Readers offer their best tips for getting extra volume from your headphones, selecting text, and making the Google bar follow you down web pages.
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.
Increase Headphone Volume by Plugging Them Into Your Speakers
Steve shares a tip for disgruntled headphone users:
I’ve been having this annoyance with my headphones. When I plug them in, I need to turn up the volume a bit more than I do on the speakers, which means when I unplug them, the speakers are REALLY LOUD. After a while of being scared to death by this, I plugged my headphones into my computer speakers instead of in the tower’s front audio jack, and the sound was much louder. Now, no more volume mishaps! I’m not sure if this is supposed to decrease audio quality or not, but I certainly haven’t noticed any kind of drop-off.
I tested this out on my speakers and it actually worked pretty well. Maybe the speaker has a built-in amp; I’m not sure — but your mileage may vary.
Use the Shift Key to Solve Text Selection Annoyances
Audiopocalypse shares a keyboard shortcut to fix a common annoyance:
When selecting a line of text, if you accidentally miss the last couple of characters you intended to include in the selection, Mac users can just Shift+select or Cmd+select from the right of it to add it to your current selection, instead of re-selecting the whole thing.
If you’re on Windows, you just use Shift+the arrow keys to add or remove characters from the selection. I’ve been doing this for a while to fix this problem which seems to happen constantly — especially since Windows usually likes to select trailing punctuation whether you like it or not.
Make the Google Search Bar Follow You Down the Page
Luke Butler shares a user script to add a new feature to Google:
I made a Greasemonkey script to make Google’s top bar area static. Thought this might be useful to some people, and although created by me, I get nothing out of it other than the satisfaction of making people slightly happier.
This is actually a very cool little tweak. Much nicer than I expected it to be after hearing about it. I highly recommend trying it for yourself.
Use Bing Maps for Higher Resolution Satellite Views
Webharsh shares a small tip for lovers of Google’s Satellite View:
Try “Bird’s Eye” view in Bing Maps. It shows quite good close up’s when you zoom into your house and view from all possible sides, as compared to google maps satellite view.
You probably don’t have to zoom in far that often, but on the off chance you do, this is a good tip.
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