Ingredients for the topping

• 4 medium onions, peeled and chopped in four
• 225g piquillo peppers
• 750g minced beef
• 1 tomato
• 2tbsp tomato purée
• 1 tbsp of salt
• A handful of chopped parsley

Ingredients for the base

• 1 small cup of oil (I used 3:1 vegetable oil to olive oil)
• 1 small cup of water
• 1 tbsp of salt
• 1kg plain flour + some for rolling

Ingredients to serve

• A handful of chopped, fresh parsley
• A lemon

Set the oven to 220ºC and have two baking sheets on standby.

Blend the ingredients for the topping together until of a mixed, finely diced texture. Then, with your hands (or a strong spoon if you prefer) mix the blended ingredients into the minced meat well. You want to have an even, fine mix, but not to obliterate the meat so do not blend it. Leave to one side.

For the base, sift in the flour and salt into a large bowl. Make a well and pour in the oil and water. Mix and kneed well and leave to rest.

Dust a surface and prepare yourself for 60 minutes of non-stop activity. Take a walnut sized piece of dough, and roll it out as thin as you can, put it onto one of the baking trays and then spread out a tablespoon of the topping mixture as thin as you can over the surface. Put the tray in the oven for six minutes, and then start on the other tray. Keep making the lahmacun and rotating the trays through the oven. You should be able to make at least 20 reasonable lahmacun from the two mixtures.

Once cooked, they can be eaten immediately or by reheating under a hot grill for around 30 seconds. Squirt over some lemon juice, add some parsley and roll before eating still hot!

Cooked Lahmacun

This Turkish (or let’s say ‘regional’) pizza-style dish is absolutely delicious. It varies a little from country to country, but is almost always served fresh and cheaply as fast food or in restaurants alike.

Warning: This toy contains magnets or magnetic components. Magnets sticking together or becoming attached to a metallic object inside the human body can cause serious or fatal injury. Seek immediate medical help if magnets are swallowed or inhaled.

Woah! First off, ‘magnets sticking together … can cause serious or fatal injury‘. Really!? Maybe they meant something I’m missing, but this seems very unlikely. Perhaps that’s why the beams can’t cross in Ghostbusters.

Then there’s ‘magnets … becoming attached to a metallic object inside the human body can cause serious or fatal injury.‘ Right, I guess we’re talking pacemakers and things here, that’s fair enough. But it says ‘becoming attached to a metallic object inside the human body‘. Becoming attached? How? We find out in the next sentence of the warning. Before that next sentence, however, we have ‘inside the human body‘. Only the human body? If these things an occur to a human why can’t they occur to any other animal? My cat might have a pacemaker… Besides, if there’s a good reason why I’d have a metallic object in me, there’s surely a good case to be made for my cat.

Then we have ‘Seek immediate medical help if magnets are swallowed or inhaled.‘ Who swallows a magnet? More pressingly, who swallows a magnet shaped like a chess piece? Presumably the immediate medical help is not for the removal of the magnet, but to have you sectioned. In the latter case, for inhaling magnets, I guess the medical help is having your lungs downgraded from superhuman to human again. Because, let’s be frank, to inhale a chess-piece (magnetised or otherwise) is a very intense stunt to pull off.

Unless, of course, they are just trying to make sure that you call medical assistance if you’re choking on a chess piece (which is more likely than actually inhaling it). So let me ask you this, who wouldn’t!? Who would sit and choke thinking, ‘I wish I was choking on a fish bone, because then I could call for help. But woe is me, I’ll have to just sit here and suffer’.

So, I gave this one a go… but made a few adjustments to it as follows. You will need:

• 500g minced beef
• 1 onion
• 2 carrots
• 200g peas
• 200g sweetcorn
• 2 eggs
• salt and pepper
• 1 cup (1/4 stale baguette’s worth) breadcrumbs
• 2 tbsp tomato purée

I peeled my carrots and them put them through the grating attachment of my blender, followed by the peeled onion. You can just grate the carrot and finely chop the onion, but try it my way if you have the tools! Then, grate (with the blender!) a quarter of stale baguette or so and mix with the egg, 1tbsp purée, beef and all the vegetables. Add a generous amount of salt and pepper and mix in well.

The whole mix should be a little dry, and only stick if pressed to itself; the moisture will come from the vegetables as they cook. You need to spoon the mixture into a small bread tin, or similar, but not press it down. I think this was my mistake last time: fill all the gaps but do not compress the mixture. Then, spread the remaining purée over the top of the meatloaf.

Pop the dish into a preheated oven to 180′C for 50 minutes, and serve after allowing it to rest for a few minutes with fresh salad and bread, or pretty much anything else.

You will need:

• A slow cooker
• four duck’s legs (or quarters), washed
• two onions, peeled and chopped in quarters
• five cloves of garlic, peeled
• one bottle of French cider (a nice smokey, dry cidre de Normandie is best)
• one litre of chicken stock

Start by heating up a large, heavy frying pan and put the duck legs in, fat side down. Keep the heat low, but enough to slowly render away the fat. After about 10 minutes, you should have a crisp and thin fat layer on the duck meat (the meat itself uncooked) sitting in a pan of duck fat. Take out the legs and put them into the slow cooker with all of the remaining ingredients. Switch the slow cooker to the ‘low’ setting and leave it for eight hours.

The legs will finish absolutely tender (you will have to be careful rescuing them from the stock) and just slightly pink inside. Serve them with some steamed vegetables and on some plain rice, or with an onion chutney and some fresh bread.

With the duck fat left in the original frying pan, you can store it for your Sunday roast potatoes; but the point of this was not to use it so I disposed of mine.

There are 6 million of them employed in France, that’s the population of greater London, and in 2005 they accounted for 44% of government spending. There are forms, regulations and procedures for everything, and the letter must be followed. It’s amazing that anything gets done, to be honest, but at the same time you know nothing will be left out. Having waded through the forms, photocopying, queueing, signatures, payments and photocopying, there’s photocopying. Regardless of the importance of your task to you, it makes no difference once it crosses into the French authorities – all are equal in France; in birth and intent.

I found recently that you could post your application for many things in to the authorities (often the local prefecture), and this is how I applied for my driving license here. A week passed before I received anything – it was the large A4 envelope that I had addressed and stamped for them (as requested). Within it was a small note that simply said “You can collect your license. Please bring proof of identity”. On the back of the card was the address to the local prefecture.

I couldn’t describe the pain that this caused me. I had experienced the prefecture once before, when first registering my car, and I had intended never to go there again. Last time I had queued behind 500 people, having arrived at 8.30 AM, and finally walked out at 2PM with my carte grise (a note binding me to my car). I dutily went to the prefecture, earlier this time and with a flask, and then queued until the doors opened. I was 15th in line for my driving license, and there were already 270 waiting for their cartes grises and other documents.

I got through the queues and to the booth for my license. I was handed a piece of card with a stamp badly stuck to it. Confused, I asked what it was and was told it was a present (this was the fourth word she had used that I finally understood) as I had attached one too many stamps to my envelope.

You see, this whole story is about this stamp. In a process that took weeks, required me to take a morning off work and photocopy a great many documents, and then to sign a great deal more, the process this lady followed even refunded me if I attached too many stamps to an envelope that wasn’t even required. The whole system is set up to ensure absolute and unwavering fairness and consistency, as this is the framework that the French have built for themselves since the revolution.

While the Brits are proud of their very excellent NHS, the French have a quietly perfect system. They do not mention it or boast about it because the whole world would turn up asking for a piece of it. Each individual is given a social security number and an associated social security card. The card works like a government credit card, only valid in medical institutes and only with the approval of a doctor. It works like this: you visit your preferred, approved doctor and pay them with the card. They refer you to whatever treatment and drugs you need. You go to whoever you feel provides the best service and get the treatment/drugs from them. You pay them with the card.

It allows for complete medical security, complete fairness and best of all, the survival of the fittest style competition only found in the commercial world. The government sets approved rates for treatment and so all doctors and dentists work to a predictable and comprehensible framework. They are incentivised to compete, be good, be professional, be friendly, be convenient. They manage themselves and those who don’t go out of business. It is a fantastic system, with a few minor drawbacks: everyone who comes to France as a foreigner must have either a European health insurance card, have a government agreement in place to provide like-for-like cover, or have private medical insurance. Secondly, no supermarkets can sell drugs unless they allow for an on-site pharmacy.

But for who it matters to, it works very well.

These paperwork regulations also extend into house rentals, protecting the renter and lender fully if the process is followed and paperwork provided. It covers employment, childcare, insurance, food, the sale of goods…. the list is endless, but it never fails to protect both parties equally and fully. All people do tax returns every year, and are invoiced at the end of the year for a bill that citizens in many other countries never see. This ensures that no assumptions are made about a persons situation. At all. It provides complete clarity to the government about your tax, and also to you. (It also means that everyone is fully aware that from January to March they are working for free, but after that it’s all theirs!)

But it is complex. Put it this way, I have scanned over 60 pages so far this morning, and I am less than a third of the way down my 2009 income tax return checklist. PWC in the UK wanted basically a signature and a signed sheet excusing them of any responsibility of actually making my return accurate. The French checklist started with “All previous payslips for this year and the last”, wonder through “passport”, “working contract” and “housing allowances” before getting to “quantity of baguettes bought per week” and “shoe size”.

There is a tool sent to me so that the process is “simplified” for me. The checklist is automatically generated at the end of the form-filling…. Get that, the checklist itself is so complex they felt the need to automate it. What does that say about the rest of the return?

What’s more, the “simplification” means that I am asked questions like “How much did you spend on chocolate last year?”, and then “Please indicate if you are covered under the thirteenth treaty of the 1943 agreement, part 9, article 17, page 439, paragraph 6. If so, you are not eligible for tax reductions on doggy snacks.”.

It is endlessly deep, asking about foreign money earned, the sort of house I own, my dependents, everything. At the end of it all, there is a final statement “If your total calculated tax sum is more than 50% of your earnings this year, then remember to deduct the difference”.

Finally something simple.

However, I decided it was time to rethink my home media setup and wanted to move all my music and videos onto a remote disk. While doing this, I thought I may as well reinstall the whole computer, which hasn’t been rebuilt despite being upgraded to Snow Leopard and me installing and uninstalling lots of applications. I couldn’t see any performance effects from all this, I’m just a tidy person.

But how do you reinstall a computer when your DVD drive is having a love affair with another disk?

My first plan of action was to fix the DVD drive. So, I watched some videos, read some blogs and then, eventually, decided to give it a go. First, you have to pull at the magnetic glass screen with an official screen remover (or TomTom mounting sucker, in my case). Then, you have to unscrew the aluminium casing and pull it off, not snapping the cable to the webcam/light sensor. The most fun part comes next; you unscrew and remove the actual display. I would be less scared performing surgery on myself, but as it turns out I managed to do it without destroying it or the many short cables that connect to its underside.

After all this you can unscrew the DVD drive, disconnect it (having removed the tiniest screws in the world) and then wonder how this tightly integrated, flimsy drive can be accessed without breaking it. I almost gave up, then noticed that just four small screws needed to be undone and the whole top just hinged away. Lovely. I could get right at the disk then, and was able to just take it out.

[Show as slideshow]

I carefully ensured that everything was in its place and working, and then slowly reassembed the mac. I booted it up, it made a noise that it hadn’t made for ages: silence. It felt great. I popped in a trial disk to see what would happen and it grabbed it, mounted it and everything seemed fine. I pressed eject, and it has been mounting and ejecting every three seconds during its powered life since.

Luckily, I have a nice new drive on order, costing €50 including postage from the States.

But I still wanted to reinstall my software and get going, and as I’d recently seen Remote Disk in action, I thought it couldn’t be all that hard to do. And, using it, I have successfully installed Snow Leopard from scratch using Remote Disk on an iMac.

Despite enabling the remote disk options in Terminal and following the usual tips, I still couldn’t see the Remote Disk option when I started with the option key held down.

So, I had another idea, and decided to look at installing from a USB key. It is possible, apparently, according to Maciverse. But I still had relatively little luck as I was using Windows to create the disk images. So, I ended up with a bit of a hybrid solution. I was using a Windows laptop as the DVD host, and managed to get sharing working (unusually for Apple, you have to go into the Windows Control Panel and enable the sharing, after installing the one-step sharing software). I then used the Mac to read the remote disk and directly  restore the USB key from the Remote Disk, following maciverse’s instructions otherwise.

And hey presto, I had a duplicate of the DVD installer in the form of a small and mighty USB key. I option-restarted and the disk was selectable, from where the installation proceeded as normal.

I hope this helps some other impatient mac user, who can’t wait to repair their DVD drive!

I started out by following the guide at wikiHow. It was a pretty successful batch, although a little flavourless. Since then I have adapted and changed the recipe, learning from each previous batch. I have used different starters, milks, creams and sugars and have settled on the following recipe.  I am pretty pleased with the current results, so I thought I’d share them here. I use:

• 1.5 litres of whole milk
• A pot of any good jam (strawberry works well, gooseberry was good but black cherry was not really sweet enough)
• I used one and a half pots of Activia as a starter, but now I use one of my previous week’s yoghurts

I start by setting the oven on a non-fan setting on a low heat at around 50′C. Then, I pretty much go as the guide on wikiHow states, I bring the milk to around 85′C. I don’t use a thermometer but instead go by the point at which the milk starts to froth, heating it very gently and stirring it often.

Once it starts to froth I turn off the heat and put the pan into a sink of cold water. Stirring the milk to help cool it down until pressing my wrist against it feels neutral, which is a little lower than body temperature (I guess around 35′, it works so I assume I’m right!).

For me, the oven at 50′ keeps it actually just around 40′, as the fan doesn’t bring the heat near the top into the main part of the oven. I put a tray of 12 large pots into the oven to warm.

Once the milk is at wrist-temperature I stir the pot of yoghurt before stirring it into the milk. Then I spoon one tablespoon of jam into each pot (having taken them from the oven) before topping them up with milk.

I cling-film each one to seal it and then put them back on the tray in the oven for around eight hours. Generally, I do all this while having lunch so that a) it’s not boring and b) I have eight hours ahead of me in which to incubate them. Once the yoghurts are finished I put them directly into the fridge overnight.

Doing this I generally find that the yoghurt takes another day in the fridge before it gets its normal tang, but they are perfectly creamy and edible the morning directly after incubating. The only drawback I have found is that cling-filming each pot is difficult and dull, but it’s also cheap so I put up with it.

Computers for a lot of people are just the screen, keyboard and mouse that they interface with; along with the complex and often unintuitive operating systems and software that run on them. My biggest fascination while studying was that to truly understand the computer you have to first understand the transition of an electron across a semiconductor barrier, improbable relationships, energy quanta and a variety of different elements including the very dull (but highly complex) silicon.

Building up from there you get a single transistor, which on its own is as useful as a household lighting switch. You can build these into a variety of logic gates, eventually creating processors, memories and complex control circuitry. On top of this you can start to run simple routines, make different circuits interact (which at this level is still very much in the electronics domain, with load and phase mapping and the involvement of fourrier transforms and magic numbers). On top of this you can run rudimentary ‘programs’ that can add up, subtract and shift… but not divide or multiply. You keep building through the assembler language, literally commanding the processor and being able to implement more complex mathematics.

On top of this we have languages like C, which do the same job but make it much simpler for the human in control with pre-written libraries and a syntax that doesn’t give you a headache. At this level we can start to programmatically interact with other devices, ports and streams of information. We can shade an individual pixel on the monitor red, or send a few characters to a printer. Perhaps take an input from a keyboard or mouse. Then we move onto higher level languages with their garbage collection and frameworks, making control and use of the massive resource of ‘the computer’ easy, standardised and stable.

Finally, someone can make a button which, when pressed, provides you with the words “Hello world!”. And all this overlooks the side-paths like device firmware and building the trusty BIOS or EFI.

Computing and electronics are a miracle to me and so many others, and I am absolutely convinced this is why so many people have got involved and why we have such rapid development. There is literally something for everyone in science, technology and engineering, whether they be theoretical mathematician, physicist or a business analyst. The car engine was developed and has, largely, remained as it was for a century. The improvements seen in the automotive world are nothing like those in the world of electronics, and I think it’s because people see a car moving and sort of accept “that’s it”. With electronics, while the iPod has its own little niche function, the stuff that powers it could have as easily been mechanical or driven by light. It could interface and work with a world of other systems making it better or changing it out of all recognition to be a health monitoring system.

It’s truly inspiring, for me at least. I am a member of STEMNET and the IET and I find it very easy to be an ‘ambassador’ (as is my role for the former) as I am sure you can tell. Science, technology, engineering and maths is going out of fashion in the western world, and it is very important that we at least give the new generations an opportunity to see it for what it could be and what an amazing future it could mean for them.

I will be saying more on this over at One Profession, because there is a lot more to say, but I think this is a sufficiently good overview for the casual reader!

It is a book filled with excellent information, particularly the history you were never taught, which makes it much more enjoyable to read. Thinking about it now, the concept that this might be an old school textbook in disguise was probably what made me so aprehensive, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. In addition to all the excellent information, which had something of a patriotic disdain for the country, if that’s possible, is a great wealth of fun. O’Farrell makes personal comments on his findings as he goes along, which is what made the book so interesting for me, as well as a little jokes rippling through to keep the duller histories lively.

The book, as is expressed in the title, revives the last two millenia of British history by bringing back the best and worst of each era. O’Farrell writes frankly with no fear of unveiling the controversial. He talks of what Britain went through and how it was shaped, including our ongoing relationship with the French and more modern relationship with the rest of Europe and, more recently of course, America. It is an excellent read and one I thoroughly recommend.

You can find the book on Amazon here: An Utterly Impartial History of Britain: (or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge)

I was very pleased to find that youtube isn’t just used by illiterate people abusing each other in the comments section of various pop videos, but also by academics, researchers and anyone else with a curiosity of the world around them. This particular man seems to be a legend in the making with his obsession with ties, academic one-up-manship and of course his hair. It’s funny that so many university lecturers choose to sport the crazy-scientist hair do, elevating their status in the academic society, while it was born of men who had better things to be doing with their time than fussing over their appearance.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX-gqFChAyk

Going back to the discovery of the new element, I was slightly alarmed to find that after eight days of continuous acceleration and impacts, the establishment found evidence of just two Ununquadium atoms. Either way, a remarkable achievement that of course will leave the Americans, Japanese and Europeans trying to find the next semi-stable element in the universe.

YouTube can be amazingly fruitful sometimes. I find it hard to convince the likes of my parents that it’s a resource worth visiting at least occasionally, as it is too well associated with cheap jokes and popular junk. Nonetheless, it has a significant quantity of educational videos, high quality entertainment and interesting video blogs from reputable sources, such as our man here.

Now, back to x-factor.