From The Tips Box: Facebook Comments, Quoted Replies

Readers offer their best tips for de-cluttering your Facebook page, quoting specific parts of an email when replying, and carrying your camera around with you.

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.

Hide All Comment Activity from Your Facebook Wall

Jupiterthunder discovers a new, hidden Facebook feature:

Facebook now allows you to hide your comment activity from your Wall. By default, when you comment on a post elsewhere on FB, a notice of your comment is added to your own wall. In the past, the only way to get rid of these was to delete them one by one or make use of an extension or script to do so. I used Better Facebook (shoutout to Matt). The native functionality, if it works as it should, will be better because it won’t require monitoring and it won’t require reloads, which is sometimes necessary with extensions. Note that this does not clear activity such as liking a page from your Wall—just comments you make on other pages.

Quote Only Portions of an Email When Replying

Jon shares another tip for email client users:

Another random tip for Mail.app that I just found today, if you select a portion of an email, then hit reply, only that portion of the email will be quoted.

For example, if you select “I’ll be there tomorrow” and hit reply, there will be a new email ready for you with your quote already set up that says “I’ll be there tomorow”, and nothing else (besides the Subject & TO, of course).

This also works in Thunderbird by default. Many of you probably knew about this already, but I don’t think we’ve ever featured it before so it’s a handy tip to know.

Use a Lunchbox as a Cheap Camera Bag

Photo by Joe Hall.

Administrator shares a money-saving tip for photography buffs:

I am not sure if other photographers know this, but instead of buying an expensive camera bag, one can just buy a lunchbox. They go for around ~$10 (far less than a camera bag), do the same job as one that’s 10 times as much, AND thieves are less likely to steal a lunchbox than a camera bag.

Manually Update Firefox from the About Menu

Wunch shares the new location of an old Firefox feature:

If you’re like me, those little pop-ups that tell you to update Firefox always come at the least-convenient time. So, I always check and do the update manually. In FF3.6, the way to manually check for updates was directly under the Help menu. In FF4.0, I originally thought they had removed that functionality, but it turns out they just moved it: click the orange FF button, Help, About Firefox. You’ll see the “Check for Updates” button on the dialog box that pops up.