u/Competitive_Mix_587

I was planning to wait until next year to trade in my old car, but a nearby dealership had one configured EXACTLY like I wanted pop up on the lot yesterday with no one claiming it (The local dealership had several inbound but they were all already bought before they arrived). Wife and I drove the hour to check it out...and drove it home.

That said, I've never owned a Hybrid so, are there any tips about driving it I should know? Example...Should I just let the car decide or are there times it makes sense to switch to EV mode?

I love the car and all the bells and whistles. It came with the Premium Plus package so it has the 360 camera (my last car had that, never going without it ever again), the HUD (the distraction lasted about 5 miles then I loved it as I expected I would). Not crazy about giant panes of glass over my head but there really isn't an option to get the other toys without the panoramic moonroof. Car told me I got 43+ MPG on the 50 mile drive home.

My wife was a teacher so she earned diddly.squat for years. Subsequently her SSA benefit is almost exclusively based on my benefits (at FRA 20% on her own eranings; 80% on mine). Accordingly, her benefits (50% of mine...although I'm not sure hence my question that follows) do not accrue delayed benefits past her 67th birthday. When she turns 67 I'll be 68 (and some change). I do know she can't claim spousal benefits until I claim mine.

1. Is her benefit based on my benefit at 68 or my PIA (67)
2. If I claim earlier than FRA, is her benefit based on my reduced early benefit or my PIA at FRA?

I learned a coupe of years ago when I executed a December Roth conversion that the IRS lets you break your income into quarters to account for uneven earning which can subsequently prevent underpayment penalties (adding substantial income at the end of the year can make your first three quarterly estimated tax payments to be too small otherwise).

My question is, can I do the same with big deductions? In January we transferred a rather large sum (well, large for us) of stock directly to our church building fund. That put us well over the standard deduction which will lower our tax burden. While I'm not sure if it would even help us tax-wise, is there a way to account for that when calculating the quarterly payments?

Note that at this point I already made the relevant payment for this year so it's more academic than anything, BUT in case we choose to do this again next year I'm curious...

We have 10 Alexa (Echo) devices throughout our house (so we can ask her something from anywhere). We have had a speaker group configured for ages that consists of three of them for playing background music. Occasionally one of the three will stop playing music. Usually I can unplug and replug it from the wall and it wakes up. If that doesn't work I delete the group and rebuild it. Has always worked in the past.

Oddly, in this case if I say play music "Everywhere" it works...every device is online and playing. No matter what I did I could not get the 3-speaker group to play by themselves. So I broke down and once again deleted the group in an attempt to recreate it.

Today however, Alexa is being particularly obnoxious...when I get to the step to add devices to the new group, I select one of the three, and many of the rest (including one more that I want to add) suddenly show offline. As soon as I remove the one I just selected, they all come back. Depending on which one I select, I get anywhere from 4-6 other devices to fall offline. There's a banner that says to make sure all are on and on the same network...but isn't that a given since they all play on the "Everywhere" group?

Does anyone have a solution? Maybe a phone number to Amazon?

Yesterday I replaced an old bathroom ceiling fan with a new smart model. Unfortunately, the new smart switch is much deeper than the one that came out and I can’t get it into the electrical box. The heavy copper wiring is fighting me pushing that thing into the wall. I get it to within about a half an inch and it just won’t go any farther.

The fan and switch came with quick connect clips that were great for wiring everything together in the proper color coding, but now I want to perhaps shorten the copper wiring to make more room, but I’m not sure I can get the wiring out of the clips without destroying them. Plus in the past, I’ve worked with switches where the copper wiring was too short and it made a challenge of getting everything connected. I don’t want the person after me to have that dilemma if he decides to put in a different switch.

Interested in people’s thoughts… productive ones only please 😎

My Velop Mesh (WHW03) has a primary SSID that is protected with a strong password and a guest WiFi with a very simple password for sharing (if it compromised no biggie because I have no critical device connected to it).

My Mac Studio is ethernet-wired into the router and connected via the primary SSID so that it can talk to my Apple Watch.

If I connect a device with the guest SSID (simple password makes it easier 😉), will it and my computer be able to communicate with each other?

How do I remove options from the right-click menu that point to programs that don't exist on my computer?

I had an apple migration fail from old to new computer...that old computer had VMWare Fusion with windows which in turn had windows Chrome installed. The right click menu had the option to open URLs in the windows version of Chrome. Current computer DOES NOT have VMWare Fusion installed, yet the right click option to open URLs in Windows Chrome is still there. How do I remove it?

I have a two car garage (traditional individual doors that roll upwards) and recently acquired a third car, a Shelby Cobra kit car.

Desperately wanting a three car garage capability, I've been wondering if I could put a 4-post lift on one side of the garage and park my daily driver under the Cobra (preliminary measurements show it's theoretically possible) but there's several of issues to make it fit, the most obvious being the rollup garage door and opener. The door rails are about 33" below the ceiling. Even if those could be raised to the very top and the garage door motor relocated elsewhere (to the side?) I don't think there'd be room for my mid-size SUV and Cobra stacked on top of each other (it's really, really close though). I'm curious about replacing the doors with something automated that opens maybe folding in half upwards or outwards.

Since I have two such doors, whatever I do would have to be matched on both (or my wife the "decorator" would be upset) so it can't be too costly.

Ideas?

I've gotten way behind in pushing pictures to a collection and weeding out the crap...it would be a whole lot easier if I could have the library ONLY show those that weren't in a collection. Once I move a phot to a collection it would go away in the library view.

Is that capability there and I just missed it or...?

I just tried Betterdisplay. Yes, it creates a more readable display at tighter resolutions which is really nice. However, and this is a show stopper for me...it shows video graphics at the resolution dictated by Betterdisplay settings. The Mac however (with the right app) will display video and graphics at their native resolution regardless of the resolution setting in Settings. Example, a 1080p video will show using 1080p pixels, not scaled like in Betterdisplay.

That said, I played with the settings briefly...there may be a way to show graphics at there native resolution using Betterdisplay with different settings.

Anyone have a clue? Their web page did not have (That I could find) a contact us link

Do I have to use the actual Southwest Chase card to get the benefits (Free checked bag being the big one) or can I use another card?

(I've switched to a United card after all of the SW buffoonery and would rather build points there. I'm only flying SWA to take advantage of my remaining points)

Never used shortcuts so I thought this would be a good test.

I have Auto Brightness set, but if I ever manually change the brightness (auto not really that smart) the setting no longer self-adjusts. To manually turn it on (like when I'm going to bed) I have to go to the Auto Brightness setting, toggle it off then back on again. I tried creating a shortcut to do this for me, but the shortcut tool will only let me set a specific brightness level (i.e. 50%) but apparently NOT "auto".

Thoughts?

A few weeks ago my wife got really confused trying to find a movie...turned out that Plex had put a bunch of individual movies into single collections of their own. I know I didn't do it. So I spent some effort removing them. Tonight I found several more.

Is there a setting somewhere that is telling Plex to do this? Most recently added movies are not subjected to this, just the occasional one. Some collections are named identically to the contained movie, but some are "thematically" named. Really odd...

I've tried the soaking and scrubbing and my cans are not coming clean. Thought I'd go the Ultrasonic cleaner route. However I don't want to spend more than I need...what's the smallest (decent, not cheap) Ultrasonic Cleaner that will hold a full 8" can?

One AirTag was connected to my key fob (always forgetting where it was) and my iPhone recently reported it as low. So I replaced the battery with a brand new one. It chirped when I installed it...but my iPhone can't see it at all now.

A second AirTag was in my wife's car and it probably died some time ago (never reported as low in "Find My"). Dug it out and put in a new battery. Same thing, iPhone now able to detect it.

Any clue how to make these things work again? In the past I swapped batteries and nectar had an issue. One of them I removed from my iPhone and tried to re-add...nothing.

Thanks in advance

I always thought that Peter Jackson got Saruman's and Sauron's "relationship" wrong. PJ seems to imply (or folks have inferred) that Saruman is in cahoots with Sauron, either working with or for him.

I always thought that (per the books) that Sauron was competing with Sauron for control of Middle Earth (i.e. he wanted it for himself), not working with/for him. That's why he wanted the ring...for himself, not Sauron.

Ready...Ready...Attack!