From The Tips Box: Google Calendar Views, Special Characters

Lifehacker readers offer their best tips for switching between Google calendars, clever uses for text expansion, and running Android apps in BlackBerry 10.

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.

Get a Better Google Calendar View from the Embed Window

Dustin Luck finds a better place to view his calendar:

I have a lot of Google Calendars and sometimes I only want to look at one or two of them at a time. I could click to hide each other calendar, then click them again to show them when I’m done, but I’m lazy. Scratch that , I’m a life hacker!

I found that the embeddable calendar helper (Calendar Settings > Embed This Calendar) works perfectly for my needs. Just open up your calendar settings and click the “Customize the colour, size, and other options” link in the “Embed This Calendar” section. That will open a new tab with a list of your calendars that you can select. The selected calendars are put together in one view in the preview area. Changes here will not affect your regular calendar display. The tool is meant for generating code to embed calendars on your site, but I’ve gotten much more use out of it for quickly focusing on a few calendars.

Use Text Expansion to Easily Access Special Characters

Judacris finds another great use for text expansion:

Use the iOS keyboard shortcuts feature not just to make shortcuts for long, commonly used phrases, but for symbols that don’t appear on the iOS keyboard, such as the degree symbol ° , or a musical note unicode symbol ♫ (great for tweeting quoted lyrics).

Also found out that assigning them to shortcuts made of punctuation like ^* and ;; , makes it less frustrating than assigning these to worded shortcuts especially when Autocorrect thinks you’re trying to type something else. Autocorrect doesn’t correct punctuation.

This of course works with text expansion programs on Windows and Mac too.

Run Android Apps on a BlackBerry Z10

Gurcharan finds that many Android apps work fine on the Android-based BlackBerry 10:

This maybe be an ‘official’ Yea/Nay list of apps, but as a Z10 owner, I have taken several android .apk files, converted them to .bar files (BB10 format) and sideloaded ’em:

Instragram (V3.1.0)

IM+ Pro

PLEX

ReadItLater (Previous version of Pocket, but still works)

Flipboard

Kindle

Google Maps and Navigation

TeamViewer

XBMC Remote

SpeedTest

ES File Explorer

Urbanspoon

Starbucks: I have screenshot capture of the barcode from my iPod Touch and use that image to pay

I have a rooted Nexus 7 that is my source for all the .apks. Overall, not perfect but definitely easy to do.

Picture: Jon Fingas/Flickr

Store Fruit and Yoghurt Upside Down

Justagigilo85 discovers a little tip for yoghurt storage:

If you have fruit on the bottom yoghurt, you can turn the cup upside down and give it a good shake. There’s a lot less mixing involved this way.

Also, try storing those cups upside down in your fridge.

Picture: slgckgc/Flickr