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Calorie Counter for Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS

Ok,

So having lost 30lbs since I wrote the python calorie counter, I'm a big proponent of counting calories. It WORKS. Not only that it's easy, and it appeals to the chewy mathematics center of my brain. All is well and good, and I've got a nice phone that supports python scripts so I'm set. There are some instances though, where a phone is just too much bulk to carry around and I really just need something smaller.

As luck would have it, I came across a game boy micro. This little devil is TINY, and fits right in a shirt pocket no troubles. Plus you can get one for 30$ used at gamestop, bonus! However there was one tiny snag, there's no python interpreter for GBA!

So I wrote a version of the calorie counter application for the game boy advance. It uses the savegame sram to store your current calories and calorie goal. It'll work in any gba emulator, flash cart, or the nintendo ds gba slot. Even better, most flash carts allow you to use it for your startup game so the time to start is around 2-4 seconds. Very reasonable! Anyway, it's pretty simple stuff and gplv3 so feel free to give it a try or even modify it. Note, you'll need the excellent HAM gba library to recompile.

You can download it here: GBA Calorie Counter

Food (and diet) management for the unix geek, a python script

For many a scientist like myself, the pear-shaped waistline which has become synonymous with the unix guru has become all too familiar. While there are a number of mitigating factors, I'm going to chalk it up to the sedentary lifestyle of the typical programmer. A study posted on Digg last week showed that on average, dieters who kept a food journal lose twice as much weight as those who don't. That's a pretty powerful tool. Carrying around a notepad doesn't make a lot of sense for me, as I'm almost never without my laptop, so I've been keeping a csv spreadsheet like below:

07:53 ,oatmeal , 160
07:55 ,water , 000
10:40 ,kudos , 100
10:40 ,water , 000

Which is fine. It accomplishes what needs to be accomplished, with regards to the diary at least. However, I would like some statistics with my diet. How many calories do I have left in the day, how many glasses of water, how many calories did I eat at lunch, etc. These little statistics and calculations really drive home the message. I always keep today's .food file on my desktop, and I have my .bashrc set up to show me my dietary information whenever I login or open a shell like so:


# display how many calories I've left/eaten today
echo "Remember to fill in your .food file today"
echo "-----------------------------------------"
~/Scripts/DotFoodStatistics.py ~/Desktop/*.food | grep today
echo "-----------------------------------------"


Attached-> python “food processor” diet statistics <- is the simple python script I wrote to calculate food statistics and keep track of my dietary intake:

As you can see it's a very simple procedural script. Took me all of 20 minutes for the python. Only time will tell if the dieting is as straightforward.