Questions you want answered.

If you don't have withholdings taken out and have a large enough balance due, you will have an underpayment penalty. The only way to do what you're suggesting and not have a penalty is to make estimated payments or have a lot of children to offset the balance due.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

If you don't have withholdings taken out and have a large enough balance due, you will have an underpayment penalty. The only way to do what you're suggesting and not have a penalty is to make estimated payments or have a lot of children to offset the balance due.

Yep, looks like if you don't withold/prepay at least 90% of your due amount, or 100% of last year's due amount, you can be penalized.

OK, my bad, I learned something today!

I will mention that for a few years, my wife was self-employed as a nanny. Her "employer" did zero withholding, so we socked away 20% of every one of her paychecks into a savings account, and used that to pay off the bill come tax day. Didn't get penalized, though that's potentially because we file jointly, and my salary is (a) three times the size of hers, and (b) subject to withholding by my employer.

Yep, things can balance out when there are lots of other factors.

I'm also terrible at filing on time.... I still have 2016 not done...

Don't judge me

In iOS, is there a way to ensure that certain apps require a passcode to open?

My use-case is handing my phone to my kid to play a game without having to worry about her going digging around in other apps.

And yes, I know about Guided Access - but rather than locking her out of everything, I'd rather lock the specific things I don't want her getting into.

Looks like parental controls gives you pretty fine-grained control.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT20...

I have only ever used it accidentally. Roscoe just wants to slobber on the phone.

BadKen wrote:

Looks like parental controls gives you pretty fine-grained control.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT20...

I have only ever used it accidentally. Roscoe just wants to slobber on the phone.

That's so close to what I want - it's only applicable to the apps that are baked into iOS. Doesn't let me gate off other apps on a case-by-case basis.

Until Apple adds the long rumored multiple user support to iOS you're stuck with all (guided access) or nothing I'm afraid.

I just want to point out that no one outside of professionals knows what you should be withholding yet. The IRS documents point to this site, but the calculator there is down until they succeed in changing it to fit the new law.

What's the deal with Kingdom Hearts?

Ok, let me clarify. I saw the trailer for the latest game and it's stirred up something inside of me, I love how it looks! I'm just so confused about this series. I didn't play them as they were released, so it looks like a complete mess of weird storylines and offshoots to me.

Of the lot, I've played:

  • Some of KH1 on PS2. I found it a bit too simple and easy, I stopped around Halloween world. I've heard I should have played the higher difficulty mode.
  • All of Birth By Sleep. I didn't understand the greater meaning, but enjoyed the 3 interwoven stories. Combat was so fun in this one!
  • Dream Drop Distance. It was all a dream? But it wasn't a dream because it was a dream within a dream? I thought it was ok but waaay too confusing.

So, say I wanted to catch up before KH3 releases. Is there any general advice you would give?

What do I play next?

https://psnprofiles.com/badkenbad

Trackmania. Dubstep mandatory.

BadKen wrote:

What do I play next?

https://psnprofiles.com/badkenbad

I picked some towards the bottom of the list since you hadn't played them in a while.

Rise of the Tomb Raider
Invisible Inc
Doom
Mad Max

BadKen wrote:

What do I play next?

https://psnprofiles.com/badkenbad

Abzû
Life Is Strange
Day of the Tentacle
Assassin's Creed: Syndicate
Dishonored
Rise of the Tomb Raider

So much great gaming to look forward to!!

Yeah, Abzû is a game you can do in a single sitting.

Cool, I'll try out Abzû tonight and dig into some of the others during the week. Thanks for the suggestions!

Has movie editing in changed in any significant way in the last 5-10 years? I suspect i's just my personal taste shifting instead but even for movies I enjoy I've been finding most of them feel about 20-40 minutes too long and could have be trimmed without really losing anything. Maybe most people are interested in more time for their money so films structure to fit that?

There's a very interesting answer for that, Krev... For me, they are not longer than others in my lifetime, but for people born around the 80's... Yeah, they *have* gotten longer.

The data reveals two major shifts in movie length. First: from 1950 to 1965, average runtime for top films rapidly increased, gaining about 20 minutes on average. Dr. Olson hypothesizes that competition from television pressured movie studios to produce longer epics that would bring people to theaters. Classic epics like "Ten Commandments" (1956, 220 mins), and "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962, 216 mins) were released in this time period.
This upward trend reversed between the 1965 and 1985. During this period, movies lost about ten minutes in runtime. In his post, Dr. Olson points to the rise of home video. There's no definitive answer, but it's entirely possible that studios wanted to keep movies under two hours so they could easily fit on VHS tapes.

These two shifts are important because they help explain why we tend to think movies are getting longer.

"Between 1985-2000, feature films grew back to the same length as in the 1960s," Dr. Olson explains. "This may explain why it's usually Millennials (born 1980-2000) complaining that movies have gotten longer than they used to be: If you grew up watching movies in the 1980s, they have gotten longer for you! Meanwhile, Generation X-ers are shaking their head at Millennials wondering what the heck they're talking about (as usual)."

Movies aren't arbitrarily getting longer so much as they're returning to a status quo set in 1965.

Well... I did want to play through Abzû last night, but for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to play a little Civ VI Rise and Fall. Just a little, you know, a few turns.

Well, you can imagine what happened next. Maybe Abzû some time this week?

I use ublock origin on my PC, and I am very happy with it.

I noticed that I don't really care about ads on my phone all that much, but facebook and youtube are heavy with ads. Any apps I can get that will block or at least reduce the number of adds inside other apps? I mean, I can go to youtube and facebook through a browser, but that seems kind of ridiculous.

Well, my solution is to subscribe to YouTube Red, which pays the people I watch and also gives me Google Music, and I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and only use a dummy account now for promotions and stuff.

That may not be a good solution for you.

There are quite a few browser-based ad blocking solutions for Android if you google around. Here's the top result I got, from techadvisor, but it looks like the methods described are not very useful. I'm sure there are others.

There's also one called DNS66 that is free and works at the system level, so it even blocks ads in apps. However, it routes your traffic through a VPN, and I don't know that I'd trust that from a free app provider.

Adblock Plus is available for system level blocking, but only on wifi, and they are known to sell information to third parties.

Thanks BadKen. The VPN thing sounds interesting, but scary. Adblock can die in a fire.

What's wrong with Adblock?

Robear wrote:

What's wrong with Adblock?

It was bought by an advertising company.

Does anyone have the problem with early 90s bikinis? 80s bikinis? high cut bikinis, especially one-pieces, that I do?
I lose all sense of contours and my brain can't process what I'm looking at anymore. It's like the wearer's legs start at the waist all of a sudden.
And yes, Baywatch fever did pass me by completely.
Also Isabella 'Ivy' Valentine was revealed for Soul Calibur 6 yesterday, hence the post.

(desktop) I started using AdBlock Plus when youtube starting putting up tiny ads on top of the video while it's playing. Come on YT, you have one damn purpose, one. I thought about writing an extension for just that one type of ad because I don't mind the rest. Servers ain't free.
There are some videos, official SNL clips so far, that have video ads before the video starts and ABP causes the actual video to not display but I can still hear it, so I use a different browser for those.

Any good alternatives to it, then?

Robear wrote:

Any good alternatives to it, then?

UBlock Origin is the best nowadays I believe.

On mobile I haven't found a good solution for apps outside of the browser besides paid versions of some of those apps.

Thanks PT! And everyone of course.