From The Tips Box: Locked Cars, The Facebook News Feed

Readers offer their best tips for getting into locked cars, getting more posts in the Facebook news feed, and tweaking Google search time periods.

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.

Get Into Your Locked Car with an Air Pump

Photo by Alan D.

Java-Princess tells us one way to get into a locked car:

My roommate locked the keys to her car inside the car. This is the same car that gets us both to the transit station and from there to work. I can’t drive so I don’t have a car. She called a friend for help and he said to use the cuff from a home blood pressure monitor which we just happened to have in the apartment.

What we did was to flatten the cuff and insert it into the crack on the right side of the door as far in as we could get it. Then we pumped the bulb thing till it pushed the door open enough to slip in the proverbial wire coat hanger and push the button to unlock the car.

Basically the tip is: When you lock yourself out of the car pry open the door by inserting the cuff from a blood pressure machine into the gap and inflating till there is enough room to get in a stiff object like a wire coat hanger. It leaves no marks or other damage on the paintwork.

Obviously, not everyone has a blood pressure machine, so she later adds:

While chatting about this at work one of my colleagues said he made something similar from an old bike tire inner tube. He cut it to four inches either side of the valve and glued the cut ends after folding them over to make them airtight. He keeps this in his bag for when he, or anyone else is locked out. All he needs to do is grab a passing cyclist – we work in NYC so there’s always one handy, borrow the pump for a few seconds and he’s in.

Get the Full Facebook News Feed Back

Facebook seems to have quietly started limiting what your news feed shows you. Wyatt shows us how to get it back to a full feed:

Probably been mentioned before, but I just found this out. If it seems like you’re only seeing a few people on facebook recently, it’s not that your friends have all started ignoring you. Facebook has started automatically paring down your news feed to include only those people with whom you’ve recently interacted. To remedy this, and actually see everyone you know, scroll all the way to the bottom of your news feed to where it says “Edit Options.” Click on this, and from the drop down that’s presented, select “All of your friends and pages.”

Note that this seems to be different than just the “Top News” and “Most Recent” buttons at the top of the page. Even after hitting “Most Recent” and trying this trick, I found there were quite a few more entries in my news feed. It’s up to you how cluttered you want it to be, of course.

Tweak Google Search Time Periods with a URL Hack

Waters7 shows us a quicker way to search a specific time period on Google:

For different time periods in google searches, you can change or add the following term to the end of the url. Starting with a search in the last month: &tbs=qdr:m

&tbs=qdr:m2 will give you two months,
&tbs=qdr:d4 will give you four days.
&tbs=qdr:y3 will give you three years


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