This week was a bit awkward and rather too long but on the other hand it included rather a lot of very good food. During one meal I wondered if there were already any Flickr groups for photos of vegan food, as they’d be a good way to show off particular dishes, or restaurants, and would help answer the frequent “so what do you eat then?” questions.

I’m tempted to start a Manchester vegan photo group but there are (of course) already many vegan photo groups on Flickr, such as:

• Vegan Foods - bought or homemade
• Vegan Bento
• Vegan Restaurant Guide
• Vegan Lunchbox
• Vegan Pancakes and Waffles

I’ve just posted a comment on an earlier post mentioning that I’d recently seen a narrowboat named after Lyra, a character from His Dark Materials. Out of curiosity I searched Google to see if anyone else had mentioned it and found that the crew have a weblog! Here’s the entry for the day I saw the boat. Narrowboat Lyra is travelling around Britain’s canals from August 2006 to August 2007. The weblog is a fascinating diary of their journey and has plenty of photos.

I see canal boats going past everyday and grew up near a canal but apart from a couple of brief trips on canal boats at The Black Country Museum I’ve never really travelled by narrowboat. I think a narrowboat holiday might become an ambition.

Manchester has a lot of dodgy looking locks that would seem to make canal travel rather slow and tedious but we still gets lots of cheerfully crewed boats chugging through. Maybe I’m just too lazy.

Link: Narrowboat Lyra

So then, it seems that:

It’s OK to bomb a state TV station (killing journalists) because they were showing propaganda (Serbia’s RTS) It’s OK to bomb independent TV stations (killing journalists) because they were showing propaganda. (Al Jazeera)

But it’s not OK to legally withdraw a broadcast license for a TV station (without killing the journalists) that shows propaganda. And was involved in a coup against a democratically elected government. (RCTV) Doing that would be terrible blow against freedom of speech! (RCTV can now only be seen on cable)

This ‘act of revenge’ by Chavez is years after the attempted coup, so it would definitely be a dish served cold. How long would an Al Qaeda funded and staffed TV station remain on air in the USA or UK?

I’m not one of the many people who idolise Hugo Chavez (I think he’s a demagogue and thug) but there seems to be a rather disproportionate media outcry against his withdrawal of a broadcast license for RCTV. Even BoingBoing is joining in.

[When NATO bombed RTS I was working in a British TV studio building. Did the RTS technicians and hairdressers deserve to die any more than the ones I passed in the corridor? Not renewing a broadcast license is rather mild in comparison.]

‘His Dark Materials: Northern Lights’ trailer! Woo! (Well, it’s ‘The Golden Compass’ now, following the book’s American title, and not quite the same as the book, but definitely Woo all the same.)

It looks good, but I’m still concerned: I’ve been wondering how they’ll convincingly show a talking polar bear (lets face it, they don’t have the jaw, teeth lips, etc for it it look “normal”) and I’m still not convinced from the trailer. Where are all the demon animals? I thought the Texan balloonist was younger… But I’m still eagerly looking forward to this. At the very least it should encourage more people to enjoy the books. Pullman himself has said “All the important scenes are there and will have their full value.” Fingers crossed.

(Via His Dark Materials from Ben Hammersley) [I too will be very surprised if they get away with showing one particular small scene in the third book. Although I’m hoping it might make it to a DVD extended edition :-)]

The lights at home did some disturbing flickering last week, so I’ve started thinking about replacing my dead UPS.

A basic UPS can handle about 400w. My PC’s power supply can provide up to 450w, but how much does it actually use?

I’ve now got a gadget that connects between a plug and mains socket and gives a live reading of the watts being consumed. Power usage on the PC ranges from 90w to 120w. It was fascinating to see power consumption rise while email was being downloaded. We tend to think of the virtual activity within computer networks being completely distinct from the real world, but in reality even an email attachment has a carbon footprint.

There was one disturbing discovery. The PSU is a recently bought Antec HE, an ATX2.2 ‘high efficiency’ power supply. It gives off less heat, and has an 85% efficiency. This is all very good, and might well account for the lower than expected power usage. Unfortunately the power meter showed that when the PC was turned off using the soft-power button, and should have been almost completely off, it was still consuming 20w! Twenty watts is quite a lot of power for what I assumed was a small circuit to detect a powerup request. To put it in context, a Nintendo Wii games console uses less than 20w when being used to play a game. The PC was doing nothing.

I normally avoid ‘standby’ modes and had no idea I was wasting so much power. I’ve now set the PC to boot when ‘power is restored’ and then switch it off at the ‘hard’ switch too.

While the general trend is for more products to become veggie friendly, even vegan, Mars have changed their recipes to include rennet, stomach juice from animals. From 1 May 2007 many of their most common pseudo-chocolates are no longer veggie.

To their credit Mars did contact The Vegetarian Society to warn them, so at least they are being fair and honest about this.

Link: ScouseVeg » Mars confectionary no longer vegetarian

(Footrant: I stopped eating any confectionary that wasn’t organic or fair trade over ten years ago. Mass-market chocolate production involves slavery, pollution and violence. Vegetarians should avoid Big Chocolate products because they’re made by child slaves, not just because they’re made with rennet. Most Mars, Cadbury and Nestle ‘chocolate’ products are utter junk anyway.)

This is a photo I took today of a pike in a Manchester canal.

Before spotting the pike I’d been reading ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’, in which the main character’s ‘true name’ is Ged. According to Wikipedia an old English name for pike is "ged". A nice coincidence.

Many years ago I got to eat some pike caught in a Warwickshire river, cooked with lemon juice. It tasted like river mud with lemon juice.

(I’ve just remembered how much sewage ended up in that river. Bleugh.)

Oh dear. I actually want to get this. Of my own free will.

Link: THE DOG ISLAND

Do not judge me harshly.

Update: Link to screenshots and YouTube (Flash) video especially for Anglo-Hawaiians who complain about WMV videos.

Manchester Vegetarian and Vegan Group held a chocolate tasting event and asked me to take a few photos.

In the end I took 105 pictures, with about 64 usable ones - I’m a point-and-clicker rather than a Serious Photographer With A Serious Camera.

The chocolate was great, ranging from expensive fancy, handmade stuff to vegan white chocolate and Jaffa Cake clones. All the chocolate had been generously donated by a long list of companies. There was a huge pile of rather good vegan fudge, raw chocolate tea, cakes and marzipan bars. The chocolate fountain decided to behave more like one of those volcanic mud pools in New Zealand, bubbling away rather than flowing, but it worked well enough.

If you’re a veggie in Manchester then I would recommend joining MVVG’s mailing list - they’re a nice group, the list often has interesting and useful info and you’ll get the opportunity to experience all-you-can-eat vegan chocolate events :-)

(I’m still humming the music from Homer’s chocolate daydream)

Link: MVVG Chocolate Tasting

Linux : the myth and the reality Ouch. I think Sam’s been a little too harsh, but Novell’s video was a bit… awkward. I like the point (there’s more than just Windows vs Mac) but in an advert with a dull, inadequate Windows person and smug hipster Mac person, the Linux person should really have had a beard, worn a Think Geek shirt, and not actually said anything. Why have two stereotypes when you can have three?

Link: All three of Novell’s Linux adverts, with background info