From The Tips Box: Kindle Accounts, Password Creation, Android Battery

Readers offer their best tips for sharing Kindle books with family and friends, creating strong passwords, and saving battery on your Android phone.

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. Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Create a Shared “Gift” Kindle Account for Easy Book Sharing

Photo by Zhao !.

MoroniLaGrange comes up with a neat way to share books between Kindles:

I believe you can now gift Kindle books, so how about creating an Amazon account especifically for Kindle use?

You can share the account with your family/extended family/close friends, and we all would buy our own books, and “Give as a gift” to this kindle account we all have access to. That way we each pay for the books we want, and we can read each other’s books as well. The reading sync would be useless then, but that’s a minor drawback, I think.

Use Alternate Keyboard Layouts to Create Strong Passwords

Photo by Leon Brocard.

Robby shares another easy way to create strong, yet memorisable passwords:

I use a mac and a few months ago I decided to learn to use the Dvorak keyboard. As you likely know, macs have a menu-bar icon that can be used to quickly switch the keyboard layout. Using this I learned how to type my “usual” password using the Dvorak layout while the computer was set to recognise the keys as if it were in a standard US Qwerty layout.

This resulted in my new “Dvorak encrypted” password having parentheses, commas and such. Not to mention that because the ACTUAL keys and the keys that the computer registered were totally different, resulting in a jumbled mess of passwordy goodness. Yet its still easy to remember so long as you know the original password and the Dvorak layout.

Quit IM Apps for Android Battery Savings

Corbab reminds us of another battery-sucking Android app:

Looking to save battery on Android? Turn off the chat apps!

I spent a few 13 hour days trudging around in the snow, and even without touching it, my Captivate’s battery was almost down to zero. I figured it was the cold, but the second day, I logged out of Skype and Meebo before heading out, and when I returned, my battery was still almost full.

Makes sense, but I was surprised it made such a difference.

It’s pretty obvious, but something I know I leave running all the time without knowing it.

Tweak Mobile Facebook URLs for Higher Resolution Photos

JP shows us how to get higher-resolution photos from Facebook mobile:

If you use the Facebook mobile site for tracking friends and grabbing photos, you may be disappointed to find, that you can no longer view the full resolution of photos. Instead you are stuck with a small thumbnail.

Here’s the trick to view the full images. Replace the letter in the URL of the photo.

For example:

http://photos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash1/hs736.ash1/162932_1547953577892_1206658431_31211981_4911932_a.jpg

This link will redirect to a thumbnail. Replacing the a or s (in some) before the ‘.jpg,  with an n will produce the higher resolution photos.

That is, voila!

http://photos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash1/hs736.ash1/162932_1547953577892_1206658431_31211981_4911932_n.jpg

This trick will work on any pictures in the Facebook mobile.