vapornut e-liquid review (alpha tasting, pre-release)

E-liquid purveyor-to-be VaporNut.com (progunxzx, on IRC & ECF) sent me some of his lovely e-liquid recipes he's been working on. These liquids are in the Alpha stage, he's just trying to nail down the recipe he likes. They were sent to me out of pity as I'd never had, at the time, tried any descent e-liquid flavors and couldn't afford any.

He sent me 3ml, I believe, bottles of his Watermelon, Carmel Apple, and Chocolate Banana. The bottles arrived intact, and well labelled. These are a 60/40 PG/VG blend, in 25mg/ml nicotine strength. I will be tasting these, obviously, with my only e-cigarette. I vape on a stock 510. I spent a couple hours vaping each by dripping the liquid in the atomizer with a blank whiste-tip with no filler. Each time I cleaned my atomizer, and puffed pure VG through it to flush it of the previous flavors.

vapornut's Watermelon
Overall 4.5/5
(Taste:5 Vapor:4 Smoothness: 4)
The liquid was, on arrival, a vibrant pink color. It looked like a Jolly Rancher candy-stick I remember from back in Middle School, and tasted exactly the same! The color has since faded, despite being locked away in a light-safe box for all of it's life with me, but the taste has not. I truly love this flavor. It's a little too up front for all day vaping, but I plan to keep a bottle of this with me as much as possible once they're available for sale! I've heard many reviewers speak of Throat-Hit and I've seen some confusion on what that means. I will speak of only Smoothness. I <3 Smoothness. The watermelon was very smooth, with really nice vapor production. Closer to the all-VG liquids I use most of the time than I expected from my experiences with PG/VG blends. I almost wanted to give this one a 5 by 5, but being a blend it's still not as smooth as "my idea" of perfection.

vapornut's Carmel Apple
Overall 4/5
(Taste:4 Vapor:4 Smoothness:4)
Next up, the Carmel Apple. I really liked this flavor, but the carmel was fairly subtle compared to the strength of the greenish apple notes. Both flavors were there, but that green apple was a nice and sturdy candy-type green apple and stood out strong. Again, reminiscent of Jolly Rancher's green apple. Equally as smooth and vaporful as the Watermelon. This was my fiancée's favorite, but she also seconded the subtle nature of the Carmel.

vapornut's Chocolate Banana
Overall 3/5
(Taste:3 Vapor:4 Smoothness:3)
This one I did not enjoy as much. I'm not a big fan of Banana to start with, in all honesty. So if you like the candy-banana runts-like flavor, you might really enjoy this. To both me and my Fiancée it came off as more of a slightly over-ripe banana. The chocolate was more of an after-taste to me, under the banana. Being prejudiced against banana, we give it a 3 for taste as it's a dead on banana, just not quite the one I'd think most people would expect. As for smoothness, this had more of a throat irritation for both of us, and really we had a hard time vaping it for very long as a result. But, as I said, we're both quite partial to the ultra-smooth all-VG most of the time. From getting to know many other vapers from ECF and IRC, most would be fine with this liquids level of Throat-Hit.

... don't call it a come back...

... I've been here for years.

As it turns out I couldn't afford to pay for the VPS and everything else life required. So I'm back to this location.

The main change of late is that I quit smoking 2 months ago. I purchased a Joye 510 e-cigarette kit from CigNot. These things are great. They let you select which color LED you'd like, I went with green. I haven't had one drag on an analog cigarette since I made the switch. It's been the most amazing smoking cessation experience I could have dreamed of. My lungs feel great. My house smells great.

I'm different than most Vaper's that I've run into since starting this journey. I prefer a smooth vaping experience. Everyone else seems to be chasing that throat hit. That burn in the back of your throat that smoking "provided." I, on the other hand, am glad to see that go. So I smoke only ALL VG based juices in my personal vaporizer. Recently I spent a few days puffing on All PG juice... and... awful. Hated it. So, if you're an e-cig user and are looking for something smoother, try out a great all VG juice sometime!

Things looking up at Clear?

It would seem that ClearWire's transition to Clear with the sprint/google/etc money is under way. There were two outages for a spell for me on Sunday and Monday and outside of that... nothing's been noticable. Other than an end to some of their traffic shapping fun. I can get a solid 200K on torrents, which I couldn't do before.

Maybe there was some grounds for all my hope about this new venture. We'll see how things continue.

With a new quarter's financial aid and a tax return headed my why I'm picking up some new resources. Namely a decked out HP tx2z. I plan to prove that all those sluggish problems in the multitouch were actually a windows problem and not something flawed in the HP hardware.

This will also free up my dv9000z for some combo intra/inter-net serving. Virtual machines FTW! Going to use dtdns for name service. That way I can use their dynamic dns stuff on hostnames in my own domain. Vanity crap, sure... but I tend to do that.

Secondly, I'm going to be signing up for a link3 vps over at VPSLink. Throw a lil' Gentoo GNU/Linux action at that, and I'll start self hosting all my NetNeeds again. Not sure which CMS I'll go with. Not sure what functionality I'll need... this'll mostly be a dry run for putting together the site the wifey will need for her business venture now that schools ending. Probably wind up being a lot more beefy than I need, to suit her needs later. Should be fun. All in all, I'd say this amounts to a last post here at the blogger site.

There's no readers, I'm not even sure why I did this. I probably won't be sure the next time I do it again. I'm still debating a name change. I don't know... I like twodogs and there's plenty of other's out there to help keep things complicated. Who knows. Either way I get to bring back my big long ass *.city.st.us domain that I love so much. Free domains FTW!

Did I miss something?

There was so much noise about the LHC going online like 6 days ago. It didn't make sense to me... all they did on the 10th was to shine a light in one direction. The "problems" people talk about were actually when they slam the crap together... and according to WikiPedia that's not supposed to happen for another 6-8 weeks.

I'm no physicist... but even as sad as the media is about everything and can't be relied on for crap I would have expected at least one outlet says something about that.

Oh well.

It's Vista's fault, not HP!

So there's some new hardware from HP that Engadget's gotten their hands on tonight. I really liked their coverage, and agree with most of the gripes. *cough*glossy*cough*

The one thing that I wished had been at least tacitly mentioned was that the failings of the touch interface shouldn't be attributed solely to HP's work! They've probably done the best that can be with the software they're stuck with. Consumer's still need it to support Vista. This Linux Geek can live fine without it, but your average consumer can not.

There's been discussion before about HP acknowledging, maybe, that Vista's just not up to par when it comes to the touch interface for this new emerging technology. The hardware's arrived far ahead the software. That's true with a lot of things, when using vista. Using Sabayon GNU/Linux and KDE with compiz-fusion I've managed to put together a desktop that's far more appealing than Vista (visually, and technically... don't forget my personal FOSS biases.) and it runs far smoother, even with the weightier effects.

I haven't played with any of the touch interface work being done in the FOSS world but I'd put money, had I any, that I could reproduce the basic functionality at an improved performance.

Now, I would like to see more AMD offerings from HP, damn it. They did recently rev their 17" entertainment notebook in the AMD flavor... but I'm not seeing enough AMD Love. I probably pay a premium for my AMD-Love but it's worth it. They're the one's continuing to truly innovate and that's definitely worth supporting. Intel may be a great company but their focus is on shrinking the die and I just don't see the true innovation we get from AMD. I don't even price Intel machines, so I don't know how much I'm paying... and I just don't buy Intel.

I just hope HP keeps us AMD Loyalists in mind... they've done well so far. I still love my DV9000z and I think it's time for an upgrade. I'd damn near kill for a dv7z with the CPU and RAM ++'d like I did with the 9000z.

...a more open internet?

It would seem that Clearwire's made some changes to their traffic shaping policies in the last 24 hours. I'm sure that this happening hot on the heels of the FCC telling Comcast they had 30 days to fess up about their throttling.

Last night I was trying to download the Fedora install DVD's to research something... in a virtual machine, as I'm not moving away from Sabayon GNU/Linux, and all I could get was a SOLID 20K.

I then shut the machine off to let it dry as my woman spilled some extremely stinky dirty water on it... but I don't think any got inside. So after it dried overnight I fired the machine up and all is well... AND my Fedora torrents are getting anywhere from 120/200K/s which has _never_ happened with Clearwire.

If this change lasts, I'm happy.

screenshots

With ebola out of the pawnshop I decided now was as good a time as any to restore the factory vista install and then reinstall Sabayon GNU/Linux. That all went reasonably well. Only issue with SL 3.5 L3 was that the installer didn't give me the option for installing grub on /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sda. I needed to as my /boot is sdb1 and with the raid0 setup it's what was needed. Not a major issue once the install was finished and it just continued to boot direct to windows I just reboot in to System Rescue CD and added grub to the remaining location and we were dual-booting happily.

Anyhow so I only use Vista for playing Command and Conquer 3. So my I spend all my time in the linux playing with crap in Virtual Machines flashing routers and just being a geek. So yeah I spent a good day getting everything dialed in on the interface. Focus follows mouse. Found the smoothest cleanest animations for all the compiz settings. It all functions quite nicely on this laptop but since we do the dynamic CPU speed thing sometimes the animations speeds get flakey.... but the fade always looks nice and crisp so that's what a few of them are set to now.

Anyhow here's screenshots of just the look. With SL3.5L3 things work great. Ecstatic about how things are progressing over there. They're getting funding... and they've moved away from that god awful red/yellow branding and adopted a nice blue. That works for me because the laptop has blue led's so it encourages me to go with a blue theme too.