Mostly This:

Angry Bird’s Flapjacks with rice (uk translation egg custard slices)

I made this recipe from the angry birds cookbook with the kids:

The book is great fun, but very american.  So a cup of flour = 110grams (4 oz) 

and 1 cup of liquid = 8 fluid oz (1/2 an american pint).

The flapjacks turned out to be nothing of the sort, but were delicious all the same, I’d do again with some nutmeg and cinnamon, and serve with some spun sugar.  The kids seems to like it once they realised it was just a custard pudding.  

My friend Thayer’s tweets this morning reminded me to load up some Nokia Music Radio Playlists, it’s a sweet free app, thats ‘very like’ Last.fm. The downloadable playlists are a major bonus when travelling/commuting etc. It’s basically radio without the adverts or presenters, a nice alternative to when your music is all a bit ‘last upload’ 

The Symbian iPlayer app was the only one that had this feature, download the shows at home, watch on the move. I hope the WP7 iPlayer app will continue this killer feature.

Angry Books: I went along to the launch of Rovio Books at Nokia House this week, the star title being the Angry Birds Cook Book - a lovely illustrated book of egg related recipies from the games pigs.  But they also launched some activity books called ‘Doodle Books’ as you can see these went down VERY well with my kids, as well as the cook book, which was pored over by my oldest.  

The popularity of Junior Bake Off and Angry Birds making this a topical delight.

The books are out now, at amazon and several other retailers.

X Factor: Likes <> Votes?

Last year I looked at the number of likes in facebook for each of the act’s pages

http://mostlythis.com/post/1619576267/whos-going-to-win-x-factor-does-facebook-give

The correlation between likes and voting off was very close last year, this year there is less granularity between the acts. with two way out in front - Frankie and Janet. Frankie has already been in the bottom two. Sophie, midtable has gone, But theres not much between the acts, and the numbers are way down.

Last year several acts had around 100,000 or more, this year only Janet does.

Apathy seems to have set in a little.

Janet 232,684

Frankie 78,461

The Risk 35,592

Micha 35,022

Marcus 32,485

Sophie 31,969

Craig 28,760

Little Mix 24,826

Johnny 23,709

Sami 15,428

Kitty 14,079

Nu Vibe 13,550

Byron has taken it up another level with the Grizz-Mo burger, its a burger with Welsh Raebit on top.

What’s not to love.

It’s for Movember, the month where growing a Tom Selek is suddenly ok.  Well, it’s always ok, but you have an excuse :) 50p from each Grizz-Mo burger goes to Movember, and if like me you are taking part, from the 7th to the 20th you can get a free burger EVERY DAY from 3-6pm. I feel a lot of late lunches coming on.

http://www.byronhamburgers.com/movember/

My Movember Page, should you wish to donate :)

Just what are QR codes useful for? Machines, not humans. QR codes were developed for manufacturing, so machines could identify and handle objects.  And that’s where they work, and work well. Where they don’t work is when an artificial step of human interaction is forced, its always  one, two or more unnecessary steps for a human to do, mimicking a machine.  

Berg just launched a film showing some of there thoughts for extending that machine automation into the everyday world.

Clocks for Robots

One of the key thoughts I take away is, let the machines talk to each other - minimise human action.  I particularly like the qr code reader that hides the camera display - which is unnecessary.  Of course theres lots of other potential machine communication possible outside of human detection, thinks like NFC and scanning codes requires a human intent, theres other possibilities such as audio signals, radio waves, etc that may well allow devices to hear where they are too.  All these time and place signals will give your actions a real context and linked to cloud - an index of actions and objects around you.

As devices get more powerful the ability to recognise objects and decode the real world will only get close to human abilities, negating the need for explicit markings and digital signatures. 

Rugby Apps: As you all know its rugby world cup time, there is an official app on Android and Apple App Store, but whats around for symbian? Well oddly theres a Nokia Rugby App, it’s a results based app, rather than a news/match report app, but if it’s live scores/results and tables you need ‘on the go’ it seems very comprehensive. Price FREE. Get It Here.

Also being pushed on ovi store is Planet Rugby

Planet Rugby is a news site and this app is a feed of news - categorised by teams / competition.  So between the two apps you have a comprehensive set of content for all rugby fans, during and beyond the rugby world cup.

A tale of two burgers: One real, One fantasy. After yesterdays Uncle Sam from Byron delighting all taste buds. The second revivalist is the McDonalds 1955 Burger, I ordered without bacon, as I’m not sure bacon is a classic burger ingredient, and to ensure a freshly cooked burger to evenly compete with Byron. At £3.59 its less than half the price of the Byron Uncle Sam, but about 1/4 the value. As you can see what you get is a sorry sight, and somewhat unlike the promotional photo.

To be fair it didn’t taste as bad as it looks, but was very dry and over cooked, the burger is larger than a normal quarter-pounder, but much thinner, so it retains no moisture.  It reminds me of the inedible big tasty, but much improved, as the ‘smokey sauce’, similar to big mac sauce, and cooked onions at least added some flavour. The previous ‘M’ Burger was a much greater success.   This one felt that it wasn’t very well prepared, there was next to no lettuce in it, and a tiny amount of onion. Consistency and portion control is something that mcdonald’s is normally good at.

I would avoid and stick with the big mac or quarter if you are swinging by a mcdonalds.