From The Tips Box: iPhone Weather, Document Formatting, Monitor Stands

Readers offer their best tips for checking the weather in iOS, dealing with annoying formatting in word processors, and raising your monitor with a makeshift stand.

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.

See Hour By Hour Weather in the Stock iPhone App

Don discovers a very handy feature in iOS’ Weather app:

I was looking at the Weather app on my iPhone today, and found out that if you tap on the 5-day forecast, it’ll actually expand to show you an hour-by-hour forecast of the current day. Can’t believe I didn’t know this before, but it’s extremely useful!

Use “Nonbreaking Spaces” to Avoid Line Break Issues in Microsoft Word

Liberalcynic shares a very simple solution to a lesser-known problem:

To enter a nonbreaking space in a word processor, say if you have “5 cm” on the end of a line but they get broken up, press Option+Shift+Space (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+Space (Windows).

This is pretty hard to understand, but for more info, check out Microsoft’s page on nonbreaking spaces and hyphens, or check out the video above. They do a good job of explaining why you’d want to use this shortcut. This should work in a number of office programs, including Word and LibreOffice.

Raise Your Monitor to Ergonomic Heights with a Shoebox

Leo puts together a makeshift monitor stand from stuff he has lying around:

I am writing an semester paper for an Engineering course and I realised my second monitor was positioned less than favourably for proper posture. I remember reading something about a desk made of cans back in the day on Lifehacker and I drew inspiration to make a remix of my own. Here it is. I used a shoebox from a pair of Nike 6.0s and a number of soda cans, which fit perfectly in the box.

An hour more into my paper and I realise my posture is better and I’m able to work a tad faster with it being right in my line of sight as opposed to off to my left. Considering that a a single empty can is pretty damn strong by itself I don’t see my monitor crashing down on me anytime soon; also, the shoebox helps to keep all the cans in a tight formation as well as better distribute the weight of the rather heavy monitor. So there you have it, a structurally sound monitor stand on the cheap that improved my posture.

Use Swipe-Based Keyboards to Hide Your Lock Pattern Smudges on Android

Photo by Greckor.

Bokscutter finds that Swype has more advantages than just speed:

For those who want a little more security from their android lock screen, you can enable a password and use Swype as a keyboard. it gives you the ability to quickly swipe a word which is similar to the pattern lockscreen key but it can be up to 17 characters in length. Since your finger will most likely make more than one pass over a single spot someone won’t be able to mimic your finger grease trail.

I imagine this could even help obscure your lock pattern smudges, assuming you used your keyboard whenever you opened the phone.