Category Archives: Ask J.D.

How to Change Claude Code Effort Levels in VS Code (/effort)

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TL;DR: In the Claude Code VS Code extension, type /effort in the prompt box and press Enter to cycle through four reasoning levels: Low, Medium, High, and Max. Each level controls how deeply Claude thinks, how many tool calls it makes, and how many tokens it burns. On Windows, it’s just /effort, Enter, done. The effort level picker in Claude Code for VS Code. This shows Max with all four dots lit up. What Are Effort Levels? Effort levels control

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Gmail to Claude: Line Breaks Disappear on Paste (Fix)

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TL;DR: When you copy text from Gmail and paste it into Claude (or Claude Code), all your line breaks disappear and the text runs together into one giant wall of text. The fix: right-click and choose “Paste as plain text” (or press Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+V on Mac). Your line breaks will be preserved. The Problem You’re working in Claude and need to paste an email from Gmail. You copy the text, hit Ctrl+V, and… all your carefully formatted paragraphs

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TurboTax Adding Rental Property Depreciation to the WRONG State Return

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TL;DR: If you file in multiple states and have rental property in TurboTax Desktop, check your Asset Entry Worksheets. TurboTax may silently add state depreciation entries for every state on your return, not just the state where the property actually exists. The fix: go to the Asset Entry Worksheet, scroll to the State Depreciation section, and set “Include asset in state return” to No for any state where the property is not located. The Problem I have a commercial rental

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Google Drive file won’t sync? (SOLUTION)

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Recently a client had a compressed .7z file that just would not sync in Google Drive desktop edition. It was a pretty normal backup file and was not huge (just a couple hundred MB and their internet connection was fast enough to back that up without issue). It just refused to sync. I retried, restarted and everything else to no avail. Eventually, I renamed the file and that FINALLY caused it to sync successfully for the client. ✅👍 Just posting this

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MacBook Neo Tap to Click (how to turn on)

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The MacBook Neo launched recently and at $599, Apple’s cheapest laptop ever is a legitimately impressive machine. I’ll have more to say about the Neo overall soon, but I wanted to quickly share something that tripped me up right out of the box: the trackpad. ⚡ TL;DR The MacBook Neo’s trackpad uses a mechanical click instead of the haptic feedback found on other MacBooks. If that bugs you, go to System Settings > Trackpad > Point & Click and toggle

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TurboTax Rental Income Bug: Why Your Schedule E Amount Keeps Disappearing

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TL;DR: If you’re entering rental income (or other dollar amounts) in TurboTax and the amount vanishes when you click Continue, the fix is to open the supporting detail worksheet FIRST (by clicking in the field and starting to type) not trying to paste an amount into the field! The Problem You’re updating your Schedule E rental income for the current year. You click into the “Other income not on a 1099-MISC or 1099-K” field, paste your amount, and it shows

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MacBook Neo Review: A18 Pro CPU, 8GB Reality, and the Thermal Wall

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Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. I have not been paid by Apple or anyone else to write this. The Short Verdict The MacBook Neo is the fastest single-core laptop you can buy for $599 or even lower at $499 educational pricing! It also drops to phone-class performance after about 60 seconds of sustained CPU load. Both of those things are true at the same time, and thankfully even (Apple) phone class performance is still quite speedy. I ran 30

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WordPress GA4 Setup: Fix Your Analytics After Universal Analytics Shutdown

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If your WordPress Blog Stopped Tracking Visitors When Universal Analytics Died… (How to Fix It in 15 Minutes) If you’ve been running a WordPress blog for a while and you set up Google Analytics back in the Universal Analytics days, there’s a good chance your site has been flying blind since Google shut down UA. If you never installed the GA4 replacement tag, your analytics dashboard has been showing zeroes the entire time. I just discovered this on my own

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