From The Tips Box: KeePass And Dropbox, Missing iTunes Tracks, Minimising OS X Windows

Readers offer their best tips for syncing passwords with Dropbox, clearing out missing iTunes songs, and fixing strange window behaviour in OS X.

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 of your own to share? Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Make KeePass Update Your Synced Passwords Automatically When Open

Dathbe lets users of Lifehacker favourite KeePass know a trick to keeping passwords synced with Dropbox:

This tip may have become obvious since this post on KeePass and Dropbox, but I thought I’d provide it anyway. The post suggests that there is a small issue with syncing a KeePass database over Dropbox because “KeePass doesn’t automatically update your passwords when it’s open, so if you make a change on one computer and then make a change on the other without re-opening the new database, you’ll end up with a conflict.” There’s actually a checkbox on the Tools>Options>Advanced tab for “Automatically save when closing/locking the database.” If you check this, and set any kind of reasonable timeout for a lock, you should be able to leave your database open at work and have it updated by the time you get home.

Make a Smart Playlist for Missing iTunes Tracks

Nicholas shares a great way to get rid of all those exclamation points:

So I recently was consolidating my iTunes library and many of my songs had the little exclamation mark icon that means “this file is not where it was when it was added to the library” because I moved my entire library inside of the iTunes Media folder, for organisation purposes. But iTunes offers no easy way to get rid of the files that have those errors.

So to get rid of them I edited all of my music files (select all in the music tab) so that the comment tag read “I exist.” Then I made a custom playlist that found songs that did NOT have “I exist” as their comment. This created a list that contained all the missing files (because you can’t change tags on files that don’t exist). I selected all and shift+delete and deleted them from the library. Ta-da, no more missing files.

Fix Unminimisable Windows in OS X

JC discovers a fix for strangely behaving OS X windows:

On occasion, I’ve noticed that the yellow “minimize” button in OS X becomes unselectable (greyed out) from the open windows. After digging in various forums I found out that it’s related to using full-screen applications such as VMWare and VLC.

To fix it, open a movie in QuickTime, double-click to go full screen, then double-click again to return to normal size; Your minimize button will have reappeared.

Pay for Daily Expenses with Loose Change

Photo by jswieringa.

Mcjjones shares a way to stay a bit ahead on daily expenditures:

Quick money-saving tip: use change to buy your daily cup of coffee when on campus or a work. Those little expenses add up every day, but if you pay with change that’s in your sofa cushions or some oddly shaped piggy bank it makes your bank account scream just a little bit less.

Obviously, this doesn’t actually change the amount of money you’re spending on daily cups of coffee. If you’re likely to misplace all that lose change, though, you probably will come out a bit ahead had you never used it in the first place. Of course, if you keep all your lose change in a jar, it’ll also add up to a sizeable amount of money pretty quickly.