heavypound

Discover announced their full 5% bonus schedule for 2022 at the end of 2021, so not really new news, but good to remind people of it and how to take advantage of it.

I have a “Credit Card Priority” note in my Notes app on the phone. I use this to track which vendors have promotional cash back offers on which types of purchases. Basically use one primary card getting 2% on everything and then have a handful of exceptions for a few special use cases, like the quarterly bonus rates from Discover.

Keep in mind that if you are not paying off your credit card statement balance in full each month, these bonus cash back rates are a non-starter. Paying a 20% interest rate to get back 1% to 5% in cashback is a losing proposition. Carrying any balance on credit cards is how you destroy your financial present and future.

This is why I don’t like scheduling payments on the actual due date. When possible, I schedule them for about a week in advance. I have my Apple Card set to automatically pay the previous statement balance on the 25th instead of waiting until the last day of the month. I wish all vendors let you schedule automatic payments for about a week before the due date instead of just ON the due date.

I’m assuming that any interest accrued because of these payment issues will be refunded, but it’s still a pain to deal with.

Did the clipboard monitoring function make it into the GA release? I haven’t seen it flash a notice yet, but I’m also pretty selective on what apps I load on my iPhone and iPad. I tried manually pasting and that didn’t generate and alert, but that makes sense because this feature is trying to show apps that are secretly reading the clipboard. Maybe the app developers have gotten their act together since the betas were released and removed this “bug” from their software. “bug” because it was really a feature. This is good because I use the clipboard to paste passwords from my password safe app - MacPass.

Also, any word if this feature is supposed to make its way into macOS?

For people in California, I wonder what the validity of using this app from Virginia is going to be. If you read the README file on the iOS App Store, it says when your test results come back as positive and are sent to the Virginia Department of Health, they will provide you with a PIN to use when you report your results in this app. Without the PIN, you can’t report a positive result in the app, so what’s the point? The PIN is used to reduce the number of false notifications that are sent out from the app.

We’re all anxious to get an app for contact tracing, but if we’re going through the trouble of installing and configuring an app on thousands of phones, let’s make sure it will work. If you get people to install this one, are they going to switch over to a new app that works once it is released. These people will feel they are covered and ignore any more “install this tracing app” messages from their corporate IT or HR groups.

For those of us that don’t subscribe to Apple News+, is there a way to keep the News app from offering these articles to you in the Today feed? The other ads are easy to spot as ads and skip over, but these look exactly the same (other than the small/faint News+ tag) and it gets tiresome accidentally clicking on them all the time.