From The Tips Box: Windows 7 Favorites, The Firefox Button

Readers offer their best tips for putting app shortcuts in the Windows 7 Favorites menu and changing the Firefox Button’s colour.

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. Got a tip of your own to share? Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Add Program Shortcuts to Windows 7’s Favorites Menu

Java-Princess shares a little workaround for making the Favorites menu more useful:

I don’t think is generally known — none of my five colleagues were aware of this till I just enlightened them — but you can place application shortcuts into your Favorites bar in Windows Explorer in Windows 7. The default contents of the Favorites pane just show folders or your search connectors. Have you ever tried dragging a link or creating a shortcut into what is ironically called ‘Favorites’? You get the annoying ‘Cannot place in Favorites’ message in “not-allowed-to-do-that-red”.

To launch your Favorites from the Windows 7 Explorer favourites pane first click the Start button and then click your name. In the folder that opens is a shortcut to the Links folder, click it to open it. Drag your shortcuts here and they will appear instantly in the favourites Pane at the left.

For some reason MS OneNote 2010 wouldn’t behave although every other program we tried worked fine, including the rest of the Office 2010 suite.

Make the Firefox Button Transparent

PrairieMoon tells us one way to tame the annoyingly bright Firefox button in version 4:

If anyone wants a transparent Firefox appmenu button, there’s an addon for it. There are probably others, but this one was enough, especially since I wasn’t looking for a whole theme in order to change the look of one button. It’s called App Button Clear.

Alternatively, Я Ξ √ Ω L U T ↑ ☼ N $ notes the same thing can be done with a change to the userChrome.css file:

@namespace url(http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul);

#appmenu-button{

background:transparent!important;

}

I’m trying to work on getting private browsing to have a different colour, but it’s a bit difficult.

Use Old Milk Bottles to Refill Wiper Fluid

Robbie Khan lets us know an easy way to avoid spillage when refilling your car’s wiper fluid:

My mum actually thought this up so here’s a neat way to re-use your plastic milk bottles and turn them into something more useful. I’ll be using mine for the car when I fill up the windscreen washer tank as none of the jugs I have can be filled right to the top to pour in without some spillage.