Although there are a number of Apple stores in Taiwan, most of them do not offer a repair service themselves. Instead, they will accept your damaged Mac or iPod, and post it off to a central repair depot.

If, like me, you instead prefer to take your electronic equipment directly to the people who will be fixing it (perhaps, because you want to explain the problem precisely to the guy that will be repairing it), then there is another nice alternative.

Data Express have just moved their service center from a hidden corner near Shuanglien MRT station, to a nice new easy-to-find place in K-Mall. K-Mall itself can be found directly across the road from Taipei Main Station, and next to the 2nd tallest building in Taipei - the Shin Kong Life Tower. Just walk into K-Mall, take the lift downstairs 1 level, and you will find Data Express’s repair center at the opposite end of the building, on the left hand side.

These guys have given me excellent service since I arrived in Taiwan. They speak great English; they fixed my laptop’s problems correctly and quickly in each case when I had minor problems; and they are super friendly.

I strongly recommend them if your Apple equipment needs servicing.

But wait! Life will be just fine. Asus has stepped up to fill the gap. What they have produced is not a perfect competitor. The OLPC is aiming for 10-12 hour battery life with a rather slower processor, whereas this new Asus model only aims for 3 hours battery life. However, the EEE has a 900Mhz pentium M, which means it should be rather awesomely fast. It appears to be related to the Intel ‘Classmate’ low-cost subnotebook design, which was bouncing around the interwebs earlier in the year.

You can find information about the EEE PC here, here, here.

Some of the interesting features:

- 900Mhz processor.

- 7″ LCD display.

- 4-16GB solid state hard disk (basically, flash-based, tough as hell, fast, no fragmentation delays, smaller, lighter, lower power than a traditional hard disk).

- built in webcam, VGA out, USB, SD… (ooh, SD! Perfect for ‘on the move’ photo-editing then?)

- 512MB Ram.

- thin + light (0.82in thick, weighs 2 lbs).

- wifi.

- Linux-based operating system included.

Initial reports are that the machine boots up from cold in 10 seconds and shuts down in 5 seconds, so it should be great for ‘writer’s notepad’ type work too as well as the afore-mentioned ‘photo editing on the fly’.

In fact… this could well be the perfect tool for written or photographic blogging. I wonder if they realise that? Heck, dangle a GPS unit off the side, and you have a location-aware uber-blogging platform for less than a normal laptop!

According to Qbit Online, we can expect to see these tasty wee things arriving in late August. If you’re interested in seeing this mini-laptop in the flesh, there should be a demo next week at the Taipei Trade Center, as part of the TICA exhibition.

The normal Wii is typically priced at $7999 NTD. If you look around, you should be able to find places selling it with a modchip pre-fitted for $9999 NTD. Haggle, though - there’s no end of stores selling it at this price. The modchips allow you to play ‘backup’ games… err… should your original disk become lost, for example. They also allow you to play homemade games.

There is also a really nice collection of games console shops between Taipei Main Station and the main bus station. Walk from Taipei Main, towards Ximen, down the ‘Taipei City Mall’ under the right hand street. Definitely worth exploring if you’re collecting unusual games for your console. Particularly the ‘old school’ store, which appears to stock games (and consoles?) dating back 15-20 years!

UPDATE: today, I found out one of the stores in Taipei City Mall has Wii’s at $7700. Haggle?

• POP3, the Post Office Protocol, is an old technology for email which is based on the idea of ‘visiting the postoffice’ to collect your mail. A POP3 server is a computer program that is always available on the internet, and which gradually stores up a collection of emails for you as they arrive. A bit like the business ‘PO box’ service still provided by many post offices in real life.

  Every now and then, your computer at home connects to the POP3 server and says ‘Have I got any new mail?’. The POP3 server then sends through a photocopy of the emails it has received, and (optionally) clears out the folder. That means your computer becomes the new home for all your emails. After all, who stores their postal mail at the postoffice?

  There are a few problems with this. First of all, it’s just a single giant box for new emails. You can’t put anything in it yourself (unless you send yourself an email); and you can’t organise your emails into different types or put them into different folders. It’s simply an ‘always-available’ dumping ground for email, so that you can receive email even when your home computer isn’t turned on.

  Also, you can’t store your sent-mail in your POP3 inbox. There are ways round this; you can always send a duplicate copy of outgoing mail to a second POP3 inbox, but that can get a little bit confusing, especially if you send things from different identities, i.e. your official ‘office’ persona, your ‘home’ persona, and your wacky ‘World of Warcraft’ persona.

  Finally, it’s annoying to share email between several computers using POP3. You can’t always be sure that both computers have the same emails downloaded. Imagine I go to the office, collect my email, and delete some spam. By the time I go home, I realise I left the computer on at home, and it also downloaded a copy of the spams, but now they’re not deleted!

  Or, maybe I organise my emails neatly into a folder. The problem is, on the office computer the emails are neatly organised into a folder, but at home they’re still sitting in my main INBOX, making a mess! Argh! If only you could easily keep things organised and up-to-date, across all of your computers…

• Webmail was introduced as a way of overcoming this problem, as well as the problem of accessing email from a temporary location such as an internet cafe where you can’t install your own programs. By storing both your ‘email program’ and ‘email archives’ on a web server, all you need is a web browser to access your mail from any location. The problem now is simply that the interface is limited, in terms of speed and ‘niceness’, by the limits of web browsers. Also, usually, webmail is not very well integrated with your home computer. By this, I mean that you can’t simply drag and drop files to and from emails in your webmail. Instead, you have to take a few extra clicks to save them. But webmail at least offers a standardised way of accessing your email from two or more places.

The third option that most people don’t know about is IMAP. IMAP was designed as a technology to make it easy to share your emails between different locations, and it is built into most modern email programs. It stores your emails on a centralised server, but in a way that is accessed a little like a POP3 mailbox rather than webmail. However, now you can seperate your mailbox into folders, and you can store your sent emails, all in the same inbox, and all with a single password. In fact, a set of IMAP folders in Outlook (or any other mail program) can be accessed exactly like a set of mail folders stored on your local computer.

This is remarkably handy. It means you can have an organised system for emails and files, shared between two or more places, but with a nice, fast graphical interface (Mail.app, Outlook Express). In practice, to make it run quickly, email is ‘cached’ on your home computer. In other words, a spare copy is sent to your computer from the IMAP server, so you can read your email even when your computer is not connected to the internet. But, the ‘official copy’ is stored on the IMAP server. That way, if you delete an email from your office, it’s also deleted when you log into email from home. If you organise your email on your office computer, then when you get home, the emails there have been automatically re-organised too, to match your office.

IMAP has a few other nice features that people don’t always notice. For example, instead of having to check your email every few minutes (we call this a pull technology in computing), IMAP contacts your computer to say ‘hey, I’ve got something new for you!’ (you guessed it - push technology). This means more work for the email server, but from your perspective, it means your emails always arrive instantly. Brilliant!

After setting up your new IMAP account (exactly like setting up POP3 - just enter the details in the IMAP section), you may want to make sure you’re not shouting everything to the world, everytime you send an email. By enabling ’secure/SSL SMTP’ and ’secure/SSL IMAP’ in your email program, you can be sure that both your outgoing and incoming email is communicated securely in a way that no-one else can read. Perfect!

Since I centralised my own email system on secure IMAP/SMTP, life has been so much easier! I use ASO who can provide about 75MB of space for around $25 US per year. This is overkill for most people’s needs; though 400MB is available for just a few dollars more. ASO, incidentally, are by far and away the most impressive webhosting/emailhosting company I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with in the last 10 years. Great prices, great services, great customer service. You think this sounds like an ad? So be it - they deserve a free ad! :)

I can even use my email system as a way of storing files I want to access from both the office and my home. I find it’s very convenient, since I can drag and drop things quickly in my email program, and by paying for a decent-quality internet account with ASO, I get super fast email, too.

My email client is mail.app, the default mail program on the Apple mac, which has incredibly powerful email searching and organising features thanks to a technology called “Spotlight” on the Apple mac. On a Windows computer, Thunderbird is a really nice free program that seems more reliable than Outlook Express.

Anyway, in summary: if your POP3 email is always a mess; or if you’re using a webmail system, but deep down, you hate it; then consider using secure IMAP as an easy, fast, and secure way of organising and sharing your emails between several locations. It’s great!

Now at a first glance, that might look expensive for a computer these days. But think: 24. That sure is a lot of gigahertz to be fooling around with. My first computer was an Amstrad CPC 464, running at 4Mhz (8 bit processor), back in 1984. This thing is moving 64 bits of data, 24 billion times per second. That’s about 40,000 times faster than my old CPC in terms of data throughput; and bear in mind also that modern processors tend to be far better at what they do ‘per cycle’ due to things like better pipelining, branch prediction, bigger/smarter caches and so on.

As ‘computers that members of the public could reasonably afford’ go, this machine is pretty damned incredible. Take a look here. If you’re feeling rich, you can order it fitted with 16GB of RAM….:)

Ok, back? Then let’s talk about Second Life. Second Life is an online virtual reality world, which appears to be inhabited by two types of person, each labouring under a terrible delusion:

• “Furries”. These are people who believe themselves to be animals trapped in a human’s body. They relieve the inner tension this causes, by creating online ‘furry animal’ personalities and doing the cyber-nasty with various other animals/furries. Yes, really.

• Journalists who are attempting to write a trendy article about Second Life, and who believe themselves to be fashionably catching the leading edge of a technology wave, but who are in fact catching the leading edge of the brown wave caused by a giant, 100ft turd slapping into the world’s biggest toilet bowl.
  

Two journalists stepping into Second Life with their freshly commissioned ‘cool’ looks, hoping for an interview that will cement their position as ‘tech journalist’, but actually about to discover how it feels to watch a giant cartoon horse forcibly violating your virtual body for two hours. (Pic: zingo)

An online world inhabited by these two types of people might not sound like fun, but when you consider that a tiny percentage of people using this ‘world simulator’ must have a sense of humour; and that some of these people also have technical skill; you can see it soon adds up to technocratic fun and hijinks. This comment, posted today on Slashdot, neatly sums up the situation.

“(PS. If you ever go into the sandboxes in Second Life, you’ll see all sorts of other types of abuse too - floating batman cubes/bananaphones which follow you around playing an annoying/catchy* loop, hundreds of stupidly high-detail models just left lying around by their long-gone creators, bendy [genitalia] which follow people around annoying them, thousands of physics objects which attempt to waste the simulator’s resources, etc.)

*delete as appropriate”

I very nearly laughed my balls off.

Wannabe-tech journalists, Second Life is nothing more than a poorly run ripoff of ‘Active Worlds’, a near-identical platform that came out *13 years ago*. Get with the program. Everyone else, here are some links to let you learn more about how incredibly wrong Second Life can be:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36509

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/03/05/john-edwards-virtual-attackers-unmasked/

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/01/ageplay_in_seco.html

First Life.

In fact, the type of memory I’m thinking of just now is computer memory. In the last 2 months, the price of DRAM chips has more than halved. I hadn’t noticed, since I haven’t been particularly looking to upgrade my computer, but this means it’s now an excellent time to make your computer that bit faster under Macos or Windows.

Usually, the price of memory follows a predictable curve. It starts out very high, and continually falls towards a quarter or even a tenth of its original price over a year or two. After hovering at the same low price for 6 months, prices rise again, as supply is cut off, when new memory technologies begin to be produced in the DRAM factories.

To be honest, there is hardly any reason to have less than 2GB of memory in your desktop or laptop at present prices. It will have an incredible impact on system performance, especially if you leave your computer on, or in sleep mode, instead of restarting.

One of the best sources for computer memory is “Crucial” in the US. They have a fantastic track record for distributing very high quality memory, direct from the manufacturer Micron. High quality memory is important; a large percentage of unreliability found in computers, comes from having unreliable memory. Just one ‘bit’ that doesn’t work correctly can ruin the stability of the whole machine, since computing is a very precise science.

If you’re scared of choosing the right sort of memory for your computer, Crucial also offer a ‘memory selector’ which chooses the right type of memory for your computer or motherboard. I strongly recommend using this, to avoid incompatibility problems. You can find Crucial’s online stores in the US, EU and UK. Shoppers in Asia should use the US store.

As with most international retailers, beware of buying from the UK store. The $ to £ conversion rate is often unrepresentative of the real foreign exchange rate. Price drops usually hit the US long before they hit the UK, too.

2GB of DDR2, 667Mhz suitable for a MacBook is currently $145.99 at the US site.
1GB of DDR2, 667Mhz suitable for a MacBook is currently $73.99 at the US site.
These prices are as of 26 March 2007. In late January, 2GB was around $300.

You can also buy memory more cheaply (but of lower average quality) at NewEgg.com. However, I don’t recommend doing that.

(When buying memory for an Apple computer, or any laptop with an Intel motherboard, be sure to get a pair of ‘matching’ DIMMs. Memory access can double in speed for certain uses, if the timing to both chips is the same. In general this is a good policy for ensuring a stable, reliable computer anyway).

Artist’s impression of Mu at time of writing.
(This image was liberated from the tyrannical grasp of ign.com.)

I could hardly believe my eyes when I stumbled across this syndicated report in a South African newspaper. Here’s a quick snippet:

“Taiwanese gamers are bringing home thousands of new Nintendo Wii consoles from the United States and Japan ahead of its release in Taiwan, with Premier Su Tseng-chang among its many fans.

Passengers have returned carrying 2139 Wii consoles — featuring unique motion-sensitive controllers — in the past three days alone, according to customs figures.” - iAfrica.com.

Fascinating stuff, though I suspect almost none of those Wii’s are actually for Wii-ing, but rather, for selling at grossly distorted prices. So, when will the blasted gizmo actually get here? The new word on the street is: next month (April) will be the official launch by Nintendo.

So, it looks like you all have another month to save up for that spare IR controller, and your must-have copy of Rayman vs. The Raving Rabbids to go along with Wii Sports.

Tick… tock… maybe I should find a way to cryogenically freeze myself until the Wii actually gets here.

From Space.com

This is absolutely incredible news. Unbelievable news. This discovery literally makes the prospect of human colonisation of Mars both feasible and realistic, by itself.

Water is needed for everyday human survival, crop irrigation and so on, and if we can also crack the problem of managable nuclear fusion (which would provide nearly unlimited power from the deuterium that can be easily found in water), then you basically have absolutely everything you need to survive and prosper on Mars.

Dirt: to build buildings, grow plants, shelter from radiation (not much atmosphere on Mars, remember).
Water: to keep biospheres running without the need for some kind of complete water recovery.
Water: to eventually provide power via nuclear fusion. And power means crops, heating, refining, manufacturing, communications, and so on.

It’s hard to overstate the value of finding this much water on the nearest planet to earth. What a fluke! And best of all, it’s all in one place, in the form of a giant water storehouse. So it won’t even be difficult to collect and process it. Brilliant!

Even in the event that fusion doesn’t prove realistic, it has also been discovered that Mars has a geologically active core. So geothermal energy could be another option, added to the discovery of water, that makes Mars a realistic next step in space exploration. Kick ass!

Essentially, it asks: Why is the universe “human-suitable” in terms of the difficulty of understanding what’s going on out there? Really, what are the odds that the complexity of reality should be (more or less) comprehended by a small, squidgy piece of goo weighing a few kg?

The rather concerning answer that is put forward is: “What if it isn’t?”. In other words, what if the stuff we’re comprehending and measuring when we do physics is just a mere fragment of the ‘real’ reality - and in fact we lack the kind of thinking power that would be needed to ever deal with the ‘real thing’?

Now, my normal reaction to any kind of limit being needlessly imposed on the human ken is ‘poppycock’, but still, it’s an interesting read.

Another article I’d like to draw your attention is about some Malaysian Monks with an Ant Dilemma at the BBC. Worth a read - the final paragraph is genius.

Last of all, some interesting pictures from the New Horizons Pluto probe: The rings of Jupiter (I didn’t even know it had any!) and Volcanoes erupting on Io (one of Jupiter’s moons). Pretty unbelievable stuff.

Heck, I’ve even seen people at markets try to charge me the ‘label price’ (anything from 300-2000% of the real price) for delightfully ‘Authentc Italien’ clothes.

This is only the first half of the problem, of course. The second being that no matter what I do, no matter what I say, they will not drop the price. Haggling is right out, apart from a laughable 10 kuai here or there.

Why? My guess is, it’s about losing face. A Taiwanese market trader, being haggled down by a laowei? If there’s anything that would get them laughed at by their fellow traders for the rest of their life, that’s probably it.

Still, no matter how much I grumble ‘tai gui!’ or ‘gui si!’, the price is absolutely not going to be coming down. So off I go, and at the end of the day I don’t have what I want, and they don’t have any of my money. No one wins!

Even on those rare occasions that I do manage to find something resembling what I want, it’s usually a very cheap and nasty alternative rather than the real deal. Why, oh WHY, do Taiwanese computer shops refuse to stock parts from top quality manufacturers? Some of the best electronics in the world is made in Taiwan, but will the manufacturers sell it locally? Hell no! ATP - I’m looking at you, here!

Anyway…I thought I’d look for a mail order online store, so that I could avoid the annoying “Laowei Effect” when I’m shopping. In the UK, we have semi-wonderful stores like Ebuyer,Dabs, Scan, and so on. In Europe, Itbutikken does a great job. And in the US and Canada, BestBuy, NewEgg and others provide the same function.

Where is the Taiwanese equivalent? Amazingly, it seems almost impossible to locate a decent, big online store for mail order shopping here. Fortunately, I recently came across a new site called Q-Bit Online. They have an English language site with a reasonable (though not extensive) choice of parts, and the prices seem pretty good. The customer rep I’ve emailled at the site (Henry) speaks excellent English, replies to emails quickly, and has already gone to a good bit of effort to try to help me find some very specific high-quality parts I’ve been looking for. I thought I’d reward his high level of attention to customers, by linking back to him from this blog. Cheers, Henry!

You can find their website here: http://www.qbitonline.com/. One offer that caught my eye in particular: a 2GB minature USB flash drive @ 410 NTD. Very decent.

For what it’s worth: I have no affiliation to this store. I just like their service.

The film “Hot Fuzz” is debuting currently in the UK. By the same people that produced “Shawn of the Dead”, and ‘Spaced’, this film could perhaps be described as a comedy about a top London cop being transferred to a rural village police force, but it’s probably more accurate just to say “Simon Pegg and chums d*cking around in police uniforms, being funny”. Trailers here. Already showing in the UK, but it doesn’t reach the rest of the world till April. Curses!

Finance: There’s gossip going round various respectable mailing lists about the price movement in Shanghai this week. The word on the street is that China’s government deliberately engineered the drop in Shanghai’s market, to try and prick the speculative bubble that is pointlessly sucking in all the free capital in the country. If so (and unlike 99% of what I read about markets, this actually seems like a sensible thing to do), there will probably be more hilarity to follow as Shanghai investors adjust to the idea of being regularly ninja-nutkicked by their own government as a form of therapy. Oh, and if you’re as much of a finance geek as I am, you’ll be delighted to know Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder newsletter is out and quite deservedly slagging off the efficient market hypothesis.

Fighters: The Taipei Times (& Michael Turton) report that America has decided to sell shiny new explody things to Taiwan to counter the large number of shiny new explody things lined up along the Fujian coastline of the PRC. Who knows - perhaps Taiwan’s invasion of the PRC is now merely weeks away from happening. China is responding by implanting electrodes into the brains of pigeons to control them remotely. Missiles, pigeons - where will this military escalation end?

Flat transistors: You’ll be reading a lot just now about some crazy new carbon based transistors that - just like every other idea you’ve ever heard - will revolutionise computing as we know it, for ever. Graphene is actually rather groovy and the story behind the research that went on over the last few years is kind of funny. Basically, Graphene shouldn’t exist. Nano-meter-thick sheets of material (such as the toilet paper found in British public toilets) tend to tear rather easily. Graphene is kind of wibbly shaped though, and not entirely flat, which provides it with structural integrity that makes it fantastically interesting and useful. It has some unusual properties that also allow it to be made into a fast, reliable and low-power transistor at sizes that would be completely unsuitable for Silicon chips. It is so thin, and uses so little power, that it can be easily stacked up into sheets. Electrons don’t seem to scatter in Graphene, so it makes electronic circuits run super fast. And when I say super-fast, I mean, electrons travel at speeds normally only found in the center of collapsed stars or at the beginning of the universe. Great stuff. The future is Graphene, I’m fairly sure.

Anyway, the amusing story. Graphene is just like a single layer of ‘Graphite’, the carbon molecule that your pencils are made from. Some researchers realised that to draw little tiny bits of graphite, you should make a really tiny pencil. They spent tens of millions of dollars developing this ‘nano-pencil’ that could be used - at great time and expense - to draw little areas of Graphene. Then, just as this huge research effort was finally starting to produce some results, some guys at Manchester Uni and Columbia Uni had an idea. They got some bog standard pencil graphite. Then, they stuck some sellotape on it and a thin layer of graphite came off. Then, they stuck other sellotape to the first bit, and an even thinner layer came off. Repeat as necessary till you have single layer Graphite on your sticky tape. Total cost: $0.30. LOL.

However this cheap production method is actually very important in other ways. Current computer processors are made from silicon crystals that are carefully grown at great time and expense, and represent the biggest part of the cost of a computer besides research and development. Sellotape and pencils on the other hand, are plentiful. Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say about Graphene for the moment.

Finally, Frikkin nutcases: “Canada’s ex-defense minister continues to call on governments worldwide to release their extra-terrestrial, UFO-derived technologies for the benefit of mankind. Film at 11.”

I’m basing this on the reports at Digitimes and elsewhere, that read: “Nintendo’s Taiwanese distributor ‘Hakuyu’ has stated that the new Wii system will fail to make it to the market any time before the Chinese New Year in February.” I also interrogated the staff at a few branches of a major electrical store (3C), and they suggested they expect their stock of Wiis to arrive during the Chinese new year period.

So far, all that has been available here are Japanese or US import models - and getting your hands on one of these a month or two early has come at a pretty high price - anywhere from a 25 to 100% markup, depending on which model you want.

Despite the fact that the Wii is very thin on the ground, I’ve seen them hiding in a few small gaming shops, and a few weeks ago, I even saw people playing with a Wii on a huge projector screen, in a cordoned off area bang in the middle of the Taipei Main MRT station. When I’ve finished celebrating Chinese new year, I’ll dig out a picture.

Meanwhile, in Taoyuan, we have a ‘gaming school’ (and store) near the city centre. They have two Wiis set up outside with two controllers each, a giant flatscreen TV and the best Wii games available - Rayman: Raving Rabbids, and Wii Sports. You can find this store very near the middle of town, and it’s a great place to go if you want to get some hands-on experience playing on the Wii.

Starting at the train station, go forward over the first crossroads immediately outside the station, past “Idee”, and then turn right at the next crossroads (where there is an under-street pedestrian tunnel). Go straight up this street, passing “Nova”, and take a left at the next big crossroads. Walk ahead till you see the store on your left.

So, a total of 5 minute’s walk from the railway station will see you at the door of the store, opposite “Ali Baba’s Indian Restaurant”. Just remember: straight on, first right, first left, and it will be on your left hand side. The store’s name is: “Kukanemoto Game Classroom”, 03-331-0088, www.tastegood.com.tw.

The store also has imported Wii’s available for purchase: 10000TWD for the japanese import; 16000TWD for the US import. There will not be much room to negotiate since stocks of Wii’s are so thin on the ground just now. It’s 1700TWD for games; 1000-1700TWD for extra controllers, which I guess is reasonable compared with extras for the XBOX360 or PS3.

Alternatively, if you are prepared to wait a few more weeks, you may start to see Wii’s showing up in stores like 3C, priced around 8000TWD (according to the 3C staff members I spoke to…). But you may face a long and boring Chinese new year without one.

In the meantime, if you find yourself unable to Wii for a prolonged period, it may comfort you to know that simply walking around Taoyuan can make you feel like you’re in some kind of computer game. Take this street for example, near the police station and bus stop…

Giant pointy bits of metal, waiting to drop. It’s just like playing Tomb Raider.

Where I grew up, it was possible to see thousands or tens of thousands of stars at night with your naked eye. Here, so far I’ve been lucky to see 40 or 50 - but at least it’s something, and I feel like I’m still in touch with the night sky.

This week, I’ve been standing on top of high buildings at sunset, straining my eyes while hoping for a glimpse of Comet McNaught. This comet was identified a year ago by an Australian astronomer, Robert McNaught. Since about a week ago, it has been visible around sunset and sunrise in many countries, starting with the northern hemisphere and more recently the southern hemisphere. You can read a little more about it here: Sci-Tech Today.

Unfortunately, Taoyuan has had cloudy weather for the last week or so, especially at sunset, which is quite infuriating. The only compensation I’ve had is that there have been some pleasant sunsets to enjoy.

Anyway, this discovery has posed a significant problem for me, as it means I have had to radically alter an already quite healthy diet, to try and make it super-healthy. I’ve had to add in even more exercise into my life.

Fortunately, I struck gold while alchemically combining various foods, and found a wonderful snack that fills you up, tastes great, and is super-healthy. I’m fairly sure no one will have thought of combining British, Italian and Korean cuisine before in quite this way, so here goes.

First, you take a piece of wholemeal bread, the staple of a British diet. Eaten by itself, it is only very modestly healthy (particularly with the sugar they add to bakery products here), and it is certainly not very tasty.

Second, toast the bread. This increases the tastyness by giving it a bit of texture, but does not add anything to the healthiness or ability to fill you up.

Third, get a bottle of ‘extra virgin’ olive oil. ‘Extra virgin’ basically means ‘taken from the first squeeze of the olives’ and tends to be more nicely flavoured than normal olive oil, and also subject to no chemical refinement or processing. Don’t be mislead by labels such as ‘PURE olive oil’ or ‘100% natural olive oil’. Only the words ‘extra virgin’ have a special meaning, and even that might not be worth much outside of Italy.

Fourth, pour the olive oil all over your toast. Why? Four reasons. First of all, we’re going to be adding something in a second which will need that oil. Secondly, it tastes great. Thirdly, olive oil drops your LDL (bad) cholesterol, since it’s a monounsaturated fat. Finally, there’s no way you are going to be snacking on crap food during the day, since this tasty combination will leak calories into your bloodstream all day long.

Fifth, and most excitingly, get a small tub of low-fat korean kimchi. You will have bought this before you make the toast, to avoid any ‘lack of kimchi’ problems at this crucial stage. Kimchi is basically just watery lettuce and chilli. It’s healthy and tasty, but sometimes hard to match with western dishes due to the sheer amount of chilli that decent Kimchi contains. Now, we’re going to put it on the toast. Your immediate reaction to this should be ‘DEAR GOD, MAN, NO!’, because putting watery stuff on toast creates a very unpleasant mush. A most untasty kind of mush, in fact, which you would not feed even to someone you hate.

But wait! Something is happening! The watery-chilli goodness is rolling off the lettuce and somehow floating on top of the toast! That’s right - by allowing the oil to sink into the toast, you’ve imbued it with magical anti-mush properties, since oil and water are not exactly the best of friends. So, now, pick up your toast and eat it, being careful not to allow the kimchi chilli to slide off onto your hands.

And there you have it: Ambrosia Mu’s Kimchi Olive Oil Toast - food of the gods!