For the past year or so, there has been a Black Camel near my place. Just outside the Rosedale subway station, this place bills itself as a cafe and sandwich bar. These sandwiches are fantastic, my favorite bounces between the pull pork and beef brisket sandwiches. They have many condiment and topping options but caremalized onions are my favorite.

They used to have another location downtown but it appears as this is the only one for now.

The Press Days at the Detroit Auto Show start this weekend, there will be lots of announcements aobut new cars in both concept and production forms. My favorite site for reading all the announcements is Autoblog.

Already an announcement about a new Buick and Nissan’s special version of the GTR, the V-Spec, is out.

A friend sent this to me today. Firefox uses a bunch of .sqlite files to manage it’s persistent data like your preferences in the “awesomebar”. These files can get quite big and cause a slow computer when using firefox; especially when using the awesomebar and closing the application.

OS X users can use this command to “compact” these files:

for f in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/*.sqlite; do sqlite3 $f 'VACUUM;'; done

Windows users can make use of the SQLite addon to do the same thing. Install the addon, then go to %appdata%mozillafirefoxprofilesxxxxx and look for the .sqlite files.

The picture below is the interior of the home that Hugh Jackman bought in Manhattan. It was linked to me via a celebrity blog but the pictures are still amazing. I wonder if there are homes like this in Toronto. I’ll know where to spend my $21 million.

The holidays always mean nice roasts for dinner – turkey and roast beef are traditional, but we’ve also done lamb and small hens too. For the last few years I’ve used a digital meat thermometer to get perfect “doneness” of the roasts. These eletronic probes are put into the meat before cooking and then stay in there while the meat cooks. Alarms are set for when it reaches the temperature you want, and most have a guide for different types of meat and levels of doneness (e.g. rare or medium-rare).

They’re not that expensive, running $30-50 and the fancier ones have two temperature readings, internal (the meat) and external (the oven). Useful when you’re not sure if your oven thermometer is accurate.

Happy New Year everyone!