From The Tips Box: Screen Real Estate, Transmission RSS

Readers offer their best tips for getting more screen space on your netbook, avoiding mind tricks when working out, and using RSS feeds with Transmission on a Mac.

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.

Move the Taskbar or Dock to the Side of the Screen for Increased Netbook Real Estate

Dereks gives us a tip for saving space on small screens:

Small and very simple tip for guys working on laptops and netbooks, which generally tend to have a problem of a limited screen space. At the same time, these days most of them are wide-screen formatted. Therefore, you can make use of this by moving Windows taskbar to the left or right. Since screens are wide, it doesn’t really constrain the horizontal space (it would hardly make the area available smaller than standard 1024 pixels), but will add more to the vertical space.

To move the taskbar, right click on it and uhceck “Lock the Taskbar”. Then just click on the taskbar and drag it to the side of the screen.

It’s a pretty simple tip, and one that many of you may already know about, but it’s good to make sure. This is why Ubuntu’s netbook “Unity” interface has the taskbar on the left side. You can even do this with OS X’s dock.

Count Out of Order to Avoid Workout Weakness

Photo by Fuyoh!.

Dan shares an interesting mind hack for working out:

I don’t know if this has been researched but I’ve worked out for the last 10 years of my life. I’ve developed a weakness, counting. Most people count their reps at the gym to complete their set. Say from 1 to 12. When you get passed 8 or 10, you start to feel week or it gets tough. I’ve found that if I actually try not to count and doing more reps is my goal. Just count out of order like 3,7,12,4,1,2,9 until you’re done. This way, you trick your brain in to not knowing where you are in your set and that psychological, “thank god I’m almost done with this damn set.” Doesn’t happen anymore.

This may sound useless, but if you only have 10 or 12 reps to do, it should be pretty easy to keep counting (“have I counted 8 yet? nope”). In addition, you could do a simple pattern like 1, 6, 2, 7, 3, 8, and so on. You’ll still be counting toward something, but it’ll be a little harder to keep track of in the sense of how close you are to being done.

Use NetNewsWire and Transmission to RSS Torrents

George shares a clever workaround for the lack of RSS support in Transmission:

I love Transmission, and don’t want to switch to another BitTorrent client, but I need RSS support for a few torrents I download. I found out that in NetNewsWire, you can set it to automatically download “enclosures” in RSS feeds—basically downloads that are attached to specific feeds. So, I just put in my torrent RSS feed, set it to download the enclosures, and voilà! Now, whenever a new torrent in that feed is available, NetNewsWire automatically downloads it and alerts me, so I can open it right up in Transmission and start downloading it.

To set a feed to download enclosures, right-click on it, hit Show Info, and click “Enclosures and Podcasts”, checking all three boxes, checking the “use custom setting” and “other enclosures” box. You can also set it to do this for all of your feeds in NetNewsWire’s preferences, under the Downloading tab.

Kill Processes, Not Programs, to Avoid Viruses

tchrman35 lets us know one trick for avoiding virus infections:

Despite all of our best protections, we will all encounter a “You have a Virus” pop-up once in a while. I recently encountered one at chess.com.

If you use task manager to kill the browser process (not close the program, but KILL THE PROCESS), I have found great success avoiding infection when one of those comes up.

Granted, I’ve only had the opportunity three times in the past two years to test it, but every time it’s worked. That doesn’t mean someone won’t write a better scareware attack tomorrow, but until they do, this method will probably steer you clear. I’d still run a malware check after-the-fact, though.

I guess if it’s not a viable answer all the time, someone will tell me here.

And I guess now virus writers will be looking for a way around it!