From The Tips Box: Selecting Text, Portable Silverlight

Readers offer their best tips for selecting text, installing Silverlight in Portable Firefox, and keeping your napkin from sticking to your drink glass.

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? Add it in the comments or email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Select Text Without Clicking And Dragging

Tip detective Java-Princess shows us another way to select text, without accidentally grabbing other ojects:

Ever investigated the ‘Caret browsing feature’ in your browser? If you’re like me you might have thought “uh, I don’t know what a caret is, I’ll ignore it”.

For those of you who copy quite a bit of content from web pages you may have noticed the copy paste features in your browser of choice aren’t the best designed. Quite often in a multicolumn layout you will find the ad in the next column impossible not to select along with your text.

If you enable caret browsing in your browser’s settings then pressing F7 in IE or FF — maybe Opera too, I don’t have a copy to check — you can then just point to the beginning of your selected text and a cursor is placed there. Press and hold the Shift key and use the Up/Down/Left/Right arrows to select your text. You will see only the text in your chosen column is selected. This is an easy way out of a sometimes messy situation.

Now on the copies of FF and Chrome I’m testing it seems to be on by default and won’t turn off, however the feature is there and maybe you were unaware of how it can be used. It turns on and off OK with F7 in IE which is supposed to be the default in FF too. I only have one machine with FF to try it out on.

KayDat notes that you can also click on your start point, hold Shift, and click on an end point to select text, even without this feature enabled. I found that both features worked by default in a lot of programs, not just browsers.

Install Microsoft Silverlight in Portable Firefox

Mikepatt77 shows us how to get Silverlight running in Portable Firefox:

If you’d like to have Silverlight working on your portable Firefox installation (so you can watch Netflix and do other cool stuff), it’s easy:

Unzip the file found here into DRIVE:FFXPATHDataplugins, where DRIVE is the drive letter of your USB drive and FFXPATH is the path to your portable Firefox install.

Use Salt To Keep Your Napkin From Sticking To Your Drink

Michael Kizer lets us know a good way to avoid a wet, torn-up drink napkin:

Another handy table salt tip that I didn’t know about until a few years ago. When you are served drinks at a bar or restaurant on little paper napkins, pick up your glass and sprinkle a little salt on top of the napkin. It keeps the napkin from sticking to the bottom of the glass.

Photo by Quinn Dombrowski.

Use Your Wrist To Discharge Static Electricity

Teknophilia lets us know how to discharge static with the least amount of pain:

Not an amazing tip, but whenever I get out of the car, I get shocked (cold=static?). I’ve found that tapping the door frame with the back of your wrist (the part that faces up/out?) is painless.

Photo by Orbmiser.