From The Tips Box: Calendar Views, Frozen Macs, Address Bar Shortcuts

Readers offer their best tips for making Google Calendar easy to read, finding out when your Mac has frozen, and getting to Firefox’s address bar quickly.

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.

Customise Google Calendar To Differentiate Weekends

CSGeek shares a couple of custom backgrounds for Google Calendar:

I uploaded this background to my Google calendar to help differentiate between weekdays and weekends (weekends are blue). These are PNG images so it’s easy to alter the colours to suit your taste. Three flavours for the three different day grouping preferences:

• Saturday and Sunday together before the weekdays
• Sunday, then the weekdays, then Saturday
• The weekdays before Saturday and Sunday together

Unfortunately, Google Calendar keeps a white background over all of your events (as you can see in the image), which is kind of annoying, but it is a handy little tweak.

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Discover Freezes On Your Mac

Judacris can tell when his Mac has frozen nearly instantaneously:

My Mac freezes sometimes and I’ve learned that a frozen clock on a menubar can mean a frozen Mac. Seeing the time separators blink means it is still going. (Blink the time separators by heading to Date & Time in System Preferences.)

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Simplify Awesome Bar For Firefox

Brett discovers a handy little extension for Firefox:

Just found a cool Firefox extension called Simplify Awesome Bar. After you install it, you can just start typing anywhere to start typing in Firefox’s address bar. No need to hit Ctrl+L or click on the bar! You can also select text to copy it to the address bar, integrate it with bookmark keyboards, and do a lot more.

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