From The Tips Box: Open In New Tab, Dropbox Uploading

Readers offer their best tips for opening sites in a new tab, managing Dropbox’s auto-upload feature, and doing laundry after travelling.

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.

Open A URL In A New Tab From The Address Bar

The inquisitive guy shares a great browser shortcut:

Now that you know how to duplicate tabs with a keyboard shortcut, there is one more thing you can do with it (if you haven’t discovered it by now).

When you type a URL or search term in the address bar of your browser, you can press Cmd+Enter (on OS X) or Alt+Enter (on Windows) to open it in a new tab. So, now you have the page you already had opened AND the new page you wanted to open without having to open a new tab. Now you can do everything from the tab you already had opened.

This is really handy when you start typing in the address bar and realise you don’t want to lose the page you’re currently on. One little keystroke and you open up your new URL or search in a new tab.

Beware Dropbox’s New Auto-Uploading Feature On Shared Thumb Drives

Defuncfrenzy shares the downsides of Dropbox’s new auto-upload feature on the desktop:

The craziest thing just happened. I met some friends for lunch and during the conversation I mentioned I had some music to give one of them. He passes me his flash drive and I plug it into my laptop to transfer a playlist to Winamp.

After the transfer I check his USB drive to see if the files all transferred — they did. Job done, continue with polite conversation.

I’ve just got home and noticed that Dropbox was uploading some pictures. I had a look through and didn’t recognise any of the photos as mine…weird. Maybe I took these photos and forgot about them?

I scroll down and then see two videos. Upon opening them I realise they’re two sex tapes…from my friend’s drive…staring guess who!

The auto uploading this has been mentioned here before, but really, it’s a feature that hasn’t quite been thought through correctly.

On the Dropbox icon, right-click and select Preferences, then click Change Autoplay Settings to stop Dropbox from automatically uploading everything without question.

Note that Dropbox shouldn’t do this automatically with new flash drives. If you insert a drive it doesn’t recognise, it will ask you whether you want to turn auto-upload on for that specific drive. However, it’s still a good idea to turn this feature off by default, then just enable it for the few SD cards or mobile phones you use to upload photos so things like this don’t happen.

Turn Dirty Clothes Inside Out For Easy, Post-Travel Laundry

Farmanietram tells us how to keep our clothes clean after a long trip

Travel tip: Often, you get home and can’t remember which clothes are dirty and which are clean. To help you remember, when you put away your dirty clothes, turn them inside out!

You could always store them in a dedicated bag or pillowcase, but this is a bit easier if you forget to pack it.

Photo by Jono Winn.

Improve Crappy Earbuds With Your iPod’s Equalizer

Penguin01210 discovers a way to make earbuds sound a tad better:

To get pretty good sound with bass using your plain headphones, just turn on “Loudness” EQ setting (in iTunes or iOS). You can now use your old, a little-crappy headphones to get very good sound!

This isn’t actually going to make your headphones sound a ton better, and you may want to make your own preset instead of using the built-in ones. The equaliser can make up for small imperfections in certain headphones (and boost the bass if you so desire), but it isn’t going to make them sound like new headphones by any stretch of the imagination.