From The Tips Box: Autofilling Credentials, Blender Cleaning

Readers offer their best tips for autofilling usernames and passwords with AutoHotkey, cleaning the nooks and crannies of your blender, and finding instruction manuals online.

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.

Autofill Credentials with a Keyboard Shortcut on Windows

PrairieMoon shares yet another AutoHotkey script from his arsenal, this time for automatically filling in usernames and passwords:

I got sick of trying to get (a certain site) to auto-fill my username and password. And because I’m now too lazy to copy/paste from a text file, I use the following two lines in an ahk script. It’s probably highly insecure for anyone who has to share their online life with someone else.

:*oc:ee::PrairieMoonDogHouseOnFirePlace

That one autofills my username. You tap the backslash key, then double-tap the letter E. Naturally, you can change those keys if you want.

:*oc:ff::{-}q,.%baaaaep_M{+}ROna,kYqkdontforgetmeNJIkalaf2

Same. That fills in the password. The curly brackets are used to make certain symbols (literal)… I believe that’s the word for it. Otherwise, some other character is substituted and the password will be incorrect.

I’m aware there’s LastPass and KeyPass and others, but this method falls right into my comfort zone, which happens to include Autohotkey. Hope you like.

P.S. As you can guess, those credentials are fake.

This works especially well for sites that don’t work well with something like LastPass.

Clean Blender Blades with Compressed Air

Photo by Arria Belli.

Matt shows us how to easily clean a blender:

I have been using a blender a lot; I love me a smoothie. It’s a pain to clean when I forget to do it right away, though – especially under the blades (ew, nasty). I started using a squirt of compressed air from the can. Quick and easy.

Looks like that compressed air is good for cleaning more than just computer fans!

Find Online Instruction Manuals with Model Numbers

Ehed shares a trick for archiving manuals for gadgets and new appliances:

When you buy a new appliance, like an air conditioner or oven, you can quickly find the PDF version of its manual or installation guide online by Google searching for a string of text printed within that seems relatively unique.

Save the PDFs to your computer for reference later (or even better, a “manuals” folder in your Dropbox so you can pull it up on your smartphone or tablet)

Use Coloured Tape to Avoid Losing Tripod Plates

KayDat shows us how to keep from leaving tripod plates on your cameras:

Tripods with quick releases are great when you need to move from stationary to moving, but anyone who has ever lent their tripod to someone (or perhaps changing between multiple cameras) will know the pain of setting up, and then realising-too late-that the quick release base is missing from the tripod. Here’s a little something that can help jog your memory before it’s too late.

Stick some bright coloured tape onto the tripod, where the quick release base mounts onto the tripod. This way, when the quick release base is removed from the tripod, there is a distinct and eye-catching notification that the base has been removed. No more missing quick release bases (hopefully)!


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