Sixteen posts in a row. Kinda proud of that, even if no one is reading them. I haven’t managed to do that since like 2016-17.
I was skimming Digital Blasphemy’s Facebook page the other day and came across a software recommendation that caught my attention. Ryan Bliss at DB creates some absolutely amazing digital art. I’ve followed him off and on for ten years or more, I think. Maybe longer, because I think I had some of his artwork on my last desktop machine and that was back in ’10 or ’11.
At any rate, the software is DisplayFusion, and it’s designed to help you manage multiple monitors. You can put up different desktop backgrounds on each monitor or spread one image across all of your screens. Windows claims to do this, but I’ve always run into problems, where the image splits in a weird way or the proportions get wrecked. DisplayFusion has handled every image I’ve thrown at it over the last couple of weeks or so. The paid version will automatically update your background every day from a variety of sites; the free version lets you do that with just a couple of clicks. I especially like the pricing model, because it’s not a subscription.
It’ll also let you create virtual monitors if you want. You can split your 19-inch screen into two 9.5-inch screens, each with its own background if you like.
There are a few other tweaks and such that it does, so I may break down and pay for the Pro version.
Had a minor hiccup with my insulin pump this week, too. I changed the sensor and the transmitter, and the transmitter change didn’t take for some reason. I was getting “Invalid Transmitter ID Error 29T” messages during warm-up. Going back through the process several times didn’t help. What finally ended up working was rebooting the pump. Note that to turn off the Tandem t:slim X2 pump, it needs to be connected to a computer. We’re told that a Chromebook isn’t enough, that it has to be a Windows or Apple computer, though there’s anecdotal evidence on FB that a Chromebook will work.
At any rate, when you reboot the pump, you’ll lose your IOB (Insulin on Board), and when it first turns back on, you won’t have your blood glucose graph. You’ll just have big buttons for Options, Bolus, and the unlock code. I knew that at one level, but it was still disconcerting to see it happen. The graph will come back after the transmitter and sensor start back up. Your profiles and other pump settings should still be there; mine were.
The data history error hit me this week, too, where the pump lost all my history. It’d been uploaded to t:connect, the Tandem website, so I’ve still got a record of it; it’s just not on the pump (or on the t:connect app). That seems to have resolved itself, in that I’ve got history again. I don’t believe there’s an actual fix for it though, and I’m reasonably sure there’s no way to recover your data to your pump.
Reading
I never did get into the Buffett book for some reason. It went back to the library unread.
I did pick up Dean Wesley Smith’s The Poker Chip. It’s the first book in his Ghost of a Chance series from 2014. Someone at Absolute Write recommended it in a thread where I was brainstorming for Ghost of Innocence. It’s a fun little story about a rural Montana doctor and a sheriff’s deputy who are killed in a car crash one snowy night. They become ghosts, and then things get really interesting. I may incorporate some of his ideas in GOI, because he had some really good ones.
Writing
I’m at 25,000 words on Ghost, and it’s coming along nicely. Monday I was working on one scene, paused to think about how a secondary character was going to interact with someone else, then came up with a couple of kind of dark twists to the story. So that made things kind of interesting.
One of my writing friends calls it pouring on the suffersauce. She generally writes romance though, so you expect that. Then again, shouldn’t I be doing that in my stories too, even if they’re thrillers? Especially if they’re thrillers? I have this weird relationship with storytelling. I want things to be realistic, but sometimes realism is, well, boring. And readers want to escape from reality, but they want accuracy, for the most part. It’s quite the tightrope to walk, really, and even more so when you’re writing a paranormal story. Where do I draw the line? Can’t have a boring thriller, can you? But I still want that realism. Sigh. #WritersLife #FirstWorldProblems
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