VeryVeryVary

After my last two purchases there, I wish I could buy everything at Best Buy. If you use their sales and coupons and rewards offers properly, their prices are quite competitive, and even when they're not competitive, they'll match for you. Any advertised price at any major competitor - for 2 weeks or more past your purchase date on most items. (this depends on your return period which is generally 2 weeks, unless you are in a higher tier of their rewards program) That means that when I saw this evening that they were now offering for $150 the same monitor I bought last week for $200, all I had to do was walk into the store and ask for the $50 back on my card. Didn't even need my receipt because the purchase was linked to my rewards account and they looked it up with just my phone number. There was a second's confusion where he didn't see the $60 rewards certificate I'd applied to the original purchase, but after I pointed that out on the receipt, he gladly agr...

Spotify Premium for Students with Hulu AND Showtime for $5 This is where I will introduce you to my favorite electronics bargain of the day, focusing on three online retailers each with their own specific advantage: Newegg with their wide selection of components and serious deals if you look close enough (and are willing to return mail-in rebates), Amazon and their two-day delivery service that many people subscribe to, and Best Buy due to always-available price-matching and their stellar return policy - aided even further by the fact that many people live close enough to a brick-and-mortar location that returns can be done in-store. If you're not already, make sure to subscribe to Newegg's email deals , as their discount codes require email enrollment. Best Buy's college student deals are also necessary if you are a student as well as joining their My Best Buy program . WARNING: The items presented in my Daily Deals will always be things that I want to purc...

UPDATE: Newegg's deal is still rolling, but Amazon has dropped their price further to $299! That, when combined with the confirmation that 8th generation Intel core processors won't be backwards compatible with my motherboard, was enough to make me finally pull the trigger, so GAMEMURDER will be getting that upgrade. On Amazon, I always check to see if they have a "Fulfilled by Amazon" option so taxes won't be charged, and as of the time of writing this, there was one option for the exact same price with Prime shipping. Link below still works. I told you it was coming! The Intel i7 7700k processor is available for only $309.99, and this time it's at both Amazon and Newegg for that price. And, what the hell - if you want to get it from Best Buy, they'll price-match for you too. For my money, I've decided to hold out until Intel releases their new 6-core processors, but I may kick myself when the prices are announced. If you don't have my ...

Amazon just revamped a lot of their products, including the Fire TV which appears to be dialed way back from the previous model - but that means they've removed features most people don't use (removed microSD and Ethernet ports and replaced USB-A with what appears to be a micro USB port) and dropped the price dramatically. In fact, now you can get the Fire TV and an Echo Dot for only $79.99 - less than a last generation Fire TV cost. And it still supports 4K, now with added HDR (high dynamic range) support, plus they upgraded Alexa capabilities, making your TV into a baby Echo. If you have a 4K TV, or do a lot of streaming and have only a stick-type device, it's worth upgrading to the full-power Fire TV for $69.99 - but for only $10 more you can add on an Echo Dot. I already have one Fire TV, but have been looking at getting a Roku for the second TV. Now that Amazon is giving me an option with 4K and voice remote (which I use all the time) for way less than the Roku ...

Today Best Buy has the Asus 27" FHD VZ279H Monitor with IPS panel for only $149.99! Guys, I bought this monitor last week for $199.99 and thought it was a pretty good deal. $149.99 is a no-brainer. I'm even considering buying a second one while it's still on sale. It's not a 4k gaming monitor or anything, but it's spectacular for this price. Response time of 5ms is great for a monitor this size at this price, and it has built-in speakers. (Note monitor speakers are never going to be sufficient for listening to music or watching movies, but they're fine for notification sounds or the occasional YouTube video.) Luckily, Best Buy is amazing and refunded me the difference because of their Price match guarantee. More on that later. 

Let me just start by saying that I love this phone, and even though I already had a Galaxy S7 edge, the Note 8 feels like a real upgrade. TL;DR: The battery is great, the camera is great, the pen is great but Samsung Notes is confusing and mostly worthless, and Bixby is a-whole-nother story. First of all, I want to talk about the battery life, which everyone is worried about because Samsung scaled way back on battery size after the Note 7 debacle. But my battery life is amazing. Way better than it was on my S7, even though the Note is brand new and I have been using it for hours every day since I bought it. I'm putting the phone on the charger late each night, usually with battery to spare. Maybe only 10-15% but that only leads me to another thing. That last 15% burned up so fast with my S7, but now it'll get me at least an hour of active use. Probably closer to two. I put it on the wireless charger a couple nights ago under 5%, and only realized that it wasn't seated ...

So the very day I wrote a post about how to make pour-over coffee, my GI advised me to try a gluten-free diet. After some discussion with my husband, I decided to do a more extensive elimination diet, mainly because if I do have a food sensitivity, but not to gluten, I don't want to go through multiple gluten-free trials to figure it out. The two most common food triggers are wheat and dairy, so those are definitely getting cut, along with eggs, soy, most grain (although I'm still eating rice and quinoa, I'm not replacing wheat with other gluten-free grains), nightshade vegetables (potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers, mainly) alcohol, and, yes, caffeine. I'm also cutting out most added sugar because I can't eat much in the way of processed food anyway, due to the other restrictions. Immediately after getting the news that I would be going gluten-free (for a two-month trial), I went to a Pizza Hut lunch buffet, because that's what you do. And I did ...

Sorry for my absence this past week. I've been on my phoneymoon - the first few days after I get a new phone and have to sort through everything and arrange my home screens and customize and organize the hell out of it until no one knows how to use it except me. (oh the poor sales guys at AT&T trying to figure out my old s7 when I traded it in) I'm still not quite finished, though it is getting there, but I tore myself away (not really though, as I'm blogging from the phone) long enough to make a post - surprisingly not about technology. Well, not directly. Instead, it's about how to make a cup of coffee so that you've got enough awareness to make a blog post when you spend all your extra money on things like phones so you can't afford to put out like $15 for a coffee pot. I expect it to have wide appeal. Seriously though, I just don't usually like regular drip coffee. I love espresso, and espresso drinks, and I bought a moka pot about a d...

TL;DR: If you want the Note 8 on AT&T, and your current phone is paid off, you can probably trade it in for $300 off your Note 8 purchase, even if it's not worth much, plus get either a free wireless charger and 128GB microSD or a cool gear 360 camera toy if you order by September 24th. If your phone isn't paid off, but you have paid enough to trade it in, you can go to Wal*Mart and buy a Moto e4 for $40, and trade both phones in for $300 off the purchase, plus the aforementioned freebies. If you aren't yet eligible for a trade in, just hold onto your phone for now. Prices will drop in a couple months for the Christmas rush anyway. YMMV, as always. Let's talk about the elephant in the room. If the room is my head and the elephant is a big grey phone with two cameras and a stylus. If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm talking about the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. A year ago, my husband and I both upgraded our phones. I to the newish Gal...

Flash back to that picture in the last post of my current desktop struggling to keep up with a fifteen year old game, and it should seem pretty reasonable that I want an upgrade for my office. Please ignore the fact that I already have a low-end MacBook Air and a four year old mid-range Windows PC. Those laptops serve specific functions not served by my would-be new desktop. Like being able to game when I'm supposed to be writing. But what else do I need it to do? One of my favorite parts of building a computer is picking components. But the first thing you have to do is define your use cases. For this computer, I need to be able to do some gaming. Okay maybe "need" is an exaggeration, but that's what I intend to do. Also, as a fiction writer, I find making my characters in the Sims can be a useful experiment, especially when suffering from a block. I don't need something that can "murder" games, but I want to be able to run Sims 4 and Skyrim with...

That's right, the big sister may not be on sale anymore, but we've got a $20.00 mail-in rebate available on the 520W. Get the  SeaSonic M12II 520W 80 Plus Bronze Modular Power Supply for $34.99 after rebate SeaSonic is the most respected name in power supplies, and this one is fully modular, so it won't take up space in your case for cables you don't need. There are bigger and better power supplies out there, but not for thirty-five bucks. I think I'm finally pulling the trigger on this one. That makes the first new part for the great Distracto!

Bonus Deal of the Day: Logitech K400 Plus Keyboard for $17.99 at Best Buy. That's its lowest price this year! This is a great inexpensive little wireless keyboard and trackpad. Great for using from the couch with a home theater PC or other lazy computing. My husband has one and I'm about to get one myself so I can give his back! Combined with my $5 My Best Buy rewards coupon, this is really a screamin' deal. Make sure you're signed up!

If you feel like all I'm writing about is technology, then fret not. As I said from the start, my interests will wax and wane greatly, and sadly, with interest, so will the topics of my posts vary. Once I actually build the great Distracto, I will probably be done with computers altogether for months. Don't worry, though, I'll send my blog posts in by mail or something. I have a series coming up on my digital bullet journal, complete with advice and pictures and templates and all kinds of stuff. It's just proved to be a lot of work to put it together, especially since Evernote just upgraded their tables. A lot of it is typed up already, so rest assured it is coming. Just like winter.  See? My bullet journal is real!

*Tech speak is mostly eliminated or translated, except where used ironically, so please read ahead if you want to know what all the fuss is about, even if computers are not generally your thing.* I have a yen to build another computer. Building custom PCs is one of my favorite activities, but it's an expensive hobby, so since I started in 2005, I've only done it four times, and two of those were for other people. The easiest way to keep costs down is to cannibalize another computer for parts. The last one I built was a Christmas present two years ago from me to my husband and vice-versa. His part of the present was a gaming computer, and mine was getting to buy and build a new computer. We named it GAMEMURDER, which isn't terribly accurate, but we're not especially demanding since we play a lot of older games, and we're not trying to push 120+ fps to a 4K monitor. We're more like Skyrim from the couch using a game controller instead of keyboard/mouse kind ...

UPDATE 2: They have now removed the discounts that were previously being advertised for the Kids Editions, so I removed the links to those tablets. UPDATE: The discount on the Kids Editions may not be accurate. Amazon is still advertising them both as discounted on the Fire Tablets Family page, but I could not get the discount to actually show up through the checkout process. The discounts on the Fire 7 and HD 8 are still good though. Discount will show up when you "Proceed with Checkout" So this is what Amazon was doing while Newegg was discounting their Echo Show. Amazon has the Kindle Fire 7 for $34.99 , Kindle Fire HD 8 for $54.99 , Kindle Fire 7 Kids Edition for $79.99, and Kindle Fire HD 8 Kids Edition for $99.99. The difference between the regular versions and kid versions are primarily a big cushy case and a no-questions-asked warranty. These prices are not as low as Prime Day prices, when I bought a 7" Fire for $20 after a $10 rebate for using voice order...

This is the second part of a two part series. Check out part I if you haven't already. Go start a system build on pcpartpicker right now. You can play along. I'll wait. ... Back? Good. Say you want to start with a motherboard. Because it's the part that everything else is going to connect to, it's usually a good place to start. Click "Choose a motherboard" and it will take you to a list of every motherboard in their system. Clicking the word "Motherboard" will do the same - useful if you have one chosen and want to change it. Because you haven't picked a CPU or case - or anything - yet, everything is compatible. But if you're like me and prefer something in a small form factor, you'll want to limit your search to mini-ITX. Note that micro-ATX is a good choice for a midsize build, but it's quite a bit larger than mini-ITX. That said, going tiny is not great for beginners, but this is just a demonstration. If you sort by pric...

This is a fun one. Today's Deal probably doesn't come from the seller you expect. Amazon hasn't put it on sale since its release, unless you want to buy two, but through 9/16/17, Newegg has the Echo Show on sale for $209.99 - 8% off what Amazon is selling it for. Perfect for those of us who want to try the Echo Show but haven't been willing to shell out $360 for Amazon's offer of $100 off when you buy two.

The website pcpartpicker.com is my favorite website in the world. Besides Triple V, of course (laugh track). It allows you to browse through an obscene selection of components, compare prices at a number of online stores (including my three favorites as mentioned in the Active Deals of the Day post - Newegg, Amazon, and Best Buy), and build a parts list for your computer, all while checking for incompatibilities. Check out the parts list for the gaming computer I made for my husband: PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant Type Item Price CPU Intel - Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor Purchased For $192.99 CPU Cooler Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler Purchased For $19.99 Motherboard Asus - MAXIMUS VIII HERO ATX LGA1151 Motherboard Purchased For $159.99 Memory G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-...

UPDATED 9/2/2018 Today's deal is limited to students, unfortunately, and it's only tangentially tech-related, but it's just too good too keep to myself. Spotify Premium for Students with Hulu AND Showtime for $5 Spotify has ONCE AGAIN upped their Student Premium plan in a big way - by adding a Hulu limited commercials subscription completely for free AS WELL AS a Showtime streaming plan. Just pay the $5/month they were already charging for Premium for students and opt to add Hulu and Showtime to your account. There's even a 3 month trial for $0.99, if you haven't already signed up for Spotify Premium in the past. This offer only applies to the base, limited commercials plan on Hulu that costs $7.99 a month. You can't take advantage of this offer if you have the no commercials plan or subscribe to HBO through Hulu or anything like that. You can downgrade and sign up, but beware that you probably won't be able to add your Hulu add-ons and upgrades back...

If you've ever installed a Blu-ray drive in a computer, then you probably already know what a pain it is to actually play a Blu-ray disc on them. There's a whole world of copy protection between you and your movie, which is why if you end up with an OEM drive that doesn't come with software (or one almost a decade old, like I have), you will need something to play your movies for you. And today Newegg has Cyberlink PowerDVD 17 Ultra for only $40 with code EMCRKRH59. That's 60% off list price and $18 below the lowest price it's ever seen on Amazon. If your HD movies, like mine, have been hijacked by DRM, then you'll want to click on through to Newegg.

I decided near the end of last year that I would read 24 books in 2017 (audiobooks included). I was reading a ton at the time, and that seemed like an entirely reachable goal, but not so easy that failure was impossible. Just a few days into April, I'd already finished 12 books, so my victory seemed certain. Then in May I hit the wall. I still read some, but not every day, and certainly not enough to keep up my pace. Not even enough to finish 24 by the end of the year. Unsurprisingly, it coincided with a downturn in my mental health, but as reading is one of the greatest things for keeping me happy, healthy, sane, and productive, the decline caused some major positive feedback. As I got more lost in my anxiety (and later, depression), I read less, which worsened my mood even more. But now as I'm coming out of my funk, and starting to write and keep up with my Digital Bullet Journal again, I'm also starting to get back to reading. And as part of that, I'm posting her...

Today we have the  SeaSonic M12II 620W Power Supply for $39.99 after $20 mail-in-rebate as our tech deal of the day. I would snatch this baby up in a second, except that it's a bit long for the extra-small mini ITX cases I'm looking at for my own new build. This is a full-size, fully modular power supply, 80 Plus Bronze Certified. As with yesterday's deal, this one is available until 9/11/17. Note that the 520W version does occasionally go on sale for around $35, so if you don't have a high-end graphics card and you can wait a month or two, that can be another option

Disclaimer: If you sign up using my link , you will receive an extra movie and I will receive 2 movies myself. You also have your commitment requirement knocked down by one! My family first joined the Disney Movie Club a few months ago, and we've already fulfilled our commitment, meaning that we're ready to sign up again, which will get us the entry package of 5 movies for $1 again, plus the bonus 2 movies on our old account for using our own referral link. Score! If you're interested in signing up, click below. Or if you just want to know more, read on.

Intel Core i7-7700 Kaby Lake Desktop Processor for $279.99 with promo code EMCRKRF22 - that's the lowest price since its release, according to the price tracker history at pcpartpicker.com ! Available until 9/11/17 Note this is not the unlocked, k version of this processor, but if you aren't looking to overclock this will serve all your needs and then some.

I absolutely love designing and building custom PCs, but it's a hobby that gets expensive fast. So I want to offer my services to anyone who wants a nice, new desktop, but for whatever reason prefers not to build it on their own. And I want to do it for free. No, really. It's win-win. You get your custom-built computer paying only for parts and shipping. I get to practice my hobby, and content for my blog as I document the process. Hit me up if you're interested! Since I also love picking components and shopping, I'm also happy to help with any assistance you need in that area, even if you want to assemble yourself. Just let me know your computer needs (big or small, browsing or gaming, budget or BUDGET) and we'll figure out the perfect PC for you.

From what I hear, blogging is something that takes a lot of work. That's not something I have personal experience with, despite the many, many blogs I've started in my life. Note the keyword there. Started . I've developed tons of ideas for blogs, named about a dozen of them, occasionally purchased a domain name ( VoraciousBooks.com being the best example, as I purchased it several years ago and am only now getting it off the ground), and in extreme cases, I've even written a post or two. But, then before you know it, that little demon known as anxiety poofs into place on my shoulder, and the angels of self-confidence and inspiration are nowhere to be found. It may take a couple of weeks, or it may only be hours. He convinces me that no one is interested in what I have to say. My writing isn't good enough, my ideas aren't original enough, and even if they were, I don't have enough of them to fill out an entire blog. When it comes down to it, that last...