From The Tips Box: Bonus Tracks, Autohotkey, Lighting Charcoal

Readers offer their best tips for splitting up annoying double tracks in iTunes, remembering autohotkey shortcuts, and lighting charcoal grills.

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.

Split Bonus Tracks into Two Separate Songs with iTunes

Adam shares one way to turn a two-song track into two one-song tracks:

This works on iOS, can’t say about other OSes, but should work on iPods too.

If you Get Info on a song, you can go to the options tab, and specify when the song starts and ends. You can use this to cut out long or annoying intros and outros.

An extension of this would be to duplicate a song with a bonus track, change the new file to the information of the bonus song, and then specify the start and end points accordingly.

Takes up double the space, but is sure a lot less painful than doing it in Audacity or another editor.

Ignite Charcoal Quickly with Vegetable Oil

Photo by Paul Swansen.

Troy Leonard shares a quick barbecue tip:

For my family (northern) fall means cook outs and bon fires! As the resident pyromaniac I am in charge of ignition. I found a great trick for guaranteed easy lighting. As anyone who has used a chimney starter for charcoal knows that spritzing a couple sheets of newspaper with vegetable oil before lighting gets the charcoal going faster. Well the same is true with wood fires! a teaspoon of oil per sheet of newsprint works wonders and is safer than lighter fluid and other petroleum accelerants.

Remember AutoHotkey Shortcuts with a Simple Mnemonic

Photo by fatbwoy.

PrairieMoon helps us remember AutoHotkey notation for modifier keys:

I’d like to share a little bit of ahk word association with people who might be thinking of trying Autohotkey for themselves.

They’re like mnemonics, ways to remember what the four main key symbols refer to.

^

Control key (Ctrl)

(because it looks like a down-facing letter C)

+

SHIFT key

This one’s a little harder to explain how I got it to stick in memory. But here goes.

“I’m moving up in the world. I’m SHIFTing gears. So let the plus sign rule me. ”

Ed. note: I always just think of it as the Shift key makes letters bigger, so the plus sign makes sense

#

Windows key

Well it looks a little like a window

!

Alt key

You might see that in relation to HALT, which rhymes with ALT.

So if you see someone post a line of script that says something like this:

^+W::run, wordpad.exe

What you’re being told is that holding down ctrl and shift while pressing the letter W, will start Wordpad.

Hope this helps someone.