Something a little different... SnackSurprise South Korean box review

A few weeks ago, my good lady showed me a video on YouTube of someone reviewing a snack box. Now this was something I had not heard of before so she explained that there are companies who, for a set amount every month, will supply a mystery box of various snacks based on a theme, in this case, snacks from other countries. Curiosity piqued, she duly signed up with Snacksurprise.com and after a short while, the box arrived. This is what we received: Snacks from South Korea. The blanket was from York.

A decent selection... but that drinks can scares me.

Along with the snacks you get a little pamphlet that tells you what "delights" have been included.

With pamphlet.

Since we had ordered the Ordinary box, this page was relevant to us:

The Ordinary box costs £12.99 per month and will contain 8 to 10 items including one drink. The Premium box costs £23.99 per month and you get 16 to 20 plus items, as well as one drink. Postage to UK addresses is free. OK, so it's not particularly cheap but the site states you can cancel at any time so at least you have that flexibility. So, where to start...

The Hot Chicken Flavoured Ramen. A one-person portion, these were easy to prepare and were surprisingly good quality ramen. Certainly better than a lot of the pot-encased stuff you get in the UK. The comment in the pamphlet did note that these were going to be spicy hot, so we prepared ourselves accordingly with suitable beverages. We should have prepared more thoroughly...

It burns, it burns!!!

Lord above, these are hot! I don't just mean warm, I mean a burning heat that, once you adapt to it, is bearable, but not entirely comfortable. Yes, we put the supplied flakes in but I don't think they were needed. Last time I had something this hot was an Elvis Pizza from a local takeaway that really was unpleasant to eat. Aside from the heat, these were rather nice and with something a little less burny, I'd quite happily have these as a quick lunch snack every now and again.

After a couple of glasses of milk to calm things down, we moved onto the Sweet Potato snacks, flavoured with Maple Syrup.

Was the package designer a fan of the film Hannibal???

A funky little shape (think miniature spinal columns...), these were quite sweet, using white sweet potatoes. You certainly get the maple syrup flavour and they are a decent snack. The issue with these was that the taste became a bit too sickly after said one or two and you certainly couldn't eat many in one sitting. Well, we couldn't anyway.

Next up, the Onion Rings, which were very similar to UK-sold snacks but with one major difference - these actually had quite a strong taste of onion. This was a pleasant surprise. So far, these were the best of the box.

Straight forward and to the point

Away from savoury now, and the Custard Soft Cupcake. Simply sponge with a custard cream filling, the notes advised eating this with a cup of coffee ready. Whilst we didn't do that, we can see why they say that. It's delicious. Very tasty, with a hint of sweetness from the sponge and quite firm custard cream, this immediately replaced the onion rings as our favourite.

Looks unassuming...

...tastes delicious.

The next three were chocolate based snacks, starting off with Pepero, a biscuit stick with a chocolate and almond covering. These looked okay but they are extremely dry, so you definitely need something to drink when eating these. That and the nuts left a sour aftertaste that I didn't appreciate. The chocolate tasted a little cheap too. My good lady took one bite and declined the rest - the almonds proving her un-doing.

Not as tasty as they appear...

Kancho next, and these little biscuits appear to be aimed at children, looking to us like a biscuit version of Love Hearts, with little pictures or words on each one. The Kancho themselves are very small and quite dry, with the combination of chocolate and biscuit reminding us both of Choc Dips in both taste and dryness. Not unpleasant, but definitely an acquired taste. Be warned, if they are to your taste, they are very more-ish!

These are tiny.

Last of the chocolate snacks was the Choco Pie, a sandwich of cake and marshmallow. As you can see, it looks quite nice, so it's a shame that there wasn't much flavour to it. In fact, it was quite bland and unappetising.

It looks promising...

... but looks are deceiving.

The My Gummy natural fruit jelly sweets. The smell almost put me off before trying one - an industrial level of grape and gelatin. The big surprise here: not much of an actual grape flavour. There is, however, a lot of gelatin here, which made them unpleasant to chew. When combined with the lack of taste, this meant a no from both of us.

Industrial jelly sweets - no thank you!

The last food item was the Secom-Dalcom. Strawberry flavoured sour fruit chews, and chewy they were, with immediate thoughts of "how to I get to a dentist" as the offending sweet tried (ultimately) unsuccessfully to relieve me of a filling. The actual taste was rather nice and they reminded us of Chewits, even if they were packaged like Hubba-Bubba.

Not bad at all.

Last, but certainly not least, the Milkis Soda.

Fantastic Feel! Milkis! New feeling of soda beverage! My ring piece...

This, apparently, is one of the most popular drinks in South Korea, combining the traditional fizz of soda with the creamy taste of milk and the tang of yogurt. Now, this description puts people into one of two camps: either you want to vomit now or you have memories of Lemonade Floats. Well, let's find out.

I really didn't like this one bit. OK, it tasted like a weak ice cream float but there was a weird aftertaste. Drinking this made me feel like I had just belched up milk, and that's not nice. My good lady, though initially liked the drink, then felt she had just vomited in her mouth. As you can probably tell, gentle reader, this was not nice. If you ever see anything like this on the shelves of your local shop, caveat emptor! Oh, and that's not the best bit about this drink. We poured it into a glass and all I can say is that I now have a very good idea what diluted carbonated jizz would look like...

Mmmmm... Milky...

So, our thoughts on our first Suprisesnack.com box: Interesting, with a couple of items that we'd buy again if we could, some that we'd avoid by choice and one that really, really needs Marty McFly and an '82 DeLorean to go back and change history. I cannot stress enough how bad that drink was. And no, we didn't finish the can. 

Would I recommend this service? Well, yeah, it's a frivolous thing but fun as well. I don't begrudge the price of the Ordinary box, though I think the Premium is a bit too much. If you're interested, then check out the website in the link above. We're now looking forward to see what June's box provides...

SeaQuest DSV - Season One

That's Scheider's best Freeman's catalogue pose...

1990's US TV schedules were littered with sci-fi shows that never made it past their first season. Earth 2, Dark Skies, Harsh Realm, Space: Above and Beyond and VR.5 are now only recalled by rabid fans and uber-nerds (which probably tells you all you need to know about me!), and are generally considered failures because of their one-season-wonder status. True, there were some shows that carved a minor niche in 90's TV history - the Trek franchise alone managed to have three shows within the decade (although each had their own faults), and you had the likes of Sliders and Babylon 5 that didn't rely on franchise familiarity to reach the heady heights of five seasons. But SeaQuest DSV is something different from any of those. This show lasted three seasons, more by good luck than good judgement, and even with the headline names attached (star Roy Scheider and executive producer Steven Spielberg), has the reputation of being a stinker. Hell, at 57 episodes, it must have done something right. Right?

Starting in the then-distant future of 2018(!), the show follows Captain Nathan Bridger (Scheider), designer and captain of the United Earth Oceans Organisation submarine SeaQuest and his multicultural (through American eyes) crew as they try to bring peace to the new frontier of the 21st Century, the oceans. Naturally, starting off as a high profile prime time TV show, the producers go for every available demographic (hence the casting choices) and whilst this means the show has relatively high production values (though at times, it does look cheap, which I'll get to later), it also means that the writers have to pull their punches due to the time slot in order to keep every viewer happy - and as the saying goes, try to keep everyone happy and you end up pleasing no-one...

Premiering in 1993, SeaQuest used the then new and exciting field of CGI to portray the undersea actions and yes, it hasn't aged very well at all. At the time, the graphics were considered decent but murky and viewing on DVD today confirms that, though they are not as bad as I recall. You have Dr. Bob Ballard (he who led the expedition to locate the Titanic) as a technical consultant and, at least for season one, talking head at the end of each episode - more on him in a bit. Unlike some TV shows of the time, there is a sense of some continuity between episodes, but only where it suits the story, and usually you can, like the network did, treat each episode as a standalone story. This doesn't work when the broadcast order is scrambled (as mirrored by the DVD running order), with one character moving from Admiral to President then back to Admiral again within three episodes. The fact that the network was screwing with the play order tells you pretty much what they thought of the show.

So, does the show deserve it's reputation. Well... not quite... ish...

Where to begin? First up, SeaQuest season one has an identity issue. Many a first season of any show is uneven - after all, they are trying to find their feet and figure out what does/doesn't work whilst trying to get that all important second season renewal. You just have to look at Star Trek: TNG to see how long it can take, where it was well into its third season before the show started to work. With SeaQuest, however, you can see the initial goal for scientific accuracy and realism but the seemingly ever present drive of American TV shows to add "humour" brings up some really stupid stories; The Treasures of the Tonga Trench being a really, really poo (literally) episode. Then there is Knight of Shadows, a Halloween episode that, aside from one decent scare, shows how silly and vapid the show could get (and that's only episode eight...). Later episodes rattle from serious geo-political intrigue to war criminals, mermaids and aliens. Tonally, this show is all over the place.

Realism suffers a lot even when you have the respected Bob Ballard doing his piece to camera during the end credits, linking the episode's story with a real world (or frankly ludicrous predictions of what the future holds for humanity and the oceans). You see, it looks like he's been press-ganged into doing them, held at gunpoint, fitted with an overly small SeaQuest DSV baseball cap and marched around the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to sprout word salads to make you feel that the show is more science fact than fiction. Yet by the time you get to Knight of Shadows (which has ghosts on a hundred year old sunken liner), you can see the desperation in his eyes, the sheer panic at wondering why he has to say such things on camera, the pleading to the viewer to call the cops. Seriously, watch him, watch his eyes! Fortunately for Bob, he was rescued by the end of season one and we never see him again on SeaQuest.

Casting did a decent enough job with most of the actors, I have no issue there, but some characters are poorly handled and, dare I say, miscast. Scheider is always good value and as the season progresses, you can see the other actors becoming more comfortable in their roles; Stacey Haiduk as Lieutenant Commander Hitchcock (younger lady eye candy) and Don Franklin as Commander Ford (supposed foil to Scheider) in particular but really, the casting choices of Stephanie Beacham (Dr Kristen Westphalen - thinking man's totty) and Royce D Applegate (Chief Crocker - to get your Grandpa interested) are puzzling. Beacham, for one, comes across as rather too plummy and is pretty much an exposition machine (apart from the last two episodes when an out of the blue romance with Bridger appears because... the writer's needed something to do???), though her turn in Knight of Shadows is particularly cringe-worthy. John D'Aquino (Lieutenant Krieg) is suitably annoying and the source of much of the (American) humour - think Sgt Bilko and you have the right idea, whilst Ted Raimi (Lieutenant O'Neill - he's the awkward nerd) and Marco Sanchez (Sensor Chief Ortiz - Cuban, so we're going for ethnic minority eye candy) are suitably decent in their limited roles. The last two main characters... well...

Darwin the (f***ing) Dolphin is a Marmite addition to the crew - you'll either love him or hate him. Guess which camp I fall into... It's not the idea of a dolphin in the crew that's an issue, it's the way he's brought to life, with annoying speech effects by Frank Oz and those bloody pan pipes. Yep, pretty much every time he appears on screen, you get bloody pan pipe music! Arrgghhhhhh!!!

Finally, you have Jonathan Brandis as child prodigy (and border line sex pest) Lucas Wolenczak. Oh. Dear. Lord.

Look, I get it. I really do. Wolenczak is a teen genius who happens to be easy on the eye for those who like the blond floppy hair look. As a network TV exec, you want your teenage male audience to want to be him, and your teenage female audience to want to date him (this is the early '90's, that's how binary the TV networks looked at their audiences). Not calling Brandis out here (because his personal struggles both during and after the show are well known, leading to his untimely suicide), but the handling of his character ranges from heartfelt (he was effectively dumped on the SeaQuest by his parents) to the aforementioned sex pest. In one episode, he is in the gym with Hitchcock and notices her chest. He starts staring with an expression that defies polite explanation. Being a TV show from the past, the director then cuts to a few seconds of Haiduk's chest moving up and down due to the exercise. Yeah, they did that back then in family TV shows and is about as subtle as a diver's boot to the bollocks... In another episode, he get's to re-use that look with another crew member who, to put it politely, is old enough to be his mother. Cue another few seconds of uncomfortable viewing. And that's not even to mention the safe sex/abstinence message at the end of "Abalon". Just wow...

Like most TV shows, SeaQuest has its fair share of guest appearances, and like most TV shows, these are variable in quality (I'm looking at you, Murder She Wrote. You lived (and died) by your guest actor casting). You get William Shatner as unshaven despot Milos Teslov, complete with "accent". I don't know what accent, so we'll just go with "accent". Then you have Charlton Heston as some kind of Dr Moreau character - though he obviously believes he is in a different TV show and out-acts pretty much everybody else on screen with the exception of Scheider. W. Morgan Sheppard is given little to do as the submarine's hologram, which is a shame, whilst Richard Herd is dependable as Admiral/President/Admiral Noyce (that bloody running order thing again!). Kent McCord rocks it as an astronaut for two episodes, kind of like a '90's Anson Mount (no disrespect to either actor meant in that comparison), whilst James Shigeta gels nicely as a confederation President, even if it does look like he's just walked off the set of Die Hard (pre-gunshot to the head, obviously). We even get Seth Green in the painfully technologically dated episode Photon Bullet, where he plays... Seth Green. To top it off, we have David McCallum. In the '90's, he scored gigs on Murder She Wrote, Babylon 5, VR.5, The Outer Limits and Team Knight Rider. Alongside the similarly talented David Warner, it seems you weren't a '90's show without one of these two actors. Warner's '90's run included Murder She Wrote, ST: TNG, Wild Palms, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Babylon 5, The Outer Limits and Total Recall 2070. Kudos to Babylon 5 for snagging both, albeit in separate episodes. Anyhoo, back to McCallum in SeaQuest and... it's not good. Set in an outpost called Broken Ridge, McCallum plays an Australian, but in no way gets the accent. In fact, his accent does a Grand Tour to anywhere but Australia during the course of the episode. Lord knows why he was cast here, but it was the wrong choice.

It's a shame then that most of the stories in season one are pretty forgettable and that the world-building was so haphazard. Indeed, apart from the episodes already mentioned, it's difficult to recall many of the others. What should have been exciting and dramatic often falls flat, much like the cultural approach to humour. Above all, this show feels like it is going through the motions, meaning most of the episodes come across as generic retreads of familiar themes, and that's before you get to casting choices and slightly dodgy production values (one episode with astronauts uses barely disguised motorcycle helmets that look more like something out of Blakes 7 than a prime time US TV show - and yes, I have just finished watching the four series of B7 and know exactly how cheap it could look!). Given a bit more depth (yes, I went there), this show could have been a ratings success in the long term. As it was, it was an expensive show to make and expectations were probably set too high. In the end, no-one really knew which direction to take the show.

SeaQuest DSV season one falls into a common trap of many TV shows, both genre and mainstream, in that by trying to please network execs, advertisers and viewers, it came across as bland and boring. Bad in places, though not as terrible as many think, it demonstrated a level of promise that unfortunately, it couldn't deliver. Out of ten, I'd stretch out to a six, since there was the foundation of a decent show in there somewhere. However, the network were troubled by the ratings and this meant changes for season two...

The Lenovo Yogabook - long term review

I've had the Lenovo Yogabook for something like three and a bit years now and it's turned out to be not too bad a purchase. When originally released, there were two models, one with Android and one with Windows 10 - the model I chose. It's a 10.1 inch convertible powered by an Intel Atom x5-Z8550 quad core processor, comes with 4GB of non-upgradeable LPDDR3 RAM and 64GB of storage. A powerhouse, this is not. The touchscreen display resolution is a better than full HD (1920 x 1200) and is bright enough to use comfortably both indoors and out. It is, however, reflective as hell. Also, with such a high resolution in such a small size, the default settings make text very small. You can scale the resolution and that may help for those of you with less than brilliant eyesight but even I can't handle more than a couple of hours working with text on here. Two cameras (one above the display, one to the top right of the keyboard) provide video call options in whatever format you use the device. Storage is expandable by up to 128GB via an SD card slot and you also have mini HDMI and micro USB ports for attaching displays and other devices. Note though, the micro USB port also doubles as the charging port so in reality, you're very limited to what you can do if the battery needs charging. Speaking of the battery, the blurb promises up to 13 hours. The device itself is quite light and handy, yet feels reassuringly solid with its magnesium alloy construction.

You can see the reflections in the bezel, the screen is exactly the same.

What really caught my interest when looking at this laptop was the design and the keyboard. The unique (for a laptop) Watchband hinge permits both laptop, tablet and tent mode, and is firm and stable in use. It keeps the screen in position when used as a laptop, nicely folds in tablet mode and is rock steady when used in tent mode. The keyboard, however, is the main talking point. This is the much vaunted HALO keyboard, where the 'keys' are illuminated sections of a capacitive panel. You can select haptic feedback that gives a little buzz every time you hit a 'key' but that got a bit annoying after a while. Without the feedback, you'll have to concentrate on your typing and even with the best will in the world, you're not going to hit your regular typing speeds. In fact, during the initial familiarisation with the laptop, you'll be making more than a few mistakes and some users might get more than a little frustrated with the concept. Put the time in though and it's ok. 'Key' size is decent, even if some of the lesser used keys are a little on the small side. The trackpad beneath the keyboard is, however, tiny and the two mouse 'buttons' are also similarly finicky to use. Overall though, if you're used a phone or touchscreen keyboard, you'll know what you're getting.

Not great connectivity.

The choice of keyboard, however, also permits the Yogabook's biggest draw. You can draw on it. The supplied Real Pen stylus uses the digitiser pad (with 2,048 levels of sensitivity) so that you can draw to your heart's content, something that works very well. You switch between the pen and keyboard modes via a small round pen icon at the top of the keyboard. Replace the nib with a supplied ink cartridge and you can clip the Book pad (a posh notepad) onto the digitiser and start writing notes on paper that are picked up by software on the Yogabook. This is an accurate system that works well with text, drawings and the like. It certainly adds to the versatility of the device.

So what do I use it for?

It started off as an on the go text input and content consumption device - although the keyboard did prove slightly too cumbersome for regular use so I ended up buying an OTG USB adapter and a Logitech wireless keyboard. The Yogabook did turn out to be an excellent tablet replacement, certainly for magazine scans and pdf's. It's just the right size to read scans at full resolution and light enough not to feel tiring after an hour or two of holding it. It does stutter at times, especially when loading from an SD card and realistically, Windows 10 prefers more than 4GB of RAM but it's usable, especially when I installed Libre Office. Battery life never approached the claimed 13 hours; 9 to 10 hours of usage for reading was pretty common, especially in the early days. Currently though, it's more like five to six hours and that means that a replacement is probably due at some point. Once again, I start thinking of the Armbok...

This was a cracking magazine in its time. But those bloody reflections...

So now that this machine is less of a workhorse and more a leisure device, I am spreading my wings a bit as to how this can be used, gaming being one suitable option. By gaming, I certainly do not mean anything recent - hell, anything at all with 3D graphics is going to hammer this machine into the ground. No, I was thinking retro console and DOS games, and there is certainly enough power here to run RetroArch, my go to emulation app. It handles Megadrive and SNES titles with ease, but anything more recent, the 3DO for example, is a tad too much for the device. That still leaves thousands of titles for the numerous 8 and 16-bit consoles, as well as handy 8-bit computer emulation with the keyboard. As you can see below, when teamed up with the Hyperkin Duke X-Box controller, you get an idea of the size of both devices. I'll probably get round to buying an 8BitDo Bluetooth controller that will be a bit more portable and not take up the the micro-USB port. Combine that with the HDMI out and you have a very nice little retro games machine that slips easily into a bag and is good for a few hours play.

Good old Desert Strike... plus reflections.

The controller is big, the laptop is small...

When launched, this was a niche device and one that wasn't overly successful. There was a follow up laptop with the HALO keyboard but that was discontinued a couple of years ago. Like most convertibles, the Yogabook ends up being neither fish or fowl, with the addition of the keyboard proving less practical than you'd want, whilst Windows 10 is not a tablet OS even with touchscreen accessibility. Despite that, it is a useful machine and has seen good use since I purchased it, especially once I discovered the joys of Archive.org and the Out of Print Archive for old PC and gaming magazine scans. A note of caution though. Visiting Archive.org is very much like journeying down the rabbit hole and it is a very interesting time sink.

The lack of ports is a bit of a bother at times and I do feel that with enough use, that micro-USB port is in danger of breaking - it certainly feels loose when plugging in cables and that is a major concern given that this is the only means of changing the battery. Time will tell. The battery is also non-replaceable, a feature that has kept my Asus Eee-PC is use for over a decade. As for a replacement, that's going to take some consideration...