From The Tips Box: Dropbox Shortcuts, Long URLs, Unwanted Calls

Readers offer their best tips for “blocking” calls you don’t want to receive, sending files straight to your favourite cloud service, and getting rid of junk at the end of a long URL.

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.

Send a File to Google Drive or Dropbox with a Bookmarklet

Forrest threw together a bookmarklet for sharing files directly to Google Drive:

Not entirely sure why I haven’t been able to find a preexisting solution to save to Google Drive but I’ve just created a bookmarklet (tested in Chrome) for saving the current document(url) to my Google Drive:

javascript:(function(){document.location.href=”https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=sv&url=” + document.URL;})();

Just create a new bookmark with that as the URL. Enjoy!

If you’re a Dropbox user, you can use SideCloudLoad‘s bookmarklet to do the same thing.

Get Rid of the Extra Junk at the End of URLs

Jake finds a handy user script for regular blog readers:

If you read a lot of blogs, you’re probably familiar with the utm_source junk that’s often appended to the end of URLS — this happens when you click a link from Google Reader, or often Facebook and Twitter. It results in really long URLs, which is annoying if you want to copy or re-share the page. This user script will automatically get rid of that extra URL junk for you — just install it and browse away as normal.

Set Unwanted Calls to a Silent Ringtone So You’re Never Bothered By Them

Lintor has a simple solution for not being distracted by unwanted calls:

Give your ex an awesome ringtone, that way you enjoy not answering it.

However, if that doesn’t help, CamJN offers a different fix:

My advice is deal with it the same way as spam, make the ringtone silent, and the vibration pattern be nothing. You will not even know they called until you look at the phone later.

Make Quick Egg Salad with a Plastic Bag

Chief chilli Fry Maker and Jvanderh share a few tips for all sorts of salads:

Fast easy way to make egg salad – put the eggs, mayo, and spices in a Ziplock bag, and chop the heck out of it with the back side of your chef’s nice. If you be careful not to chop too hard, the back of the knife will not cut through the bag, but will chop the eggs and mix things. It’s really fast, and you have no cleanup, becuase the egg salad is already in a storage container (the bag). Alternatively, just chop the eggs in there, if you are squeamish about getting the may on the sides of the bag.

If you’re more of a chicken or tuna salad fan:

If you like sour cream, a quick and dirty tuna/chicken salad is to dump the can into a mostly empty container of sour cream, add a pinch of salt, put on the lid and shake it hard.

Photo by Natalie Maynor.