I can't remember if I'd mentioned it before, but I've built a parser and page to track Tumbleweed snapshots. It'll be in the next site update, which should be sometime this week, I think. There will also be feeds for other sites to use. The Tumbleweed page will display what snapshot you are on, if you are using Tumbleweed, and there's a diff viewer to show package changes between the current snapshot and the past snapshots.
I haven't updated the Grazie versions in a while, so when I merge the React Router changes, I'll call it 0.7.x. Version 0.8 will have the new theme system updates, which will be a pretty big shift, and then 0.9.x will be betas and RCs.
I am not at all happy with the way the react-router dev server works, which is just vite dev. It is very slow and is basically only useful for error messages. I've put in a stop gap with nodemon and the production build/serve, which is much better, but not entirely useful as a dev server. I'm still trying to get it figured out. Unfortunately, it's the reason I hadn't migrated much sooner, even to newer Remix versions, because the dev server is just terrible.
I still have a few updates to do in the react router migration, mostly dealing with how route components changed from Remix 2, and tweaking the routing in general. It runs really well on the production server, I just want to get those few things cleaned up.
I'm not sure how much time I'll have to work on it this week, but I'd like to get this site updated with the last Remix 2 version of Grazie. I'm trying to decide if I want to launch ProfoundGrace.org with the Remix 2 version or wait and merge the React Router version into it first. It may be easiest to wait for the changes planned for 0.8.0.
Speaking of 0.8.0, my plan for it is to add a site folder outside of app, but I'm still trying to decide on the exact structure. The idea is to have the core Grazie app and then site specific stuff in the site folder, like theme, routes, and components. This makes it easier to build different sites which Grazie and makes merging upstream changes easier. I'm also thinking about dropping PostgreSQL support. Allora will have a better database alternative to SQLite, so I don't really see the point in having PG in Grazie!. It's not changing for now, but is a possibility.
I had planned to stay on Remix 2, without Vite, for a little longer, but some initial tests went well. I've rebuilt Grazie! to run on React Router 7 Framework, which is the equivalent of what would have been Remix 3. This means we get React 19 support and Vite. The latter, I'm not super impressed with. I kinda hate the Vite Dev server. It's super slow, compared to the Remix Dev server. I've tried a few things to speed it up, but I can't believe it wants to download every package file as a chunk on every refresh. That just doesn't make sense, plus it's non-responsive for a good 10 seconds after a restart. It has to be, something, not entirely correct, but I haven't figured out what, if that is the case.
The good news is the production server runs fine, so I've decided to press on. The big changes planned for February are, obviously, the RR 7/Vite migration, and then I plan to restructure the way themes and overrides work. Currently, you can override a page/layout, based on the loader value for that page, in your theme. I plan to add route and component overrides as well, but I haven't decided if those should be in the theme yet.
The goal is to build something that can be deployed and built onto for different purposes, without causing a lot of issues merging upstream changes. Th current structure is almost there, but I feel like it needs another layer between Grazie! and site specific changes. It needs a better core and customization separation, basically. That's what I hope to solve in February.
In addition to the package/framework migration, I'm also adding password resets and email support. The email support is kinda needed for the password reset. This change is driven by me moving away from bcrypt to the Node.js crypto module for password hashing. If a current user has a bcrypt hashed password, it will trigger a password reset workflow, when they try to log in.
If I get everything done, that I want to, in February, then we may be close to a beta for March. There are a few additional things I want to fix or add, but it wouldn't hurt for them to come later.
Today I merged the new RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds into Grazie!. The feeds are currently only for latest posts (up to 25 items), I plan to add feeds for categories in the future. I've decided to take a step back from the work I had done for theme component overrides. I think the block system is more important and may make component overrides unnecessary. I also worked on a page that processed Tumbleweed snapshots. That's mostly a personal thing for me, but it could be useful as an RSS feed, which I plan to add as well.
It's been sitting for a while (20250103 branch), so I went ahead and reviewed/merged the early January updates into Grazie!. It's mostly just the Notes functionality (although not complete) and some bug fixes. I've been working on theme overrides for route components/loaders. I'd like to get that finished for some other projects I'm working on using Grazie!. Either way I'll likely upgrade this site sometime this week just for the Notes functionality. I've also been working on RSS support for Posts, some RSS reader features, and a content block system, which will likely be part of the February updates.
On alltheflavors.com we have formulations that you use to "mix" flavored recipes. Most people on the site use these to create eliquid, but we have a lot of different ingredients to create other things to. I've been drinking a lot of tea lately, mostly green tea, but also some mixtures with green, oolong, and white teas. I mostly have individual size tea bags, so I would put in 2 green tea bags and 2 oolong tea bags, to make a green tea with a little kick. I also have used some flavored tea bags. It eventually occurred to me, I have all of these flavor concentrates, I wonder if I could flavor my own tea. Well, I can!
I did some research, some math, and compared usage percentages of different concentrates. The concentrate bottles most of us get drop 0.02 grams of concentrate per drop. I wanted to try to create a simple formula for use, that would work for drops or grams (or mL). Based on the research, it looked like people were using 2 to 3 drops per 8 ounces of water, while one site recommends 5 drops per 12 ounce of water. I deduced this down to 1 drop per 100mL. Since 0.02 grams is 0.02mL, this approach simplified usage percentage, which comes out to 0.02%.
I created a formulation on ATF that uses brewed green tea and a flavor modifier of 0.02x. I left sugar out of the formulation and it assumes you've already sweetened the tea to your liking. I've made my formulation public, you can see it here: Mixnjuice's Green Tea. To use it, just select it under a recipe with the Mix button in the formulations list. I've only tried it with Flavorah flavors, one of them made the best Mango Green Tea I've ever tasted, but it should work with other brands. I plan to test others, so if it doesn't work as well, then I'll make a v2 formulation to adjust the modifier, but none of the Flavorah flavors I tested used the same percentages, so it should be fairly universal.
One downside to my methodology, is you are more limited at smaller quantities. For instance, there are a lot of flavors that you wouldn't, easily, be able to use at the 100mL minimum, because it would require less than 1 drop. You would need to find a less concentrated flavoring at 100mL, something like Capella or The Flavor Apprentice comes to mind, but that means you'd need to use more flavoring as the scale goes up. Overall though I'm extremely satisfied and surprised at how well this works.
Sony announced they are ending support for Blu-ray, potentially ending physical media and consumer media ownership, Techspot reports.
Tumbleweed now has the latest (mainline) Linux Kernel, 6.13. I'm running it right now, no issues so far :)
I never use Discover, unless it's to install something KDE specific and I never use it to update. If you are using openSUSE Tumbleweed and want to get rid of Discover Notifier, run this:
sudo zypper rm --clean-deps discover6-notifier
sudo zypper al discover6-notifier
These will uninstall the notifier and lock the package so it isn't installed in the future, which it typically is by default.
Drupal has released a new CMS, creatively named Drupal CMS. The Drupal framework is one of the most used platforms for building web sites, with deployments from governments and several large corporations. The timing is exceptional, as the popular WordPress is currently going through some difficult times, both legally and financially. I haven't had a chance to try it, but it looks like it has potential.
I've been experimenting with creating a new scripting language that I'm writing with Rust. I've named it Languish, which is a synonym for Rust and a word play on Language. Surprisingly, it's actually coming along fairly well. I don't want to really get into details yet, but it has some novel capabilities and has been kind of refreshing to work on. I don't know when it'll be ready, but I plan to get it to the point I'm happy with it and then I'll begin sharing it with the world. For now it's just another side project.
Sometime around snapshot 20250102 I started having issues with Flatpaks not using system fonts or cursors. Most notably in DBeaver and Zen Browser. If you have these issues, you can solve them as below.
Download the previous RPM from the Tumbleweed repos: https://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss/x86_64/xdg-desktop-portal-1.18.4-1.1.x86_64.rpm
Open the location you downloaded the RPM in a terminal and run:
sudo zypper in --oldpackage xdg-desktop-portal-1.18.4-1.1.x86_64.rpm(optional) Lock the package version to skip the bad version:
sudo zypper al xdg-desktop-portal
Note: once a newer package is released, you can remove the package lock with sudo zypper rl xdg-desktop-portal
In the evenings I've been working on the reboot of ProfoundGrace.org (PFG), which is being built on top of Grazie!. I have the Bible feature working fairly well, with some additional features it didn't have before. PFG will have it's own theme, named Rock, based loosely on it's existing color scheme. The work has driven some fixes and improvements to Grazie! as well. I found some bugs in the pager and content lists: the pager currently overwrites query params external to the pager itself; the posts listing page doesn't display correctly for privileged users when there are no posts. There have also been a few little fixes here and there.
In Grazie!, I've been working on the Notes feature, which will later merge into PFG and kinda be specialized for that use case. Notes in Grazie! are mostly a feature for me or any user that registers here; they are private notes and lists, so you can only see the ones you create. I also plan to add website Bookmarks to Grazie!, but I don't know yet if they will be public or private (or both).
ProfoundGrace.org (PFG) hasn't had any updates in a while and it uses ArangoDB, so I'm converting it into SQLite so I can use Grazie! with it. I had been planning to use Allora (the SurrealDB variant of Grazie!) for it, but it seems like overkill and I was working on some JSON to SQL scripts earlier, which gave me the idea to use it with PFG. The tooling is intended for a project on ATF, but it actually works really well with SQLite as well. I have the SQLite tool in a repo, on github, named dbtools, if you want to take a peek, otherwise I'll talk about it later on when it's more capable.
I need to get back to the ATF work, which inspired this change, but I mostly have the Bible feature ported to Grazie. I'll work on it on the side and try to get it online in a couple of weeks. This was all necessary because I'm moving to SurrealDB and want to drop my ArangoDB sites/servers. Getting PFG converted gets me another step closer and SQLite makes a lot of sense for mostly static data. The content features don't get a lot of traffic, but the Bible does, so I don't want to take it down without replacing it.
I've been working on several new development branches for All the Flavors. We also acquired VC (https://vapingcommunity.co.uk/), which was, previously, going to shutdown 1 January 2025. Hopefully we can keep this great community going.
Batches
We've added a Browse Batches listing, for public batches. You can also now feature a public batch by pinning it to the Recipe, there's now a list of public batches on the Recipe, and a toggle button to choose which batches are viewed. This one is completed, we just haven't pushed it to the live site yet.
Flavor Reviews
We are adding Flavor Reviews and updating the way reviews are displayed. Reviews will also have like and dislike buttons.
Recipes
We are updating the flavor tooltips in the recipe editor to display flavor ratings, favorites, inventory amount, and location info.
Tags
We are adding a page to browse by tags and displaying tags on item listings (like flavors and recipes).
Home Page
The home page is getting some styling updates and some new content, like recipe forum posts and recent reviews.
Flavor Compounds
We are building up a new data set of Flavor Compounds, which you will be able to use in Recipes. These will also enable you to create perfumes and other aromatic recipes.
Better late than never, Tumbleweed finally got the 6.12 Kernel with version 6.12.6.
As far as I can tell, there were some issues with the new kernel and systemd-boot (which I don't use). The automated testing kept failing, so the kernel had been held back until now.
We launched the new calculator updates. These allow you to mix recipes with flavor shots and premixes, as well as mix a premix from just a formulation.
We also had some bug fixes in the update. There was previously an issue where mix counts weren't incrementing, so that was fixed. We fixed a bug that would cause issues if a recipe had more than 20 revisions (due to a self-imposed query limiter). We also fixed a state bug when adding favorites or flash stashing flavors from a recipe view.
Next
I am currently working on enhancements for Batches. There will be a general Browse Batches menu item and page. Recipes are getting featured or pinned batches, so the recipe author can highlight a mix or variant of the recipe. Recipes will also be getting a public batches list. These will all be under a selector button, so you can choose which batch view is being shown, instead of adding more buttons or tabs.
We will also be adding the ability to set ingredients to 1/1000 instead of just 1/100 as well as the ability to mix by parts, instead of percent.
We have some new types of "ingredients" we will be adding soon, which goes along with the 1/1000 and parts updates.
Finally, there is still an outstanding bug in remixing batches: if you modify a formulation in the calculator, the changes don't show up when you remix it. I've worked on that some and will try to get that fixed soon. I will probably spend a week here soon just bug fixing, as I'm sure more will probably be identified with the more recent updates.
Just so you know, I've forked Grazie! (my own project) and created a version that supports SurrealDB, named Allora. So far it's a 1 to 1 port, with just changes related to SurrealDB and dropping SQLite/PostgreSQL support. It's taken a lot longer to find time to work on it than I hoped. It will be the platform BeSquishy will be built on and will be open sourced eventually, along with the SurrealDB tools developed for it.
We've been doing some big calculator updates for ATF.
Formulation Mixes
We've added a formulation only mode to the calculator, so you can make premixes.
Premixes
You'll be able to add a Premix to the calculator, which can match the formulation or be additional ingredients. You'll also be able to replace a formulation with a premix.
Flavor Shots
You'll be able to mix with a flavor shot of a recipe.
Other
A big focus of the calculator changes initially were to make it more modular, but I'm not very happy with how that turned out. That will happen, but it'll be a work in progress and may wind up being a separate experimental mode.
We've fixed a few bugs with the calculator, most of which people haven't seemed to have noticed. I also fixed some bugs in the Recipe History display (again, probably unnoticed). There is one outstanding bug for remixing a batch, but I haven't tracked that one down just yet. I also fixed a bug that wasn't counting mixes correctly and one that didn't update if you added a flavor to flavor stash/favorite from a recipe.
I've also worked on improving the formulation selection for mixing, including a selector in the calculator. This won't be in the next update, but it's coming.
There's more, including some enhancements for tags in item lists and some public batch improvements, and some all new stuff that has been a work in progress.
Mid-summer in 2020, I started planning and buying parts for a new PC build. During all of that, I was also looking for a new Linux distro. At the time, I was tired of LTS and always having to manage a big chunk of my own package versions. I tried Fedora, but then an upgrade broke my desktop and I could have probably fixed it, but I decided I didn't want to deal with major distro upgrades at all. I tried Arch, then I tried Tumbleweed. I said, "Okay...I'm gonna give this [Tumbleweed] a try, I'll run it until it breaks." Well, 4 years later now, It never broke. Not only that, I went nearly 2 years without having to use snapper to roll back an update, at one point, and today, it has been 11 months and 15 days since my last roll back. That is insane reliability for a rolling distro. That's also without me having to manually fix anything, which you just don't do when you can just roll back.
Tumbleweed is the best Linux distro. It is.
She just squirtin' her coochie into the wind?
By my wife, watching a nature show, Night on Earth. The scene was of an Atlas Moth, for context, spreading pheromones.
This past week we released Recipe History, which allows you to track recipe revisions, revert to older versions of a recipe, or save an older version as a new recipe. We also released an update that allows you to copy a new recipe from a Batch of another recipe or update a recipe from a batch that was modified in the calculator before saving it. The third update added the flavor information from the Recipe editor to the calculator freeform and modify features. Finally, we added user cards that can be clicked to activate on Recipes and Formulations.
It's hard to believe we only have 12 weeks left this year. We still have a lot we want to do. This past week I developed the user cards and did some finishing touches on the Recipe History before launch. I also worked on the ability to mix a recipe as a flavor shot, which is mostly functional now, and the ability to select ingredients in a formulation to be part of a premix. These are all built on the branch that adds the ability to mix a formulation without a recipe, so the part that creates a premix.
We are getting close to the calculator state we want, which will allow us to add more functionality to it. We also want to break up the calculator and make it more modular, but that should preserve functionality and just allow us to do more things more easily in the future. I should be getting my co-worker back soon too, so either the pace will pick up or we'll be developing a wider range of features.