Some quick notes

Summer here was way too hot for my taste and quite frankly I didn't enjoy it at all. Now, since weather has been cooling down I do feel a bit less tired and even dare to dream on getting things done. Not much and definitely not overnight, but perhaps something someday..

As a part of that.. I'd posted a update onto my other blog. It's an old project idea which I have finally got the parts and had some energy to begin hacking it up.  It's a long way of becoming anything usable (if it ever will be), but I take this as a sign of things slowly turning on better.
http://diytao.blogspot.fi/2014/09/olpa-or-project-long-not-done.html

Just another quickie here..

I got the Cpap machine on 6th November. I had an overnight visit to local hospital on 5th, I slept there with their diagnostics machine (variable pressure machine with oxygen saturation measurement) thus they were able to tune the Cpap with proper settings.

So I have been using it now about two weeks. It's hard to describe, how it feels. On the other end sleeping with mask and the hose does hinder sleeping (especially when turning in middle of the night), but on other hand I think I may have slept a bit better. I can't yet say that I'd be feeling much more energetic (or less sleepy), but it's still quite early. According some instructions it may take couple of months before the treatment really starts to show the full benefit, and I don't want to make too early judgement on this.

Seeya..

PS; for what it's worth (aka not much) I do hate the fact that Google keeps cramming that G+ system down to our throats. At the moment I can't even comment Youtube posts with my real youtube.account anymore. I should be using G+ and that's bit too much. IMHO G+ is the biggest failure on Google ever, and it should be terminated ASAP.

PS2; at the moment I have no idea if I ever return to make youtube videos. I hate these changes on youtube and don't really want to support Google with any add-revenue or free content. 

Sometimes things indeed seem to move forward, and occasionally even at considerable speed. Since the last post I have been officially diagnosed quite severe sleep apnea. In a way it's a good to have some explanation to the overwhelming fatigue and long sleeping hours I have been having.

Apparently this sleep apnea has been happening for quite a long time and it just has gotten worse during the years. But when one lives alone, there's no-one to check snoring or breathing while one sleeps, so the early states have gone by without much notice.

When I try to think about the history, there has not been any single incident I could say that could be given as a definite start, most likely many issues I have had with daytime drowsiness and oversleeping during the years have just been early symptoms of things to come. If I now had to make a wild guess, I would like to say this sickness has most likely been around least a decade or so. 


And all in all, it's not the only thing happened to me during this time. Weight changes also affect the breathing, like to Allergies, Asthma, Stress and various infections one tend to have. Most likely all of them on one way or other. Also the sleep apnea has nasty habit on causing overweight and diabetes (which I thankfully don't have) due fatigue and limitations to ones exercising.

So, at the moment.. I have no idea how things move on from here. Apparently there aren't much what medication or surgery could do, it'll be mostly taking care the symptoms with weight control and the CPAP machine. I should be able to get the machine via heath care system, so it should not become too much economical burden, unfortunately at the moment I have no idea when that happens. It may be weeks or months (?) .

Ah well, at least the diagnose is there, and it's not all *merely in the mind* or 'just imaging it'..




ICD 10 : G47.33 Obstructive sleep apnea 
http://www.cpap.com/  Examples of cpap systems.

Yes, I'm still alive. Even though I have to admit, that I have been even less active (due CFS*) during this year than I even feared that might happen when I posted my 2012-wrap up. But on the other hand, this year has given me couple nasty surprises that I really didn't expect to see.

Of the most important to me and the blogging have been two untimely deaths of close friends of mine. I'm not going to mention any names here, but rather try to paint on wide strokes. I'm not right person to write eulogies, so please bear with me.


Firstly, at February I happened to read from local newspaper that an long time friend and associate of mine had died at the middle of January at the age of 47 years. I didn't even knew he was ill, nor had I heard of anything about the funeral, so it was total surprise and quite a shock. And even though we have not been that close at last 10 or so years, we used to do quite a lot stuff together on 1990.es, working together, hacking Amigas, even having a company of our own.

Blog related this becomes due the fact that I have had this vague idea that I could (in time) bring out those early projects we made. I know that many of them are definitely old and useless by now, but I'd expect there to be people who would have been interesting to see how the electronics etc were made back then (no Arduinos or 30usd dev boards).

Alas most of the old goodies of that time was quite randomly spitted amongst us around. So my original intent was to bring him as an repeating visitor to my Diytao channel videos for talking about those old goodies. We could  have shown then, talked about how they were made etc. Unfortunately I now lost access to bigger half of our old stuff, but the most important part definitely had been his memories and insights. We didn't bother to keep much written documentation on paper, and without his help, it's a lot more difficult to reconstruct those old devices.

Second untimely death was at the middle of April, when my local friend dies to aggressive cancer. I had known about her condition about four months, and in a way it was a bit easier to come by. But, no matter how well you think you are prepared, you are not. I'm not sure how much I should write here about her life, experiences or plans, so I'll be cautious. I can just say that she was in process of re.educating herself to become game developer, and I'm sure she had been good at those.

On personal front.. Not much of anything. I have not got any closer of solving my own health dilemma, nor gaining more hours of usefully time.


PS: *  About that CFS; I have no official diagnosis whatsoever, so I just use CFS as a self-declared status for now. As far as I can see, it seems to fit, but I'd rather like to find the real causes and perhaps even a hope for remedy or cure.

As I mentioned briefly at my latest entry at DiyTao, I have been alarmingly inactive with everything; making, designing, thinking and writing lately. In the end I now decided to open this up somewhat and start using this old, long died blog (since 2008) for these bit more personal comments that are not so much in line with the DiyTao material.

Reasons mostly unknown to me, I've been needing a abnormal amounts of sleep quite a long time now. There has been no real medical explanation yet (still working on it), but I'm sure at least partially it's been due my unhealthy high stress levels some years back. I'm so not going to explain all that has happened to me since 2004 up-to 2012.

That said, a lot of good, excellent and amazing things have happened at these years. There have been many things I've done first time (like getting my Msc degree and running for parliament ) and many important closures for things that just have been left open years back. Stressful, oh yes,definitely.

I wish I could promise to you (and me) that this will get better, that I will be more active, more awake, doing more of the things I have wanted to do but have not got time/energy to. Unfortunately it seems to be somewhat out of my reach, out of my controll. I do hope there will be improvement, and that someday I'll reach the contribution level I'd consider acceptable.

PS: I have decided to keep those old 2008-ish posts available. Afterall, nothing wrong with them, just they aren't fully what I'd expect myself to keep on writing here from now on.

It's funny how things come back. It's not much but since last blog I have managed to make some nice and useful words in Forth.. My implementation of SEE is borked and I have not yet even started on writing the in.line assembler but since it's been years on should not expect miracles.

words .name % u%. %. $ u$. $. binary dump dumphex dumpasc ldump .s S.S $8. $4. $2. .r sign #s #> <# # hold hld abs spaces

Number formatting <# # #S sign hold #> are based on "All About Forth", Glen B. Haydon, Mountain View Press updated towards ANS Forth .. Rest are my own.

After a long time I have decided to start coding with Forth. It's kinda amazing language but I don't like to use it on normal PC class systems. IMHO it's a lot better for smallish Embedded hardwares .. like for example Parallax Propeller demo board I have been having over a year now (mostly unused, I have been way too busy). There is quite nice Forth (named PropellerForth) that is 10 kilobytes binary and runs native on that board.

There are only Serial port connection (with USB-ser converter) and not much storage on the board (32kB eeprom, having Propller boot image), but I'm hoping to add some auxilary memory and forth+asm code for in chip videodisplay+keyboard.

Parllax Propeller info:
http://www.parallax.com/tabid/407/Default.aspx

PropellerForth author blog:
http://cliffhacks.blogspot.com/search/label/propellerforth