Anyway, all that aside, I had been convinced that the Marmite you can buy in Canada, although it is made by the same company and in the same packaging is watered down. It’s the wrong colour for a start. Canadian Marmite looks like diarrhoea and doesn’t have the translucent inner glow of British Marmite. I thought I was going mad, why would there be a difference? Tonight, I came across some old packages of British Marmite I had nicked from a hotel in Norwich in 2003 so I finally had a comparison.

Firstly… Hotel packets of British Marmite:

(Yes, I know the sell-by date is 2005, we will ignore that. It’s not like Marmite changes over time).

Now Canadian Marmite:

(You can tell it’s Canadian, it has English and French labels, so no cheating here).

Now some anaemic toast:

(Yeach, do people really eat toast this colour?)

And now, the Marmite on a knife:

I may as well have stopped here really – It’s obvious that they are completely different. In the interests of Science, however…

The Marmite on toast:

I have no idea WHY Canadian Marmite is so completely different. It costs pretty much the same in Canada as it does in Britain. It doesn’t taste bad, it’s just a little weaker and you have to spread a lot more; plus there is that whole bodily fluid thing going on with it. People who may claim that the 2003 Marmite is blacker because it is old, well you will just have to trust me. I could have used the British Champagne Marmite which is just as black but that wouldn’t have been like-for-like.

There is no conclusion to this. I just figured that rather than waste a posting ranting about Google I may as well expose this curious Marmite Conspiracy.

So let’s pretend for a moment that Google isn’t a great encompassing blob of an alien life form and it is in fact different organisations some of which I can be nice about and let’s ponder Picasa.

I have been using Picasa from the start – I don’t know why, it’s not very popular to use Picasa, especially for somebody who doesn’t like Google. I should probably be using Flickr or Deviantart like all the cool kids do but I like Picasa desktop and I like the way it talks to Picasa Web Albums and I like the way Picasa Web Albums are nice and easy to use. But there is more.

Firstly, my Picasa crashed a few weeks ago. I was not happy, I use my Picasa a lot on my laptop for trying to keep tabs on what photos I have on here that I haven’t moved to the Desktop and the huge photo archive I have. Every time I loaded it, it crashed and told me to send a crash report – As long as I didn’t hit “OK” it would carry on working so that was good but I submitted a crash report anyway.  I wasn’t expecting anything, I submit Microsoft crash reports on a weekly basis and have never had any feedback at all but apparently the Picasa team actually read theirs. and a nice chap called Fernando Corrado asked me to test a new version which promptly crashed too. Eventually after 2 days of trying new versions and tweaking things the Picasa people discovered I had a screwed up installation of Quicktime that was causing some previews to die and created a fix. My Picasa now works properly again and it is nice to see such a quick response for what is really, free software.

Anyway, armed with a working Picasa and being generally impressed so far with the new face recognition, I decided to let Picasa run riot over my desktop.  I started it about 48 hours ago now and it claims to be 14% of the way through recognising faces (which is odd because 4 hours ago I restarted it and it claimed to be 21% of the way through).

It is sloooowly indexing 3 terabytes of disk on a 3.5ghz Pentium and has found just under 5,100 folders full of photos. It has found over 1,500 photos of me now ranging over 25 years, some of which have me wearing glasses, funny hats and in one, a Pippi Longstocking wig and a diamond fairy tiara (Hey I get bored in Wal*Mart sometimes). Every time I look at it, it has dug up more and more obscure photos of people with terrifying accuracy and it is still going strong. It also seems quite good at sharing the facial information (via my Gmail account I assume) between my laptop and the Desktop. I am deliberately avoiding asking what Google will do with the huge amount of data I am giving it but I am pretty sure now Google could track me pretty well with its hidden spy cameras since it even recognised me in my tinfoil helmet. Damn.

(Why wouldn’t Picasa let me link that from my Picasa album? Weird)

I can’t find much wrong with it – There are some pretty useless filters in it (why would I want to find all purple photos, or all orange photos?) and some seemingly useful filters missing. One really useful thing would be for it to be able to detect naked photos  (ok, let’s call it a porn filter). There are very few good tools for detecting porn by flesh percentage and *ah hem* “body features” on Windows – Hyperdyne’s Snitch and Media Detective are the only two I can think of and they cost more than I paid for my copy of Vista. It is a feature many people need and want so go on Google, add it please?I suspect all the tools are in there, although please… It will freak me out if you start being able to identify people without faces, that is going a little too far ok?

And now for the downside. Don’t worry Picasa, this isn’t about you, I have nothing but praise for you today and this weblog entry would have stopped here if I hadn’t needed to register a Gizmo5 account for Jess today.

I merrily browsed to http://gizmo5.com only to be redirected to http://www.google.com/gizmo5/ and told:

Gizmo5 Has Been Acquired by Google
New user signup has been suspended and will return when we re-launch.
To receive information about the re-launch please enter your email address.

This is not useful… I needed a Gizmo5 account today and now Google own it I assume that the useful “Forward to Skype” feature will end up broken since Skype are in the business of selling Skypein numbers and won’t want Google Voice numbers supplying this for free. I assume it will also create a mess because Google Voice is only available in the US and Gizmo was available everywhere. Plus of course, it’s a pain since I wanted an account today dammit! Grrrrr.

On the plus side, this means I didn’t have to write a Weblog entry that was full of praise for The Evil Empire.  Got to take some good out of everything I guess.

(I also wonder why WordPress wouldn’t allow me to have that last line in a paragraph by itself… This thing has a mind of its own I swear)

It’s quite simple really… North American toilets just aren’t made as a comfortable place to read. They are too low and it seems offputting and potentially perilous to be quite so physically close to all that water in the bowl.

In England people have traditionally retreated to the bog to sit and read and get away from the other people in the house. It’s sometimes the only privacy they ever get. People started to read on the toilet because we tended to use ripped up newspapers to wipe our frozen botties in outside loos. It gave us something to do whilst we were trying to shiver out a poo in the wind and rain and even though now our toilets tend to be inside and somebody invented Andrex¹ the reading habit has carried on and no English toilet² would be complete without a pile of toilet books. The upshot of this is that North Americans have never been exposed to books like “The Book of Heroic Failures” (volumes 1, 2 and 3), “The World’s top 20 Serial Killers”, “Not a Lot of People Know That” (by the esteemed Mr Caine) nor in fact, any Gyles Brandreth books at all.

You know… This is probably why Americans don’t have pub quizzes too. It’s all starting to make sense now.

¹: Does anyone else still object to the slogan “240 sheets per roll”? It’s not true, at best you can get about 30. If you are a vegetarian, your mileage may vary.

²: Note, toilet, not bathroom, the toilet has the throne position here not the bath – And come to think of it, most American bathrooms don’t even have a bath, especially the ones in cafes – What sort of a rip off is that? Grrr!

³: Did you spot that I moved from they to we mid-posting? I can’t be bothered to correct it since it amused me.

Duh?

I am not sure I think too much of the jokes, but it’s a nice touch.

Anyway,  I saw some of St Ivel’s new Omega-3 milk, reduced to 40p in Tesco last week so I decided that I may as well try it.

St Ivel, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that what milk really needs, is added Omega-3. Of course, being moderately sane I figured that they would make this tasteless but apparently, I was wrong.

The first thing I did with it was to make a Latte – I was still being naive here and I thought the fishy taste was just my imagination but then I had a pint of the stuff, cold and fresh. It tasted like herring in a milk sauce! I am not exaggerating, it really did.

I checked… I didn’t believe it so I took a photo of it because I knew you wouldn’t believe me either. St Ivel got perfectly good milk, straight from a perfectly happy and innocent cow, and then squeezed the innards of a fish into it.

I don’t think I can say any more, this is just madness! Mind you, the cats love it.

** Update: That last statement was a lie, they were just being polite because I was watching them. I just went back into the kitchen and the rest of has been left untouched by a pair of greedy felines who will eat just about anything; alive or dead.

I have made up a sign, so that he knows that I am onto him, but it doesn’t seem to have worked. He’s still here.

There is nothing on the Internets about ridding your house of Mark Wahlberg so I am having to somewhat play this by ear. I am not sure what his natural predators are but I know that Bill Hicks is one. Unfortunately he is dead but then I realised I could just disguise somebody else as Bill Hicks and that may well scare him off. Whilst I am at it, I may as well bring in some more troops, so I got together Mark Harmon, Chuck Norris and MacGyver to command an army. Of course, I have to find them an army, but I have something in mind… I shall make them an army of Jungle Animals and Monkeys!

I present to you… My General Staff.

And, their army:

Tonight they will seek out Mark Whalberg and remove him from my house. I am afraid I cannot post any more details, I have been sworn to secrecy. This is, after all… War!

To get 59 monkeys, I have had to buy 9,440 tea bags at a cost of about 165 quid. The tea alone takes up a few square metres of space. But hey! They are handmade, and in England too, that’s got to be something right?

For those who have been lucky enough to avoid my monkey obsession, these are the little monkeys being given away with special packs of PG-Tips but he was originally not a PG-Tips monkey, he escaped from the long since failed OnDigital TV Adverts just after they became ITV Digital and crashed horribly, taking Monkey with them. Monkey became a cult advertising hero and for the first time I can think of, another company bought the rights to him and ressurected an advertising campaign for a completely different product. The OnDigital monkeys became quite valuable, selling on eBay for about 100 quid each and for a short time, they made the Sidekick mini-monkeys but that stopped due to licencing problems I think. I have one of those and Carolyn has his only known relative.

http://www.pgtips.co.uk/freemonkey/

For more, and watch the advert, it’s great You can find the older adverts on Youtube.

Isn’t he cute! Can you see why I need 60 of them now? I am going to try and get one of those fairground claw machines for them to live in.

Anyway, I figure I owe you something so this week I will present How to Hack a Stanley Yankee Screwdriver in glorious digital kodachrome. The Stanley Yankee is one of those screwdrivers that you push in and it twists itself in the direction that you set; they are useful for doing things without people hearing you, unlike those pesky noisy electric things and they are just generally cool things. One of the problems with the Yankee though is that the bits are expensive and as far as I know there is no interchangeable tip system so – I made one.

The standard flathead bit looked like a good start since it already had a taper in the shaft which would save a little bit of cutting. The aim was to create a tapered 1/4 inch square drive on the end so that a bit changer could be fitted.

Case hardened steel is no match for my Dremel and a sodding great vice! Anyway, it needs cutting off at the neck.

Eventually, with time and some effort, it’ll fall off. Happens to us all in the end. You need to keep this bit in case you were wondering:

You need to taper the end now – Luckily two sides are already done as part of the flathead so just match these up on the other side to make a nice square.

With luck, the 1/4 inch bit will fit onto the end nicely – A bloody big hammer makes it fit better though.

And just to prove it still looks cute – Here’s the end product.

There. Now don’t say I don’t occasionally post something useful!

Today I turned my mind to the issue of car thieves. Contrary to popular opinion, deterring car thieves isn’t a problem; all you have to do is to drive a peice of shit that none of them would be seen dead in. A yellow Citroen AX with a one litre engine is pretty good since they won’t even steal it as a quick ride home, it would generally be quicker to walk. No no, Theft Deterrent is so 20th Century, this century should be all about Theft Retribution.

The idea is so simple, I am amazed all cars don’t have one. All you do is to fit a couple of Magnetrons into the driver’s seat (a magnetron is the thing that cooks things in your microwave oven) at the points where the car thief is in closet contact with the car seat and have it so that unless it is disabled, the magnetrons start up with the car engine. It is a nice cosmic convenience that the most boilable parts of the car thief’s body also happen to be in the places where he is in closest contact with the seat but you could also put one just underneath the scrotum should you be feeling mischevious. I was thinking something like this:

I haven’t done any field tests yet, so I am not sure how quickly the car thief would actually notice their insides being boiled. It may be possible for them to get out of the car before they actually died. One problem I can see is that when they explode in the enclosed space it will be rather messy to clean up but we can address that by putting the devices on a timer linked to a weight sensor on the seat. Nicely cooked, as opposed to completely obliterated. For those readers who are interested in eating the heart of their enemies, this should also be a major selling point.

I shall be approaching companies with my new invention shortly, I can see the letters of thanks and wonder pouring in already!