From The Tips Box: Pill Bottles, Recipe Hangers, Facebook Friends

Lifehacker readers offer their best tips for keeping track of pill bottles, hanging your recipes in the kitchen, and cleaning out all those Facebook friends you don’t need.

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.

Label the Caps of Your Pill Bottles for Easy Reference

Mike Ashland shares a genius way of storing all those pills:

m now over 60 and my short term memory has gone to seed. I need a heart transplant and take quite a few prescriptions to stay alive. That combination has been frightening. I’ve reached the point where sometimes I’ll take one pill, put it back in the drawer and instantly forget which bottles I’ve taken and which I haven’t!

My elegant solution: Number the bottle caps. Sound idiotically simple, I know. But now, as I’m putting the bottle away that I just opened and closed, I can glance at its cap and know which one is next. For prescriptions that I take 2, I put two numbers on that cap.

For prescriptions that are taken several times a day, I have put them in separate drawers with separate colours. But I eliminated that by asking my physicians if taking all the pills one time a day would be worse than missing one. They put me on one pile of pills a day.

Dang if the system isn’t working just perfectly.

Hang Recipes from a Clothing Hanger for Easy Reference

Alexander K discovers an easier way to read those recipes:

With everyone doing lots of baking this month, use those old hangers. Recycle, instead of purchasing more “stuff.”

Slowly Unfriend Facebook Users by Checking Birthdays

Thierry finds an easy way to solve one of Facebook’s biggest annoyances:

I work in the entertainment industry and ended up having thousands of “friends” on facebook. About a year ago I decided to do a cleanup but didn’t have the time to go through all of my contacts, so I figured this trick so I could do only a few a day: Every day, you look at the upper right of your Facebook page and look at who’s birthday it is. If you don’t know or care about the person who’s birthday it is, simply delete them! It takes 365 days to complete but it’s the simplest (but jerkiest) way to do it.

Fashion a Makeshift Spoon for Pudding, Applesauce and Other Travel Snacks

Amy doesn’t let a lack of silverware get in the way of her snacks:

My eight-year-old daughter is fond of applesauce, and she came up with a solution when she was in need of a spoon to go with her packaged snack: she formed a spoon out of the foil covering of the packaging.