From the Tips Box: Phone Charms, Bed Making, and Firefox Caches [From The Tips Box] - 7924th Edition

Readers offer their best tips for finding other uses for phone charms, making the bed in the morning, and speeding up Firefox by clearing out unlikely caches.

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About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in—the tip didn’t make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or email it to tips at lifehacker.com.

Use Phone Charms to Mark Your Drink Glass

Photo by Andrew Currie.

Josh tells us about his newfound use for phone charms during the holiday season:

I was at a dinner party the other night with the much welcome glass of wine in every hand. While greatly appreciated and conducive to mingling I so often put my glass down and immediately forget which one it is. Not this time! I simply unlooped my tasteful phone charm from it’s slot on my mobile and relooped it around the stem of my glass, voila, instant wine charm. The main trick is to remember to put it back on your phone after an evening of merriment.

Use Google SMS for On-The-Spot Reminders

Christian makes an old tip more useful with the addition of Google:

Earlier, I was sitting here at my Google account, chatting away with my wife via SMS who is working this chilly snowy morning, and I messaged her, ‘I put the camera in x place.’ I then followed that up with ‘I said that not just to tell you, but to record into google, so i can ask it later where i put the camera.’ I suppose I should mention that one of our first conversations we had this early morning was about where I had put the camera away yesterday (we cleaned).

I then realized that would be a pretty convenient method of personalizing Google, as well as keeping track of stuff

This is especially useful for those of us that may use Google Voice but are still on old-timey cell phones (that is, not smartphones)—and of course, you can always just text your own Google Voice number (no need to inconvenience other people if they have no clue what you’re talking about).

Make Your Bed While Still In It

Photo by emdot.

Aim4WhirledPeas shares a tip found on weblog The Art of Manliness on how to make your bed:

When making your bed daily, make the bed while you are actually *in* it. Instead of going around the bed 3-4 times to get everything just right, just pull the covers up around you, make the bed as best as possible, and then get up. Smooth the sheets, and presto, you’re done. It also helps you to gauge if everything is centered. It’s saved me a lot of time, and encouraged me to actually make my bed every day.

Clear Separate Caches to Speed Up Firefox

Michael shares a discovery about Firefox add-on Lazarus Form Recovery:

Lazarus Form Recovery (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6984) is a must-have Firefox extension, and it’s been a lifesaver for me on numerous occasions. However, I discovered that Lazarus keeps its own cache, separate from Firefox’s main cache, and it does not purge old data by default. In other words, every time I ran Firefox, it was loading a saved copy of every form I’ve filled out for at least a year, maybe two. By clearing that cache, I cut Firefox’s launch time down to near-Chrome speeds.

This tip could very well apply to other Firefox extensions that save things in their own cache—every once in a while, it’s a good idea to go through your add-on preferences and see if there’s anything you can clean up.

By Whitson Gordon
Yaab