From The Tips Box: Android Kickstands, Updating Flash

Readers offer their best tips for using the kickstand on newer Android devices, and manually updating the Flash Plugin.

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.

Make Android Phones Stand Upright with Their Kickstands

Walter shares a tip for users of big Android phones like the EVO:

A lot of new Android phones coming out have kickstands on the back, which are supposed to stand them up on their side for watching videos. I don’t watch a lot of videos on my phone, so I thought this was kind of dumb, but then I realised you can also use the kickstand to stand them upright. It’s perfect for when I’m charging my phone, since the charging port is on the side. I don’t even need to buy a dock!

Manually Update Flash with a Simple Command

Googeling lets us know how to update Flash when you accidentally close the auto-updater:

If you have the Adobe Flash Player plug-in installed, once in a while it’ll notify you about available updates or newer version of the plug-in. The notification appeared for me today but I accidentally closed the window! So how do you trigger the notification immediately again?

On my XP computer, I navigated to C:WINDOWSsystem32MacromedFlash and opened the ‘FlashInstall.log’ file. Right at the bottom should be written:

C:WINDOWSsystem32MacromedFlashFlashUtil10o_Plugin.exe” -update plugin

This is the command line to trigger the notification. All you need to do is copy the command line and paste it into ‘Start > Run’ or into the ‘Command Prompt’ window and then press enter. Voila! The notification window should appear. You can go ahead and update your plug-in but you have to exit the browser first.

That same command should work in 32-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. More installed locations of the plug-in on different OS’s (and on 64-bit Windows) can be found here.

Use Google to Look Up Recent Earthquakes

Twignation shares a useful tip for those in earthquake-prone areas:

If you search earthquake in Google then the first search will be the most recent earthquakes with their times, magnitude, and location kinda like it does with movies. Just another thing Google does to speed up getting info.