VeryVeryVary

Wow it's been a long time. I've been through a lot so far this year, and I'm sorry for allll those times when I didn't update you. Basically in January and February anxiety was killing me. I went to the ER twice within a couple months and they didn't really seem to think anything weird about that. After the second time, I got myself set up with a new therapist who I've been seeing about twice a month since then. My PCP also got me started on a low dose of an SSRI which helped almost immediately. We also moved house in January, during a snowstorm which was cool. We're appreciating the extra space in the new place, but more space to live also means more space to clean, which isn't something I'm good at when I'm really struggling with my mental health. I was excited for school to end and to get to hang out with my daughter all summer, but just a week or two into her summer I got some news about my health and started feeling sick all the time...

Guys, I did it. I actually picked out parts for Distracto, and purchased them. Pulling the trigger on big purchases is hard for me because I'm always worried the price will drop in the near future (this is why I love buying at Best Buy when I can). The following is the list of parts that will comprise the Great Distracto. Some of these were already determined, because they were stolen from Gamemurder (CPU, memory, and video card) and some were otherwise left over from other projects (SSD, Windows license, monitor), but the others were purchased specifically for this process. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant Type Item Price CPU Intel - Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor $194.79 @ OutletPC CPU Cooler CRYORIG - C7 40.5 CFM CPU Cooler $26.90 @ OutletPC Motherboard MSI - Z270I GAMING PRO CARBON AC Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard $131...

It's weird how it works. I've actually written several posts that I haven't been able to bring myself to publish. It always starts off feeling like I can't do the writing part, then transitions to feeling like it's been too long since my last post to try again now. And it's not just blogging. I feel the same way about my Bullet Journal. Hell, I feel that way about reading. At this point, I probably won't be publishing posts every day, but I don't have a reader base yet, so that's okay. In the meantime, I'll try to remind myself that it's okay to miss a post or ten, and more than that, it's okay to come back afterwards and start posting again. It's all about continuing to work, and not stopping or giving up just because you needed to take a break. I do have things to post about, so I hope I'll be back soon. To anyone reading now or in the future, ❤️❤️❤️

These are the same rgb fans I just bought for my build. They have a few major drawbacks, but at this price , those are easy to overlook, especially if you have any other best buy discounts. They'll work in any computer, which is a plus - they don't need an rgb header on your motherboard or anything like that. They come with everything they need except power, which you get from your motherboard. On the other hand, that means you have to have their proprietary controller to use them, and there's no syncing with any other lights in your case. And the biggest annoyance is that they can't be controlled by, software.  You're again limited to the little box unless you are comfortable with a soldering iron and you've got a spare Arduino lying around (one of my future projects). My understanding is that the box also controls the fan speed despite them being PWM fans that are basically designed for being able to respond to temperature changes when plugged directly into th...

Something wonderful has happened! Several months after seasons 1-6 were removed from Netflix, all 10 seasons of Futurama are available for viewing on Hulu! This is the image I found upon signing in this morning: If you're not already a fan of Futurama, go watch it now. If you are a fan, watch it again. There's new stuff you'll notice every single time, starting with episode one where (SPOILER ALERT) a certain shadow is present, which is not explained until episode sixty-four . Also, Futurama is the only television show that had a writer prove an actual real-life mathematic theorem just to make sure the plot is consistent. No, really.  And if that's not a reason to watch a TV show, I don't know what is. Go watch Futurama on Hulu right now, or Robot Nixon wins!

We all know that "time flies," but when an average person says that, they're talking about the years. They're talking about time not spent with loved ones, or time wasted on a job you hate - the things you take for granted. Today I want to talk about the hours. The minutes.   I'm sure everyone has had an experience where they sit down to the TV (or read a book, or browse Facebook….oh Facebook you are a time thief) when suddenly it's 3 hours later and you didn't even notice. For me, this happens with almost everything I do. Every activity takes me twice as long as I expect it should, which means that if I sleep eight hours a day, I only have eight hours left over to plan my day. I've adapted for scheduled, required things like doctor appointments, allowing myself 2-3 times as long as I think it should take for me to get ready and arrive on time, but in my daily life, it is crippling.   My daughter is in preschool for three hours these days. I've bee...

So here's a fun story. After a week on an antibiotic, I developed an rash all over my body. So now in addition to not being able to eat food, I'm also covered head to toe in itchiness. Fun stuff.

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!