

I’ve been on the Gabapentin that my doctor prescribed me on May 3rd. It removes my pain which is great.
However I am experiencing a few strange symptoms. First, the oily skin. It used to be dry and clean when I first woke up but now it’s so oily and slippery. That’s weird but it doesn’t bother me all that much. Second, I’ve had reduced appetite. There is food to eat but I don’t feel like eating in the morning and have been skipping breakfast most days.
But the strangest thing is that it just appears to me I’m gaining weight. The scale doesn’t show it but I’m a lot squishier. I don’t know yet if I’m just getting fat from eating too many Larabars or if the medicine is causing a hormone shift. It looks more like a redistribution of fat if anything. My butt feels enormous.
However it’s not a big enough change to be worried about. All I really care about is my muscle strength which appears to be normal as long as I eat enough later in the day to make up for not being hungry enough for breakfast.
BBM Format Plans
There are so many decisions to be made when designing my own image format. I know it will be a 1 bit per pixel format much like monochrome BMP files or PBM and XBM.
However the exact details of the header have yet to be decided.
Currently my program produces Windows version 2 BMP files for the checkerboard. This format has been supported since Windows 2.0(released December 9 1987!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format
14 bytes for the bitmap file header
12 bytes for the DIB header
6 bytes for the 2 colors in the palette. Each taking 3 bytes for Red, Green, and Blue.
That’s a total of 32 bytes. I love the BMP format but it has a lot of junk data in the header that is reserved or tells how many bytes are in the file.
But my biggest criticism of the format is the fact that the width of each row must be a multiple of 4. This means hundreds of extra bytes for no good reason.
PBM files only have a few extra bits at the end of the row if the image width is not a multiple of 8 but that’s only because computers operate on 8 bits at a time.
PBM was the first official format that I learned to write with only code from the C standard library. In fact a few printf and looped fputc calls on a file opened in binary writing mode is really all you need. The details of that format are here.
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbm.html
Both the Windows BMP and the NetPBM PBM format are perfectly capable of storing ANY image containing only black and white. They can also pack each pixel into a single bit!
But here is where they differ.
BMP files can have a color palette so that the two colors can be whichever two colors the author chooses.
PBM can be black and white only
BMP requires padding at the end of each row of pixels to be a multiple of 4 bytes.
PBM doesn’t have to have that extra padding and the files will typically be hundreds of bytes smaller.
BMP files have binary headers for the information about the bitmap and how it will be displayed.
PBM files have a plain text header that can be viewed even in Notepad! Yet they still are smaller than the space wasting headers of BMP.
I have decided currently that my format will be called:
BBM: Binary Bit Map
Sort of redundant I know but it was to emphasize that it’s a format for two colors. I reject the gender binary but not the binary numeral system! Also there will be no plain text unlike PBM has.
But the specific details of how the information will be stored has a few things that I’ll need to decide on.
1. Do I have the width and height be 4 bytes each for a total of 8 bytes of a header? That would allow up to 4294967295*4294967295 size images.
Or do I use only two bytes for each which allows a maximum image of 65535*65535? That’s probably bigger than any image that websites allow uploading. A single image would be close to 4 GB!
2. Do I include a color palette like BMP has or should it be strictly black and white for tradition?
3. How will I deal with the extra unused bits when the total number of pixels is not a multiple of 8? Should I use the same routine as for pbm where the end of the row is padded to be a full byte. Or should I use an even more clever method like only padding to a full byte at the end of the entire image? I think there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.
Additional notes:
Also worth mentioning is the XBM format.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_BitMap
XBM is worth mentioning because although it is a text format and takes a lot of space, it is a monochrome format which stores 1 bit per pixel. My own format will be so much like it that converting it to an XBM would be trivial.
Update: 5-31-2019
I did eventually decide to use 16 bit values for the width and height values in my format. I also wrote the “BBM Format.txt” which details my format.
There is an herb I have a special interest in. Chasteberry. This is partly because of it’s connection with Chastity by reducing sexual desire. That’s how it gets its name.
I have become increasingly sick of Facebook for its censorship of vegan and anti-vaccination posts on people’s timeline.
Additionally I’ve had two posts that were related to neither of those. One was a link to a book on Amazon and another was the one where I called Nintendo Communist for deleting a transgender flag stage someone made in Super Smash Bros Ultimate. But Facebook did not like that and deleted it.
But yeah when you make sure people can’t say certain words that’s censorship and I really don’t like it.
Of course there are probably a lot of other reasons I should not spend time on Facebook but I have a lot of people on there that I don’t have contact info for outside of Facebook.
I know I’ll still keep my Facebook account but only because it is tied to my Love Nikki Dress Up Queen game on the iPhone.
I ask anyone else who reads this and wants to not lose contact with me to email me at :
And I know I will have freedom of speech outside of the internet but only when I get my own apartment where no one can hear me anyway. But that kinda defeats the point of the internet plus most people worth relating to don’t live in Lee’s Summit.
I really only like people who are vegan or at least video game or programming nerds who can talk about cool stuff with no controversy.