From The Tips Box: Annoying Windows Shortcuts, Mac OS X Wallpaper And More

Lifehacker readers offer their best tips for making our favourite smartphone car dock even better, remapping annoying Windows shortcuts, getting unique wallpapers for individual spaces in OS X, and always having enough fresh ice water to drink in your hotel room.

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.

Upgrade Your DIY Binder Clip Smartphone Car Dock

We love our binder clip smartphone car docks, but tmurph135 offers a simple way to make it even better:

Here’s a twist on the popular DIY binder clip smart phone mount. I thread an old printer cable onto the arms for added grip, stability, and, I think, improved appearance. Here’s a Flickr set showing how I did it.

That method probably saves a lot of time too. Winding the yarn around the binder clips is what makes the project take 20 minutes instead of two.

Make Control+L Take You to the Address Bar in Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer still uses the now uncommon Alt+D shortcut to take you to the address bar, rather than the more common Control+L. Dustin Luck wrote an AutoHotKey script to remap it:

GroupAdd, grpExplorer, ahk_class CabinetWClass

GroupAdd, grpExplorer, ahk_class ExploreWClass

#IfWinActive ahk_group grpExplorer

^l::SendInput !d

#IfWinActive

Photo by Dan Gravell.

Fill Your Hotel Coffee Pot with Ice Water

Fresh drinking water isn’t always the most accessible commodity in your hotel room, but jvanderh has a simple solution:

After a week of living in hotels, I’ve taken to using the coffee pot as an ice water dispenser. Since the cups are always obnoxiously small, it saves me from running back and forth to the sink as often, and I like that the pot lid more or less keeps the ice cubes out of my cup.

Hopefully your room has a frige to keep it cold too.

Photo by Porsche Brosseau.

Easily Set Individual Wallpapers for Your OS X Spaces

Audiopocalypse has discovered a simple way to set different wallpapers for each of your spaces (virtual desktops) in Mac OS X Lion:

In case this isn’t too well-known — if you use multiple desktops with swiping gestures, you can have different backgrounds on each desktop by making one active, right clicking on an image file and clicking “Set as Desktop Picture.” This will change only that desktop’s background, as opposed to System Preferences which sets all desktop wallpapers uniformly.

Just don’t switch it from the System Preferences pane and you’ll be good to go!