The stove is in two parts, a fuel pump and a burner. The burner fits very nicely inside the pot set, without the lid in place. The snap shut handle of the pot holds the stove in place nicely. The pump can travel inside the fuel bottle, so the whole thing has packed down remarkably small. I’m really pleased to have my laptop inside a dry bag inside my waterproof cases. Any spills in there and the laptop will still be dry.

Here’s a video of the first burn on the stove. We made tea, it worked like a charm.

I’m leaving Quebec City tomorrow. I may be off the grid for a while as I’m now fully equipped to camp and cook wild! I’m heading for Les Escoumins to catch a boat over to Trois Pistoles, then up by way of Gaspes and back down to Charlottetown, PEI. Here’s a map of my proposed route courtesy of Google.

View Larger Map

Thank you Marie for sharing it with me.

Please be advised, this video contains adult language.

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Fucking Work

Caught a Chivas football game in Guadalajara. They are the only team in Mexico to have a team of only Mexican players. The game was interesting, 3-3 the final score. The crowd went absolutely nutso!

Sam and I stayed on Lake Atitlan in San Marcos for a couple of nights. This was the view from our bungalow on the first night.

This morning we rose at 5:25am to catch the sunrise over the mangroves. Hard work this travelling lark!

Here’s a couple of shots of other tourists on another boat.

Our captain, tour guide and local connection, Sender, seen here standing majestically at the helm of his vessel.

The volcanoes around Lake Atitlan were visible in the distance.

We stopped for a look inside the mangroves.

Then back into our merry craft.

There were lots of local fishermen out at sunrise.

We got back to the hotel and ran into our friend Felix, wearing only a towel and carrying a one-eyed parrot!

Then over breakfast I heard a strange sounding “Hola” from behind the next table. Turned out there was a chatty little parrot in town!

That concludes this edition of MacNews. Check back soon for more exciting action!

Mexico City Subway

The Mexico City subway costs only 2 pesos (15c USD / 10p GBP). It’s subsidised by the government I’m told. So at peak times, it gets just a little crowded!

Here’s a couple of videos to fully convey the madness…

Mexico City Taxi

The classic beetle taxi…

Lucha Libre

Mexico has something similar to WWE in the form of Lucha Libre. It’s equally as ridiculous and apparently ferociously popular. I was (un)lucky enough to see some up close in Mexico City.

It turned out to be a publicity stunt to raise awareness for…

Yep, condoms!

I think it may have inspired my travelling companion as a few hours later a small fortune was spent upon the acquisition of his very own El Santo silver mask!

Food

My flatmates made sushi, how awesome!

We ate sushi.

Then Lluis was cooking an octopus, although I didn’t actually see it being eaten!

Tacos are hard to beat on your way home at 4am!

Finally, I couldn’t resist breakfast in a cup of these proportions.

Mexican Toilets

I was struck by two scenes in Mexican toilets. The first was in a mall toilet.

This second shot was on my phone so the quality is pretty poor. The green circles are slices of lime placed at the bottom of the urinal. Very eye catching I thought!

Mexican Wedding Afterparty

One last picture to conclude this session. This was taken in a nightclub at about 4am after a Mexican wedding.

I’ll try to publish photos a little more frequently in smaller batches.

There was Thai on Thai fighting. Two guys who both work for the same bar apparently! Some farrang (foreigner) girl on guy fighting. Then lots of drinking buckets, dancing, and general debauchery.

I was last on Koh Pha Ngan for the new year party 2006/7. It was much, much busier, the beach was absolutely packed. The vibe this time was a lot better. Fewer people, but enough to make a good party. It had less of a thugs out on the town feeling.

Here’s a short clip of the fire skipping to give you an idea of what it was like.

First thing I noticed, no wireless networks. It detected my card and it seemed to work, but no networks were listed by NetworkManager. I unplugged the power and went through to the living room to plug in with a good old fashioned ethernet cable. Fairly quickly I found a solution. So back to my desk on wireless.

Appearance

At first glance, Ubuntu is just not as pretty as Fedora. The graphics seemed a bit too Windows 3.1 for me. I switched to one of the other included themes. It was a bit better. I think I’d have to hunt around for a nicer Ubuntu theme. Personally, I think this is a big failure for Ubuntu. In aiming to bring free software to everyone, appearance matters.

For a Windows user, comparing Windows Vista with Ubuntu 8.04, I think Vista wins on appearance. For many users, that’s an important factor. Personally, it’s not a deal breaker, but I will do something about it.

Installing software

The package manager in Ubuntu is streets ahead of Fedora. Straight away it just works. It feels nice and clean. It tells you the expected download time until all your packages have downloaded. It strikes a great balance between the fine grained control I get with yumex and the simple interface of the default Fedora package manager. Thumbs up for Ubuntu.

Proprietary formats

Playing MP3 files, avi files, or any other non-free format is a little tricky on Linux. You need to install software which can be “questionable” in terms of it’s copyright position. Fedora gets round this problem by not shipping any of that software. Instead you grab that stuff from livna. However, livna is not installed by default. You have to manually add it yourself.

In Ubuntu, I tried to play an MP3 file. It asked if I’d like to search for the codecs. Then it warned me that I was installing software from the Ubuntu community. A minute or so later, the song started playing. Whatever magic happens behind the scenes in Ubuntu happens automatically. A big plus for Ubuntu, particularly for new users.

Installation

By default, Ubuntu boots in Live CD mode. So no changes are made to your hard drive. It’s a great option for new users. You can test the operating system. Check all your hardware works. Then choose to install if you want to. It was at this point that Ubuntu crashed. I’m not sure what went wrong. I could move the mouse, and the clock was ticking, but nothing else. I tried a ctrl-alt-backspace to restart X, no luck.

Ironically, I was proceeding with the install when it crashed. Now I’ve booted back to Fedora. I’m still swaying on whether to try Fedora 9 or not. If I do go with Fedora 9, I almost certainly won’t switch to Ubuntu. In Ubuntu’s favour, I already have the CD. I’ll have to go to the local library to download Fedora 9. That might end up being the deciding factor!

Conclusion

I recommend Ubuntu to anyone interested in trying Linux. I think they work really hard to make it easy to use, and largely succeed. Personally, being fairly experienced with Linux, I don’t think there will be much difference. Package managing is better in Ubuntu. TrueCrypt ships .debs and not .rpms, so that’s a bonus. I’m just not sure if it will be worth the effort of switching.

For new users, Ubuntu is great. Personally, time will tell.

Yesterday, Ismael Lo was playing. The concert set a new Kirstenbosch record selling out all 6’000 tickets in 6 hours. Ismael Lo is a Senegalese singer, songwriter, guitarist and harmonicist.

He really is a great performer. The whole band were excellent. They worked the audience well. By the third song people were already standing and dancing in the garden. By the end the whole audience was upright. It was a great afternoon.

They made an announcement at the beginning of the concert asking for no videos or photos. So the following are brought to you illicitly.

Here’s a shot of the stage early in the concert:

Now here’s a shot of the crowd later in the concert:

Then a shot of the stage again nearing the end of the concert:

Finally, a short video of the closing seconds of the whole concert, after the 3rd encore, when the crowd were at their most excited:

I was told there’s always a good feast on a Sunday in the townships and some friends invited me to head out there with them. Being the proud Scotsman I am, I accepted so long as I could wear my kilt. It was set to be quite an adventure!

We left Cape Town a little after noon and caught a minibus taxi out towards Guguletu. It didn’t quite take us all the way, so we walked the last mile or so. It was obvious that we had left the “white” South Africa behind. For example, the hairdressers were in shipping containers.

We arrived in good time to get a table. Later in the afternoon it’s next to impossible to find a seat. The place sells meat and ice, but no drinks. So you head to the local liquor store to stock up on beer, which we promptly did. Here’s a shot of Zim behind our bucket of beers.

Here’s a picture of me while I’m still (fairly) sober!

Zim ordered the meat, and some hours later, a tray of chicken wings arrived. I forget the name of the white stuff, but it’s made of maze meal I believe. Despite the fact it looks terrible, it actually wasn’t bad!

It was hard to capture the essence of the afternoon with a still photo, particularly the pounding music (I had my earplugs!). So I shot a few videos, and I think this one sums it up best.

There was dancing, I think our table led the charge on the front actually. There was eating, drinking and much merriment. More than a few people asked me what was under my kilt and I gave my standard response to all of them. “To answer that question involves a woman and a blindfold.” Alas, no takers on this occasion.

These girls did pose for a photo though. It seems to be the only picture of the day which actually shows I was wearing my kilt!

Thanks to the kind Unathi, our friend with a car, we were able to stay out past the last taxi at 5pm. We got back into town around 11pm after stopping at a house in another township. Then three of us came back to my place and I think I finally crashed out somewhere between 1am and 4am. It was quite a Sunday!

It was really interesting to see a real South African party. The townships have a reputation as being dangerous, mainly because they’re poor areas. My experience was entirely positive. Everyone I met was friendly and welcoming. Several people had to be sharply corrected for confusing the words kilt and skirt, but everyone took it in good spirits.

Overall, it was a great day out. I’m sure it won’t be my last visit to the townships.

It even supports torrents, and the channels are simply RSS, so with a little effort (or probably searching) you could set it up to download your favourite TV programs by torrent.

There are currently over 3’000 channels, all of them free. My favourite thus far is The Onion News Network.

The best part is, the player runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Here’s a screenshot from my lovely new Fedora 8 desktop.

Here’s the most recent Onion News instalment which inspired this post.

For the cunning linguists amongst my readers, I hope you enjoyed the barely bare bear!

Then I wandered by Lumpini Park for a little jaunt in the swan shaped pedal boats. I’ve seen the next scene countless times in the park, but it never fails to bring a smile to my face…

Alas I couldn’t bring myself to participate, I just wasn’t wearing the right brand of spandex, but maybe next time!

I also upgraded to Firefox 2.0, lovely, major improvement on the previous version. It includes spell checking in text fields, so this post is spell checked courtesy of Firefox!

For those that are interested, I’ve decided to give up on using Linux as a tablet. I’m instead going to, somewhat sadly, install Windows for my mobile, tablet related stuff.

On the plus side, with one click in Fedora Core 6 I was able to run Xgl, which is an awesome 3d desktop. Check it out…

Now if that’s not a good enough reason to switch over to Linux for you non-believers, I don’t know what is…

Now there’s something you don’t see every day!

Many thanks to Dr Jamesonian Kendallosis for this contribution…

I was over there seeing Vicky before she flies home after two and half years of travelling! She’s heading to Edinburgh, ahhh, home, and she’ll fit right in with all the other grandmothers with her super trendy shopping bag pictured below…

Vicky was the very first person I met in Chiang Mai when I arrived from the UK. My first backpacking buddy! Safe flight Vick.

I’ve also added a selection of snaps taken around Bangkok today. See what a good investment that camera was! Click on the picture below for the gallery.

It’s a little shot of Bangkok traffic on an early Friday afternoon…

You need flash player to see the video, which makes it super quick to download. If you haven’t already got this indispensable plugin for your browser click here to install it now (new window).

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