Anthony Bourdain describes the perfect bowl of pho as food porn. I’m still mad that my pho-monger won’t sell me just the broth.

BlogTO wrote a “Best Soups” article. They mentioned two favorites of mine, Ravisoups and Soup Nutsy. The other selections are below:

• Ravisoups
• United Bakers Dairy
• Soup Nutsy
• Esther’s Soup Kitchen
• Hibiscus Cafe
• One Love Vegetarian
• Urban Herbivore
• Coffee Mill
• Utopia Cafe
• Le Gourmand
• Kalendar
• Cafe Polonez

The full list with descriptions, and a google map is at their site.

Rogers has been coasting for a long time with their antiquated PVR’s. They were old when they were introduced and have continued to lag behind in features and functionality in the past years. Finally, they have begun to offer a new PVR with more modern features that have been found in Tivo’s, Sling’s, Apple TV’s and other PVR’s for years. The Cisco 8600 is the new PVR that is available.

Notable features include:

• 1080p resolution
• Use a single PVR for the entire house, watch PVR shows on any TV
• Compatible with DLNA for sharing music/movies on a PC
• Ethernet connection for home networking

Look for Rogers to take advantage of some of the advanced features to offer much more interactivity to your television. Bell already offers controlling your PVR over the Internet.

Quattro was made famous by Audi over ten years ago. After using it to dominate motorsports, they incorporated versions of it into its road cars, culminating with the torsen-based system found on the Audi A4. The system has changed gradually over the years, moving from a 50:50 torque split to a rear-biased 40:60. Torque vectoring was added in with the debut of the S4 sedan last year. Now at the Geneva Auto Salon, Audi debuted it’s new Quattro system that uses a new center differential. This is significant because Audi stayed with the Torsen center diff from 1996 all the way until this year. Whether this new diff gets put into the regular series of cars or remains an RS-exclusive remains to be seen.

The new center diff is explained in the video below, and also goes over the torque vectoring concept. The RS5 and S4 both come with torque vectoring, and is also seen on the new 2010 Porsche Carrera Turbo.

This category has been dominated by one camera for the past few years, the Panasonic Lumix LX3. Within the past few months, the Canon S90 and Samsung TL500 both try to steal market share away from the Lumix. All cameras are compact with fast, bright lenses – feature starting aperature sizes of f1.8 or f2.0. However, all the lenses have a different focal length. The incumbant LUMIX with a 24-60mm (f1.8-2.8), the Canon with 28-105mm (f2.0-4.9) and Samsung with a very wide 24-72mm (f1.8-2.4).

I plotted these on a graph to compare the type of coverage at each focal length It becomes quickly apparent that the Samsung offers the brightest lens at all focal lengths (lower f-stop is brighter). Canon offers the most zoom and the 3 year old LUMIX soldiering on.

If the Samsung does use the same sensor as the S90 as rumored, pairing it with such a bright, wide lens will really be fun to use. The Samsung will definitely be able to capture the most light in dark situations. The Canon will provide the most zoom. Once the Samsung hits the streets look for many sites to do comparisons of the low-light performance of both cameras.

Well, the hits against the iPad keep coming. If you thought the device would tether with the iPhone, you were wrong. Engadget confirmed it yesterday.

BlogTO launched a new look today. It’s a bit awkward but they have a good team and will iron out some of the bugs. I think this is part of a larger change in strategy of the site away from a pure “blog” to more of a “destination” site. There’s a large vacuum in the “Toronto portal” market with the mismanagement at Toronto.com (seriously, does anyone use this site anymore?) – BlogTO looks like they are positioning themselves to take up more of that space.

Offered quite a while ago, but they recently got my attention again. Spacing magazine has been selling these buttons which represent the tile art and font used by the TTC on all their stations. They can be purchased directly from Spacing or at Swipe Books.

As part of Boston.com’s Big Picture series, they posted some fantastic photography from this years games: Vancouver 2010, part 1 of 2 – The Big Picture – Boston.com.

Have you accidently used the data services on your Rogers mobile phone while in the USA? It’s not a cheap mistake. There are some massive add-on fees when you use data in the USA. Well today rogers introduced a new option for most data plan customers. On certain data plans, for an extra $10 you can use data in the USA at the same rate that you have in Canada. For frequent travellers this will dramatically reduce your data fee costs.

More information on the Roger’s site.