I work as a UX designer, program manager, and general IT consultant to help non-profits that are making a real, positive difference in the world. This blog is one of the ways I give back to the community.
Usually neverssl.com works great for forcing the WiFi authentication page to come up. But not at the Holiday Inn Express I stayed at recently. I ended up entering the IP address for the local router, which brought up the auth page.
To find that address, I connected to the WiFi network, then looked at its DNS address. On a Mac, you can find it under:
System Preferences > Network > Wi-Fi > Advanced… > DNS
In my case, it was 192.168.128.1
Yours will likely start with 192.168. If all else fails, try one of these:
If you end up getting texts from an organization and you want to unsubscribe, all you need to do is reply to the message with a single word: stop.
Of course this only works for organizations that are following the law. There as some spammers out there who might not honor your request. Use the “block” feature on your phone for these numbers.
The standard deduction for US federal taxes is now a staggering $12,400. Few people who don’t have a mortgage will come close to reaching that value. But if you (or your donors) do fall into this category, there is a trick to maximizing the tax deduction—lumping 2 years worth of donations every other year, and then taking the standard deduction on alternate years.
This works best with a donor-advised fund, but it could also work without if you want to donate in early Jan one year and then late December the same year, which to your charities will still look like you are donating yearly.
The optimal value—where you receive the largest percentage increase in deduction—is at the standard donation (again, $12,400). But you still get benefits if you are on either side of that number. Of course once you hit ½ the standard deduction ($6,200), the gains disappear. [The chart below really should cap out at 0, since you would simply take the standard deduction each year at any given level below $6.,200.) And as you increase above it, the percentage gain falls off asymptotically.
A month ago I nearly quit Facebook altogether. But on further consideration, I realized that there was still value in it for keeping in touch with some friends and acquaintances in my life. So I focused my efforts on optimizing my experience for that, and that alone.
This means unfollowing nearly every non-friend organization, artist, musician, influencer, and brand I had mindlessly “liked” over the years. Here’s the page where you can do the same:
Next, I cleaned out left most groups I had joined, either turning off notifications, or leaving the group altogether. You can do both of these things in the ••• menu at the far right side of the header when viewing a group.
I also became be more selective with who I allow in my feed. I unfollowed (but remained friends) for many folks in the long tail of my friends list (available in the ••• menu in the upper-right of one of their posts), or even unfriended a few where I felt like—even if we had had a closer connection at one point—we don't have what I would consider a friendship at this moment.
Finally, I started making ample use of the “Hide post” option. Even for people I like, sometimes they get a bit… spammy with their postings. I have a family member whom I love dearly, but they post way too many links to political stories with no additional comment or manipulative memes (“I bet this won’t get one like or share” 🙄) and I just won’t tolerate those in my feed anymore.
And when you do all that, you know what happens? It’s no longer possible to doom scroll your news feed. When you are only viewing posts from a small group of people you actually like, you can legitimately get to the end. And that is a good feeling. 😊