From The Tips Box: iPhone Serial Numbers, About:Config, Sluggish iTunes

Readers offer their best tips for finding your iPhone’s serial number, rifling through about:config, and speeding up iTunes.

About the Tips Box: 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 for us? Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Locate iPhone Serial Numbers on the SIM Card Slot

Raj Nagra shares another way to find your iPhone’s serial number:

When popping open the Sim tray on my wife’s iPhone I was surprised to see on the back of it the phones IMEI number and serial number. Useful if you need the info and the phone is dead.

Search About:Config in Firefox by Item Value

PrairieMoon tells us about a useful search tactic in Firefox’s configuration:

In FF, you can search about:config for items by their value. Can be useful, if you remember the number you gave to an integer type of entry, but not its name.

Borderline useful. You can also sort by boolean value. Type True or False in the Filter field to line up items that are set to either of those.

And of course there’s always Preference Name, Status, Type, or Value to click on. Good for sorting alphabetically (clicking once, toggles sort order to descending or ascending), by what value has been changed or left alone, etc.

Turn Off Genius to Speed Up iTunes

Yean lets us know of another fix for the always-sluggish iTunes:

If iTunes is loading or navigating quite slowly, try turning off Genius. I just disabled it and noticed a major increase in performance! This is probably because Genius is constantly (well probably frequently) analysing your music and sharing its results with the Apple server, which consumes both processing power and network bandwidth!

Use Post-It Notes to Soften Harsh Light Bulbs

Supergeek13579 shows us one way to emulate softer light bulbs:

You can put yellow postit notes around a fluorescent or led light to turn its harsh white light into a soft orange glow. and neither light will get hot enough to cause a fire hazard.

it certainly isn’t ideal for all the light bulbs in your home, but with many places outlawing the old, softer model light bulbs, this is nice for specific situations.