What the heck do people do to keep their power bills down? In the United States electricity comes in at around 12 cents a kilowatt hour, which, like, to me is a lot. I like electricity. I consume it constantly. I plug myself in and eat it for dinner. (Don't do that). But seriously. Alone, I used almost 1600 kwh of electricity last month. My bill was $175. It's nuts. I get that heating and cooling is a huge contributer to the bill, but jeez. For one person, it's so much. I get why single people live in apartments now (other, than, y'know, house prices). My air conditioner isn't even that old. It just drives me nuts. I have mostly all energy efficient bulbs (CFLs because I'm horrible and have yet to find LEDs with the right color temperature and price), I try to barely run anything I'm not using, and still. Everything just leaks out. Phantom power gets used by electronics left plugged in. Older appliances don't run as efficiently as they used to. And definitely energy star certified may as well mean they consume the power of the sun. It drives me nuts. And when I'm not home, I can't even get ahead because they just up the price on me (they will literally double my rates to make it so that I pay at least like $40/mo). It drives me absolutely nuts. I asked Cat (check out his phlog, FAX SEX, at baud.baby/) about how much electricity costs in Australia. Apparently 30 cents a kilowatt. How the *heck* do people live with that? I wouldn't be able to afford it. I'd live in a hole. I don't understand. Anyway, that's enough ranting about electricity usage. Someday I'll have the money to update my appliances and fix up my Pawpaw's old house into something a lot more efficient and nice. That or I'll just make enough money to stop complaining about the bill (lol that'll never happen). On other topics, I've finally decided on glasses. Thank you to users Tomasino and koan for recommending Zennioptical. I'm going to get two pairs from them (which is literally less than half the price of getting *just* lenses from the place attached to my eye doctor). My mom is going to help me pay for them too (she just wants me to pay her back by December because she needs the money for land taxes or something). They'll hopefully help my eyes not get so strained sitting at a computer for many, many hours on end (hek ye blue light filters). I don't really need them that much otherwise though. I'm gonna put my prescription here for reference. Different places give me different conversions from diopters to 20/XX, but I'm pretty sure my two eyes combined work at about 20/20 vision. I could be wrong though; idk. I do apparently have *not great* depth perception though, which sucks. (But ayyy my color vision is great!) Sph. Cyl. Axis O.D. (right) -0.25 ----- --- O.S. (left) -0.50 +0.50 090 (I don't really understand that very well, but yeah. My left eye and right eye are uneven and sometimes it causes them to really start feeling that way and bother me. I'm not sure exactly what causes it; I guess just general eyestrain). On a THIRD TOPIC - I fricked up my TI-99/4A. Soooo the cassette and joystick port both look the same. They're both db9 connectors, and I ended up plugging in my cassette player to the joystick port because I got a cable to hook it up to my cassette deck. And like an idiot, I kept trying to get it to work until finally columns 4 and 5 stopped working. I don't know exactly *why* they did. I tried finding stuff burned out on the motherboard but I just couldn't. So I've ordered a new 74LS156 chip (the CRU chip) on eBay to try and get it fixed. (Actually I ordered 15 of them because it was just easier to buy them in a lot. I despise myself). I'm hoping that switching out the chip fixes the problem and that maybe I just screwed something on it and didn't fry anything else. Hopefully. Also weirdly the layout that I got from http://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/keyboard.htm doesn't appear to be correct. The pins just don't line up right. I don't get it. I guess maybe that was for a different version of the 4A, or maybe just the original TI-99? Either way, they use the same chip, so y'know, it's cool. Also, because the old thermal paste was coming off and all nasty, I put arctic silver inside of it. Pretty great for a computer from the 80s lol. Lastly, I haven't forgotten about the ADM-5. It's just been on the backburner. I don't have a lot of faith in my dinky soldering iron, and the reality is that even if I get the video display working again, it's just going to be a fancy screen until I get the money to build a brand new keyboard for it (which is gonna cost a hell of a lot of money). And, like, don't get me wrong, that's better than nothing. It's just that it's not my main focus right now. And I don't want to end up doing it wrong and fricking something up. I will get it done, eventually. I just know that it's going to be a good while, sadly. At least in the meantime I'm getting even more experience working on and repairing electronics, so y'know, I'm getting better. Another thing I'd also like to eventually do is finish fixing my Pawpaw's old TrueTone D1032. I'm pretty sure the IF transformers just need to be serviced, and that puppy will be picking up radio signals like new again. But of course, that's definitely on the backburner lol. It works great as a phono amp for now, and it's fun sometimes listening to The Intergalactic Wasabi Mix on it :p Go snowdusk! And welcome back to the Gopher Club lol That's all for now. Thanks guys!