From The Tips Box: Cable Management, Peeling Ginger, Video Card Overclocking


Readers offer their best tips for keeping cables organised, peeling ginger, and overclocking your video card without causing crashes.

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.

Use String to Keep Cables Managed Without the Fuss

Photo by Richard Bitting.

Casey Brooks discovers that sometimes, old school is the best school:

Rather than use zipties or rubber bands, which have a tendency to break, to hold your cables in a neat bunch, I use short lengths of string. I make a simple slip knot in a string then tighten the loop around the cables to be managed. It allows the bunch to get much tighter than rubber bands allow, and can be removed much easier than zipties. Just about any kind of string or rope works for this, but I am fond of using 550 paracord; thinner strings tend to get too tight over time, making it difficult to loosen the loop, while paracord being thicker has yet to have this problem for me. Extra length can then be wrapped around the bundle.

I am currently using this to keep all my desktop cables neat behind my desk, as well as keeping my phone and laptop charger tidy in my bag.

Peel Ginger More Easily with a Spoon

Jason shares a pro tip for the kitchen:

I worked in a Japanese restaurant for a few years, and a trick I learned: Ginger can easily be peeled with a spoon. No sharp edges, no cuts. Plus, you don’t cut off as much of the flavour.

Use Multiple Stress Tests when Overclocking for Best Results

Nick shares an overclocking tip for beginners:

This may be common practice for some, but I’ve been overclocking my video card as described in Lifehacker’s tutorial and found that Furmark wasn’t giving me artefacts when it should. I could raise the memory clock all the way to the max in EVGA Precision and it still wouldn’t artefact or crash. However, when I tried using EVGA’s OC Scanner X, I immediately started seeing artefacts. It also has a lot more control over the test you run, though it never seemed to raise my temperatures as high as Furmark.

The moral of the story? Use more than one tool to cover all your bases!

Old iPod Peripherals Won’t Work With New iOS Devices

Photo by Nathan Wong.

Craig shares a tip for those of us with multiple iPods:

I’ve been using an old, first gen iPod touch and a really old 4th generation iPod on a little iHome dock I have, and they worked great. But when I finally upgraded to a 4th generation iPod touch, it wouldn’t work. After some trial and error with friends’ devices, it looks like iPods from the 2nd generation and up — so this probably applies to the iPhone 3G and above as well — work differently enough from the old models that you’ll need all new peripherals. Many of you may have realised this already, but in case you’re just upgrading like me, hopefully this saves you a bit of confusion.


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