bygjohn's blog

It's not often these days I get worked up about an audio product. My main stereo in the living room has been pretty much static in terms of configuration for over a decade, I think, mainly got together when I was in my mad hi-fi nut phase. Which lasted about 30 years, to be honest, and even now I'm picky about audio. But basically I got to the point where the law of diminishing returns set in big time, and could have ended up spending vast amounts of money for only small increases in sound quality.

Anyway, these days I do nearly all my listening with an iPod, even at home. And due to health issues a lot of that home listening takes place in the bedroom using an Apple iPod Hi-Fi speaker dock (a sadly underrated product IMHO: it's really very good indeed). Listening in the living room has been rather limited, especially as my current iPod Classic sounds a bit thin and feeble through my stereo via an Apple dock (previous 5.5G sounded better, but half the capacity and still sounded a little muddy a lot if the time). But it sure beats excavating CDs, vinyl and tapes!

So I got all excited when I read about the Pure dock. Instead of taking the analogue line-out from the iPod's dock connector, it extracts the digital stream and either provides a digital connection for external DACs or uses its own high-quality DAC to provide an analogue output for non-digital amps like mine. Either way it bypasses the iPod's internal DAC and analogue output stage, essentially using the iPod as a purely digital transport. And it does all this for less than £80, instead of the several hundred that such things have cost up to now.

So, a quick trip to Amazon and a wait for delivery later, and here it is plugged into my stereo as of yesterday afternoon. And WOW! This is seriously good. Even with my mostly low bitrate lossily compressed files (ie AAC and MP3), the grand plan to re-rip my CDs to lossless not having happened yet. Great news, as most of my recent acquisitions have been downloads rather than CD purchases (eMusic sub accounts for most).

Everything sounds much meatier and in focus, bass is more evident but nice and tight, everything sounds much more solid. My stereo sounds much more like itself. Best £80 I've spent in a long time.

Reading the reviews around the net, including a long thread on the Head-Fi site, it seems that you need to cough up several hundred quid to beat the Pure's internal DAC, but if you do it can beat some seriously expensive CD players when using lossless files.

If you use a dock to connect your iPod to a good stereo system it's definitely worth a shot. NB it only works with more modern iThings which can do the digital output thing, which includes iPod Classics, most Nanos, iPod Touches and iPhones.

Oh, and it does video out, too: SD via composite, S-Video or component. Haven't tested that yet, much too busy grooving to the audio at the moment!

Well it's not often I post about cooking, but I've just had a minor epiphany!

By a rather roundabout route starting with being inspired by reading Robert Van Gulik's Judge Dee novels (detective novels set in ancient China), I got interested in kimchi, which seems to be something approaching Korea's national dish. It's spiced, fermented, pickled cabbage, and is consumed in vast quantities, along with a myriad variants involving other vegetables and ingredients.

So I thought I'd have a go at making some, as it's not available commercially around here. Here I hit the first problem: recipes for kimchi mostly assume you're already addicted to the stuff and want to make huge quantities. Also they tend to include ingredients that are just as unavailable around here as manufactured kimchi, with little guidance as to suitable substitutes. Not only that, but traditional kimchi seems to be a bit of a palaver to make.

Then I found Maangchi's web site. Not only does she show you how to make kimchi in the traditional way, but she covers alternative ingredients and also has this easy and quick recipe for what she calls Emergency Kimchi - ie you can make it quickly, use ordinary cabbage if you can't get what we in the UK call Chinese Leaves (Napa Cabbage to the Americans), it uses fewer specialised ingredients and she suggests alternatives in the comments:

Maangchi's Emergency Kimchi

From which you can tell it's OK to use Thai fish sauce (easy to find here) instead of the Korean variety, and the only problem ingredient left was the Korean hot chilli flakes. Luckily another recipe I found suggested using hot chilli paste, which again is easy to get here:

David Lebovitz's Kimchi Recipe

So, I set to this morning. I used 60ml Thai fish sauce, 60ml hot chilli paste, two small bulbs of garlic, two small carrots julienned, four spring onions, 1 tablespoon (15ml) sugar, and added about 5cm of fresh ginger to Maangchi's ingredients for the paste. (It's worth noting here that Maangchi also has suggestions for alternatives to fish sauce for vegetarians.)

I used a whole Chinese Leaf cabbage, salted as directed, combined the paste ingredients, rinsed the cabbage, mixed it into the paste and packed the results into recycled takeaway containers. It took me about an hour because I'm slow in the kitchen, so the cabbage had about 30 minutes salting while I made the paste, and the paste was probably a bit too liquid due to using the chilli paste rather than dry flakes, but I reckon it's OK for a first attempt.

Maangchi says it's fine to eat it fresh, so I decided I'd try the small amount that hadn't fitted into my main container for lunch with some brown rice cooked with a few vegetables. It had been marinating for about three hours by the time I tried it.

Wow! It's absolutely gorgeous! I can see how it's got a whole nation addicted - I tried a bit while the rice was cooking and really wanted to scoff the lot. I'm currently exercising superhuman self-control so that the main container stays untouched for at least the next 24 hours so I can see what it's like once it's started fermenting.

One thing is for sure: I'll be making it again. Even if I don't like it once it's fermented, it's so delicious fresh that I want more!

Earlier today (2/6/11 - posting delayed as MyOpera is down) I registered my personal list with the BBC's Desert Island Discs site (there's a deadline if 14.00 BST tomorrow). It was quite an interesting exercise, and I'm not sure my list would be the same tomorrow or the day after, but here is today's version, for what it's worth.

These aren't really my all-time "favourite" tracks - I'm never sure what that really means, to be honest, but more of a useful selection if I were to be stranded on such an island, to help with my emotional and spiritual well-being, if I had to be limited to 8 tracks. Particularly interesting is the absence of any full-blown heavy metal or real reggae, though they are sort of covered by the selections.

1. Klaus Schulze - Bellistique (Live) *Favourite*

2. The Slits - Heard it through the grapevine (12" B-Side, Cut CD)

3. Joy Division - Atmosphere (12" single, Heart and soul CD)

4. New Order - Everything's gone green (12" single, Substance CD)

5. System 7 - Alpha Wave (Plastikman remix, full version) (CD single)

6. Comsat Angels - After the rain (Fiction)

7. Led Zeppelin - In my time of dying (Physical graffiti)

8. Yes - Close to the edge (Close to the edge)

Why?

Klaus Schulze, because there had to be a bit of Berlin School electronica in there, and this track has a combination of all the great things I love about Schulze's work: the semi-hypnotic sequencing, extended soloing, grand washes of synth textures etc. For those unfamiliar with the show, the favourite here is the one you'd keep if you had to save just the one from the waves.

The Slits, as it combines one of the best Motown songs with a dub sensibility, so two for the price of one!

Joy Division, because they were wonderful, and this is fantastic.

New Order, because it's great to dance to and energise yourself, and I'd appreciate it's ability to give me a kick up the pants if I start to mope.

System 7, because it's energising and healing in one, and it reminds me of a period when I did a lot of Gabrielle Roth Five Rhythm dancing (it's great for Chaos).

Comsat Angels, because it gives me hope.

Led Zeppelin, because they were my favourite band in my younger days (maybe still are), and I want this played at my funeral. I love the slide guitar and Plant's singing.

Yes, because it's positive and oddly good to sing along to, though what the lyrics mean is mostly beyond me!

The Beeb's survey doesn't seem to include the book choices, but here are today's for me:

Swap the bible for abbreviated Chenrezig sadhana (it'd be good to do some meditation to keep myself together on the island, and I have a particular fondness for Chenrezig practice, though I hardly ever do any).

Extra book: Iain M Banks - Excession (?) - tough choice, this, but I seem to be able to read this one over and over again and still find new bits, and it makes me laugh in places.

Much to my amazement, Cheshire East council has actually come up with a sensible recycling scheme.

The previous Crewe+Nantwich one has been a strangely defective mess (eg no glass collection, incomprehensible paper collection schedule, all sorts of limitations about what's suitable). Alternatives seem to result in a plethora of bins and an even more confusing collection schedule, but our new scheme actually expands the range of stuff we can recycle at the doorstep to nearly everything but textiles and food waste and does it with just three bins.

They seem to have cottoned on to the fact that if you want people to do this stuff, it needs to be easy. So we have a bin for garden waste, another for non-recyclables and the third for all recyclables. These get sorted at the depot, mostly by machine, and don't need to be over-processed - ie rinsed, not completely cleaned, labels and lids still on. This appeals to me as I'm firmly of the belief that machines should be doing the work, in fact we should all be sat by the pool while the robots do everything by now... :-)

The recyclables bin will take nearly all plastic, paper, cardboard, glass, cartons, cans and aerosols. I reckon about half (maybe more) of what I currently have to put in the non-recycle bin will now be in the recyclable bin, and for the first time there should be more recyclable waste than non-recyclable.

All this, and a simple collection schedule: recyclables and garden waste one week, non-recyclables the next, alternating fortnightly on the same day.

What I really want to know now, is why it's taken so long to come up with something this sane.

Not sure why I like this so much, but I do. Blurry photo of police car taken on iPhone with SlowShutter and then processed with Infinicam.

(The upload attempt thing refers to multiple abortive attempts to use the new version of iBlogger, which was driving me potty yesterday: don't mind things being changed as long as the changes are optional. In this case it went from a great app that worked well to an unusable app that worked horribly, with no apparent way to get it to work how it used to. Spent a large chunk of last night fiddling and ended up reverting to the old version - and that didn't go smoothly either!)