viciouz.co.uk

So, another pair of budget drinks from a supermarket. They look so similar to Morrisons’ source and are at the same price point, so if you compared the ingredients on the back, you’d probably find they were the exact same mixture too. Anyway, here are the cans, 2 of the 250ml variety:

Nothing special. They even have the same colour code as Source. And the horrible colour. So: do they taste any different?

Short answer: No. You could put these pretty much side by side with their Morrisons counterparts and be unable to tell the difference. If anything, they feel ever so slightly less syrupy, but that’s about it.

So, as there’s nothing else really to say, here are the scores. Same as Source, if you were wondering. Even the value is the same; same price and concentration.

Taste (regular): 6/10
Taste (sugar free): 3/1
Value: 7/10
Experience: 5/10
Overall (regular): 6/10
Overall (sugar-free): 4/10

I wasn’t sure whether this should be called Lucozade Atert or Lucozade Alert Lemon Zing or what, but it’s basically the big Lucozade brand’s venture into caffeine drinks. A 250ml can labelled “Mental Stimulation” greets you, as seen below.

Well, despite my initial beliefs that a cheap lucozade tie-in could only be a bad thing, I was surprised as I realised that the flavour was “Lemon Zing”, which actually sounded quite nice, especially as the drink marketed itself as something to wake you up in the morning. It also boasted about having a relatively low number of calories unlike the original Lucozade brands, which is another point that differs it from most energy drinks.

Pouring it out, it was nice to see that the drink is fizzy but transparent, and does in fact, taste exactly like regular diet lemonade. That’s pretty much all that there is to be said about that really. It is just like lemonade.

Of course, the brand tie-in comes at a price. The drink does pack caffeine at 32mg/100ml, but at 89p for each 250ml can, it’s pretty pricey – 0.90mg/p of caffeine, which is second last, beating only Red Bull. However, the drink does have its own selling points of low calories and a popular flavour. Overall, not so bad, but the price is irritating.

Taste: 8/10
Value: 2/10
Experience: 9/10
Overall: 6/10

So, I’ve had this gadget for a few years now. It’s a DJ controller consisting of two jog pads for scratching, some basic level knobs, volume slides and a crossfader, and a few extra buttons which are used to control stuff in the bundled VirtualDJ software. However, VirtualDJ doesn’t have a linux port. There are several open source alternatives, but the one I found which was actively developed and looked good was Mixxx. It supports the Hercules DJ Control MP3 and a bunch of other similar controllers, and is cross-platform, built on the Qt toolkit.

So far, so good. Of course, like pretty much any hardware device other than the very basics, you’re going to need some drivers in order to use it properly. Hercules provide drivers for Windows and Mac with full support, and also, to their credit, provide linux drivers too, with source code available, but no official support. The drivers come as .deb and .rpm packages for both 32 and 64 bit systems. So far, so good. But on attempting to install the packages, which were last updated 2009, the installation dies while the kernel module is compiled. After a bit of investigating, I found the build log and the problem:

error: implicit declaration of function ‘snd_card_new’

The source uses the snd_card_new function, which was deprecated in mid 2009 and removed soon after in favour of the snd_card_create function which allowed better error handling. To fix this, you must extract the packages, open device.c, search “snd_card_new” and replace the line:

card = snd_card_new(index[idx], card_id/*id[idx]*/, THIS_MODULE, 0);

with:

snd_card_create(index[idx], card_id/*id[idx]*/, THIS_MODULE, 0, &card);

That solves the problem with compiling. Then you can pack it all back up again and install with dpkg as usual. However, it’s a bit of a hassle, and to make it simpler, here’s a pre-baked .deb package, tested on Ubuntu 10.04 64bit. Have fun and happy mixing!

Download [x86, x86_64, .deb, 213kb]

On August 2-6 2010 I was lucky enough to participate in a great event for young developers called Young Rewired State. The event is the smaller sibling of the Rewired State week-long events and ‘Hack Days’, where developers get together and write innovative apps using data provided by the Government – often in ways that were not previously imagined or where the provided data was in a format unfriendly to development use.

Young Rewired State is slightly different in that the developers are all 15-18 years old, gather in centres around the country (this time there were centres in London, Brighton, Manchester and Norwich) and have a week to work on their projects. Collaborating in groups or developing alone, there was also help from professional developers as mentors. Sadly I couldn’t afford the travel costs into London for the whole week, but I was given a chance to participate anyway, working from home and just going in for the presentation event at the end of the week. James Cunningham also missed out on the mentoring, working in Dundee, but that didn’t stop him from writing a truly amazing project.

Faced with the question of what to do for a project, I wanted to incorporate real life data into a game style simulation. However, this didn’t seem very practical, so eventually I wrote a postcode comparison web tool with PHP  – enter two postcodes and it will give you a table of results comparing the two areas in a number of different categories. As each category is output in a similar way, I separated the logic for input and output from the category logic, which allowed me to easily add and remove collections of categories by adding and removing PHP classes. Some of the categories that I implemented included ADSL and Cable Broadband availability, the number of materials able to be recycled locally, the crime level compared with the national average and the Digital Switchover date.

Then, on Friday, everyone assembled in London for the presentation day, where everyone gave a short talk about their project, and, technology permitting, a short demonstration. The quality of the products was amazing; everybody had clearly put a lot of effort into polishing their projects, with lovely CSS designs everywhere you looked, which was one reason that I was apprehensive when taking to the stage. A minute long delay while attempting to get the projector to work didn’t help either.

Projects included UniSearch – a search engine for university courses, NatuSearch (a natural-syntax database search engine) by the aforementioned Mr Cunningham, an endless number of HTML5 spinners by the YRS Manchester team (who also contributed a rap!) and Isabell Long’s GovSpark site tracking government energy usage.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable experience which taught me a valuable lesson – just because you’re at home doesn’t mean you can slack off working!

An in-depth, official writeup by the wonderful people who made everything happen can be found here.

Another long name! This is the second drink in the Relentless Juiced Energy family, with a similar slightly sturdier can with gold-coloured top, and the extra 20p on the price of a normal Relentless. It shares the same concentration and therefore the same caffeine cost efficiency of its Tropical flavour friend, 1.10mg/p for the total of 160mg, that’s 32mg/100ml.

The only other differences are the deep red colour of both the packaging and liquid – and, of course, the change in taste. Again, you’ll probably want to shake the can lightly or pour the drink into a glass to get the juice and the rest of the drink well mixed. First sip – mmm. It tastes just like a generic summer fruits squash. Next sip: mmm.. wait, that tasted funny. And it gets worse. If you have to drink this, do it slowly. Obviously I can’t judge for everyone, but the sweet, not-quite-berry taste quickly got too much for me, to such an extent that I got rid of the rest of the can. It really was quite nasty. And it takes a while to leave your mouth too. Definitely not worth the £1.45.

Taste: 2/10
Value: 3/10
Experience: 6/10
Overall: 4/10

What a name. So the juiced energy “flavour” of relentless apparently consists of two separate “flavours”. It’s 50% juice in both cases, and also costs more, this can of “Tropical” Juiced Energy being £1.45 instead of £1.25 in Morrisons. The only external different is a different colour can (the metal itself looks gold coloured like Rockstar).

Obviously the taste is what they’re selling it on, so here goes. “Tropical”. It taste like pretty much any other drink labelled as “Tropical” tastes. That is, vaguely of pineapple. It’s not so bad. If I had a can of Monster Ripper to compare it with this would probably come out slightly worse. This surprised me, as last time I had some of this I seemed to remember it tasting like drain cleaner. Obviously they’ve improved since then. Still, if you don’t like sweet, tangy tastes, you’d probably be better off staying away from this one. It’s probably a good idea to shake the can a bit, lightly, before you start to drink, or pour it out, because otherwise the taste seems to change as you go down the can.

Due to the extra 20p on the price tag, it’s not really a mid-range option any more, so stay away if you just want to wake up or get a buzz. The concentration is the regular 32mg/100ml for this type and as such you get a rather low 110mg/£, or 1.10mg for every penny you pay.

Taste:  7/10
Value: 3/10
Experience: 7/10
Overall: 6/10

So, Relentless Origin is done, now for another flavour, Relentless Inferno. The can is orange and blurry (the picture makes it look worse than it is) and is supposed to look like there’s a fire somewhere behind it. Can is the same flimsy one as Origin.

Bad photography.

So far, so boring. Crack open the can. The drink is yellow, but not the usual nasty energy drink colour. It’s cloudy yellow, a bit like. Which makes sense, as this flavour of Relentless tastes a lot like a nice fizzy orange drink, which it does very well. It’s basically Fanta with caffeine. Talking of caffeine, like other 500ml drinks so far, it has a concentration of – you guessed it – 32mg/100ml, and mg per penny of 1.28, the same as Monster or Origin. If you’d prefer a usual orange soda flavour to the tang of Monster, sweetness of Relentless Origin, or “mixed fruit” atrocity of other brands, then you’re in luck, Relentless Inferno pulls it off very well indeed.

Taste: 9/10
Value: 5/10
Experience: 8/10
Overall: 8/10

I wasn’t sure whether or not to include “origin” in the title to this review, because to me and all my friends, it’s just “Relentless”, and the other flavours are referred to by their names, if they are referred to at all. As a warning, you can probably already tell, I might be a bit biased in this review. Relentless was the first energy drink I ever had (apart from a can of the new-defunct Sprite 3G) and have continued to drink. Maybe this review will shed a light on why that is.

It comes in a rather flimsy can, but it does the job alright, and the design is pretty nice. There’s a lot of pretentious marketing stuff on the back which appears to compare people drinking Relentless with great artists and poets.

It’s not particularly price-efficient either, at somewhere around £1.25 a can – and it has the 32mg/100ml concentration that I’ve by now come to realise is not just a coincidence, but the mandated maximum concentration by EU law. So, the mg/p ratio is 1.28, exactly the same as Monster’s branded drinks.

The taste is quite sweet, and although the flavour is described as “mixed fruit”, it doesn’t retain any of the budget energy drink oversweetness or aftertaste – there’s actually no aftertaste at all. It’s generally an incredibly pleasant drink to have. After a couple of hours your mouth might feel a bit dry due to the high level of sugar, but otherwise it is probably the best tasting drink, even after trying all the other ones so far.

Taste: 9/10
Value: 5/10
Experience: 8/10
Overall: 8/10

So, I’ve done a basic portfolio website where I’ll be chronicling all the good pieces of work I do, in case there is anyone out there interested in some inexpensive web design who wants to see what I can do. I’ve based it on an old CMS project of mine which means it’s fairly easy to manage. You can access it from the links bar at the top of the blog or the new domain splash page, which allows you to choose where you want to go.

Monster Ripper is a spinoff of Monster Energy, which incorporates fruit juice into a new flavour, instead of the decidedly strange mix of chemicals already in place for standard Monster. It seems to be marketed as M-80 in some parts of the world, or at least shares the same nice, worn industrial metal can design as it. Speaking of the can, it’s the same 500ml deal as Monster, for roughly the same price, but it seems to be a bit higher in some shops. Ideally you should be looking for a can at about £1.25. It has the same concentration as Monster too, 160mg over the 500ml, that’s 32mg per 100ml or 1.28mg per penny, provided that you can get a can at the same price as regular Monster.

The taste: As many times as I’ve said that other energy drinks taste vaguely of pineapple, this one does too. But much more so. This time they’ve actually put fruit juice in, making up a whole 50% of the drink. The fruits are a blend of apple, passion fruit, pineapple and guava, and you can properly taste them. The taste only carries a hint of usual Monster, although you can tell quite quickly that the sugar content of the drink is still pretty high. Again Monster have made a drink with a taste that you wouldn’t usually expect from the energy drinks market.

Taste: 8/10
Value: 5/10
Experience: 8/10
Overall: 8/10