I seem to have accidentally acquired a new hobby.

For years I’ve been intrigued by electronics but despite my Dad being an electronic engineer (in ye olden dayes, before he started selling wine instead) I never ended up playing much with hardware. There was an incident involving a soldering iron, a broken scalextric car and me spraying molten melt all over the place, but I suspect that my overactive brain has exaggerated the importance of that in my running from electronics.

Anyways, after a chat with a former workmate (who now lives in San Francisco and has started attending Noisebridge events) I found out a couple of things – 1) That there is now a London Hackspace and 2) Mitch Altman (one of the Noisebridge founders) would be over this month to do one of his soldering workshops. So, I wandered along and learned to solder. I grabbed one of the Adafruit MiniPov3 kits, stuck it together, pinched a pair of AAs off of someone and it all worked. Which is rather cool:

It’s got a serial port on the board and the controller is an eeprom, so I see some learning to code for an Atmel microcontroller in my future.

After my success with my first project (I was even complimented on my soldering and given a quizzical look and informed that I must have done it before…) I decided to grab a shiny thing – an Arduino LoL Shield, designed by Jimmie Rodgers, who was also at the Hackspace meet to show off his kits and talk about cool things. It looks like it may well be a good ‘you will now learn to solder by constant repetition’ project…so may LEDs:

I’ve got an Arduino starter kit (an Arduino, breadboard and Big Box ‘o components) on the way and have plans to try and do shiny things with electronics. Well, I say that, but so far my only plan is to make an iPhone version of the MiniPov that will do cool things with the accelerometer. In the meantime I have another kit to put together – a scrolly LED message thing picked up from Maplin when I went in to buy a soldering iron. Unfortunately it’s not got a programmable controller, but having a friend at work who used to tinker with electronics is useful, as I now know which PIC is the code compatible programmable version…

However, the coolest thing about the entire evening for me is this – after finishing my kit and thanking Mitch for doing the class, he grinned, said “You’re ready” and handed me one of these:

Not only can I now claim to know how to solder, I can prove it – I have a badge…

I went on holiday the other week, as is (not) often my wont, and spent the time being remarkably relaxed in the mobile phone signal free idyll of Aviemore in sunny snowy Scotland. We got a lot of snow shortly after arriving, replenishing that already there, and I even had the chance to do a bit of a ski. Well, I stood on some skis and travelled from the top of Cairngorm to the bottom of the ski-slopes, but to call what I did skiing is a bit of an insult to skiers.

Anyways, I may have also found a number of things to drink and write about, and took some piccies. Here is a lovely reindeer:

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’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.

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.

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 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.

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…

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.