From The Tips Box: Grocery Shopping, Tab Closing, Travelling With Spices

Readers offer their best tips for avoiding impulse buys at the grocery store, closing multiple tabs in your browser, and making a portable spice kit.

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 favourites for your buffet-style consumption. Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Ditch the Grocery Cart to Avoid Impulse Grocery Buys

Photo by Alexandre Vialle.

Trickycoolj lets us know another way to avoid buying more than you need at the grocery store:

If I’m only at Costco for a few of the essentials (paper products, detergent, bag of frozen chicken) or maybe a single item (large potluck dish from the deli/bakery) I don’t take a cart. If I only buy what I can carry then usually my bill stays under $US100. (Obviously this doesn’t apply to small electronics or jewelry or that time you run in for a super bowl size bag of chips and you get dinged with your annual membership fee that expired last month.)

This works at any grocery store, really, not just at the bulk warehouse stores. It’s simple, but at the very least will make you stop and think, “do I really need this?” The more you’re aware of the risk of impulse buys, the less likely you are to succumb to it.

Use Ctrl+Shift+W to Close a Whole Browser Window (Without Quitting)

PrairieMoon tells us about a lesser-known keyboard shortcut in web browsers:

In Firefox 3 and 4, ctrl+shift+w exits the browser. That’s for those of you who can’t be bothered with some other key combo like alt+F4.

Shockingly, we’ve never featured this shortcut on the site — not even in our Power User’s Guide to Google Chrome, which is rife with keyboard shortcuts. This shortcut is especially nice on the Mac (Cmd+Shift+W), where the Alt+F4 shortcut doesn’t exist. It’s also worth noting that it works with all browsers, not just Firefox.

Turn a Medication Organiser into a Portable Spice Kit

Yarden shares (via Dollar Store Crafts) a clever way to lend your friends some spices, bring them with you to a dinner party, or otherwise save some space when travelling:

Simple & cheap way to bring your gourmet salts (or spice collection) along with you. Cost of project as low as $US1. I gave these to the guys in my family for Christmas.

Make Up for Your Keyboard’s Lack of Media Keys with a Simple AutoHotkey Script

Photo by Mike Seyfang.

AutoHotkey ninja Platypus Man shares a script for making truly global media shortcuts:

So, I’ve been using this simple AutoHotkey script for months and it just occurred to me that others might like it. At home, I’m used to using hardware buttons on my laptop to control media, like previous, next, pause, and play. However, at work, my computer has no such hardware buttons. There are Fn key combinations, but I don’t like those. Anyway, these 3 simple Autohotkey scripts allow the Windows key in combination with left click, middle click, and right click to go previous, play/pause, and next, respectively. They use the standard media commands and work fine with Windows Media Player. I’d imagine that they’d work with iTunes and other media players as well as any dedicated hardware or keyboard button do, but I haven’t tested them outside of WMP, so YMMV.

#LButton::Media_Prev
#MButton::Media_Play_Pause
#RButton::Media_Next