From The Tips Box: Paper Towels, Facebook Trending Articles, Clean Windows Installations


Readers offer their best tips for cleaning your grill without wasting paper towels, getting rid of Facebook’s new “Trending Articles”, and compiling a list of all the apps you use for clean installs.

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.

Clean Grease With Newspaper (and Stop Wasting Paper Towels)

Photo by Daniel R. Blume.

After reading this tip about saving paper towels, reader tdub97 shares another great tip for keeping your consumption down:

Another great way to stop wasting paper towels is instead of using layers of them to absorb grease after cooking fried foods, take a few pages of newspaper and top that with one paper towel. Then put the bacon, or whatever you want to degrease, on top of the paper towel. The towel absorbs the grease, which is then sucked down and absorbed by the underlying newspaper. This not only conserves paper towels (newspapers are a lot cheaper), but it’s also is a great way to repurpose old newspaper…Eat bacon, Save a Tree!

If you don’t have any newspapers handy, AlphaGeek offers another alternative:

This assumes you have newspaper lying around. I haven’t had that outdated medium in my house since I realised that I can get information up to instantly, or in some cases up to 2-3 days earlier.

Phone books on the other hand… I can’t seem to tell the phone company to stop littering my driveway with them, and I never seem to be able to get around to recycling them. so I guess it would be a good use of those.

Hide Facebook’s New “Trending Articles” with a User Style

Invalidopcode saves us from Facebook’s newest annoyance:

Use this Stylish script to remove Facebook’s new “Trending Articles” from the news feed. You’ll need Stylish for Firefox or Chrome if you don’t have it already.

Use CCleaner to Create a List of Your Installed Programs

Jeremy shares a tip for those looking to wipe the slate clean:

I’m sure you guys have seen this on How-To Geek already, but it’s a really useful tip if you’re going to do a clean install of Windows. Just start up CCleaner, go to Tools, and click the “Save to Text File” button in the bottom right corner. This will save a list of all your installed applications, so you don’t forget any when you reinstall Windows.

You can also grab some of those apps in the list and install them along with Windows using RT Se7en Lite.

Count Visitors to a Dropbox-Hosted Page with Bit.ly

If you’re hosting a small website with Dropbox, Lifehacker reader shardina has a quick tip for counting the number of visitors you get:

Quick and dirty page view tracker for Dropbox-hosted web pages:

  1. Make a 1×1 px transparent PNG and put it in your Dropbox public folder. Get the public URL.
  2. Make a shortened bit.ly link out of said public URL.
  3. Embed the bit.ly link in an img tag on the page you wish to track.
  4. Use the bit.ly stats page (your shortened URL with a + sign tacked on the end) to get real time view stats!

The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

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

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