From The Tips Box: Tissue Boxes, Quiet Ringtones, iPhone Emoticons


Lifehacker readers offer their best tips for fixing tissue box annoyances, making your ringtone louder, and unveiling a secret iPhone keyboard full of emoticons.

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.

Stop Tissues from Falling to the Bottom of the Box

YeEun June Sung fixes the ever-failing tissue box. When the box starts getting low, you can cut out part of the bottom of the box, then fold it down as shown above. From then on, the tissues won’t fall to the bottom of the box when it starts getting empty; they’ll just fall on top of the little “loft” you’ve created. Click here to see the full trick with step-by-step images.

Use Sound Recorders to Fix Quiet Ringtones

MsCassLopez makes her ringtone more audible:

No matter what phone I have, everyone else’s ringtone seems to be louder. I can hear my neighbor’s over the fence and around the corner of her house but I miss all my calls when mine is in my pocket book on the swing right next to me. So I decided to take action! I used Cool Edit, courtesy of nineties legend Peter Quistgard, but any simple and free sound editor will do. Try Total Recorder or MP3Gain among many. I just plugged in my phone to the computer with a USB cable — Android has to be rooted to be able to access the file but you can also just choose any sound file or ringtone — navigated to the mp3/ogg in my sound editor of choice, and pumped up the volume. I then saved the file back in the same place with a new name; selected it as my ringtone and instantly became one with those who never miss a call.

Seriously, if you wish your chosen ringtone was louder then just do the above to increase the volume. If you get some kind of scale in your chosen sound editor then an increase of 10dB seems to work well without causing any distortion.

Enable the Secret Japanese Emoticon Keyboard in iOS 6

Benjamin Guise finds a wealth of emoticons hidden inside the iPhone:

I was just messing around with my iPhone keyboards and found this. It’s not an app, it is part of the stock keyboards.

To enable it, go to Settings > General > Keyboards and add the “Japanese – kana” keyboard. There is a little key on the bottom left that looks like a face. When you tap this key, you can drag the top up and there are hundreds of different faces and other interesting combinations of characters.

Add Curved Edges to Your Business Cards Without the Premium Price

Timgray shows us a cheap trick for business cards:

If you want a fancy curved edge on your business cards but cant afford the premium, you can buy the die cutters to do that at a hobby store for less than the price of paying the premium for your business cards to have that special cut. you can cut the edges of a box of 250 cards in less than an hour of vegging in front of the TV.

Picture: Connor Turner/Flickr


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