Memory Habits, Good and Bad

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Bad - Asking a person's name then forgetting it immediately.

Bad - Deciding that I need to do a task then deciding to do something else first. Then forgetting the task.

Bad - Finding a good way to solve a problem and not writing it down. It is important because I will run into the same problem again, but the next time I might not be able to figure out the solution or find the web page with the answer.

Good - I have a tips file full of useful bits of information. It includes a lot of Linux command line programs and parameters, lots of system file names that might need modifying. This has saved me many hours of finding the information on the web.

Looking through it just now I noticed one of my favorites

  sudo cp /home/r/Downloads/silent.ogg /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/system-ready.ogg

This kills the obnoxiously loud system startup sound. You have to download silent.ogg, but it's not hard to find. I've only done this once, but I'm sure it will be handy when I am forced to update my operating system.

One day my phone was not making any sound on notifications. I scoured the settings and did not see anything to help. After a while I noticed that the Bluetooth icon was displayed. Not that this is unusual, but I couldn't think of why. Ah - I used my Airpods and needed to take them off to talk to someone, so I put them in my pocket and forgot about them. The notification sounds were going through the Airpods. I put them back in their case, the Bluetooth icon disappeared, my notification sounds came back. A few months later, the same thing happened. Including the search for the problem and the eventual solution. Sigh.

Good - check for keys, wallet, phone whenever I get in the car or step outside. I always lock my car with the key so I don't have a problem locking myself out.

Bad - writing code (computer program, 3D shape) with absolutely no documentation. Possibly the worst habit that I have.

Good - using Google Calendar for all appointments and events. I'm not recommending Google Calendar specifically other than saying that it works for me. Except for the sporting event calendar - teams should be designated as home city or school not mascot - this Saturday it's the Wildcats vs the Wildcats - thanks Google. (Same with GMail - yay, I got an email from Tom.)

Good, Bad - using a phone todo/shopping list, not looking at it while in the grocery store.

Bad - letting distractions get in the way of my good habits.

Investing - Fun Retirement Tables

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(2026-05-30 revised) 

These three tables are important for retirement planning. They are subject to change and I might have entered them incorrectly, so when it comes to detailed planning or payment, check a more reliable source than me.

These are for 2023.

Social Security Taxable Fraction

The taxable fraction of your Social Security income is based on provisional income, PI = 1/2 of Social_Security_income + AGI (adjusted gross income - pensions, wages, interest, dividends, capital gains, etc.) + tax-exempt interest. If married, filing jointly, add the PI for both people.

If PI is $25,000-$34,000 for single people or $32,000-$44,000 for married and filing jointly, up to 50% of your Social Security will be taxable.

Above these intervals, up to 85% of your Social Security will be taxable.

The "up to" is resolved by filling out the tax forms. Apparently the algorithm is too complex to document any other way. (This reminds me of the HTML spec - HTML is defined by whatever the web browsers do.)

Medicare Surcharge - Income Related Monthly Adjustment Amount (IRMAA)

For Medicare part B and D -

If your income (specifically MAGI)  is over $97,000 ($194,000 if married and filing jointly) in any given year, two years later your Medicare premium will have a surcharge. This is recalculated annually.

MAGI (modified adjusted gross income) is your AGI (adjusted gross income)  modified by obscure things that I am not going to include here.

Table of Monthly Premium for Parts B+D

single		married		premium
$0 - $97,000		$0 - $194,000		$160.90
$97,000 - $123,000		$194,000 - $246,000		$230.80 + $12.20
$123,000 - $153,000		$246,000 - $306,000		$329.70 + $31.50
$153,000 - $183,000		$306,000 - $366,000		$428.60 + $50.70
$183,000 - $500,000		$366,000 - $750,000		$527.50 + $70.00
$500,000 -		$750,000 -		$560.50 + $76.40

Watch out for this when converting assets from a TIRA (traditional IRA) to a Roth IRA. These conversions add to your MAGI and can trigger IRMAA surcharges two years later.

IRA Required Minimum Distribution (RMD)

RMDs are required, currently starting at age 73. For each age, there is a fraction of your TIRA that you must withdraw, expressed as a life expectancy factor, Y. The amount to withdraw is the total value of the TIRA at the end of the prior year divided by Y. This applies to all pretax retirement accounts (TIRA, 401K, 403B, etc.).

You must withdraw total_value/Y and include that as part of your taxable income. You cannot transfer it to a Roth.

Table of Required Minimum Distributions

Age	Y		%		Age	Y		%		Age	Y		%
					90	12.2		8.2%		110	3.5		28.6%
					91	11.5		8.7%		111	3.4		29.5%
72	27.4		3.7%		92	10.8		9.3%		112	3.3		30.4%
73	26.5		3.8%		93	10.1		10.0%		113	3.1		32.3%
74	25.5		4.0%		94	9.5		10.6%		114	3.0		33.4%
75	24.6		4.1%		95	8.9		11.3%		115	2.9		34.5%
76	23.7		4.3%		96	8.4		12.0%		116	2.8		35.8%
77	22.9		4.4%		97	7.8		12.9%		117	2.7		37.1%
78	22.0		4.6%		98	7.3		13.7%		118	2.5		40.0%
79	21.1		4.8%		99	6.8		14.8%		119	2.3		43.5%
80	20.2		5.0%		100	6.4		15.7%		120+	2		50.0%
81	19.4		5.2%		101	6.0		16.7%
82	18.5		5.5%		102	5.6		17.9%
83	17.7		5.7%		103	5.2		19.3%
84	16.8		6.0%		104	4.9		20.5%
85	16.0		6.3%		105	4.6		21.8%
86	15.2		6.6%		106	4.3		23.3%
87	14.4		7.0%		107	4.1		24.4%
88	13.7		7.3%		108	3.9		25.7%
89	12.9		7.8%		109	3.7		27.1%

If you are more than 10 years older than your spouse and your spouse is the sole beneficiary on the TIRA then you get a new table. The table has your age  horizontally and your spouse's age vertically and each entry is (as in the table above) your expected years of life (the inverse of the fractional withdrawal). Too much to document here, TIAA has the complete table - https://www.tiaa.org/public/pdf/rmd-joint-life-expect-table.pdf . (Thanks Gwyn P. Williams.)

If you do not take out the full RMD, you will be taxed heavily on the undistributed part.

Smell

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Many people like new car smell, associating it with new cars, I assume. It is caused by the outgassing of new plastic. It stinks. I assume it is toxic. When I get a new car, I make a point of leaving it in the sun with the windows closed to heat the interior and drive the outgassing so that the car becomes livable sooner. The outgassing also causes a hazy film to build up on the inside of the glass. I use Armor All Glass Cleaner which works well on this.

Restaurants need to keep water in their drain traps. Sewer smell does not make dining more pleasant.

New neoprene products - I leave them in the garage for a month before I use them.

My latest mattress, a big chunk of memory foam, came rolled and vacuum packed in plastic wrap. It had no chance to outgas until I unpacked it. It took weeks to not smell. Incidentally, I love memory foam mattresses after the odor goes away.

Cascade dishwasher pods work very nicely. I was shocked when I saw how clean they got my unrinsed dishes. I tried Platinum first. I never tried Platinum Plus - no need. But my dishes started to stink. Drinking fresh iced tea while smelling an unknown chemical is not to my liking. I backed off to Complete. This worked just as well as Platinum for me, but my dishes still smelled. I backed off again, to Original. Still works great, much less smell. I just saw Cascade Free and Clear on Amazon, but it has lemon essence. Blech. I don't even like real lemon in my iced tea.

(2026-07-14) After a new batch of Original Cascade dishwasher pods left a smell on my drinking (plastic) glasses, I tried (Kroger) Simple Truth Free & Clear Dish Pacs ("no chlorine bleach, no added dyes, no fragrances"). Two batches now. No noticeable smell.

I've been using All Free and Clear for washing clothes for many years. I can't understand why anyone would want a fake scent in their clothes.

A side note on clothes - if you work with heating oil, trash the clothing that you wore. It will never be free of heating oil smell and it will spread the smell to your other clothes. And your hair will need multiple washings to become normal.

Air fresheners - spray, plugins, hanging things for cars - they are all horrible. Why would anyone would want chemical scents in their homes or cars. And why are shampoo and soap scented? Does everything need to smell?

Micro Annoyances

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None of these issues rise to the level of pain or damage. But they sure cause mental anguish for me. Not because they are terribly bad, but because they could have been so easily avoided with a little thought by the perpetrators.

Pocket Dials

I regularly get phone calls that are clearly pocket dials. I have traced this to iPhones that I have called. It appears that it is very easy to provoke iPhones to call back the most recently received call. Why is it so hard to prevent this?

Tap Cards

My credit card has a chip (I assume they all do at this point). It's a pain to use compared to the magnetic strip, failing often. But that's not my topic. The card also has a tap feature - tap the card on the sensor, watch the four lights on the sensor light up. That's it. When it works - great. For me it worked about half the time. Until a friend said - tap it on the chip side of the card. What? The tap symbol is on the right hand side of the card, the chip is on the left. Well, it hasn't failed since I started using the chip side. There seems to be a major ergonomic mistake here. Also, you don't need to tap anything - just hold the chip near the sensor.

The other problem with tap - where on the card reader is the sensor? Sometimes it's separate from the screen and obvious. But if not, is it under the screen? Probably, if the software isn't lying to you that it has a tap card reader. But where under the screen?

Snowflakes

Elementary schools get this right - snowflakes have six arms. All of them. But looking at depictions of snowflakes on posters and flyers (generally from clip art, I think), a lot of people missed that lesson.

I'm not sure what happens if you break off one arm of a snowflake. Does it immediately grow back? Does the snowflake disintegrate? Maybe some damaged snowflakes have less than six arms. But eight armed snowflakes are definitely fake news.

Rate of Speed

When a reporter says that a car was being driven at a "high rate of speed" that means the car was being driven at a high speed. The word rate is completely meaningless (or perhaps it changes the meaning to the car was accelerating quickly, but I doubt it). PLEASE stop offending my brain with this phrase.

Also, if a measured value, say 100, is reduced by one half, that is 50. It is not two times lower - that would be negative 100. If something is reduced to 1/5 of its original value, that is 80% lower. It is NOT five times lower.

If news reporters don't use correct terminology, how can I trust anything that is reported? Maybe I should just take the hint instead of being offended by it.

Surveys, Polls, and Other Interruptions

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Email Surveys

I get a constant stream of email surveys from businesses that I have used. The surveys usually start with something like "would you recommend this business to a friend?". That indicates to me is that all that they care about is sales, not improving their product. Furthermore, what I want is not necessarily what my friends want. Delete.

If still going, I will start answering the questions, each one rating some aspect of their product/service. These aspects rarely get to the things that I care about. After about ten - Delete.

If still going, maybe they offer me the option to write something. If not - Delete.

So now I can give them some useful information. If I still care about the business, I will take some time to answer. I wonder if they will read my answer.

Phone Polls

I get calls regularly that are polls. My answer - "I don't do polls" and hang up.

To politicians who use these polls - tell me your positions and I will vote for you or not. Don't choose your positions based on polls. My big issue with politicians is that when they say something to me, it is them telling me what they think I want to hear. I want to know what they really think. Well, another big issue is stupidity.

To news services that use polls that are biased with leading questions to push a narrative - I'm not participating.

Twitter

And on a related topic. To news services that use Twitter to judge public opinion - I don't use Twitter and I don't care what people who do use Twitter think.

Spam Phone Calls

I am not selling my house to you. And I do not want you to turn my web page into the kind of garbage that most web pages have become.

Web Pages

And speaking of web pages - if I am looking at your web page on my phone, that likely means that I do not want to use your app. Please stop annoying me with nag screens that ask me to use your app.

And to the European Union - your requirement that web pages nag me about whether to allow cookies is far more annoying than the cookies. Why couldn't you have requested a small browser switch that lets people choose to allow or disallow cookies, saved for each URL. My search for relief found this Firefox browser add-on - "I Still Don't Care About Cookies". It doesn't look optimal but it might lower my stress level a bit.

Television Tech

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In a previous post, I complained about the difficulty of turning closed captions on and off on my television. This was primarily so that I could watch a basketball game without captions covering the hoop. It led me to think that maybe I could find a TV that had closed captions on/off on the remote control. And a friend suggested that soundbars offer TV speech enhancement. So I set out to get a new and better system.

I have room for a 32 inch TV and 26 inches for a sound bar. (Not that I need or want anything bigger.) This shuts me out of high end TVs.

A few TVs have "CC" on the remote. Smart TVs abound - these have internal handling of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. I use, on a rotating basis, Netflix, Prime Video, Paramount+, Peacock, and Hulu. Many smart TVs have voice control, for which I have little use.

Soundbars replace a TV's speakers with a bar shaped package that sits in front of or below the TV. They have a several speakers, built in amplification, sound processing, and multiple interfaces to TVs. Not being limited to the thin packaging of modern TVs, and with signal processing, they can put out better sound than a typical TV.

I would have liked to get a soundbar to use on my old TV before getting a new TV. But you need a compatible audio interface - optical or HDMI-ARC (ARC is audio return channel). These isolate the audio signal and send it to the soundbar. HDMI-ARC is newer and has the bandwidth needed for seven channel audio. Only five channels for optical. Two channels is enough for me.

So a Samsung 1080p smart TV and Sonos Ray seemed like they would get the job done. After some work, the Sonos is doing pretty good. Default, it has boomy bass that ruins the sound. I set the bass way down and the treble way up. Then the sound was okay. I had to look online to figure out how to make the soundbar volume adjustable from the TV remote, but it was easy. Then I found speech enhancement. A huge improvement. And it works well with neutral tone controls.

Then I was looking through the Sonos phone app (required to set up the soundbar) and wanted to figure out how do turn speech enhancement on and off. It was not there. I did an exhaustive search of the menus. Finally a web search. You must have the TV turned on and sending sound. Then you just look in System and choose your device and the option appears. Sigh. Couldn't they have put a note in the app explaining that little detail.

On to the TV. Very small captions. And "enlarge" didn't do anything. Very confusing controls and very small text. The "smart" channels included Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Peacock, but NOT Paramount+. I couldn't see any way to download an app for Paramount+. I put my Roku stick into HDMI 1. Works well but I have to use two remotes. I was hoping to get it down to one.

Anyway, the captions are useless and I will return the TV tomorrow. Insignia makes a dumb (i.e. not "smart") TV with a remote that looks useful (has a CC button). 720p resolution. Two remotes required, but that's my current situation. I should get easy caption on/off and enhanced sound. Maybe not enough to justify the price of the Sonos Ray.

The Next Day

Best Buy makes it very easy to return things. I returned the Samsung and got the Insignia in 15 minutes.

YES! The Insignia dumb TV is great. Reasonable captions with easy caption on/off. Easy to configure. Easy to set up with the soundbar. The picture is as good as my old TV.

Of course basketball season is about over. This year's UK team is wildly inconsistent - not good for doing well in tournaments. Likely won't need the CC button for nine months.

Lessons Learned

Getting a smart TV means giving up useful buttons on the remote. If that's okay, make sure that the smart TV has all of the streaming services that you want. Otherwise you will have to add an external device anyway.

If you want a high quality, high resolution TV, it will likely be smart. And you will likely get a stupid remote control with it. Perhaps voice control will make up for the stupid remote. But I find voice control to be annoying.

You can't win.

I wonder if there is some accessibility option that helps people who have lost their voice use voice control. Maybe a lip reading TV or a TV that understands sign language.

Tomorrow

Oh no - boxes, packing material, old hardware scattered about my living room. Cleanup day.

 A Tip for Streaming Services (2023-03-16)

I just signed up for Netflix. The menu showed three options - 720p with ads ($6.99), 1080p ($15.99), and 4k ($19.99). My TV is 720p, so there's no point in paying for any higher resolution. But I'm willing to pay to avoid ads. Ah - a button at the bottom - show all options. This displayed the above three options plus one more. 720p without ads - $9.99. I'll take it. The higher resolution options allow watching on multiple devices simultaneously, but I have no use for that feature.

I have also purchased episodes of shows on Amazon Prime Video. If you look carefully you can find (at least in some cases) 720p versions for a significantly lower price than 4k or 1080p versions.

What is Wrong with Linux?

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My Chrome version is very old. I have been using Firefox.

Chrome says it is out of date, can't update, must reinstall. Okay, I follow the link to download a new version.

Downloaded the .deb file (used by Ubuntu Linux) and ran it.

And? What do I do from this screen???

Apparently I can't do anything since the .deb file MIGHT be a security risk. I trust it - Chrome led me to it. Linux doesn't trust it. What do I do?

I clicked on the yellow circle. This led me through some incomprehensible way of telling Gnome that the .deb file was trustworthy. How many hours will it take me to decipher the procedure and make it work? I have no idea.

I will stick with Firefox.

As much as I dislike Windows and Microsoft, I must say that I have never had a problem like this. I can't remember having a problem installing anything under Windows.

Update 16 May 2023

A tip from the internet and I finally have the current version of Chrome installed.

Uninstall Chrome, from the command line - sudo dpkg -r google-chrome-stable .

Install Chrome by double clicking on the previously downloaded .deb file. Now you still get the screen that says it's potentially unsafe, but there is also an install button. It works! I don't know if it's unsafe, although I expect that any version of any browser is unsafe. And I don't know what will happen when another update is needed.