Can I contribute to a 401k and an IRA?

Short answer: No because my 401k contributions are high enough that it wipes out any headroom for tax-deductable IRA contributions. Slightly longer answer but you can still do Roth (pfft!). Some links:

This is a basic regurgitation of the rules, which admittedly are complex enough to require a review. https://www.personalcapital.com/blog/retirement-planning/can-contribute-401k-ira/

This article explains a little bit better what's hinted in the first article, namely that you can contribute to a traditional IRA up to the limit, just won't get the tax deduction, and that you have more personal freedom to chose the investments with IRAs. Also give some examples that point out when being in a lower tax bracket helps on either end.https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/07/401(k)_ira.asp

HSA forms

This horribly formatted link is to an explainer page by an HSA-specialized bank for what all the tax forms are that are associated with HSAs. Accessed via a google search when I was working on the 2020 taxes.

Low-dose naltrexone

LDN is an alternative medicine idea for chronic inflamation. We tried it, it didn't seem to have an effect. Looks great on paper though. Here are a couple of links from typing what is low dose latrexone into Google:

A high-level explainer. From "The LDN Research Trust" so a bit biased: https://ldnresearchtrust.org/what-is-low-dose-naltrexone-ldn

A paper published on the NIH website, so somebody respectable seems to have taken a look into it (discaimer: no real clinical tests done yet): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3962576/

Inflatable Pools

Some links from a research on large inflatable pools:

A nice pictorial summary of some different inflatable pool products "for adults": https://www.pinterest.com/pin/464011567839765743/

The main thing I learned was to search for brand H2OGO on eBay. Interestingly this search no longer produces links for the big deep rectangular one that we got; everything is back to normal now and inflatable pools are for kids again: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=h2ogo+pool&_sacat=0&rt=nc&LH_PrefLoc=1

It seems that Amazon no longer sells the big hexagon pool that was available in 2020 either: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=h2ogo+hexagon+family+pool&crid=1IHGRFU4F6Y6O&sprefix=h2o+go+hexagon%2Caps%2C183

Parental controls for a chromebook

I swear that I wrote up a gigantic post about attempting to lock down a chromebook but I can't find all that stuff I wrote. Maybe it was in text only and I never uploaded it. Bottom line, there are only two things you can do. First of all, there is only one single parental control product for chromebook, Mobicip. Mobicip has a lot of good features; it monitors websurfing and makes reports, and has some remote locking capability. But oddly access to the app store is completely unrestricted and can't be turned off. The other option, which I had to go with is to install FamilyLink, which did everything I wanted but is such a beast to install and has some things which are too tightly controlled (only YouTubeKids allowed for example).

Mobicip: https://www.mobicip.com/

Online education

Looking for alternatives to in-person school for a kid (gee I wonder why), there were some nice options but they all required some self-motivation to use which sadly was not present. These are some of my favorites of the ones recommended to me:

Elephango, a membership service that looks really friendly, broad, and deep. Pricey though. https://elephango.com/

Codemonkey, a great top-down approach to teaching coding basics and mindsets and then languages. Requires a student who doesn't have to be dragged through learning things though. https://www.codemonkey.com/

Khan Academy, a lot of peoples' go-to for math, they do organize their curiculum very well but barely seem to have more than a few examples for each subject. They do have other subjets also, but mostly everyone cares about the math. One video per lesson so if you don't get it and you aren't capable of looking up alternative lessons on a topic yourself you're stuck. http://www.khanacademy.org/

Setting up a Kindle account for a kid

I was trying to set it up so my kid could order kindle books using amazon gift cards. Bottom line, at least in 2019, was that there was no way to do this. The only way to order kindle books was with 1-touch, which required a linked credit card. The system that I finally had to use was to send books to her account as gifts, and do the ordering myself. Also she didn't figure out how to use email until a couple of years later, so her account is linked to one of my own emails which meant that I was sending the books to myself, opening the gift email myself and accepting it so that it would go to her device. Here is the trace of the research that I did on this problem two years ago.

This thread seems to indicate that it is possible to use a gift card to buy a kindle book, but the account still has to have a linked credit card which was a non-starter for my case: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116313

This YouTube vide seems to rely on some sort of glitch when setting up 1-click purchases and it didn't work for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVA5d9-jXeg

There are a lot of hits for my question. The answers from 2010 don't seem to apply any more. There were other variations on the theme of the youtube video which was "set up 1-click but don't actually enter a credit card" so there must be something to it. https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+kindle+no+credit+card&oq=amazon+kindle+no+credit+card

Lastly, because it's not at all clear how to send a kindle purchase as a gift, here's a page showing what it looks like to do it, followed by a sneaky advertisement for DRM removal software: https://www.epubor.com/how-to-gift-kindle-books.html

Python-docx

The amount that I have learned about they python-docx library could fill a book. Fortunately all of that information is still online where I originally found it. For the purposes of closing tabs, here are some selected lessons and links:

In word tables, to set cell sizes and other cell properties it isn't really set up to do it like a person would and set properties by row or column. Most properties are set at the individual cell number, but it's a computer, make it iterate through all the cells in a row and column to get the desired look. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43051462/python-docx-how-to-set-cell-width-in-tables

Here's the online python-docx docs page about tables. Doesn't fully illuminate the ideosyncracies, mostly a general explainer on how docx is xml and what tables look like in this particular xml. Apparently there are only two table-wide properties, because everything else is cell properties. The table-wide properties are alignment and fixed-width vs auto-width columns: https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/dev/analysis/features/table/table-props.html

WFIRST Primer

A great article by Doug Messier explaining how WFIRST will work: http://parabolicarc.com/2020/05/06/a-tale-of-two-telescopes-wfirst-and-hubble/

Minus Sign/En Dash

Partly due to my timesheet program not accepting a dash as a minus sign, I ended up researching all kinds of interesting information about minus signs, em-dashes, and typography in gherneral.

This page does a wonderful job explaining the differences between the different minus signs and their names, and even shows what they look like in regular print. https://jakubmarian.com/hyphen-minus-en-dash-and-em-dash-difference-and-usage-in-english/

A great discussion about this that includes not only the coding perspective but an answer that shows it from a typesetting perspecitve. Surprsingly, the different dashes have different heights! https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/68674/what-s-the-right-character-for-a-minus-sign

Hunter x Hunter 1999

I have spent way too long watching episodes of and reading about Hunter x Hunter. Of the two Anime versions, the 1999 one seems to be canonical as far as I'm concerned, except that it doesn't have any of the story from the Magna that was written after 1999, arguably the defining arcs of the series, and has wacky "filler" episodes that invent whole stories not in the original magn. Aside from the "Beetle 7" phones, most of the character design and story changes made in the 2007 series are embarassing, although overall the consistency of both series to the magna is surprisingly high. Here are some links:

The list of 1999 episodes: https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Episodes_(1999_series)

The Boston Massacre

Thanks to T studying the Boston Massacre in her history class, I ended up doing a deep dive of my own. This is a placeholder for some of the links that I found but later lost. Among the many interesting details I learned were that 8 soldiers involved in the incident were arrested, which must have been an astonishing assertion of civilian authority over a soveriegn military at the time, that John Adams was the defendant's lawyer at the trial and his defense is fascinatingly disgusting, only two were convicted and their punishment was hand branding, and Paul Revere published the famous engraving which he totally stole from somebody else. A public letter from the commander of the soldiers was published with their side of the story; it is as equally biased as "Patriot" reporting and T had to read it in her class. T was also greatly amused by the detail of a random dog in the engraving.

For starters, the wikipedia article on the Massacre, which pretty much has all of this info but for how long: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Massacre

McDonald's All-Day Breakfast

It wasn't until October 2021 that I began to notice that the all-day breakfast had disappeared from the menu at my local McDonaldses. This apparently happened more than a year ago. Googling, I found news items about its discontinuation when it originally ocurred, and several news items indicating that it was about to restart. However as far as I can tell it never came back in my area.

Here is a corporate news release promising a restart in October 2021. None of my local stores had even heard that this was a thing however. https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/en-us/our-stories/article/ourstories.all_day_breakfast.html