From The Tips Box: iPhone Security, Tab Closing


Readers offer their best tips for securing your iPhone against ne’er-do-wells, checking to see if fruit is ripe, and closing lots of tabs at once.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or send it using the contact tab on the right.

Put a Passcode on Find My iPhone to Protect it from Thieves

Dkreifus shares a tip for keeping your iPhone safe:

While securing my iPhone with “Find My iPhone”, I realised that any thief could easily turn off Find My iPhone as soon as they have their hands on it, rendering the feature useless.

If the phone is locked, this isn’t much of an issue, but many people have long delays on the lock feature, or someone can grab it before it locks.

A quick settings change would require a pin code to disable “Find My iPhone”. Go to General > Restrictions > Location (under Allow Changes). Head down to Find My iPhone. Make sure it is turned on, and for good measure, hide the Status Bar Icon. Back up one level, and select Don’t Allow Changes.

Here are the other security based changes I made to my iPhone:

  1. Don’t Allow Changes to Find My Friends. (You will have to temporarily allow changes to accept/make new requests)
  2. Don’t Allow Changes to Accounts. (I don’t want anyone modifying my Accounts)
  3. Don’t Allow Changes to Location Services. (I set this after going through and blocking most of the stuff listed. But leave Location Services on so Find My iPhone will work.)
  4. Restrictions > PING set to Off. Because it sucks.
  5. Auto Lock set to 1 minute
  6. Passcode Lock > Set to require Passcode Immediately

Use a Toothpick to Determine Fruit Ripeness

Photo by Eden Hensley Silverstein.

Audiopocalypse discovers an easy way to tell when fruit is up to his standards:

Easily figure out how ripe a nectarine (or similar fruit) is by poking a toothpick into it to tell how soft it is on the inside. I prefer to eat nectarines when they are soft, not crisp, but I can never really tell just by pushing the outside of it softly, so I figured out this method. It leaves almost no trace of a hole.

I probably wouldn’t do this at the supermarket, but useful for when you’re waiting for fruit to ripen at home.

Close All But the Current Tab in Your Browser

KBS reminds us of a handy feature in modern browsers:

When you are researching, you will probably end up with lots of tabs. If you find what you were looking for and want to close all other tabs, you can right click on the tab of the page you want to keep and select the option “Close Other Tabs” to get rid of them at once.

And if you researched different sources you could use the fast option to “Bookmark All Tabs” by right-clicking any tab.

The screenshot is of Chrome, but Firefox, Opera and even Internet Explorer have this feature as well.

Get Rid of the Watermark on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Rob Rogers lets us know an easy way to get rid of that watermark in the corner of Windows 8:

The Watermark on Windows 8 is super-easy to remove, without any additional software or file editing. You just need to copy your wallpaper to the C:\Users\your_name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\CachedFiles folder and rename it to that of the cached wallpaper, and the watermark is gone. You can find more detailed instructions here.


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


One response to “From The Tips Box: iPhone Security, Tab Closing”

Leave a Reply