From The Tips Box: Windows Installations, Corn On The Cob

Readers offer their best tips for organising your Windows programs, cutting corn off the cob, and scanning receipts into your computer.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.

Sort “Program Files” by Program, Not Publisher, for Easier Access

Java-Princess tells us how she keeps all her Windows programs organised:

I just spent more time than I wanted to looking through my Program Files folder for an application’s folder. This is because I knew it by its name rather than by the somewhat obscure and unrelated name of its publishers whose folder it resided in. So… if this affects or is likely to affect you then when you install programs don’t just click through the wizard; when you get to the ‘install in this location’ sheet check the path and remove the offending middle-man folder with the publisher’s name – it’s not necessary in 99% of cases.

You could always search of course, but this really does make the whole thing a little less stressful.

Use a Bundt Cake Pan to Cut Corn Off the Cob

Photo by Like_the_Grand_Canyon.

Sandiegoguy keeps the mess down when preparing his barbecues:

Removing corn off the cob can be a challenging and dangerous adventure if you’re not careful. A safer, and convenient way of removing corn from the cob is to firmly insert it into the centre of a bundt cake pan (the pan has the raised centre with a hole in the middle). You can cut down the sides of the corn cob, with the kernels falling into the pan (for easy clean up). This is a safe and quick way to quickly remove corn from the cob.

This is especially useful if you’ve grilled the corn on the BBQ for a special recipe.

Use Sheet Protector to Easily Scan Receipts

DannyBR shares one of his techniques for going paperless:

I recently needed to scan some folded receipts and found it hard to keep them straight when I closed the top. I got a sheet protector, cut down along the sides and now I can easily scan something long and thin or wider than a sheet of paper. My scanner doesn’t even pick up the gloss from the plastic. Plus, you can use it to scan multiple small items at once without them shuffling around!

Avoid Ads and Make Pages Load Faster with a Google Cache URL Hack

AnnieKate76 shows us how to turn a Google Cache page into a text-only version:

When you want to use Google’s cache to look at a page you don’t trust not to give you malware (*cough*lyric sites*cough*), you can right-click the “cached” link in the Google search results page, copy the link’s URL, paste the link, add &strip=1 to the end of the link, and use that new version of the link to go straight to the text-only Google cache. Obviously there are other ways to do more extensive text-only browsing; this is just a quick-and-dirty trick.