From The Tips Box: App Organisation, Slimming Your Wallet

Readers offer their best tips for smarter organisation of your mobile apps, quickly accessing Google’s cached web pages, and preventing your wallet from bursting with rewards cards.

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.

Organise App Icons More Efficiently

Audiopocalypse shares a smart way to organise your mobile apps, especially if you have a wide phone:

If you are using a wider phone (like most Android phones) and are right-handed, then put your most commonly used apps on the right side of the home screens. I am constantly just holding my phone with my right hand, and with my own (small) hand, it can be hard to reach the left side of the screen with my thumb, making it pretty hard to open up the app I was intending to press sometimes. Try out a right-to-left pattern for most commonly used apps.

Photo by ZeyToX / MyColorscreen

Quickly Access Google’s Cached Web Pages

Dylan Rayner writes in with a quick way to access Google’s cached web pages (perfect for when we’ve Lifehackered websites!):

In Chrome, just add “cache:” before the url and Google will re-direct you to their cached version of the page.

You can also just search for this from Google’s homepage.

Better than the traditional way of needing to find the cached page link buried in the site’s preview.

Combine Rewards Cards

Bryan Quattlebaum offers this tip for minimising the space rewards cards take up in your wallet:

There is really no reason to have each store’s reward card be the size of a credit card. That is why they often give out a key chain “mini-me” version. Either way, you either end up with a bursting wallet or bursting key case. My solution — trim down each rewards card until just the essential bar code remains. You can then place three (3) of them into one credit card-size lamination sheet. Viola! One card now takes the place of three.

You could also use an app to store all your loyalty cards or photograph them, but this is a neat no-batteries-required and works-all-the-time way of carrying all those cards.

Burn OS X Mountain Lion to a Single-Layer DVD

The normal way of burning Apple’s new OS to disk requires a dual-layer writable DVD. Abrels offers this workaround to get the installer to fit on a normal DVD:

I created a new disk image, set the size to “4.6 GB (DVD-R/DVD-RAM)”, then fired up Terminal and copied everything from the partition “Mac OS X Install ESD” to my new disk image, with a simple cp -R. Had to go to the Terminal because Finder hides a lot of the files in the installation image.

The resulting image is exactly the size of a single-layer DVD and still has ~300MB left.

(1) Disk Utility: File->New->Blank Disk Image

Choose Size: 4.6GB, Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled), Image Format: read/write disk image, Partitions: Single partition – CD/DVD. Pick whatever name you want, I wrote “Mountain Lion DVD”.

(2) Double-click InstallESD.dmg, to mount the partitions inside.

(3) Now you should have two mounted volumes: “Mountain Lion DVD” and “Mac OS X Install ESD”. Fire up Terminal and write:

cp -Rv "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install ESD"/* "/Volumes/Mountain Lion DVD"/

It should start copying, it’ll output the file names as it copies them. It shouldn’t give any errors.

(4) Follow the steps on this tutorial to burn the image to a DVD. In Disk Utility, click on the image file that we created, and hit Burn.