My friend Raye is in the process of becoming a licensed aromatherapy master. Her boyfriend and I start MTB biking together and that’s when I ran into her bright & spiritual soul. I have always been fascinated by this holistic branch of self-therapy. You can get compounds (organic or not) into your body in a variety of ways. If you use a cream, for example, the skin filters and the what makes the cut goes into the bloodstream. If you inhale instead you are going to hit the neocortex super quick (vs topical applications) and when that happens the limbic system is going to react accordingly.
During a getting together dinner, I shared with Raye my struggle with insomnia and she offered some help. She needed a case study for her training phase that will lead to certification, I needed more Zzzz time, a win-win game. If you are a follower of this geek portal you already know that I drive scientific thinking in every common day of life. Therefore, when I signed up as a Guinea pig I started tracking the benefits and effects of her custom prepped oils mist that would eventually affect my sleep.
Raye passes the oil mixture into blue dispensers. To avoid to confuse them since they all look the same I label every sample she passes on and I leave some leftover inside the container when near the end. Just in case I need a sample for chemical analysis within the year of running the associated experiments.
Every time I breathe in a few whiffs of the “magic potion” I track into a spreadsheet
date/time of the inhalation
body temperature at the time of the inhalation
temperature scan (using FLIR) for the first two hours ( I store thermal imagery every 15 minutes)
I am on my second trial “blue bottle” and this time I wanted to evaluate the brain response after the inhalation. For the job I used Muse which is an established consumer product for aided mediation.
Since the Muse SDK allows to stream via OSC protocol I built around the streaming capture program that comes with the Muse SDK a script that looks for cues that I know clearly indicating mind state changing due to relaxation. It is calibrated around my meditational history collected via the Muse app.
Then I whipped up a UI via MaxMSP that allows afterward to playback what was captured and that I couldn’t see while collecting data. Like eyes blinking, mouth movements and so on. I called it “Mirror’. Ah! How original of me… I know I know…
Thank you to Tom Hartogs for donating the Max project he had built for his own experiments, very kind and time saver of you Tom!
In addition to all that, I collected the raw data of my brain activity that eventually can be re-processed with better algorithms later on if needed. For example to build a brainwave mapping via Matlab or R. Some of those tools allow to perform a 2/3D mapping of the signals for easy debugging of what’s going on in the big box that processes the signals of our existence. The one below is done with Matlab with which I have a love/hate relationship…just sayin :-)
Here is my video capture of sniffing sample1 and sample2 (higher intensity)
[video]
If you haven’t heard of the Muse before now, these guys can show you the basics of the product.
I own a few Synology NAS, one of them is dedicated to development for various projects. More than once I need to store data into a relational database. Synology comes with MySQL Administration tool (MyPhpAdmin) and the cool MariaDB. It actually also comes under the hood with Postgres. By default, it’s not configured for your consumption. Below you find my recipe on how to get it up and running. If you are not familiar with vi (the editor) then you definitely want to install a package manager (iPKG) that allows you to install what you give for granted on my UNIX OSes. Say nano as for the editor. To do that the best guide ever that I found is already written by @zarino – follow his instructions and you can’t get it wrong. There’s only one piece of information that is missing from that blog post and is for a special case: When you log back into the system the profile that enables all the goodies of the packaging isn’t loaded by default, you can force the loading doing source /
Boxee If you haven't met this beauty when it came out then you have been missing out! It was so forward-thinking and so well designed. As often happens to great acquired products, they are killed for reasons beyond the compressible path to the mere mortals. I was helping my friend Cristiano in setting up his Synology system along with Plex. And every single time I dealt with Plex I regretted every second of just installing and then figuring out how to remove that cancer from the system. I know that some people out there must have a good experience about that product otherwise I don't understand how they still alive... but over many years that hasn't been me and now Cristiano too :-) So I was digging in my garage for something that I could have used as tvbox with some Linux distro on it. And that's when I ran in this wonderful piece of tech. Sitting there without love and full of dust bunnies. It booted at the first attempt and the remote battery was still alive!! Sadly,
TLDR : I am decluttering my life. On my own terms. If your span of attention is higher than one sentence, read on and you will see how I got to create my own word "Zeninifcation" as a start to take action against the fact that I have more crap than I need and it is sucking my time just to keep it out of the sight. I don't like clutter. I don't do things I don't like. Even if my wife disagrees, no, I don't have OCD according to this one random article . But I do consider clutter a distraction to my thinking process. It's like if you always dress like a slob then that one day you have to dress nicely it feels specially constraining. Or if you normally dress like a New Yorker stock exchange assassin; the few days in a row that you are in your PJ feels like after you finished your huge McDonald's burger the first week of when you started a strict diet. I am overly active and keeping the thinking streamlined is essential to focus just on what matters the
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