From The Tips Box: Audiobooks, Cable Organisation

Readers offer their best tips for motivating yourself to listen to your audiobooks and organising cables in your backpack.

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.

Keep Audiobooks on a Separate MP3 Player to Motivate Yourself to Listen

Dee Tee tells us a good way to keep pushing through those audiobooks:

To improve my commitment to listening to my self-improvement audiobooks, I’ve loaded them onto a different media player than what I listen to my music on. If you have an MP3 player, keep your music on that and maybe load your audiobooks onto your phone or vice versa. iPhone owners just need a second iPhone (kidding).

Photo by tonystl.

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Store Extra Cables in a Glasses Case

t4stywh34t shares another clever use for that old glasses case:

As a student who uses a laptop but prefers carting everything around in a backpack, having a bunch of random cables/cords/adapters can get annoying. One day I found an old eyeglasses case laying around, and voilà, instant management. Now I keep an extra phone charger, earbuds, iPod cable, and various other odds and ends securely in one spot in my bag.

We’ve mentioned another good use for these before, if you don’t have a lot of cables but are overflowing with USB drives. Photo by Andrew Watson.[imgclear]

Use su in Ubuntu Minimal

Cinnamonster shares a tweak for Ubuntu Minimal:

Update on the minimal install for Ubuntu. I have discovered that among other things, I can’t run Synaptic because it won’t accept my password (which is accepted in terminal and Users and Groups). A quick Google search and I found the answer. Turns out for some reason, it’s using the wrong authentication method (su instead of sudo). To fix this, run this in terminal: gksu-properties and select sudo instead of su. Close and it should work from now on.

Photo by Dan Lynch.