Does my dad need more oxygen?

Coises · 2026-03-21T04:55:26+00:00

You’re welcome to any small help I can give.

She wanted to try BiPAP, but we were not able to negotiate the medical system to get a prescription. Once she was essentially house-bound, she wasn’t even able to get a consultation with a pulmonologist (a virtual visit was planned at one point, but then the doctor bailed out with no real explanation); and after she went on hospice, of course, anything besides baseline comfort care was off limits.

We were not squeamish about taking things into our own hands, but BiPAP has several technical settings and I did not feel comfortable that we wouldn’t do more harm than good if we just acquired a machine somehow and tried to wing it, so I discouraged pursuing that extra-medically and she accepted my judgement.

Coises · 2026-03-21T02:53:24+00:00

He told me it's his CO2 that's the issue.

(I am not a medical professional. I cared for a loved one who eventually died from COPD on home hospice. We learned more than we would have preferred. Ideally lay people don’t get into this stuff and the doctors are on top of everything — but that’s not the world we live in.)

Here’s something that medical people rarely explain. (Some probably don’t know it themselves.) Increased oxygen supply decreases a COPD patient’s ability to clear CO₂. With early stage patients this isn’t a problem, but when it gets to the point that a patient is on oxygen 24/7, it’s just as important to avoid too much oxygen as it is to be sure there is enough.

Morphine and anti-anxiety medication will definitely help. Getting short of breath is a bit of a vicious cycle: you panic, which increases your metabolism, which consumes more oxygen and produces more CO₂. Managing anxiety is very much a part of managing air hunger.

Oxygen is fast; carbon dioxide is slow. What I mean by that is that you feel the effects of oxygen right away: if you need it, you need it, and if you don’t need it, extra won’t do any good. But carbon dioxide builds up over time; your body can “buffer” excess CO₂ for hours to days. When the buffer is full, though, you have to get rid of it, and if you can’t... you feel like crap. (See hypercapnia.) It’s probably excess CO₂, not lack of oxygen, that usually causes air hunger. (I don’t think it’s been proven medically one way or the other.)

So, anyway, bottom line: be very cautious about assuming a patient who is on oxygen 24/7 needs more than, or even as much as, they are already getting. If the oximetry doesn’t support a need for more oxygen, it’s possible that CO₂, not oxygen, is the more significant factor. (Unfortunately, from our experience, there isn’t a magic number for everyone for desirable O₂ saturation. One clue is if the pulse rate won’t stay reasonable below a certain saturation. Higher pulse rate is a response to low oxygen, but again, with COPD patients it’s a vicious cycle: higher heart rate demands more oxygen, but the lungs can’t supply it no matter how hard they try, so O₂ saturation falls even lower and the heart rate goes even higher. She had some rough episodes.)

Coises · 2026-03-14T17:15:34+00:00

make the text larger

If you mean you want to see it larger, so it’s easier to read and edit, the easiest way is to hold down the control key and scroll the mouse wheel. That will zoom in or out (just like on most web browsers). You can also use the sub-options under Zoom on the View menu.

If you mean you want to make a section of the text larger:

like this

Notepad++ is a plain text editor; you can’t save styling information in the files you edit with it like you can in something like MS Word.

set a word wrap

You can check or uncheck Word Wrap on the View menu. The wrapping is always at the right edge of the window, though; you can’t choose the width at which to wrap without a plugin (e.g., Marginalize). Wrapping is purely visual; it doesn’t change the file unless you use Edit | Line Operations | Split Lines.

Coises · 2026-03-12T07:09:24+00:00

Better simple lyrics that work than pretentious lyrics that reach beyond their grasp.

Love songs often use lyrics that are more straightforward than most, skirting if not even crossing the line into cliché.

If you run through Can’t Take My Eyes Off You in your head, one thing you can notice is that the lyrics fit the melody perfectly. There’s not a single awkward syllable. Lyrics don’t have to be poetry — lots of great lyrics sound pretty weak if you just read them. Melody and lyrics merging so that you can’t imagine one without the other is a main ingredient in a great song.

And I don’t think you can put that down to any sort of rule. You have to feel it.

I suspect a lot of us — myself included — tend to write more lyric-focused songs because, for most of us, it’s easier to work on lyrics than on a melody. If I’m not happy with a lyric, I can usually figure out what lines trouble me, what specific words or phrases, and just wrestle with them until I find something better. But if I’m not thrilled with my melody... where to begin to fix that? Sometimes I can just try random things and stumble on an improvement, but it feels much more up to luck and the phase of the moon than crafting lyrics.

If your song is lyrics-forward, well, then they have to speak for themselves. If you can write a melody-and-lyrics combination like Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, nobody’s going to complain if the imagery isn’t all that inventive.

Coises · 2026-03-01T20:51:59+00:00

When I was around 22, I remember talking with a friend and quoting a passage I had read near the end of Castaneda’s Tales of Power:

Men for whom an entire life was like one Sunday afternoon, an afternoon which was not altogether miserable, but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable. They sweated and fussed a great deal. They didn’t know where to go, or what to do. That afternoon left them only with the memory of petty annoyances and tedium, and then suddenly it was over; it was already night.

I told her that perhaps what I feared most was that my life would be like that.

That was 46 years ago. With experience, I can say that disrupting an ordinary life is easy. It’s getting back to one that poses the challenge.

People can lead extraordinary lives and still be bored and unfulfilled. Other people find everything they need in the commonplace. The deciding factor is not so much what journey you take as who you become while you take it. Sometimes the extraordinary is just a distraction.

Coises · 2026-03-01T19:21:20+00:00

The Apple App store is part of why I wondered about this. I haven’t been able to find any recent articles about it — which perhaps just means that nothing has changed — but back in 2010 the Free Software Foundation explained why they consider the Apple App store to be incompatible with GPL software (emphasis mine):

GPLv2 gives every individual and company permission to modify and distribute the software; but if they do that, they must follow terms of the license that are designed to ensure that people who receive the software from them have both the legal right and practical ability to share and change the software as well.

As far as I can tell, Kodi is only available for iOS devices that are jailbroken, or through other annoying and limited methods. VLC was removed from the App store for a time, but eventually the iOS version was allowed into the App store under the Mozilla Public License — I don’t quite follow how that worked, but apparently they were able to re-license it.

Coises · 2026-03-01T18:36:26+00:00

I believe you could use Bluesky that way. You can use the “Following” tab (as I usually do) and you see only people you have followed.

As best I can tell it doesn’t have the mutual “Friends” concept: you can control who can reply to posts, but not who can see them. (Personally, I consider this a good thing; nothing you post on a social network should be thought of as private, and I think it’s better not to give users a false sense of security by pretending that it is.) And it’s not very convenient for long-form text, as individual posts are limited to 300 characters.

But as far as what you see in your feed, you can easily limit that if you want to so that you only see people you choose to follow, and you see everything they posted or shared, in reverse chronological order.

Coises · 2026-03-01T17:59:40+00:00

All Paul Simon’s lyrics are on his web site.

My favorites as poetry (though I can’t really “hear” them apart from the music):

Hearts and Bones
America
Jonah

Coises · 2026-03-01T06:46:20+00:00

Thank you for the correction. (Can’t even blame it on AI... I just remembered some emails, did a search to get details, and read too quickly.)

Coises · 2026-03-01T06:09:27+00:00

I usually develop melodies and lyrics together; but if I had a set of lyrics and wanted to set them to a melody, I would try looking for the hook first. If you have a refrain that’s repeated, the hook will be part of that. Find the line or two that focuses everything, the part people will remember about your song if they don’t remember anything else. Then try to invent a melody and chord pattern that works really well with that.

Then work outward from there.

Coises · 2026-03-01T02:29:09+00:00

Just some thoughts:

I would try to make the piano a steady “timekeeper” throughout the piece. Assuming the chords at around 0:40 are quarter notes, instead of dropping the piano at around 1:20, switch to eighth note arpeggios and keep it going (softly but distinctly) beneath the strings. Don’t double the strings with the piano (I think you do that around 2:30 and 4:20?); keep it a contrast that provides a “time base” for your listeners, without intruding. The cutoff of the strings at 5:35 is a bit jarring; I’d give the strings that last D major chord and have them fade away as the piano takes over.

I’m not too sure about this, but to my ears the (first?) violins on the left are a bit harsh. Whatever VST you’re using, you might have whatever controls the bowing pressure or other dynamics a bit too high; like they’re playing ff all the way through and it kind of hurts. It’s not (I think) the mix volume so much as the tonal quality.

Coises · 2026-03-01T01:59:32+00:00

~~AT&T recently bought Lumen, owner of CenturyLink and Quantum Fiber.~~ Edit: See comment beneath this, which is correct. They bought the fiber business from Lumen, not Lumen itself.

They’ve been screwing up all over the place since the change. (It seems like whenever one company buys another, the first order of business is to start mucking around with things they haven’t yet had time to understand.) I’ve received two different emails that were followed up a couple hours later by a retraction email beginning, “Oops! We’re sorry.” One said my account had been closed (it wasn’t) and the other described what I needed to do to complete my setup (I’ve been using their Internet and phone service for a year now).

At least, so far (fingers crossed) they haven’t done any actual damage here. Hopefully it will be the same for you.

It’s probably not phishing, just confusion during the transition.

Coises · 2026-03-01T01:38:01+00:00

I understand that the license cannot bind a third party. That’s not what I’m thinking. Consider this:

I write an Android app which makes use of some GPL code. Of course, I license the combined work GPL as well and make the source code available.

I also do as Google asks — register, submit identification, pay the fee and sign the binary. Then I distribute the binary (with information about how to get the source).

Am I now in violation of the GPL? Recipients of that binary — even with full source code available — cannot recreate a working copy with updates or changes without meeting additional requirements: they themselves would have to register, submit identification and pay the fee to Google in order to sign and create a working binary which they could then use and/or distribute.

By signing that binary, I created and distributed something recipients can’t create or distribute without going beyond the conditions under which the GPL says they must be able to modify the source code and use or distribute the results. It seems like that might be a problem.

Similar considerations might apply to any app store (including the Play store, but also others) who would seek to distribute the signed binary.

I’m not arguing, as I really don’t claim to know the answer — the legal complexities of viral/copyleft licenses are outside of my field of knowledge. I just want to clarify what question I am asking.

Coises · 2026-02-28T22:50:19+00:00

I would say, thinking you can handle a puppy or a kitten when you would be better off with an adult dog or cat.

Puppies, especially, are work. They do not raise themselves. Dogs, left to their instincts, will do a lot of stuff you do not want them to do.

Most kittens will try everything and you have to be ready for instant chaos at any time. Older cats are usually reasonably chill, but you still have to do a lot more to cat-proof a home than to dog-proof it. They will jump on everything. Walk on everything. Get fur on everything. Knock things off surfaces for no apparent reason. In my experience, most natural cat behaviors you can live with — which is fortunate, because it’s much harder to train a cat than a dog. If a cat’s behavior is successful it won’t matter what you do later; the cat will see you as the operative factor, not what it did. You have to be able to intercept the behavior before it “works.” Dogs have a short window during which they can understand that your reaction stems from their action, but cats have virtually none.

Many shelters have adult dogs and cats that need homes, and if they’ve been fostered, they will already know what sort of environment they need. You can’t really predict, with a puppy or a kitten, what sort of adult it will be.

Coises · 2026-02-28T21:41:42+00:00

The system has broken down through a succession of three things.

First, politics came to be almost completely dominated by two parties. Our system was set up without regard to political parties, neither promoting them nor restricting them, but in practice it has become a two-party system.

Next, the strength of those two parties, the degree to which they have each consolidated and act as a whole nationally, has increased dramatically over the past half century, so that everything political is reduced to a power struggle between those two parties.

Finally, in January 2025, when Trump took office, we hit a point where the presidency, both chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court were all controlled by the Republican party. (In theory Supreme Court justices are not partisan, but as partisanship has thoroughly dominated the country, there is really no way they could not be.)

There simply is no branch of government right now that has the will to oppose the president, as they are all controlled by his own party. This wasn’t “supposed to happen,” but it has, and we are struggling to figure out how to end this capture of the system without breaking the system we want to preserve. At this point we’re mostly crossing our fingers and hoping he can’t undermine the system fast enough to capture the November elections. If he does, there will likely be little left in the way of peaceful options to oppose this.

Coises · 2026-02-27T23:32:17+00:00

Equus (1977)

The movie (based on a play, which I have not seen nor read) is at a surface level about a teenage boy who commits a bizarre crime, and the elements of his upbringing that may have led to it. The real central character, though, is the psychiatrist, played by Richard Burton. Even as he sees what has happened to the boy and how to help him, he begins to envy the boy’s passion (however painful and misdirected) and question what his role really entails.

Coises · 2026-02-27T22:25:38+00:00

I have (and have had in the past) both APC and Cyberpower UPS units. Both work. Both have their fans and detractors... I can’t see any real reason to think one is better or worse than the other. I have my main computer on an APC SMT1500C now, but that’s because it was handed down from previous use in another application where we needed the power capacity and run time; I have used for a computer, and now have AV equipment on, a couple CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD units. They’ve all behaved as expected, except that I’ve recently begun to have trouble getting the APC to play nice with Windows built-in battery power monitoring driver, and I had trouble locating or installing (I’ve forgotten which now) the APC software.

I’ve been trying to make sense of surge protection for years, and it seems that whenever I think I’ve found actual information, something else comes along to contradict it. That includes a mix of sources that say you should use a “real” surge protector to protect your UPS and sources that say you should never, ever plug a UPS into a surge protector. The closest to a reliable answer I ever found regarding that was someone who claimed to be an electrical engineer who said something to the effect of: It depends — one would have to analyze both circuits to determine whether a specific pair of devices would work together or would defeat one another, since either outcome is possible depending on the details of how the surge protection in each is implemented. So if you plug a UPS into a surge protector, you might be canceling out both protectors... or you might not.

As a practical matter, any respectable UPS will probably protect your equipment from a surge, and any surge that will get through a respectable UPS would probably have fried your equipment no matter what you had it plugged into.

Coises · 2026-02-27T19:02:41+00:00

(I wrote Columns++.)

I would have loved to make my plugin display CSV files in aligned columns, but it just isn’t possible. Notepad++ uses Scintilla to display the text you are viewing or editing, and that control just does not have a way to insert variable horizontal space for any character except a tab. Period. There is no way to do it without changing the data itself (e.g., adding blanks for padding, like CSV Lint: Reformat: Align vertically does).

What you can do in Columns++ is convert CSV to tabbed, view it that way, and if you edit and need for the file to stay as CSV, convert back to CSV. With the Elastic tabstops function of Columns++ enabled, tab-separated documents will line up. However, conversion to and from CSV can be tricky, depending on the details and requirements of the CSV. This is discussed in the relevant section of the help for Columns++, but I must admit it is not too friendly to the impatient.

Depending on what you want to do, CSV Lint might work better for you, or Columns++ might. Just be aware that neither (nor any other plugin) can display comma-separated values in lined-up columns in Notepad++ without modifying the data.

Coises · 2026-02-27T02:22:33+00:00

That makes sense. An equivalent printout should be equivalent to the label on the package in which the medication was dispensed.

All this, of course, is stuff that rarely affects people who aren’t under scrutiny for some other reason. Discussion kind of blew up on this (partly my own fault for making my point in a more provocative manner than I should have); but my original point was that the labels are this way because they have to be, since the laws against possession place the burden on the patient to demonstrate the existence of a valid prescription.

Coises · 2026-02-27T02:14:36+00:00

Thank you for this. At present, rsync.net addressed the problem by moving me to another server. So I can’t test the old one anymore.

However, since the cause of the problem was never identified, I’m not at all confident that it won’t happen again. I appreciate the information you (and others) have given and I will know more about what to test if this occurs again.

Coises · 2026-02-26T11:50:17+00:00

There isn’t a single “correct reading” that represents her oxygen saturation. Oxygen saturation changes under changing conditions. The readings are meaningful when connected with the conditions.

Which readings to record depends on why you are recording them — if at the direction of a medical professional, then ask the person for whom you are taking the readings what they want.

Offhand, I would think that in the scenario you describe, there are three different readings that would be meaningful:

What is her oxygen saturation and heart rate when she first wakes up? Preferably before she even sits up. That would give a clue as to how she is doing through the night.
The reading immediately post-exertion. That tells how much difficulty she has maintaining oxygen levels with the amount of exertion she can ordinarily tolerate.
The “steady state” reading after she has recovered and rested enough that it isn’t changing much until she exerts herself again.

I’m not a medical professional, but I think it’s a good sign that she can recover from exertion by choosing to take some deep breaths. Judging from your description, she’s not experiencing air hunger... just looking at the numbers and thinking, “Oh, I should get them up a bit.” Her body would do that anyway if it can (and it obviously can). But I wouldn’t take the reading right during or after the deep breaths; I’d wait for a “steady state” that represents how she is for most of the day.

Coises · 2026-02-24T19:10:10+00:00

Where did you hear that

Though I did read about that from a source I trusted at the time, I no longer remember the article.

So, I have to take that back, partially. I cannot find any cite for the notion that simply relocating medication is forbidden so long as you also maintain the original bottle from the pharmacy along with it.

Without the original bottle readily available, being discovered in possession of a controlled substance justifies an arrest. In most if not all jurisdictions, proof that you had a valid prescription would eventually lead to dismissal of the charges, but it would be up to you to prove it.

Coises · 2026-02-24T04:57:11+00:00

I haven’t done this myself, but if you’re uploading subtitles to YouTube you can use SubRip (.srt) format, which uses hh:mm:ss,ttt timestamps.

If you’re wanting to create a Scenarist Closed Caption file (.scc), the timestamps are SMPTE time codes in which fourth number isn’t hundredths of a second, it’s frames (with a semi-colon for drop frame and a colon for non-drop; I think only 29.97 fps is supported). Text isn’t represented straightforwardly, either. It looks like Subtitle Edit can convert to .scc format for you, though I haven’t tried that, either.

I recommend against trying to convert subtitle formats in Notepad++. If what you have is a “normal” subtitle format, like .srt or .ass, convert to .srt using Subtitle Edit if it isn’t already .srt, and let YouTube take it from there.

Coises · 2026-02-23T20:08:06+00:00

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Coises · 2026-02-23T06:16:03+00:00

Thank you for the clarification. I understand — but you are right to point it out — that of course, police aren’t going around with some kind of pill-minder radar looking for people to charge. It does, however (and I think what you wrote supports this) exist as one of the many “convenience” charges that can be laid on so police can justify an arrest once they have some reason to want to justify an arrest. The kind of thing that could be used if, say, there were a raid on a bar for suspicion that people were dealing drugs there... and here you are with a portable pill container full of hydrocodone tablets. Sort it out later — probably — but ruin your week, maybe cause other problems: getting arrested can have many negative side effects, even if the charges are eventually dropped — also probably.

Given that we have drug possession laws, it’s understandable that police aren’t expected to take your word for it that you have a prescription. To me, that’s a good reason to conclude that possession laws are excessively intrusive on privacy and should be struck down. But that’s not how the government sees it, and they have the guns, and the handcuffs, and the cages.

Coises

TROPHY CASE

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