From The Tips Box: Album Art Searches, Stains, System Tray Icons

Readers offer their best tips for searching for album art on the internet, cleaning up ink stains, and re-ordering your system tray icons.

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

Use a Search Keyword to Find Album Art on Amazon

Brandon Beaumia shares a time saver for adding album art to your music collection:

I use MusicBrainz to manage my music tags, but don’t let anything else near my files. Manually searching for album art was made a lot easier after I made these keyword bookmarks (see this for how to use them).

Google Image search of every Amazon domain for 500×500 images: http://google.com/images?hl=en&tbs=isch:1,isz:ex,iszw:500,iszh:500&q=%s+site%3Aamazon.com+OR+site%3Aamazon.ca+OR+site%3Aamazon.cn+OR+site%3Aamazon.fr+OR+site%3Aamazon.de+OR+site%3Aamazon.it+OR+site%3Aamazon.co.jp+OR+site%3Aamazon.co.uk

And the Internet-wide version is nice when Amazon fails: http://google.com/images?hl=en&tbs=isch:1,isz:ex,iszw:500,iszh:500&q=%s

Remove Ink Stains with Hand Sanitiser

Photo by Milan B.

Robin shows us another way to clean up pesky ink stains:

I had an incident with a broken pen today at work and remembered that you can use the gel-type instant hand sanitizer (like Purell) to remove ink from skin and most non-porous surfaces. Just squirt the gel right on the stain and use a paper towel to wipe off. It can take a few applications, especially for skin, but afterwards both ink the germs are gone! This works because the germ killing power of hand sanitizers is ethanol (ethyl alcohol) which is a great stain remover for all inks.

Since hand sanitisers are mostly alcohol, this is the same reason things like hair spray work to remove ink (though hand sanitiser is probably easier, especially for your hands. Plus you get the added benefit of killing germs!)

Rearrange System Tray Icons in Windows 7

Windows wizard Java-Princess tells us another way to pretty up your Windows taskbar:

No use at all except for prettying things up but in Windows 7 you can move the tray icons around by clicking on them, holding the mouse button down, and dragging them around. I just found it out by accident and now I’m busy imposing my will on the little critters.

We mentioned this once long ago, but if you’re used to older versions of Windows, you might not realise how easy it is to move them. You can also move them in and out of the extended menu by dragging them in.

Switch Between Mac Terminals with a Keyboard Shortcut

Mac maniac cinnamonster discovers a handy keyboard shortcut for Terminal enthusiasts:

OS X: While working in Terminal, I accidentally discovered this. if you hold Command and press Left or Right, you switch between Terminal windows. Cmd + Up/Down scrolls the current window. awesomeee. much easier than Cmd+` . very useful since I’m doing a lot of work through SSH to a Linux server for CS classes.