One may be enticed to play the stock market according to advice from Yahoo stock stories.

Titles like "These Two Stocks Will Triple in Four Years." may make you want to buy those stocks.

So I decided to follow a few stories.  Here is the result after 3 months:

As you can see if you followed the advice of just these randomly chosen articles, you would be down over 12%.  

Maybe the best advice is to short Yahoo advice.

I No Longer Use Shade Tree Mechanics

That's right. My days of using and discarding, finding another good shade tree mechanic are done.
In my experience you save maybe 20 to 30% (in the beginning).
But then they either get lazy and start making half ass repairs, or they get popular and hire someone who does half ass work. 
On several issues they would throw parts at it until it was fixed, costing me more.
Another issue is they would use cheap Chinese parts that would fail soon after.
Even parts I myself got from AutoZone or other parts stores were cheaply made and I would find
myself redoing the fix when that part failed.

My new modus operandi is to use the Dealership Auto repair facility with OEM parts.
I used to laugh or think people who used Dealership auto repair places were gullible or
just not mechanically proficient enough to know how to find a good mechanic.
I would feel smug thinking I knew better and knew enough about cars that I can save bucket loads of money. 

But I think I was the wrong one after all.
You see, Dealership mechanics are highly trained on that make of vehicle.
They charge more money to cover those trained mechanics, to not take shortcuts, and to use OEM parts.
The advantage of this is they will not fix things by throwing parts on it until it works.
They will either have been trained on the problem, seen it before, or have access to technical notes on certain problems.
The parts will cost more but last longer and work better.
Their reputation is paramount as they have to keep good ratings and will do what it takes to fix your problem.

So although it costs more to use a dealership auto repair shop, it saves you headaches from
finding, vetting mechanics, having issues unrepaired, and problems from showing up later.
This is what I'm hoping for in the long run.
My first repair was replacing valve cover gaskets, spark plugs, wires and an oil filter change.
It cost me about $700 for all this. I have a 2003 Toyota Tundra. If I used a shade tree mechanic I maybe could have saved $200 or $300 bucks.  My bet is in the long run that savings would have cost me more.

I would like to hear from other people who have made the switch for longer and get their experience on this.

Leave a comment.

Thanks

SurveillanceClienth Safari Plugin Stops Working

Well, today Apple updated Safari, and the plugin SurveillanceClienth.plugin was deemed to be unsafe and now only Safari Extensions from the AppStore are preferred.
So it was disabled and no longer works.
I have not found a solution at this time, if you know of one, leave a comment below.
I will update on this later.

Update 09/23/18

Well, seems like all the available apps and programs that could work on OSX, don't.  Not for me.
I tried iDVR-Pro, iSMS, and a bunch of others.  Tried viewing the RTSP stream with VLC. Tried opening the port 80, tried most of which I exhaustively found and nothing worked.

Now I'm in Trial mode right now with Parallels and Windows 10 on my Mac.  Installed the plugin.exe and it works this way. 
So, $99 for windows and $79 for Parallels, looks like I need to buy $179 to make my DVR work on my Mac. 
Well the good thing is I now can move over Quickbooks to the mac, and remove my laptap that the Mac's keyboard has to sit on for me to work with two computers.

The End

How To Read Business Insider and other Purposely Obscured Pages

It's annoying to come upon a page that is obscured because you are using an ad blocker.
Most of these news stories are run elsewhere and you can search for them, but that is a hassle.
To read the ad blocker obscured page, what I do is start a screen recording.
Usually these pages are readable for about 3 seconds or so.
So in the screen recording, I refresh the page and start scrolling down.
It may take one or two page refreshes to get to the bottom.
Then stop the screen recording and watch the recorded movie.
You can skim or pan the movie and it scrolls the page so you can read what was recorded.
And that is how to read an obscured web page.

Amazon Is Getting Retarded

Long story short, I researched a bunch of products, put them in my Amazon.com cart and when I went to checkout, one item was deemed an 'addon' item and I could not buy it.
They would hold it for me later. How nice.
I wasn't about to read how to buy this 'addon' item.  I just wanted to fricken' buy the damn thing.
Now Amazon wants to give you a manual on how to buy products.
Remember the good old days of their patented 'one-click' buy system?
What next? I'll have to program my 'buy' order in Javascript before Amazon will let me buy something?

Thank you eBay for not making things complicated.  I was able to buy what I needed there without being told I had to research on how to add an item to my shopping cart, or hounded on buying a $99 a year membership to get free shipping.

Amazon.com, you are losing it!

Pro Call Blocker Version 2.2 Does not work on Ooma basic

I have the free Ooma or Ooma Basic.
I keep getting this one call that no one picks up and no one answers when called back.

So I ordered Pro Call Blocker V2.2 on eBay.
It says it works on VOIP.
I installed it and it does not even recognize caller ID when a call comes in.
It has to do that to even work.

Long story short, it does not work on Ooma Basic.
So don't waste your time.

onjo

Mac OSX Preview Printing blank PDF

If you download a PayPal statement as a PDF or other form as a PDF, you may view it in Apple's Preview, but when you print it, it prints a blank page.

Here is a work around.
Right click on the pdf in the finder, choose 'open with' and choose Chrome.
Down in the right, choose print.
It comes up blank. Tick the box that says "Fit to page" and there it is. Print and it will print correctly.

For some reason fit to page in preview does not fix the problem.
It may work with other browsers, I chose Chrome.

As far as I know, it may be related to updating to El Capitan.

Over and Out!