As I Xi It v2.3

Last night I had a bit of an off-beat dining experience, perhaps an insight into what the future holds for eating out.

I went to the recently opened Inamo on Regents Street, a stone’s throw away from the original one on Wardour Street. I think it’s a pretty safe generalisation to say that those who dine there mainly go for the experience rather than the food itself, which isn’t too bad by the way.

The main “attraction” is the interactive table menu system. Basically, the desktop is projected onto the table and you navigate the menu using a touchpad. The user interface is quite smart and simple to use, when you select an item, it projects the dish onto your plate, however, what you see is not neccessarily what you get as we very soon discovered. Along with food and drink, you can also change the backgroungd, have a look at real-time footage of what’s happening in the kitchen, play games (nothing fancy), look at local transport options, call a human waiter over and get the bill.

The thing I didn’t like about the menu system was that you couldn’t easily see what other diners in your party are ordering, it’d be useful to have a screen with an overall table order list and also to be able to see what has already been ordered.

Food was pretty good if somewhat pricey. I think the worst value for money dish we ordered was the black bean tuna, it was just three small canapé sized portions for £7, that’s like £2.33 a bite! It was good, but not £7 good.  I’d have to put it up there with the 7 salted prawns (gambas a la plancha) for €8 in Madrid (they weren’t even deshelled!) in my list of all time dining extortions. My favourite dish was the pork ribs, they were finger lickin’ good, I just wished there were more of them, “only” £6.75, a bargain in comparison.

Who knows, perhaps the next technological advance in novel dining will be robot waiters. At least there’d be no need to feel bad for not tipping them.

I thought it was about time I retired my elderly headtorch of 10 years and pick up something new, shiny and super bright. Seeing as it’s something I rarely purchase, I figured I might as well go for the upper end of the Petzl Tikka series and settled on the aptly named XP 2.

LED technology really has come along in leaps and bounds in the last decade. The light on the old one (original Tikka) is like candlelight compared to the new one. I don’t even know what the lumens on the old one is. I think it was at a time before lumens were the industry standard for comparing brightness.

There’s a whole cornucopia of features in the new one. It has white and red lights. The white light has high, economy and strobe mode, while the red light just has one light level and strobe. Great for aurora shooting and alerting others to where you are should you get lost. The new one also has an integrated whistle on the headband, takes more effort to blow than some regular whistles though.

New toy

Face off

Whistle

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about getting a full backpack which would be able to carry both of my largest lenses. Seeing as I quite liked the back-opening of the Flipside 200 and Primus, the Flipside 400 seemed the logical choice. It had fallen in price on Amazon and seeing as Chirstmas was around the corner, I thought, why not?

I got it in a very understated pine green colour which looks quite at home in both urban and rural environments. Makes a change from all the black camera bags out there.

Being a Lowepro bag, the padding’s ample and like the Primus, it has a comfy waistbelt. It seems to fit me better than the Primus with a shorter back length. I quite like how there’s a back opening compartment to keep pricey lenses away from sticky fingers and the large outer front pocket for other bits and pieces like maps and pens.

There are Sliplock slots on both sides of the bag for lens cases and things to expand the bag’s capacity, I’d probably put my GPS on one of them. There are also two generous elasticated mesh pocket on either side which fits a 0.6 L Sigg bottle quite nicely. Splendid.

It’s rather stiff at the moment and needs to be broken in like my worn and well travelled Primus.

Official specs here.

…not the final frontier, but the top half of my camera bag. It’s always a pain trying to find things in there because things have a habit of moving around no matter how its carried. To rectify this, I picked up an army medics pouch, it was around a tenner off good ol’ eBay. It’s a reasonable size, has lots of elasticated straps on the insides where I can just slide in batteries, remote, lenspen, penknife etc… Since it’s all strapped in, I could just leave it unzipped in my bag and things will stay put.

Before, a messy, mish-mash of stuff.

After, nice and organised.

More efficient use of space.

I picked up a Spork today. Simple, light and oh so useful. Well, I perceive it to be useful otherwise why would I have brought it? I guess I can now leave my metal camp cutlery behind. Incidently, it’s made in Sweden much like the Fold-a-Cup I picked up while I was in Abisko, Sweden earlier this year. I didn’t intend to go with a Swedish theme. I brought it in yellow just because it’d be easier to find should it wander around my cavernous backpack.

Picked this up from the pound store. Only a quid and perfect for my GPS!

Lowepro Rezo 40

Ahead of my upcoming trip to Austria, I picked up a new tripod! It’s far more compact than my other tripods and extends up to my eye-level with the centre column down.

The original ballhead it came with was fine with my Canon G11, but I wouldn’t trust it with my 40D, so I’ve swapped it out for my Manfrotto 486RC2. The whole thing weighs around 1kg with a maximum carrying capacity of around 2kg, fine for a semi-pro DSLR and standard zoom/prime, but definitely not for telephotos.There are variable leg locks and you can remove part of the centre column to further reduce weight. It’s reasonably sturdy, but won’t replace my Gitzo for shots up in the Arctic. Further specs are available here – Slik Sprint Pro II GM.

Given its petite proportions, its easy to pack making it ideal for weekend city breaks around Europe.

How exciting could a mug be? Well, apart from all that commotion with the Canon mug in recent months, I came across the Sea to Summit X-Mug which is just so neat that I had to share!

Basically, the X-Mug is a drinking vessel by Sea to Summit made of food grade silicone, acepting both cold and hot beverages . It folds down to a disc shape approximately 1.5 cm x 11.3 cm and has graduations on the inside for measuring things out. Being fairly light and compact makes it ideal for those travel adventures. It seems fairly robust and there is also the X-Bowl and X-Plate in the collection of X items which all nest together when squished down. I’m pretty confident that this will replace the Lifeventure mug I usually pack for my next globe trotting adventure… assuming that this dastardly cloud of volcanic ash moves along.

I’ve just been testing the voice search on the Google app for my iPhone and I can’t say that it’s as good as I’d expected. When I asked it to ‘search Xiyu’, it returned with ‘sexy z’. I also tried ‘Xiyu online’, but got nowhere close. Now, granted that those aren’t very standard things to search, so next I tried ‘Applied Environmental Microbiology’ and it returned with ‘applying for men to microbiology’. Now, while it’s fairly close phonetically, it’s not really close enough to be of much use. Nice try Google, but I think I’ll stick to good old typing for the time being.

One more thing before I go – I’m actually posting from my iPhone using the WordPress app. It’s fairly capable for blogging on the go. I think other blogging platforms have their own apps too. I love my iPhone.

Now I thought seamless integration of my iPhone with my computer as a remote was cool, then I came across Apple’s own app which lets me control my iTunes via wifi! Works mighty well too, I’m almost tempted to get a Macbook Pro now.

See here for more info.