12 days of Thyroxin

L-Tyhroxin is the hormone the thyroid gland produces. My doc said to take half a dose for the weekend and then switch up to the full dose. So I did. I took 25 μg four times and since then every day 50 μg half an hour before breakfast.

The first four days were heaven. I have never felt so good in the last one and a half years like I did in the first four days. I was enthusiastic, optimistic, I had energy, I was well rested, it was amazing. Sadly, switching to the full dose kind of put a halt to this great feeling. I still am well rested, but motivation and enthusiasm are gone – but maybe this has to do with the flu?

I was at the doctors office and I got diagnosed with the flu (which led to 5 sick days I am grateful for), but of course this could be counteracting the high I felt from the Thyroxin.

I weigh now 98kg and I am hungry, like all the time. I knew metabolism would increase, but in order to loose weight I need to stop stuffing my face with sweets.

Hypothyroidism

As teenager, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. My thyroid gland was too weak to support my body, so I was prescribed a hormon supplement which I took until I got 18. My doctor then told me, I had to pay for my medication myself (up to this point, my health insurance paid for the medication) which came (with my second drug I was taking) to a whopping 90€, a large sum for someone barely out of school. So I decided to stop taking it.

12 years later I didn’t sleep well. Don’t misunderstand me, I slept through the night, but I wasn’t rested. I got increasingly anxious and nervous, couldn’t concentrate, gained a lot of weight and had problems loosing it again and had no drive or motivation anymore.

Then I remembered: I had hypothyroidism, could it be that? I knew it was linked to weight and sleep, so I had it checked out. Results will be available in 4 weeks, I was told. Yesterday I was at the doctors office, asking if my results were already available – and they were! They asked me to wait a short time and then I had a talk with the doctor.
Hypothyroidism (struma), some cysts (which are benign so they don’t have to be operated) and Hashimoto-Syndrome.

Hashimoto is an auto-immune disease were the thyroid gland destroys itself, leading to many of the symptoms I described.

Luckily, treatment is easy: Hormon supplement. In fact, the same one I had as a teenager. Sure, I have to take one pill each day for the rest of my life, but I figure that’s a small price to pay if I can get back to my old self.

So, today marks the start of my medication and I will try documenting as many steps as I can.

I am 1.84m tall and weigh 96.7kg. I took 25 μg at 6:32 in the morning. I slept until 8:01 am and went to work. I was feeling unrested. It now is 8:53 and my head feels somewhat unfamiliarly clear and I am not tired anymore.

Smol update

I am alive!

Some time went by since I posted my last entry and much happened.

I am working on my Kass cosplay, I finished the trousers, I bought a brown pantyhose for the legs and I finished cutting and glueing the feet. I still need to sand, prime and paint them but it’s coming along nicely. If everything happens according to plan, I can wear it on AniMuc or even LBM 🙂

My CNC-Mill is almost finished. All axes work, I just need to install the limit switches and the tool I ordered this week. We had to completely redesign some parts and completely replace the power supply and the motor drivers, but it was worth it!

I now have a Ko-Fi and I would love your support, though I barely and rarely produce content, sorry!

I also offer electronics-commissions, hit me up if you’re interested 🙂

I wanna be more active next year and I think the best way to do that is to have less projects, so I’m trying to finish most of them by the end of January.

So long,
Tiger 🙂

One hour one life stories

I was firstborn of Eve Greathouse, but she preferred to be called Madre. I was given the name Bob and tended the farm together with my little brother Ted. When mother couldn’t have children anymore, she told us that our family line was going to die and she wanted us to venture out and get wives of our own. I travelled not far but was killed by a bear before I could deliver the finishing arrow.

 

I was Tobias, but I didn’t do much because there wasn’t much to do in this prospering village.

So many projects, so little time

I have a shitton of projects on my hand that need to be finished:

A lightsaber replica (teamup with modelbaubert from whoyagonnacall)

CNC milling machine

Vaccumformer

Cosplays! (Princess Luna wig, Hermoine wig, Watcher from Horizon Zero Dawn)

Gaming (haven’t finished Horizon Zero Dawn, Breath of the Wild and Batman the Telltale game)

Plus usual chores x_x

._.

Somebody hacked my wordpress – luckily I had a backup of my database, so everything is back to normal…

The end is neigh

Cosmine is down because the Raspberry Pi on which it ran was only borrowed, but don’t fear, it will return (probably around January with a big remake).

Lightbow

I think, many people understand something different than I when they hear the word ‚lightbow‘.

This is, what I understand:

This is a violin bow with 30, individually adressable RGB-Pixels attached to it. It is controlled by an Arduino Pro Mini (5V, 16MHz) via a single wire protocol (exactly like the Adafruit Neopixels only much cheaper (17€/m on amazon, one time offer)).

You can find the sketch for the arduino here (on my github account 🙂 )

There are quite a few things to do, so feel free to fork the repo and do some pullrequests – the most important thing would be management of the different modes the bow has.

This part here

const int NUMBER_OF_FUNCTIONS = 10;
typedef void (* functionPointer) ();
functionPointer functionPointerArray[NUMBER_OF_FUNCTIONS];

[...]

  functionPointerArray[0] = ClearStrip;
  functionPointerArray[1] = SetStripWhite;
  functionPointerArray[2] = Flag;
  functionPointerArray[3] = SlowKitt;
  functionPointerArray[4] = FastKitt;
  functionPointerArray[5] = FastDisco;
  functionPointerArray[6] = FastWhiteStrobe;
  functionPointerArray[7] = FastPulse;
  functionPointerArray[8] = Rainbow;
  functionPointerArray[9] = FastForwardPacman;

is just plain ugly, I would have liked something like a vector of delegates, but I just couldn’t quite figure out how to do it yet 🙁

Edit: I replaced the functionPointerArray through a linked list from the LinkedList library, now it’s easy maintainable, huzzar!

Oh and here is a video of the different modes 🙂 (not all of them, though, I added a few after making this short video).

Fallout: Equestria – Pen & Paper

Ever since I read Fallout: Equestria by kkat, merely by accident because I was interested in Fallout and everything postapocalyptic, I considered myself a big fan – it even lead to me beeing a brony (albeit for not very long). I then thought, that there must have been a fan, who’d wrote a Pen & Paper rulebook about this really great story (I still consider it the best story I have ever read!) and with the Fallout: Equestria RPG by archerofhope I had found one!

I played two sessions, one with a small group of acquaintances and once on a Pen & Paper convention and I quickly realised, that it doesn’t fulfill all my expectations of what I thought was Fallout: Equestria. There are many inconsistencies, leaps of thought and so on. It also is much more complex than it has to be. Plus, at the time I am writing this blog post, archerofhope has not been active for more than 6 months – a clear sign that his project had eiter faded or even died.

BUT FEAR NO MORE!

I created an open source project for a new Fallout: Equestria Pen & Paper!

It is written in LaTeX (because it is source control capable and editor-independent) and will use a simple d100 system, other than that, I have a few ideas for gameplay mechanics and the general ‚vibe‘ of the rulebook.

Feel free to join me!

Retropie on Raspberry Pi 3

Installing Retropie on Raspberry Pi 3 was quite the challenge – it all started smoothly with the description from their github wiki, it was pretty straight forward – until I tried to enable bluetooth and connect my PS3 controller.

I really tried for hours but did nothing but fail until I gave up, erased the SD-card and did the setup anew (both the Raspbian image and the Retropie) – and suddenly it worked!

I then realized two things:

  1. I had used an „older“ image of Raspbian (10.05.2016), where apparently the drivers were still experimental and
  2. I found a description that with the installation of the PS3-controller needed libraries, the libraries for sixad were installed with a bluetooth app which conflicted with the built in bluetooth app

With the Raspbian image from 27.05.2016 everything works just fine (except a few known errors, like sound glitches and that a few N64 games are almost not playable (like Super Mario Party, where you can’t see parts of the board, your figures and the die at all)).

I also recommend a cooler: when using RetroPie, the Raspberry Pi 3 gets quite hot!