Readers offer their best tips for staying connected during heavy storms, using Quick Look in Mountain Lion, and keeping your sunglasses on your head.
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.
Turn Off Wi-Fi During Storms
David Bowman shares an important tip for those in disaster-prone areas:
In order to get text messages to go through on an iphone, it is sometimes helpful to (counterintuitively) turn off the Wi-Fi.
My parents are in New Orleans right now, and surprisingly still have power. They lost all cable/internet/phone last night though. My mum didn’t understand why she wasn’t getting texts anymore, as they have typically been a reliable way to communicate during storms.
This is a quirk of iMessage, and the way the iPhone handles Wi-Fi vs. cellular data in general (I think this is to be fixed in iOS 6, but I may be wrong about that). Since the phone still sees a Wi-Fi signal, despite the fact that the router has no internet connection, it continues to try to use that Wi-Fi. This is obvious when you are trying to load web pages, but may not be so obvious to less tech savvy people who don’t realise the way iMessage handles texts.
The solution was simple. As soon as she turned off Wi-Fi under Settings, the texts immediately began again.
Thank you for getting this info out to your readership.
Photo by Judit Klein.
Hold Spacebar for a Simpler Quick Look in Mountain Lion
Computergeek97 shares a tip for Quick Look in Mac OS X:
In OS X Mountain Lion, you can press and hold the space bar for a preview of a file then when you release it goes away too.
I don’t know if this tip works in pre-Mountain Lion versions of OS X, but if someone out there does, let us know in the comments.
Keep Your Sunglasses from Slipping with Silicone Bands
Jenn keeps her sunglasses on her head:
I found a quick and dirty way to prevent my spendy sunglasses from falling off when I have them pushed on top of my head. I love them, but it drives me nuts when they slip off and crash to the floor.
I received a ‘silly bandz’ from a young friend of mine. They are made of silicone and are thin — just grippy enough but not as much as a rubber band (which would pull on my hair). I wrapped one near the end of the arm of the sunglasses- I have used that for about a week and my sunglasses haven’t slipped off once. It looks a bit odd, perhaps, but worth it for me to prevent them from falling and breaking.
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