From The Tips Box: Paywalls, Google Reader Font Size

Readers offer their best tips for avoiding data overages on your mobile phone account, bypassing the New York Times paywall, and changing the font size in Google Reader for Android.

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.

Bypass the New York Times Paywall with Instapaper

Eddard lets us know yet another way to bypass the Times paywall:

Looking for yet another way around the nytimes.com paywall? Use Instapaper!

Just drop the bookmark onto your toolbar, click on the article you would like to read, and then click the Read Later bookmark. The article will show up in your Instapaper queue just like any other.

I tried this a few times today to test it out. No problems yet.

I’ve also heard this works with the Reader function in Safari, so it probably works with most or all of these Readability-type services.

Pinch to Change Google Reader’s Font Size on Android

Jon shows us a lesser-known feature of Google’s official Reader Android app:

You can quickly change the text size in Google Reader App using pinch to zoom.

This may not work on every phone; for some reason I could not get it to work. It did, however, work on Adam’s Samsung Captivate.

Use Gmail’s Old Contact Manager

Dealmaker7883 points us to the old, sometimes more reliable Gmail contact manager:

The (newer) Gmail contact manager was giving me trouble today; trying to save each incremental update as I entered info into various fields. Moving between contacts and returning later, I found things were NOT saved and was forced to retype my notes, numbers and emails.

The next time this happens, scroll all the way to the bottom of Gmail and click the “older contact manager” link. The layout might not look as pretty, but functions (and retains my contact updates) perfectly.