From The Tips Box: Savings Accounts, SSH Command Prompts

Readers offer their best tips for staying out of your savings account, running PuTTY sessions in another terminal program, and inserting images next to text in email.

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.

Rename Your Savings Accounts to Motivate Yourself to Save

Photo by Phillipe Put.

Lackofsunshine tells us one way to keep your eye on the (savings) prize:

I found a way to prevent the occasional dip into the savings for an unnecessary this-or-that purchase is to rename the savings account. For instance, I’m saving up for a move to a new apartment and when the account was just called “savings” I was wont to take $US50 from time to time to pad the checking a little bit. A couple of months ago I renamed the account to “New Apartment” so every time I want to move money out of it, I have to confront the reality that I’m just robbing my ability to get a new place sooner. It’s helped immensely and I hope this works for you guys saving up for a new car or school or any large purchase!

Run PuTTY Sessions in Other Terminal Programs

Jeremy shows us how to use SSH from any command line program you desire:

I’m a pretty big fan of PuTTY, but I wish I could run those sessions in my regular Console2 window rather than having two terminals open. I Googled around and found a comment in this post that details exactly how to do that!

Just download this ANSICON zip file, and extract the contents of the x64 or x86 folder into your Console 2 installation folder (x64 for 64-bit versions of Console2, x86 for 32-bit versions). Then, head into Console’s settings, go to Tabs, and create a new tab with this as the shell:

C:\Program Files\Console2\ansicon.exe "C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\plink.exe" -load PROFILE

Where PROFILE is the name of one of your PuTTY profiles. Give the tab a name (like “PuTTY”), and from then on, you should be able to just open up a new SSH tab in Console2 by going to New > Tab > PuTTY!

Insert Images Next to Text in Outlook and Gmail

Java-Princess lets us know a way to circumvent email’s annoying image embedding habits:

Outlook users: do you ever send emails and want to include pictures right by the text which refers to them? You can add a table to your email by hitting the insert tab and selecting table. Draw out your table. Click in any cell and type your text. Click in any other cell and select the Insert tab once more but this time select Picture. You can resize your picture to suit. Repeat as necessary with each cell. You can merge or resize cells. Once finished select the entire table, right click and go to Borders and Shading and select the icon for No borders, Result, a nicely formatted email with text and associated photos.

I just tried to do this in Gmail and found it was possible through a different route. Just open up Google Docs, create your table there, complete with pictures and text and simply cut and paste it into a new Gmail message.

Fix the “Checking Battery State” Hang in Ubuntu

Obsoletist fixes an issue some users are seeing in Ubuntu 11.10:

In Ubuntu, if when you boot up, the computer hangs at “checking battery state,” log in via console with Ctrl+Alt+F1. (You may have to do this twice).

Enter your login name & password when prompted. At the prompt, run sudo start lightdm to start the desktop manager. Log in again when prompted.

The fix:

Go to top right of the screen computer icon, right click, and you should see “System Settings.” Click; go to “User Accounts,” and turn OFF Automatic Login.

When you restart, it should boot normally.


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