Sunday, February 18, 2018

Dear Diary #80: Found a Reason for an Alexa, RAM is Expensive?

Dear Diary,

Couldn't think of any use for a voice-activated home assistant or any use for light bulbs connected to Wi-Fi until recently. Coming home to a pitch-black home sucks. Having to feel around for the light switches in complete darkness also sucks. If only there were some device I could yell at to turn on a light or set of lights for me...

That patch for CPUs apparently came out weeks ago -- I was still waiting for it. If true, the good thing is that I haven't really noticed it while doing basic stuff on my computers. The bad thing is that a virus scan makes my system chug now. Maybe it's just this specific scanning program? My CPU core temperatures have jumped about 10-ish Celsius from what I remember during virus scans. Oh, and RAM prices have exploded higher -- chugging computer makes me think about upgrading. I could find 8 GB of DDR3 RAM like mid-2017 for CA$ 80 regular and CA$ 70 on sale. Now it's $90 and up. DDR4 was about $10 more than DDR3. Now I can't find anything under CA$ 120. Good times...

Got a new lamp and realizing that I probably shouldn't have gotten the nickle-plated version. What do you mean that surfaces buffed to a mirror finish reflect lights like ceiling lamps and the bulb in the lamp itself? Minor annoyance, gotten rid of most of the problem by setting the arm at a correct angle. I'll throw something on the base to block the rest if it really bugs me.

Twas checking out micro SD cards online and found a USB SD card reader with a slot for micro SD cards. Wow, what an idea. Definitely going to spend $20 on such an innovative idea, but I should check the memory card reader I bought over a year ago first. Oh, the one I have already has one.

Don't know why I didn't do it before but I finally put a BIOS password on my computer. Not for security but to let it warm up before anything big loads up. That RAM problem that causes freezing is still around, popped up for the first time in Windows 10 recently -- may not have given it the 5 minutes to warm up it needed. Can't replace the RAM with a single stick to bypass the problem since RAM is $90 for 8 GB now so this is it until something else dies.

Later.

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