Boing Boing had an interesting video from someone with an idea of how it could be done and I thought I'd tune in to see if the guy who made the video was right or not, seemed plausible and quite clever.

Big mistake, the show was the biggest waste of an hour of my life ever. It was just lots of crap full of bad maths explained under the mumbo jumbo "Deep Maths" label with a touch more crap about people being able as a group to guess lottery numbers by clearing their mind and writing on bits of paper.

His claim of how he did it was to get 24 people in a room, have them write numbers from their subconscience on a bit of paper and then he created an average of each number and then used them as his results. The whole thing sounds like a load of bollocks and even ignoring my scepticism about the logical improbability of people being able to write lottery numbers via their subconscience; one of his numbers was 2, to get the average for that number to be 2, so many of the members of the group would have to have written a very low numbers.

To me this is just implausible. It didn't help that for the final version, he collected the papers and totalled the numbers and then put them in a sealed tube and no-one saw it until he revealed it live at the end of the lottery show, so there isn't even a semblance of proof that the numbers the group chose averaged out to the numbers he revealed.

To me, this totally ruined the show, half way through I thought it could go one of two ways and either way would be massively disappointing. Way number 1 (which was the case) is that he tries to pass it off with some sort of pseudo-scientific explanation. Way number 2 would have been to fool the audience for 50 minutes and then reveal a camera trick at the end (which would have made any further episodes pretty much unwatchable if he was going to stick to that formula).

I was under the impression that Derren Brown was the kind of guy who spoke out against so called psychics etc. but from this episode of his show, it seems like if he can make money from bombarding people with nonsense then he'll be happy. My only guess is that he might reveal everything at the end of the series, but I doubt I'll tune in to watch that.

Monopoly City Streets

2009-09-12T00:18:00.002+01:00

If you've been under a rock for the past couple of days, you'll have missed out on the launch of Monopoly City Streets. It's basically a giant worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps, so you can buy real streets around the world and build houses etc. You start with £3,000,000 and get more each day from rent on your streets and properties.

It was dog slow when it launched, but they've been adding more processing power and it actually runs quite well now and it looked promising. But ... lots of people weren't happy about not being able to get the streets they wanted at launch due to the performance issues, so they're now talking about resetting everything next week.

Hopefully, they'll think about this and give something back to users who have been playing for the past couple of days, otherwise it's completely pointless. If I don't get the streets I want when they relaunch will they reset the system again? Madness.

Bicycle Parts online

2009-09-12T00:15:00.003+01:00

I've been buying quite a few bicycle parts recently and two websites I've used have been really good: Merlin Cycles and UK Bike Store. Both have a pretty good range of products, reasonable prices and pretty swift dispatch and delivery. Merlin offers next day delivery for free and UK Bike Store do first class Royal Mail delivery for not much money. So if you're in the market for any bike parts, give them a try.

Computer Woes

2009-09-10T12:48:00.003+01:00

Well, my desktop at home is totally stuffed, Windows won't boot, last known good configuration doesn't work and not even safe mode boots. To make matters worse, when I had a look in the crap that came with it to try and find out how the recovery partition works, it says I should run the system restore program (click on Start->Programs... Doh!). It's ok though, you can recover from DVD as well, I just need to insert the DVD I burned with the System restore DVD creator ... oh wait I didn't burn any DVDs. So that's all a bit shit.

Delicious China - Chinese Takeaway

2009-09-08T22:04:00.003+01:00

In my bid to sample every Chinese takeaway in Edinburgh, I picked another random one to order from on Sunday night. I used to cycle along Dalry road everyday and there are a fair few takeaways on the mile and a half or so between Haymarket and my flat. Delicious China is one of these, but not one we'd ever ordered from before.

We ordered a fairly standard order (for us), Spring Rolls, Chicken and Sweetcorn soup, Kung Po King Prawn and Boiled Rice. Total cost just over £10 and for that we got a free bag of Prawn Crackers (which is always a bonus because Rosie doesn't like them so I get to eat them all :)

The Spring Rolls were the two big fat kind rather than the skinny kind. I'm not a big fan of these massive Spring Rolls, but the ones from Delicious China were pretty tasty, stuffed with Bean Sprouts and other vegetables. Rosie really liked them.

The Chicken and Sweetcorn soup was sweet and full of chicken, we thought it smelled like Roast Chicken, a winner there.

Finally, the Kung Po King Prawn. No battered Prawns, but a fairly sweet and relatively spicy Kung Po sauce with an assortment of vegetables and some cashew nuts.

The menu is available here and you can even order online.

All in all, another success in the world of Chinese Takeaway. Possibly a little better than Hui which I reviewed last time, but not by much, more vegetables in the Kung Po was definitely a winner.

Overall 4.2/5

Delicious China : 261 Dalry Road, Edinburgh : 0131 346 8383

Scottish licensing laws

2009-09-05T22:41:00.003+01:00

Well, I've been blogging more and more recently, so I reckon it's time for a bit of a rant. With the recent overhaul of the Scottish licencing laws, a number of changes have been introduced in how alcohol can be sold in Scotland.

Sundays no longer get special treatment with the old no alcohol before 12:30 on a Sunday scrapped and a standard no alcohol before 10am every day. This is a step forward in my eyes, no longer do I have a law forced upon me which was created solely to appease specific religious beliefs. But this is not the focus of my post.

Another change made is the scrapping of happy hours, pubs can no longer change the price of alcohol sold for any period less than 72 hours. I'm pretty ambivalent on this one, but certain newspapers are today reporting on a "Loophole" in the law which means that some pubs are now doing "happy days" where they will do drinks promotions for a period of 72 hours up to 5 days or so and then bump the prices back up at the weekend. One would premuse this is to try and get some more footfall during the week.

This doesn't really seem like a loophole to me, the law says 72 hours, so I don't see how adhering to the law and reducing the price for 72 hours or more is being cheeky or flaunting it in any way. Just more sensational journalism on the subject. Aside from this, neither of these papers even contemplate the fact that maybe the law is designed this way so that we don't encourage people to go out and drink as much as they can in a 1 hour period when things are cheap. The only way I can see pubs could flaunt this rule and break this idea would be if their 72 hour period was set up to end at say 6pm on a Friday, there by encouraging "binge" drinking between 5pm and 6pm straight after work. Although, no pubs seem to be doing this.

I've not read the law in depth, but I think the following is more of a loophole than serving cheap drink during the week. If I was an unscrupulous publican what I would do is buy in e.g. a keg of some cheap lager and sell it at £2 a pint for an hour a day, but don't sell it any other time. I've not changed the price of the drink, it's just only available at certain times and outside of that time you'll have to buy the more expensive stuff.

I don't see how the legislation could protect against this, you could even go one step further and only hold a certain amount of the cheap drink in stock and when it's sold out that's happy hour finished until you get more in stock the next day. After all, the government can hardly demand that if you sell one drink for a price and it runs out that a different, but similar, drink has to be sold at the same price as well, otherwise all pubs would have to sell all their lagers at the same price.

Anyway, that's just my thoughts on the subject.

The Wire Season 1

2009-09-05T22:33:00.003+01:00

We're quite big fans of bug budget American TV, ever since the Sopranos, I've enjoyed watching shows such as 24, Lost, Heroes, The Shield on DVD. The quality of the production is like a film (which lasts for 20hours) and watching them on DVD means I can waste lots of time watching episodes back to back with no adverts and not having to wait a week to see the outcome of the cliffhanger.

But, despite it getting pretty good reviews from pretty much everywhere, we hadn't really seen any of the Wire. We picked up the season 1 box set in Sainsbury's last weekend and a week later we've just watched the last of 13 1 hour episodes.

The show follows Homicide and Narcotics detectives within the city of Baltimore Police. When wise-ass detective McNulty starts investigating a drug dealer responsible for a crime wave including several murders, he talks to a Judge who puts pressure on McNulty's superiors to do something about the case. This doesn't do any favours for McNulty, but a team is assembled to investigate the drug dealer involved.

The Wire is very well produced with a great plot, some excellent characters and is well written with some classic lines thrown about by the main characters. It's like a cop movie which lasts for 13 hours. Highly recommended.

4.5/5

Airbus A380 at Edinburgh Airport

2009-09-05T22:32:00.004+01:00

Airbus A380 as it flew over Edinburgh Airport, originally uploaded by chored.

Caught site of the new Airbus A380, the largest passenger jet in the world as it performed an approach and go maoeuvre at Edinburgh Airport. My in-laws live pretty much at the end of the runway and we were over there for lunch anyway, so hopped into the field behind their house to get some photos. (Taken with my new A700).

Despite the size of this thing, it is massive, the most impressive factor is how quiet it is. It is way less noisy than a lot of the other aircraft which regularly come into Edinburgh.

Onion Rings

2009-09-05T19:19:00.002+01:00

Onion Rings, originally uploaded by chored.

On the way back from a charity ceilidh on Friday night we stopped off at a chip shop and I got a portion of onion rings and a bag of chips. This is the most ridiculously over the top portion of onion rings ever, it was a whole onion battered and deep fried (and we got them out the cabinet, so deep fried again). I'm not sure if this is amazing, or absolutely disgusting.

Saughton Park

2009-08-31T13:07:00.001+01:00

I've lived in my current flat for about 3 years now, just across the road lies Saughton Park which I've never really visited. This Saturday Rosie and I took our new toy (Sony Alpha 700) and went for a wander round the gardens there. Hiding in the middle of the park is a greenhouse with a winter garden and some pretty amazing outdoor gardens. Just goes to show what can lie on your doorstep if you never explore you surrounding area.

Lexmark X5650 & Sainsbury's ink refill kit

2009-08-30T10:33:00.002+01:00

Maybe I should have expected it when I bought a Lexmark printer/scanner all in one for £40, but I've not been particularly impressed with the experience. I guess, the first sign should have been when we had to return the first printer because it wouldn't even power on.

The ink cartridges don't seem to last very long and the printer has a very annoying habit of just refusing to print when it deems the ink level is too low. If the last print out was fine, why can't I just print and deal with slightly faded print out until the ink fully runs out? Well, I assume if I did that, it wouldn't line Lexmark's pockets as much since I'd get another few print outs from the cartridge before I had to buy a new one.

So rather than spend another £20 on a cartride which wouldn't last, I went for Sainsbury's £5 Black ink refill kit. Compatible with over 1,800 printers and faxes, the kit comes with 3 bottles of black ink and some flushing solution as well as a syringe and tools to get into the cartridge if necessary. It seemed like a bargain, 6 refills for a quarter the price of a new cartridge.

But, 1,800 printers supported and mine has one cartridge that can't be refilled. Sure you can refill the Lexmark 36A black cartridge for the X5650, but I have a "36" cartridge which can't be refilled :( So it looks like I have to buy a new cartridge anyway, Lexmark win this round.

I've always owned HP printers, even since a child my parents always bought HP printers and I've never had a bad experience with them. Next time, I'm going to pay the extra and get an HP, because Lexmark frankly suck.

Spotify - Or how I stopped listening to Tool and started to buy CDs again

2009-08-28T23:44:00.003+01:00

I'm a bit behind the curve on this one, but just got round to trying out Spotify earlier this evening. For those as out the loop as me, it's basically an app where you can stream music to your PC at no cost, a pretty large library of music is available and you pay for it by listening to the odd advert much like comercial radio. For £0.99 you can buy a day free from adverts and for £9.99 a month you can access all the content advert free.

The app itself is a black iTunes clone which is pretty straightforward to use. Search for music, add it to a queue and play the music. You can also set up playlists and it has the ability to link in to your last.fm account to track all your new found music. The only thing which appears to be missing is some way of rating tracks/albums you have listened to, in order to go back and find a band you though were pretty good later when you're buying CDs

I was a bit sceptical at first, maybe only 40% of bands I searched for are available. I thought this was a bit poor, and was thinking maybe it's aimed more at mainstream tastes rather than my strange musical listening habits. But after a bit of perseverance, I've found more music I want to listen to than I have time to listen to, and that's without searching for anything I am already familiar with, so it's not all bad.

The adverts are surprisingly well spaced, you can listen to a lot more music before being interupted than I thought would be the case. So far, the adverts have been about 20 seconds of adverts per 15-20 minutes of music. They're also not as intrusive as I thought they might be, although it would be nice if they tried to sell me some albums I might actually buy rather than the Pop albums they seem to be pushing. (Not sure if this will change based on my listening habits).

90% of music I listen to tends to be at work on my iPod and without the ability to stream from the internet there, I'm not going to be able to listen to Spotify. So it's back to either downloading music illegally (something I have pretty much stopped doing) or buying CDs (something I wish I did more). [Although it has to be said the UK's current archaic copyright laws mean that buying the CD and ripping it to my iPod is technically illegal as well]. The one strength Spotify does offer though is being able to preview an entire album completely legally before purchase.

It's a bit surreal though, if I was to find a torrent for an album I was interested in, download the album and listen to it before deciding to buy the CD, I'd open myself up to the possibility of a $1.9 million fine (at least if I lived in the US). But load up Spotify, listen to the same album with perhaps an advert for some album I'm never going to buy and that's completely legal.

Anyway, I don't see me ever paying £9.99 a month for the service, the adverts are too unintrusive to make it worthwhile and I'm unlikely to listen to more than a couple of hours a week. For that £9.99 I could buy a CD and listen to it to death for 37 hours a week (Interesting fact: for the past month or so I've basically been listening to the last 3 Tool albums non-stop while at work, but now I want something new, hence the Spotify experiemtn). Being able to sample music free of charge before purchasing the CD definitely helps, it saves me loading up the MySpace page of the band in question and dealing with the Flash hell to listen to maybe 2 tracks off an album. It also frees me from the poor quality 15 second samples Amazon allow you to listen to on their website.

Since signing up for Spotify this evening, I've added 6 albums to my Amazon wish list which I will probably buy in the next week (maybe ... ;) and 5 of them were from bands I haven't ever heard before.

Overall, Spotify is a pretty good service, could it be better? Yeh, it could have every album available on Amazon available to listen to, but that's no mean feat and the range that is there is still pretty good. It's more appealing that last.fm radio since I can choose all the bands up front and listen to a whole album if I want. To sum it up:

Amazon recommendations + Spotify == Expanded Horizons.