I love my Instinct Solar. I have never connected it to my phone though — I don’t want notifications or anything. I can manually take the workout results and plug them into my phone.

The solar part is really nice. I did a three hour hike in Colorado a few weeks ago (GPS off) and added like eight days of estimated battery.

Got my annual “raise” today at 3.5%. The average for the department was 3% so I guess it’s better than a stick in the eye.

(Disclaimer that I’m still new-ish to Linux)

I just went about a year between EndeavorOS updates on a laptop and uhh… it wasn’t happy. I just installed Kubuntu which hopefully will be more forgiving haha.

Not really, however I’m fortunate to get 33 days of PTO per year, so once my bank got near the limit of 40 days saved I was able to arrange for one day of PTO to be used every two week pay period. The extra day off really helps!

This is totally not the intent of buildapc, but if you’re willing to go ITX, I’ve been meaning to sell some “old” parts through the hardwareswap Discord. If you’re interested (and in USA :)) it may save you some money to go for a higher end GPU.

I have:

• Asrock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming ITX/ac. Works with up to 5000 series CPUs with a BIOS update
• Ryzen 3400G (about 10-15% slower in CPU benchmarks)
• 2 x 8 gb 3200 MHz Samsung B-die RAM

I have an AKLLA A5 with a 3700x, RX 6800, 2x16gb DDR4 @ 3600 MT/s, and an XPG SX8200 Pro 1 TB NVME. I have a Gigabyte 28” 144hz 4K monitor.

The A5 certainly isn’t the smallest case (10.3L) but I wasn’t happy with ITX GPUs topping out with the 5600xt.

I have a Minisforum EM680 mini PC on order which is TINY (0.8 L). I will use that as my travel PC that can handle light gaming. I am toying with the idea of using that as my only PC while turning my A5 into an eGPU enclosure. I would have to buy the logic board to make this work…

Yes. I keep 25-30% in international stocks. FZILX in my IRA, I-fund in my old TSP, and whatever the institutional equivalent is in my employer plan.

Short version: yes. As long as sugar and other junk isn’t added. Generally any intake of coffee has benefits over none; and 3-4 cups a day of coffee seemingly the sweet spot. Coffee intake should be minimal/none if pregnant. In general, we don’t have the highest quality studies for coffee/health because it’s really hard to have a double-blinded study. Most are just observational and retrospective in nature. More studies are still needed on the topic.

Here’s a meta analysis (review of many studies) from the British Medical Association. I removed some wording to shorten their conclusion. https://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j5024

Coffee consumption was more often associated with benefit than harm for a range of health outcomes […] with summary estimates indicating largest relative risk reduction at intakes of three to four cups a day versus none, including all cause mortality (relative risk 0.83, 95% confidence interval 0.83 to 0.88), cardiovascular mortality (0.81, 0.72 to 0.90), and cardiovascular disease (0.85, 0.80 to 0.90). High versus low consumption was associated with an 18% lower risk of incident cancer (0.82, 0.74 to 0.89). Consumption was also associated with a lower risk of several specific cancers and neurological, metabolic, and liver conditions. Harmful associations were largely nullified by adequate adjustment for smoking, except in pregnancy […] There was also an association between coffee drinking and risk of fracture in women but not in men.

We’ve never been one to strictly budget, but SO and I had to take a step back and come up with a plan after we both acknowledged that we impulse buy too much on Amazon. We can afford it just fine even with a >50% savings rate, but we still want to rein it in a bit.

We’ve decided to try making a joint wishlist (both are contributors). Whenever we think of something that we think we want or need, we add it to the list. At the end of the month we’ll look at it. Each item gets reviewed and deleted if no longer wanted/needed, added to the cart, or pushed on to next month’s list for reconsideration.

It does help to see everything in the cart at once to decide if it’s really worth spending that much.

Cool! Probably helps break up the monotony.