Month: March 2017

Weight Loss… AGAIN

On By Michel McDonaldIn WeightLeave a comment

noom coach

In January 2013 my partner and I were sitting in a Denny’s when I asked him to take a picture of me. I weighed myself that morning and I was 262lbs. We went to Food Maxx and bought a bunch of Weight Watchers Smart Ones frozen dinners, and I got on my cell phone and bought the lifetime membership of Noom for $29.99, the best $30 I ever spent because that year I lost 70lbs.

It’s 2017 and literally all the weight has come back. March 9th I was 261lbs and I felt like I was back to where I started in 2013, and I’m sick of being overweight, so we talked about me going on another diet where I eat what I want to eat and he eats what he wants to eat and he doesn’t try to get me to eat anything that is detrimental to my weight loss journey.

On March 14th, I started using the Noom app again after we went to Food Maxx to buy Progresso soup for my lunches and Weight Watchers Smart Ones frozen dinners for my dinners. I figured that the soup is only $1 a day and the WW SO’s are $2 a day, and then of course I’m eating a banana for breakfast with exactly 1 cup of cereal and almond milk.

By the time I started using the Noom app again on March 14th, I had already lost weight. I was down to 256lbs, which is the weight I logged as my starting weight. I’ve been weighing in every day on the Noom app instead of just weighing in once a week and today I was 249lbs. Noom estimated that I would be at my goal weight, which is 200lbs by September 26th, but with the weight I’ve already lost, it recalculated to September 3rd. I’m not in a hurry to lose weight because it took me a long time to gain the weight, I don’t expect to lose it immediately. It will happen when it happens.

I have a Planet Fitness membership, but the car has been making a strange noise lately and we can’t afford to take it in to the shop right now so I’m not getting to the gym. I’d like to ride the $250 tricycle that I bought just after I broke my leg last year, but my partner won’t let me because he thinks I’ll break the other leg, or an arm, or whatever, because let’s face it, I don’t have a good track record for not hurting myself lol. I’m clumsy. I’ve been clumsy since I was a child. I used to walk towards the hallway, but instead of going through the doorway, I walked right into the wall. My right eye is a little crossed, so I see 2 of everything. My mother called me Mr. Magoo lol.

Anyway, I won’t bore you anymore. I’m going to continue on this weight loss journey again and if I blog about it, then I blog about it, but I don’t expect that I will.

Terraria Android Cloud Issues Solved

On By Michel McDonaldIn Android, Games, GoogleLeave a comment

Terraria

I have a little addiction to a silly video game called Terraria. I found out about this game when I got my PS4 for Christmas in 2015 while playing Minecraft. It said Also try Terraria on the Minecraft logo, so I found it in the PlayStation store and bought it. I didn’t love it immediately because I wasn’t sure how to play it, and I kept getting killed at night and it was frustrating to keep burying myself whenever the zombies came out at night, much like Minecraft lol. But once I started to play it more, I became addicted and eventually over time I bought the PC version and the Android version.

I have it installed on my Nook HD+, but recently I decided to install it on my cell phone so that I could play it anywhere. I uploaded my world to the cloud from my Nook so I could use some of the items I had gotten before on my phone. I created a new world, because it’s always fun to start over and build a new house, even though I build the same exact house every time lol. Anyway, I uploaded the world a couple more times and eventually it wouldn’t allow me to access the cloud. Every time I would click the cloud save, the game would freeze up for about 10 seconds before crashing. I’m sure anyone would understand just how frustrating that can be. I tried accessing the cloud worlds from my Nook, but no go. I even installed the game on my old android phone and still couldn’t access the cloud worlds.

My only alternative was to go to Google Play for help. Their help sent me to my email app to send an email to them. I got an email to sign up on their website so I can submit a ticket, which I did late on Friday. Today is Monday and I finally got a reply. They sent me a link to a fix, which I didn’t read right away, but they sent me the link again and I read it and apparently when you save your game to the cloud, your worlds and characters go directly to your Google Drive into a folder called Terraria. I had no idea lol. I didn’t have any special world that I needed anything from. Everything was basically just backup, so I deleted all the files and went to the game and it took a minute, but it cleared up the issue and now I am able to use the cloud again.

Here’s a little cheat tip. If you back up your world on the cloud, then access the back up, then go into one of your bags and grab things, like for example ore, you can exit out and go back into the cloud world and it will still be there as if you never touched it. Use this tip only if you must. Don’t use this tip if you think it might ruin the game for you. I actually did that so that I could duplicate the hearts so I could get the max amount of hit points without having to search for more hearts. I know it’s bad, but I just can’t stand dying so fast, but now I have to deal with the Eye of Cthulhu before I’m ready, so that’s on me.

Anyway, I hope you found this cloud fix and my cheat tip useful.

Play PC Games with an Xbox One controller

On By Michel McDonaldIn EverQuest, Games, MinecraftLeave a comment

XpadderMinecraft

Ok so I’ve been struggling for years with PC games and not being able to play them with a game controller. I think that’s why I love my PlayStation 4 so much, because it has a game controller. I bought a game controller many years ago, I think back when I still had Windows 98, and never could figure out how to get it to work. It didn’t work with any of the games I had, and the program it came with didn’t seem to help.

I played EverQuest with a keyboard for 6 or 7 years and got used to it because I didn’t have much of a choice. I hated that I couldn’t use a game controller, but I learned to live with the arrows for moving my character and pressing the Q button to auto attack, I for inventory, and many more buttons and button combinations.

Last year I bought Minecraft after I bought my Xbox One game controller since I figured it would work since Microsoft now owns Minecraft, but apparently that doesn’t matter since it didn’t work. It actually started to piss me off that I wasn’t able to play a simple game with a simple game controller. It’s like why don’t these things go together like Peanut butter and Jelly, or Macaroni and Cheese for crying out loud? You would think they would automatically just work, right? Microsoft Windows… Microsoft owns Xbox and Minecraft… Hello?

Ok so finally today I searched and found Xpadder. It was $10 and I just happened to have $20 in PayPal, so I used that to buy it. I’m broke and that $10 could’ve been a couple items for groceries, but that lasts 5 minutes, this lasts a lifetime. Then again so does the food, am I right?

So you will notice in the image above that I had to make the up arrow down and the down arrow up, and the reason is simple. If I use the right stick to look up, my screen looks at the ground and if I use the right stick to look down, you get the sky. I also bought the Windows 10 version of Minecraft (before I bought it from Mojang) and it looks at the sky if you use the right stick to look up. I don’t know why it doesn’t work right in one but not the other.

XpadderEQ

Here is Xpadder for EverQuest. I’m not sure if these buttons will work for me yet. The Alt 2-4 are the spell gems and I is inventory, Q for auto attack. Ctrl X I believe is camping and Ctrl S is sit/stand. I forget what C is lol. The left stick moves my character and the right stick actually controls the cursor/mouse. I will change Ctrl X to the space bar for jumping since I probably jump more often than I camp out of the game lol. I tried running around in the Plane of Knowledge, and it was a bit tricky because I’m not used to it, but I can see me starting to play EverQuest again now that I can play it with a game controller. And any time I need to change a button to something else, I can just put EQ in windowed mode and change it, then go back to the game. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

I feel like Xpadder was well worth the $10 I paid. Sometimes I regret things I buy, but I do not regret this at all. It’s wonderful.