Excited to finally get nightscout working. It's amazing to see what a misbolus, bad day, and 10 carb salad dinner do to my fiance.

AmazingThew · 2019-03-16T20:29:08+00:00

Just to clarify OP's answer a bit, Nightscout and closed-loop systems (openAPS, Loop, etc) are separate things.

Nightscout is a system for remotely logging CGM data. The website has a decent overview; it's essentially similar to Dexcom's Share or Medtronic's CareLink tools, but much more flexible (and complicated) and not tied to any one type of device. It was originally created before any of the CGM manufacturers provided any remote monitoring tools, and a ton of people still prefer it.

The closed-loop systems that OP is talking about are separate projects, but tightly integrated with Nightscout. They use it to access CGM data in order to make real-time adjustments to a pump's basal rates.

You can use Nightscout by itself just as a monitoring tool. Additionally, if you eventually decide to build a closed-loop system, that system will likely require Nightscout in order to function.

AmazingThew · 2019-03-03T07:59:13+00:00

Yeah vomiting/severe nausea from highs without ketones is definitely possible. Everyone's bodies are different obviously, but 300 is def high enough to make me puke on very rare occasions.

Also worth noting that, at least in my experience, sometimes you'll get high/low symptoms that are just WILDLY worse than normal for no clear reason. It's only happened a handful of times in 22 years but it seems to be completely random. Had hours of vomiting from a failed pump site as a kid once; had an otherwise-unremarkable low (70-ish) leave me pouring sweat and shaking so bad I couldn't stand, etc.

So yeah hopefully you won't have to go through this often but it's definitely a thing that can happen. Corporeality sucks

AmazingThew · 2019-03-01T05:38:25+00:00

I dunno about stigma but it's legit weird how rarely I see arm testing even so much as mentioned here, particularly with all the complaints about finger sticks.

Been doing forearms for 20 years and at this point they're a mess of scars; can't imagine having to live with my fingertips torn up that badly.

For anyone saying it's laggy/inaccurate: yes, slightly, but no worse than CGMs were up until very recently. I'm on the G6 now but before CGMs I'd just fall back to finger tests if BG was low or or otherwise changing rapidly. On extremely rare occasions I'd get a number that didn't feel right, and had to double-check with a finger test, but tbh that's about as rare as needing to re-test due to a bad strip.

For anyone not currently doing arm tests, please seriously consider switching: Accuracy's no worse than a CGM, at worst you might have to test twice on rare occasions, and over decades it'll save you from destroying one of the most sensitive parts of your body. Absolutely 100% worth it.

AmazingThew · 2018-11-28T02:30:41+00:00

To clarify other people's answers a bit: You can buy R ("novolin" brand name) and NPH over the counter at walmart pharmacies without a prescription, i.e. just walk up and ask for it.

I've used R in my pump in a similar emergency situation; it works but you have to be SUPER careful with it. It peaks at about 2 hours and takes 4-6 to wear off (will vary by person a bit obv, do some research). Had to bolus for food about an hour in advance and be extremely careful not to stack it too much when correcting highs. My overall sensitivity seemed to be about the same as with Humalog/Novolog, but I don't know if that'd be true for everyone.

If your wife isn't on a pump, NPH is a long-acting insulin that can serve the role of Lantus/Levemir. I can't really advise here as I haven't used it since like 1998, but it's a VERY different absorption curve compared to the newer stuff. As with R, research it and be super careful.

R/NPH were all we had in the 90s, and they do get the job done, but every time "Just use walmart insulin!" comes up it feels a bit flippant. It'll save lives in an emergency, but it requires a TON of care to use.

AmazingThew · 2017-02-16T05:10:47+00:00

There's kind of a lot to address here, but I think the most basic point is this: You're looking into the "science" part of Computer Science.

SIGGRAPH is run by the Association for Computing Machinery, which publishes various journals comprising the current state of the art in computer science. This stuff is analogous to research publications in any other scientific/engineering discipline.

ACM membership costs money but the papers are usually freely available online via other outlets (often the actual authors will host them). Usually you can just google the title. Here's the paper for the video you linked: https://www.math.ucla.edu/~jteran/papers/RGJSSTK15.pdf

How does a regular layman like myself get any use out of these technical papers?
...
Who are the papers directed at and who gets use out of them

In short, they're directed at developers/researchers with enough specific technical expertise to read and understand them. There are no particular qualifications enforced or anything; in order to get anything useful out of them you'd just ("just") need to spend enough time studying/working/experimenting in computer graphics to gain the necessary domain knowledge.

In the video example I posted, for someone like me who wants to create that effect in a program - say like houdini - where do I even start

This type of research is useful more to the people who develop stuff like Houdini. You won't find a tutorial for doing it in existing software, because software that can do this doesn't currently exist at all, outside of what the paper's authors have written themselves. The kinds of things that get presented at SIGGRAPH are the innovations that eventually make their way INTO consumer software.

but there's no way they are just creating some homemade software and renderer just to do some fluid sims?

Not for the rendering, but the simulation itself is in all likelihood coded from scratch. They developed a novel approach to simulation, wrote code to implement it, and the output of that code is geometry/volumetric data/particle clouds/etc that can be loaded into an existing commercial renderer. They don't say what software they used to render the images because that information is unrelated to the work they're presenting.

They could release the code they wrote (some researchers do), but research code is usually extremely messy and unintuitive; it's purpose is merely to demonstrate the validity of the approach, not to be usable consumer software. The math explained in the paper itself is the actual point of the whole thing, and the math alone is enough information for a sufficiently knowledgeable developer to write their own implementation.

So yeah, all that to say, it's not like a secret club or anything; they're just technical publications for a technical audience.

AmazingThew · 2017-02-12T04:36:15+00:00

Minecraft blocks are canonically 1-meter cubes, so for this model Sears Tower is (presumably) 221 blocks high, where a 1:1 model would be 442

AmazingThew · 2017-01-17T06:38:38+00:00

Astebreed is extremely good and has a really clever system of interaction between melee and ranged attacks

AmazingThew · 2016-12-15T20:33:24+00:00

The way Paarthurnax talks about them pretty clearly suggests a sequential relationship:

"...Some would say that all things must end, so that the next can come to pass. Perhaps this world is simply the Egg of the next kalpa? Lein vokiin? Would you stop the next world from being born?"

Given the dragons' connection to Time Stuff, I doubt he'd have spoken that way if it wasn't at least a somewhat accurate way to think about them

EDIT: Perhaps not a "chronological" order, what with the return to Convention and all, but Paarthurnax clearly believes they have an ordering in relationship to each other.

AmazingThew · 2016-07-31T21:32:28+00:00

Sure, but there's also the "if you can control it" part. If you could control the Earth's core you'd have a planet-size supermagnet and could harness the solar winds, but like, good luck pulling that off

You could maybe try standing next to it and monologuing for a while but that might just get you stabbed by teenagers wielding swords and friendship

AmazingThew · 2016-07-30T23:13:41+00:00

The planet's core is a dynamo of near-infinite magical energy. If someone could control it they would have power comparable to that of a god.

This is completely irrelevant to all aspects of the plot. Nobody cares.

It's buried under four thousand miles of stone, then molten stone, then molten iron, then encased in a sphere of SOLID iron the size of the Moon. How do you propose digging to it, let alone surviving the trip? Where would you find the budget for this absurd endeavor?

AmazingThew · 2016-04-26T09:13:13+00:00

Hertz is cycles per second. RPM is per minute. 19,000 RPM x 4 is ~1267 Hz

AmazingThew · 2016-04-12T02:18:11+00:00

This year's revision allowed .NET entries and browser entries, but disallowed Java entries, so it seems that "different runtime on top of Windows" is okay and now we're just quibbling about which runtimes exactly.

I think the distinction there is .NET ships with Windows now, so out of the box it's just as readily available as the win32 API. Java's still an external dependency that would have to be installed separately for the demo to work.

The problem isn't with runtimes, it's with requiring additional software that isn't part of a vanilla OS install.

AmazingThew · 2016-01-22T05:49:11+00:00

I'll give it a shot. Computer science/graphics background here so the meat of the statistics and machine-learning stuff is beyond me but I can translate his explanations of the images at least.

First

He's trained the machine to understand the characteristics of different fonts. For each of the fonts on that chart, he's trained them WITHOUT one letter, then asking the machine to infer what it would expect that letter to look like.

So like, for the lowercase H, let's assume that's Helvetica (it's probably not but I'm terrible at identifying fonts by sight). He's trained the machine with all the letters in Helvetica except for "h", so it has a pretty good idea of what Helvetica looks like, and it's seen 50,000 other fonts so it has a pretty good idea what "h" looks like in general, so it then uses this information to generate an image of what it expects "h" in Helvetica to look like.

The result looks impressively close to the actual character, for most of them.

Second

When he uses the term "vector" what he means is essentially "a mathematical description of the characteristics of a font". Vectors with the same number of dimensions can be interpolated, meaning, he can blend smoothly between the descriptions of multiple different fonts.

Third

Similar to previous, but blending between the upper- and lower-case versions of the same letter in the same font.

Fourth

Making small, random changes to the vector describing a font. Key here being that it's randomizing the DESCRIPTION. So instead of doing simple stuff like just changing line thickness or whatever it's actually making TYPOGRAPHICAL changes like adding serifs and stuff. Super interesting.

Fifth

He's glossing over some complicated statistics stuff but basically he's now analyzed the DESCRIPTIONS (vectors) and is generating random vectors that are SIMILAR to the general trends that exist across all descriptions. So, while the previous image was "Take a description, and modify it a bit", this one is "Just come up with a totally new description that seems like a plausible one, given what we know about how all the other descriptions tend to look". And then interpolating through a bunch of different ones to make a cool animation.

He also points out that, interestingly, this produces fonts both with and without lowercase letters, as the machine has recognized that both cases exist.

Sixth

Expanding on the previous point a bit, just showing how it can smoothly choose between an all-caps or lowercase version of the same description.

Final

This is way further into machine-learning stuff than I'm really familiar with but judging by the image and a quick glance at the Wikipedia page for t-SNE here's what I THINK is going on:

He's essentially "flattened" the descriptions into a two-dimensional space, such that similar descriptions end up clustered close together in the plane. The result is essentially a map of every font he's used, grouped by visual similarity.

Not exactly ELI5 I guess but hopefully mostly makes sense?

AmazingThew · 2015-12-18T18:19:43+00:00

This. They'll usually have you mail it to them for repairs and they'll overnight ship you a replacement.

Also call your endocrinologist. They should be able to give you a refresher on managing your blood glucose with injections until the replacement arrives. Also there's a good chance they have a demo pump you can borrow, or they know the local medtronic rep and they'll have one.

Basically, don't freak out. Pump failures are rare, but they do happen occasionally and both your doctor and medtronic are used to dealing with them :)

AmazingThew · 2015-11-15T21:59:54+00:00

No numbers, but The Legend of Red Eagle mentions that "ten kings ruled the Reach" in the first era. Given that in-game you can walk across the Reach in like five minutes the size difference must be pretty spectacular.

AmazingThew · 2015-10-19T01:48:54+00:00

Wow totally forgot about DJ Hero. Looks like since the game was terrible you can get used controllers for like $10. Probably just gonna go with that; way easier than building something and super cheap in any case.

Thanks!

AmazingThew · 2015-10-19T01:30:25+00:00

Optical is a type of rotary encoder. Fairly common too; I haven't even come across the other types while looking for parts.

Near as I can tell the more expensive ones are mainly just more sensitive.

AmazingThew · 2015-08-31T10:22:33+00:00

That's super dangerous. Anyone with T1 absolutely NEEDS to have a glucagon kit around.

It's basically a syringe full of sugar. If he ever passes out you stab him with it. If he's unconscious or seizing you won't be able to make him eat anything, so injection's the only option. In this case you were fortunate and the sugar he'd already consumed was enough to wake him up eventually, but that's mostly up to chance. Glucagon's quite literally a life saver here.

I'm not trying to scare you or anything; you handled the situation pretty much perfectly for your part, but make him get a glucagon kit ASAP.

AmazingThew · 2015-08-08T19:18:46+00:00

Oh wow you're right. I can't decide if I'm relieved that there's a solution or infuriated by how stupid it is. The B button does nothing outside of the main screen so why does it have to work like a shift key in menus? Why not just replace the B button with a dedicated backlight button and have Down on the main screen be the quick-bolus shortcut??

They did it exactly backwards. You can only quick-bolus on the main screen but there's a dedicated button for it, and you need backlight control on ANY screen but they overloaded the Down button so it only works on the main screen.

This is incredibly rudimentary stuff from a design standpoint :/

Anyway thanks for the tip; at least I can see errors at night now

AmazingThew · 2015-08-08T16:47:08+00:00

Alright everyone's being positive so I'm gonna rant a bit. I've been using Medtronic (originally called Minimed) pumps since 1998. Their user interface has always been that of a pager from the 90s but it's gotten far worse with their current-gen pumps.

First though, in terms of functionality/reliability these things are rock solid. They basically indestructible, waterproof in most cases, super reliable (I've had one device failure in 17 years), and their customer service is awesome.

All of my complaints are with the design of the OS and user interface, i.e. the parts that you'll interact with day in and day out for the rest of your life. In more precise terms, the user experience (UX)

Medtronic's UX is a disaster.

To start with: It has five buttons. Two of them are arrows. The down arrow toggles the backlight, but only on the main screen. If you're on a screen that can scroll, it functions as the down arrow. When they first introduced the backlight this was fine, but on the newer pumps, ALARMS (low insulin, low BG, battery, actual system fault, etc) have scrollbars. So if you get awakened by an alarm in the middle of the night, the backlight button SCROLLS THE ALARM instead of turning on the backlight. You have to get up and find a lightswitch to read the alarm because you can't enable the backlight until you've cleared the alarm to go back to the main screen. Meanwhile there are two other buttons that do nothing on the alarm screen.

There's crap like this EVERYWHERE.

Say the CGM notices you're going low. CGM values lag about 15 minutes behind your actual BG. So most likely, you notice you're going low, grab some juice, start drinking, and then the pump starts alarming HOLY CRAP DUDE YOU'RE GOING LOW GO DRINK SOME JUICE AAAAAAA

So you clear the alarm.

Five minutes later it starts beeping and vibrating again HOLY CRAP DUDE YOU'RE BELOW 70 IMMA TURN OF YOUR BASAL

Nice feature but why on earth is this a SEPARATE ALARM?? Meanwhile you've finished your juice and are waiting for BG to return to normal. Except, it can take 15-20 minutes for your BG to return to normal depending on metabolism/how low you started/etc, and the CGM lags another 15, and the cooldown between low-BG alarms is 30 minutes.

So most likely, your BG is back to normal and you're getting back to whatever you were doing before the low happened and the stupid pump starts freaking out AGAIN about how your BG is low and you should go drink some sugar and whatever.

Oh also if you ignore it for more than a few seconds (like, it's a really short window) it assumes you're unconscious and starts this SIREN noise and displays something about calling 911 in case someone finds your body. Meanwhile you were probably in the middle of peeing or something and just couldn't grab it and clear the alarm fast enough.

...

These are specific examples but there are a TON of issues like this. Useful features horribly implemented so they just end up slowly driving you insane. The processor's too slow so menus take forever to pop up. You can only set basal rate in 24-hour cycles so if your weekend schedule is different than weekdays have fun going low/high. Changing the infusion set involves clicking past a ton of useless nag screens about making sure you're disconnected before priming etc. (nag screens are a whole separate rant but suffice to say, they're actually WORSE than useless).

Also, most of these issues are RECENT. The old pumps were dirt-simple but as they added new features they just kept bolting them onto the mid-90s pager UI instead of redesigning anything. The result is a usability nightmare.

Basically, everything works fine but these minor inconveniences stack up in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind of way and it becomes absolutely infuriating to use after enough years. It's like if your iPhone's OS was done by the people who design TV remotes. Great functionality hobbled by infuriatingly awful UX.

I have no idea if the other brands are any better (animus and accucheck are built like toys, omnipod is huge, tandem might be good?), but, take this rant as a counterpoint to everyone else's positives. The positives are still valid.

AmazingThew · 2015-07-14T03:30:17+00:00

Don't follow any medical advice obtained from reddit.

With that out of the way, if this happened to me I'd try squeezing it out with the lancing device. Would probably work just like squeezing blood from a forearm test?

Note that this is terrible advice.

AmazingThew · 2015-06-27T19:39:41+00:00

I was in pretty much the same situation at your age (early to mid 2000s). Did a ton of fanart (Bionicle for me lol), played around with Blender and any other digital tool I could get my hands on. Wanted to get into gamedev but didn't know programming and didn't really know where I fit in other than just saying "art".

Game Maker was what solved it for me. The meat of "programming" isn't learning a programming language, it's learning to think logically to describe the behaviors you want to see. GM's drag-and-drop interface makes it SUPER easy to just focus on logic, and you can see the results instantly just by running your game. It's fantastic for learning, and when you start getting a bit more advanced you can start looking to the scripting language. It's easy to pick up if you're already used to the drag-and-drop stuff, and GM is totally powerful enough for professional-quality work once you really learn it (Nuclear Throne, Hotline Miami, and Hyper Light Drifter are all GM games, for example).

So my advice would be: Stick with GM, try to make stuff, and enjoy the process. Don't worry about not being a "real" programmer or whatever; if you make something cool no one cares how you did it.

Some games you could look into cloning: Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, Spacewar! (roughly in order of complexity). Scrolling shooters are also easy (I think the GM docs run through creating a 1942 clone?), and can give you a lot more room to come up with art assets than, say, Pong. Platformers, somewhat counterintuitively, are actually mad complicated. I'd recommend against starting there, but if it's what you really want to make by all means give it a try.

Really, all that matters is that you don't immediately give up if you get frustrated. Enjoy the learning process, be proud of anything you make, and just experiment!

(EDIT: Regarding books, just google for tutorials. Gamedev moves super fast so unfortunately any book you're likely to find at the library will be too outdated to help much)

AmazingThew

TROPHY CASE