From The Tips Box: Airport Security, Galaxy S III Reading And More

Readers offer their best tips on speeding up the airport security shakedown, preventing Windows Media Player from leaving crud in your folders, and the lesser-known reading mode on the Galaxy SIII.

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.

Travel with a zipper-pocket coat to speed up security

dathbe suggests a way of making the unload/reload process at airport security a bit smoother, especially if you cut it close to your departure time:

Travel with a coat with zippers. While you’re in line, shove everything in your pants pockets into the jacket and zip it up. Theoretically, this could include your liquid baggie too. When you get through, you should be able to shove your laptop in your bag, slip on your shoes (you were wearing slip-on shoes, right?), grab your bag and jacket, and head to your gate. You can load your pants back up once you have a break like on an escalator.

Photo by Marcus Jeffrey.

Prevent Windows Media Player from Dumping Folder.jpg Everywhere

moon gives us a registry hack (so back up your registry!) that prevents Windows Media Player (12, in this case) from depositing a folder.jpg file in every folder it touches (unless that’s what you want for your media centre):

WMP12 kept creating [folder.jpg] in places I didn’t want it, even after trying other things people recommended, mostly to do with WMP’s Library settings.

This method seems about the only thing that stops that particular behaviour in Media Player.

I found it here:

It’s a registry hack so mind your keystrokes.

Go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences

Create or modify these two dwords and set them both to ffffffff

LargeAlbumArtSize

SmallAlbumArtSize

That seems to have fixed things for me.

I wanted this tweak, because I embed album art on a tune-by-tune level, and a folder is almost NEVER an album in my case, yet WMP wants to treat it that way. And you can imagine what gets messed up.

Use the Built-In Reading Mode in the Galaxy S III

If you’re sporting the hit Galaxy S III Android phone, the inquisitive guy wants you to know that your phone has a built-in way of making web pages extremely readable:

I simply was trying my native Android Browser on my S III and found a nifty feature. You see that “R” thing with an arrow on the address bar? Yeah, if you click/touch that, it’ll convert the whole webpage in-to a nice readability/iReader type format. A cool feature that Chrome lacks.

I don’t know if this is there on other 4.0 devices but certainly there on my unlocked Galaxy S III.

Make the Windows Command Prompt Far More Unix-y

mztriz needed to stop confusing his home Linux terminal and his Windows command prompt at work, and came up with a very nice Console2 script to share:

I’m a Linux/BSD user, but at work I use Windows. All too often I will fire up the Windows command line and accidentally try to run `ls` instead of `dir` or`rm` instead of `del`. I recently tied my favourite terminal emulator, Console2 in with Cgywin so I could use these commands and it’s been extremely helpful for me. I was even able to set up a custom prompt with colours and theme Console2 with the famous Twilight theme from TextMate.