cowfish

Daisy: In the end, our relationship was just like a sandwich toaster. You know, you just forget you’ve got one. And it just sits there on the top of the cupboard collecting a layer of greasy fudge. And even if you do see it you just assume it’s broken, you think if it’s working I’d be using it all the time, but you don’t and it just sits there. Then one day, you get an overwhelming desire for toasted sandwiches, you know? And you get it down and it works, and you can’t believe it, you know? And then you make every kind of toasted sandwich there is, you have toasted sandwich parties. You make Marmite and cheese, chocolate and…
Tim: Pilchards.
Daisy: Banana and…
Bilbo: Acorns.
Daisy: Acorns. And then as quickly as the desire comes, it just goes. And then you put the toasted sandwich maker away. And, you know what?
Tim: What?
Daisy: You don’t miss it.
Bilbo: So what you’re saying is ‘Don’t hide the toasted sandwich maker away, use him regularly and you’ll get the most out of him’.
Tim: No, she’s saying ‘Chuck your boyfriend, have a sandwich’.
[Spaced episode 5 - Chaos]

I have recultivated an obsession. It is one that festers deep in my soul, occasionally bursting forth with dangerous consequences. There are injuries, weight gains, more injuries and shortages of cheese in my local corner shop. I have realised that I own a Breville sandwich toaster.

Some toasted sandwiches, earlier

My love of the toasted sandwich can be traced back to a single incident in my childhood. Having been raised on cheese on toast (for a certain US based reader, please notice the ‘on’ – a very important preposition) I had often heard of the fabled ‘toasted sandwich’ and assumed it to be a sandwich made with toasted bread. As a lover of melty cheese this seemed to be inadequate, as the toast would have to be super heated to melt the cheese which would then run out the sides – a far from an ideal situation. One day I had been left in the care of my now-departed step-grandmother, a lady of strong food based opinions forged in the 40s and 50s and never changed (the list of food items that she had never tried but was sure she wouldn’t like was quite fearsome in its length and variety), and she decided that toasted sandwiches were the order of the day. Digging around in the depths of the cupboards she unearthed a strange circular device with long handles that looked more like an instrument of torture than a cooking implement. She buttered the inside, used it to slice a circle out of the centre of a cheese sandwich and then dumped it on the gas. A few minutes later a toasted (fried?) disc of bread, sealed at the edges and filled with molten cheese was placed in front of me.

I never looked back.

The key difference between the US style “grilled cheese” and the excellence of the Brevilled sandwich is this sealing process. A grilled sandwich can easily leak, with cheesy goodness (or marmite, jam, peanut butter, bolognese, acorns or whatever filling you have selected) coming out of the sides of the sarnie not only as you munch away, but also as you cook. The sandwich toasting machines of which I am fond seal the edges, making a bready pocket that is more akin to a pasty than a traditional sandwich.

Part two of the joy of the toasted sarnie is getting the outside of the bread right, and to this I turn happily to the US method – frying. To combine the best of both worlds, sealed edges and crispy exterior that’s better than toast (if such a thing is possible. It is) the buttering of my grandmother and my more middle class application of olive oil is important. Rather than the normal light toasting that a dry sandwich undergoes you instead end up with a gentle frying, greasing up your toast at the same time as not turning it into a fried slice – crispness without drowning in fat.

While the circular toaster is a great thing, especially if one is in a forest with nothing but a camp stove, a loaf of bread and bag of cheese for company, the now traditional electric square toasting machine has its benefits. First up – you use all of your bread. The circle-from-square off cut crusts from the circular machine may keep you going as a snack while you await your sandwich’s cooking, but I prefer the anticipation of a whole sandwich than mild sating that second class bread crusts can provide. Also, in the forest situation mentioned above, if one discards the crust it could attract bears, which puts a damper on both the camping and sandwich making experiences. Secondly – you get more sandwiches. They may be smaller sandwiches, and the extra bread may end up being crimped by the toaster’s pocket sealing edges, but you get two triangular delights rather than one sub-Adamski flying saucer. There are places in the world for both kinds, though: a bolognese sauce and cheese toasted sandwich is an excellent thing, but the square toaster generally doesn’t allow you to get enough sauce in to make it worthwhile, as the pocket impressions are seldom all that deep; whereas a toasted cheese, ham and marmite sandwich with enough cheese to fill the circular pocket could a) cause serious burns if not treated with care and b) may actually be too much cheese, or at least too much cheese to justify the addition of the tiny percentage by total volume of ham and marmite. Also, the square toaster requires electricity and a portable generator, when shipped to the woods, will happily make enough noise to scare off any wandering bears.

So, long live the toastie, whatever you put in it. Cheese, ham, ham and cheese – the possibilities are endless.

I like scotch eggs. From the gourmet end of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s warm ham hock scotch egg with picalilli to a Ginsters scotch egg bar, I love the entire range of pig wrapped chicken precursor. At the end of last year I saw that the Qype folks (ta muchly Neil) had organised a scotch egg tasting event at The Coach and Horses in Clerkenwell and enthusiastically jumped on the chance.

I’ve not been to the Coach and Horses before, having confused it with the nearby Gunmaker’s, and it seemed rather nice, with a landlord who knows how to look after his beer, a cheery head chef and a very decent whisky selection for a pub. Henry the chef also has a bit of a thing about charcuterie, leading to a section of the cellar being kept aside for hanging maturing meats – a couple of platters of these appeared at the end of the evening and they’re pretty good.

Part of the pub’s schtick is to try and cook more traditional british fare and to further this aim they added the scotch egg to their menu. There’s a bit of conjecture over where the name came from, with Fortnum and Mason’s claiming they invented the dish and others pointing out that ’scotching’ is a term for wrapping things in meat anyway, but it’s generally accepted that it has become a much maligned bit of fast food in recent times. Times are changing, however, and our scotch egg tasting turned out to be a lesson in how to make them ‘properly’.

Firstly, Henry prepared the meaty wrapping – pork mince (made from shoulder and belly) was mixed with the traditional pork pie seasonings: mace, cayenne and sage, as well as some mustard, to fulfil Henry’s craving for it, and some cooked shallot for ’sausageness’. This was smooshed up and left to rest while we prepared our eggs.

Donning latex gloves we grabbed an egg each and swiftly discovered that the sous-chef had gone slightly too far with the ’soft boiled’ instruction, leaving smashed piles of barely cooked egg all over the table. A quick run upstairs later and we had another batch of more solid, but still runny, eggs. Shells removed, we grabbed a small handful of mince each (about 50g per egg) and started making porky sushi. We spread the meat out quite thinly onto a sheet of clingfilm, placed the egg in the middle and then used the clingfilm to bring the meat around the egg to make a ball.

We then moved onto the breadcrumbing, using the Coach and Horses chosen double crumbing – meaty ball into flour, then beaten egg, then finely ground panko breadcrumbs, back into the egg and then into some regular chunkily crispy panko crumbs before being placed on a tray ready to cook.

The eggs then disappeared for a bit to be first deep fried until golden and then finished off for 10-15 minutes in the oven. When they reappeared they were more prickly than the average service station version, with panko crumbs very golden and crunchy. They tasted really very good, with the eggs just slightly runny and the meat actually tasting of meat rather than the uniform salty greyness that you get from Budgens. The meat was quite loose in texture though and Henry recommended leaving the uncooked scotch eggs to chill for a while before cooking to allow them to firm up a bit.

Anyways, the scotch eggs are good and they’re a standard on the menu. I think they’re up there, but maybe not quite as good, as those made by Andy of Eat My Pies (although that’s a hard decision to make, especially as I didn’t try one made by the C&H staff), but they kick the (still rather good) SMWS one to the kerb. I still have a place in my life for the ghetto scotch egg, but it’s nice to know that there’s somewhere else that appreciates that they needn’t all be like that.

You can find organiser Neil’s write-up over on his blog with a bunch of links to others.

The iPad announcement has come and there wasn’t much to surprise out at the front – 10″ish screen, running iPhone OS, new look and feel for a bunch of apps… Basically a big iPod Touch/iPhone with optional 3G. It’s a very shiny thing but I suspect that I won’t get one, despite lusting after it with deeply repressed fanboy-ness, as I don’t think I’d use it.

Anyways, there was interesting stuff. Other than it containing a new chip, Apple’s A4, which I’d not heard of before, Steve Jobs mentioned the iTunes Book Store (or whatever they will christen it) and a few bits and pieces that have been floating around have come together. He acknowledged that Amazon have led the way with the Kindle Store, but if my hopes aren’t dashed things will hopefully get better from here on in.

The first piece of info that I heard through the various rumour sites and also via last night’s McGraw-Hill info leak was that Apple have been working with the publishers to get ebooks out there. So far so Amazon. However, one thing that popped up, which I can’t find a source for other than Kosso on Twitter (Update: from the Engadget feed – The Steve said it at 10:57), is that Apple are going to use ePub as their ebook format. This opens up a number of possibilities depending on decisions that are made:

1) What DRM will they be using? While Adobe have a fairly tight grip on the DRM’d ePub market with Digital Editions, Apple do like doing things on their own. However, with the gradual decrease of DRM on iTunes music is there a chance that they might do the same thing here? Could Apple get behind a movement to get DRMless ebooks?

2) If we end up with no DRM or an industry standard will they allow transfer of books to non-Apple devices? If I could buy books from the Apple store and stick them on my Sony Reader then I would be a happy man. Especially if it didn’t require Digital Editions.

3) What are they going to charge? Unfortunately this does seem to be the place where things will fall down – the rumour mill suggests that they’ll be pricing at US hardback prices – $13-15 rather than Amazon’s $10 for new releases. This is still more pricey than the physical equivalents, but if they come down to be closer, like mp3s have (they generally still cost more than discounted older CDs) then this will lower the resistance to buy at least on my part.

It also looks interesting on the unit cost side. Based on the US prices (with added VAT and ‘You live in the UK’ tax) I reckon we’ll see the lowest model clock in at between £400 and £450 ($500+VAT is about £360 at the moment), and my overly precise guess is £429 – Apple like their £x29s. I suspect that the 3g models will be bumped by a bit over £100 (maybe £120 – the $139 premium works out at about £95), although they’re keeping quiet about when those might appear.

So, we get a moderately flexible device with a colour screen and ok battery life for $499. The Kindle DX, with a similar sized screen, currently clocks in at $489 – only $10 cheaper. If Apple get their bookstore running nicely then I suspect that Kindle sales might start feeling the pinch, although that’s a very big if – taking on Amazon could be a foolish move. I’ll be interested to see how Apple’s relationship with Google continues as the latter starts eating the book market with the Google Books settlement inexorably rolling closer…

In an ideal world Apple would put up a DRM free ePub store with a similar or better to Amazon range of titles available worldwide, with no restrictions on getting them onto a compatible reading device. I suspect that we won’t get this, with custom DRM wrapped around the epub and no support outside of Apple devices for a good while, if not forever. I can only hope that their experience with iTunes music informs their decisions more than the movie store.

Update: It seems that I’m not the only pessimistic one – Defective By Design have a petition up asking for Apple to stop DRMing everything. I’ve signed up, not that I think it’ll do much good.

With that, there’s the sort-of-opposite opinion – that this is a great day for open software. With Apple’s continued restriction of on platform software they are forcing people to the cloud, says Yehuda Katz. Annoyingly I like to work offline, as I kinda agree.

As a) I like talking about myself and b) Kelsie and/or Mel over at Travels with my Fork sorted me some linkage I thought I’d put something here about what I’ve been writing over on my booze blog.

Anyways, recent things:

• A quick review of Brewdog Harcore IPA
• My writeup of the Salt Bar/Talisker Burns Night thing from last week

I’ll also have a write-up of the rather good Glenmorangie tasting I went to at Vinopolis last night on there soon, once I’ve written up a trip to the Houses of Parliament for a computer gaming discussion and watched the fallout from this evening’s Apple event. Busy busy.

I’ve also got a polariser again as of lunchtime today, so there may be photos of beer without so many reflections in as previously. I do hope so.

I have become scared. There is now preamble, bear with me.

I noticed today on macrumors.com, a site that I have become increasingly obsessed with as I have become addicted to the sweet drops that drip from Apple’s still milky udder, that the CEO of McGraw-Hill had broken a piece of news that most thought would be saved until tomorrow’s Apple show and tell about their much rumoured (and now pretty fucking certain) release of a tablet computer – it would be using a version of iPhone OS. Now, this isn’t particularly news to anyone keeping an eye on the way the tides were moving, with Charlie Stross predicting it 6 months ago and despite my frantic scrunched-up-eyes-wishing even me knowing that they weren’t going to stick a full version of Mac OS X on it, but the macrumors comments page quickly devolved into murmurings of how Terry McGraw would not hear the ninja who would disembowel him and that stealing The Steve’s thunder is a very easy way to get yourself dropped from the corporate Christmas card list. Being someone who works in an industry where McGraw-Hill are the #3 player (and that my lot are #4 in, although quite a chunk behind) I immediately went on a mild defensive. ‘Terry McGraw shits out companies like Apple for breakfast’, I thought to myself. ‘His publishing empire buys and sells commodities more pricey than Steve Jobs’s offal for mere shits and giggles’, my whisky fuelled imagination continued. ‘Fuck you, Apple, you fly-by-night metal and/or white box merchant, publishing and financial data looks down on you with the contempt you deserve’, I finished. I then went, of course, and performed the correct penance for taking the holy name of Steve in vain and while I bandaged my wounds I had a quick look on Google Finance.

• McGraw-Hill – Market capitalisation: $10.78billion
• My anonymous employer – Market capitalisation: ~$3bilion
• Apple – Market capitalization: $185.49billion

My industry isn’t even in the same league. I am humbled and scared by the scary amount of cash that final number actually signifies – Apple as a single company are worth more than pretty much my entire market segment. We are mere dust under Steve’s loafer, but ants to Apple’s Burj al-Arab. May I never doubt you again, oh mighty Steve and your empire of Gap clad stormtroopers.

So, tomorrow at 6pm GMT the show and tell will start and something will be revealed by a man who will probably be wearing a roll-neck sweater. My feverish fanboy-ness is newly forged, so I will most probably be at work tapping away at the refresh key as I flick between ‘live update’ websites awaiting the news from the holy mountain. But at the back of that excitement for a product that I not only do not need but that will also be backordered until it is almost obsolete is a lingering doubt. An annoyance. A disappointment that the Apple Store at White City will most probably be jammed and that I won’t be able to get my Mac there to be fixed . It’s currently backing up the 115GB of randomness that I’ve managed to fill it with so far ready for me to hand it to a ‘Genius’ to get them to remove the copy of Doolittle by the Pixies that currently has decided that it likes being in my iMac more than it does not, jamming up the CD drive. The Steve sorely tests my patience with one hand and strums my inquisitiveness with his other. Oh, you tease.

Shift Run Stop is a rather excellent podcast who don’t talk about games as much as their C64 oriented title might suggest. I have no problem with this other than that they got the name before I thought of it. It is a very good name. Anyways, they’ve been putting up snippets of video showing bits of their next episode (despite there not being a video of the main eps) and this one contains one of the best stories I have ever heard:

Chris Cleave from shiftrunstop on Vimeo.

It makes me think that I really should have put a tent up on my balcony when it was snowing the other week so that I could have a ready made igloo for when I woke up in the morning. I could have worked from home from an igloo. That would have been awesome.

I went to Paperchase today and bought myself a nice big sheet of white card. I was given approving looks by the various customers (I suspect that they don’t get that many Metallica hat wearing bearded men trying to delicately manoeuvre a large piece of card around while pleading with the cashier to be careful not to crease it. She wasn’t all that careful) and I have put it to good use in building my ghetto photo studio mk2 – overhead lights, a chair, a piece of card, my camera and a tripod. The above piccy is my only real success (you can see the background getting darker in my other attempts), but with cow-orkers in the US at the moment to mule me back a polariser and the ready availability of clip-on lamps for cheap in my local Roberto Dyasi I see ghetto studio mk2 working even better than mk1. This time I’ve got an A0 piece of card…

I might claim that this post is more for me to mark what I’ve been doing recently, but I suspect it’d be a lie and I’m merely an attention seeker with this being another demonstration of my ‘condition’. I MUST BE LOVED!

Ahem.

I recently tried my hand at editing the OneMoreGo podcast and failed quite spectacularly. As such, fellow bearded gamer Matt tutted and Got It Done, meaning that it appeared yesterday, only a week late. I think I rant in it a bit, but can’t remember as it was a whole two weeks ago that we recorded it. Here it is:

I also managed to get some more bits on the Pod Delusion, although I suspect that this means that James needed to fill in about 3 minutes to get it up to length. My most recent rant asking photographers to be ‘nice’ may appear at some time in the future, but for now here’s the episode from last week with me (it now seems…I’m sure this wasn’t my attention) calling for Tony Robinson to harass homeopaths. I reckon that should be homeopathists, it’s a much better word.

And now I go to protest about photographers’ rights. I’m not sure that assembling in Trafalgar Square is all that controversial (the Canary Wharf flash mob the other week was a bit more subversive) but I’ll go along and add my large mass to the en masse to make the crowd one Billy bigger. I might even try some of this ‘journalism’ thing that I’ve heard talk of. It sounds exciting.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here before, but I have a strange amount of respect for David Icke. Now, don’t mistake respect for belief in any of the crazier end of what he says (there’s a lot of ‘just, like, be nice to everyone and stuff’ in his talks these days, from what I’ve seen), but I do respect him. It comes down to two distinct points:

1. He absolutely believes in what he’s talking about
2. He’s not really doing any harm

Taken on their own neither of those really garner my respect: there are lot of people who really believe in what they’re doing from shit artists to genocidal fuckheads and most people drift through their lives without doing any harm, but taken together he’s a strange figure who just sits in the corner telling those who are interested about his slightly strange view on the world before shaking a few hands and drifting off quietly into the night.

I saw a bit of documentary about him a couple of years back and the days of being the son of god and a lizard overlord obsessive are behind him. There are hints of lizards still present, but the documentary seems to suggest that he’s more interested in his message of peace and love these days, although it also showed his wife/manager knows what the crowd are after and deftly manoeuvring him back round to what the crowd had come to see. He’s a slightly comical figure and seems to know it, but still churns out books and does ridiculously punishing talking tours where he seems to play to packed out houses, with (I guess) a proportion of the crowd just there to see a formerly well respected personality talk crazy. That’s sort of where I’d be if I went, which makes me think.

Thoughts of The Icke don’t often cross my mind often these days, although every now and again I wish that I had something that I could go and evangelise about with the same level of lack of harm attached. Telling people how great eBooks are doesn’t really come close and the paper publishing market probably wouldn’t agree (yet…) on the harm element. However, I got an email from the folks over at the Brixton Academy today letting me know that due to popular demand another date had been added to see Icke talk. And when I say talk, I really mean it – the day runs from 11am to 9:30pm. Even with breaks that’s going to be a long day of fairly crazy talk and at £35 it’s about £3.18 per hour, which is top value for such high quality crazy. Add to that the date – September 11 – and all of a sudden you get an event that could kick off in unexpected ways.

If anything the date has put me off – I like the idea of a guy with crazy ideas going around and telling everyone his message of peace, love, mind expansion and lizard conspiracies, but if you start dropping serious and potential controversy causing reality into the mix then it stops being quite so fun. So, for now the chance of seeing David Icke lecture animatedly about the secret rulers of the world will sit in the back of my head for another day. Long may he continue.

It seems a chunk of his talk is online…time for some watching.

I’m posting this for two reasons:

1. I might forget how to do it
2. The guides I found online are rubbish

So, due to my new found love of hearing my voice online, aka podcasting, I’ve been looking into ways for me to record things. At the moment the lovely Matt records our (now bi-weekly) podcast and handles all the editing, but being the friendly soul that I am (and knowing that the boy wonder is a busy chap) I’ve been trying to work out how I could do the recording bit (as being a filthy lover of The Steve as I am now I’ve got GarageBand which does editing for you. Or something. I hear). However, I decided that the recording MUST BE DONE PROPERLY! so I’ve been tinkering around (although not particularly effectively as it turns out) and have now found out how to do the PROPERLY! bit.

The challenge: using only GarageBand and software freely available on the interwebs, record Matt’s voice (via Skype) onto one track in Garageband and my own into another, as well as monitoring the Skype call as usual (ie. only hearing Matt in my earpiece).

The online guides I found said that I’d need a USB headset, or AudioHijack Pro (which looks like it would have done most of this for me for a few quids), or other such things, but after a bit of tinkering today (after I bought a USB mic [a nice one though]) I found it can all be done nice and easily with only one download.

In case the mentions of the Holy Steve and GarageBand weren’t enough, this is for Macs. My shiny iMac is running Mac OS X 10.6.2 so, in traditional disclaimery fashion, YMMV¹.

Part 1: Soundflower

If you don’t have it already then you can grab Soundflower from the Cycling ‘74 website – it’s an application that creates synthetic sound sources made up of inputs from multiple other sound sources for ease of routing sound between applications. I thought it was a bit rubbish when I first started playing with it, but now I’ve got this working it’s my new best friend.

Load up Soundflowerbed (which is what it calls itself) and load up ‘Audio Setup…’ from the top bar menu that appears (its icon is a silhouette of a pretty flower. Aaah):

In there you need to create an Aggregate Source by clicking the little + button at the bottom of the left listbox and then select Soundflower (2ch) and whatever audio input you are using for your side of the Skype call (in this case my Built-in Mic).

Part 2: Skype

Fire up Skype, go to Preferences in the Skype menu and choose the Audio section. In there you’ll need to set the Audio Output to be Soundflower (2ch) and the input to be whatever your audio input is:

Part 3: GarageBand

Load Garageband and choose a new Voice project, as that sets us up nicely with 2 tracks ready to go, and when its loaded go to the Preferences menu, the Audio/Midi section and set your Audio Input to be your Aggregate Device.

When that’s done, select track one and set it to use input from Stereo 1/2 of the aggregate device and then set track two to Stereo 3/4. If you don’t have two stereo devices (as far as I know Skype is always stereo, but my USB mic is only mono [but very nice]) then you may have to twiddle around with the mono channels or a combination of mono and stereo. Once you’ve selected things, make sure both channels are set up to record and then hit the record button. Now when you speak you’ll get picked up in one channel and when you dial Skype the audio from there will go into the other channel.

Part 4: Monitoring

But Oh Noes! You can’t hear the other person! If you click on the Soundflower menu and then on Built-in Output under Soundflower (2ch) it will redirect the Soundflower (2ch) audio (Skype) to you standard output.

If you put headphones in then this won’t even cause a feedback loop that will cause the universe to end. Which is a good thing.

This all seems entirely obvious and simple now that I’ve done it. Hopefully it will one day be of vague use to someone else. Or me tomorrow morning when I’ve forgotten it.

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1. I think that’s the first time I’ve actually written YMMV, which I’ve always avoided as I always mistake it for YHWH. I thought I’d share that.