From The Tips Box: Gmail Links, Citing Sources, Extra Dessert

Readers offer their best tips for opening mail in Gmail, citing sources in a Word document, and tricking yourself into eating less.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.

Open Gmail Messages in New Tabs and Windows

Java-Princess discovers that Gmail links work just like… well, regular links:

You might not have realised, or maybe you have…life’s like that, but clicking an email in your Gmail inbox is like clicking a link, which means that control-click opens it in a new tab, and shift click opens it in a new window.

Every once in awhile this just gives me a blank page, but it’s still easier to Control-Click it twice than it is to go hit that darn pop out button and try to stick it back in my tabs.

Automatically Cite All Links in a Word Document

Andrew shares a pretty neat AppleScript for writers:

I came across this awesome AppleScript whilst looking for a way to create a table of sources for a lengthy article I wrote that featured many web links as references.

It is an absolute work of genius and saved me an age of time and hassle. It created the above table in about 8.5 seconds. Very, very handy if you are creating a document with lots of links on the fly and need to tabulate your sources at the end. Just open the document you want, put your cursor where you want the table to show up, and run the script.

Here’s the code:

tell application “Microsoft Word”
activate
set allTexts to {}
set allLinks to every hyperlink object of active document
set theTable to make new table at active document ¬
with properties {number of rows:1, number of columns:2}
insert text “Link” at text object of cell 1 of row 1 of theTable
insert text “URL” at text object of cell 2 of row 1 of theTable
repeat with theLink in allLinks
set theText to text to display of theLink
if allTexts does not contain theText then
make new row at end of theTable with properties ¬
{allow break across pages:false}
insert text (theText) at text object of cell 1 ¬
of last row of theTable
insert text (hyperlink address of theLink) ¬
at text object of cell 2 of last row of theTable
set allTexts to allTexts & {theText}
end if
end repeat
table sort theTable field number 1 with exclude header
end tell

Trick Your Mind Into Eating Less by Sneaking More Later

Photo by Like_the_Grand_Canyon.

Random Rambler shows us how to keep yourself from eating too many sweets:

I love cookies. So here’s a tip on how to not eat TOO much!! (I’m not fat just don’t want cavities 🙂 ). So take one less the desired amount of cookies (say 2) and a few minutes later go an ‘steal’ another. Don’t get a tray or anything just kinda take it without anyone noticing. This (at least for me) feels more justified and thus I eat less cookies :D.

It sounds silly, but probably a nice little trick to play on your mind if you go overboard on the cookies (or anything else for that matter).

Put Firefox’s Bookmarks Bar at the Top of the Window

PrairieMoon shares a userstyle that puts your bookmarks on the top of Firefox’s window:

Firefox 4: Bookmarks Toolbar above tabs, enhanced. The bookmarks toolbar stays on top of everything, even when Tabs-on-Top is enabled.

If you’re on a Mac, you’ll want to edit the userstyle from Stylish and delete the second block of code. It changes the font of the bookmarks to white, which you’ll probably want on Windows, but not on OS X.