From The Tips Box: Backpack Hangers, Coin Flips, Slow YouTube

Readers offer their best tips for keeping your backpack from messing up your floor, making decisions when you don’t have a coin, and speeding up YouTube on the iPhone.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or send it using the contact tab on the right.

Hang Your Backpack from a Shelf with an Old Hanger

Audiopocalypse shares a little DIY project that keeps his floor a bit neater:

Hack an S-hook or wire clothes hanger by hanging your backpack on one. It saves space, keeps your pack from constantly slipping onto its back/front, and looks nice.

I cut and bent a wire clothes hanger to the right size and angle, because the S-hook I bought had too small an angle to fit onto the CD rack on my wall. It actually works great, but if you want something a bit more classy, make sure it will fit onto whatever you hang it from before you spend money on it.

Emulate a Coin Flip with Any Digital Watch

Photo by Nadia308.

Undecim figures out a way to make binary decisions when you don’t have a coin to flip:

If you need a quick coin flip and have a digital watch that shows the current seconds, you can just make a quick glance at your watch. Instead of using “heads or tails” use “even or odd second”

You can do more than coin flips, too. You can get a random number from 1 to any number that divides 60 by taking the remainder of the seconds divided by the maximum number you want, plus one. For example, lets say you want a random number from 1 to 3, and when you look, it is 40 seconds. The remainder of 40/3 is 1. Add 1 to get 2 as your random number. It works for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 30, and 60. (7, 8, and 9 work too, if you don’t mind some bias toward a few of the lower numbers)

Speed Up YouTube on iOS by Using the Mobile Site

Jack John Brown discovers a way to avoid the YouTube app in iOS:

Let me start by saying that this has bugged me for ages: the native YouTube app is often painfully slow on my iPhone 4. Videos will take forever to buffer, then start, only to stop five seconds later while the app continues to buffer. Meanwhile, the same video will almost always play perfectly on YouTube’s mobile site-however, clicking a YouTube link in Safari automatically opens the native app instead. It’s maddening.

So I started thinking: why hasn’t anyone made a tweak that forces YouTube links in mobile Safari to open in mobile Safari? I was beginning to mount a Twitter campaign to get it done when I realised that Apple had already provided a solution in its Restrictions settings.

By default, iOS devices ship with Restrictions disabled; cautious parents, though, can go in and Enable or Disable any number of apps-one of them being YouTube-as well as a variety of other settings within iOS (in-app purchases, FaceTime, and app installation and deletion can all be toggled on or off, for instance). I’d never given it much thought before tonight, but it turned out the solution was there all along.

I haven’t noticed a huge speed difference, but if you have any trouble with or don’t like the app for some reason, this is a clever workaround.

Run Multiple Instances of Revo Uninstaller for Quicker Mass Uninstalls

Java-Princess discovers a useful characteristic of our favourite uninstaller for Windows:

If you use Revo uninstaller to remove programs from your Windows computer you’ll know it can take quite a long time performing the second part of the operation – searching your computer for files and objects.

You can run more than one instance of Revo at the same time; once one instance of Revo has completed the uninstallation and is in part two you can start uninstalling from the second or third instance. It is only the Windows uninstall routine that can only have a single instance running.

This is quite useful if you’re having a mega-uninstall session.