From The Tips Box: Laptop Slippage, Smartphone Passwords, Household Chores

Readers offer their best tips for keeping your laptop in place, typing in complicated passwords on your phone, and divvying up household chores.

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.

Use A Rubber Mat To Keep Your Laptop Stable

Ganeshamouse gets slippage under control:

Keep your laptop from sliding around on your desk (or straight off your lap-desk) with a folded piece of rubber-net style shelf-“paper”. Works like a charm and provides a little air circulation under there as well.

Type Passwords In The Username Box To Check Their Correctness

Zane shares a tip for complicated passwords on smartphones:

In iOS, there’s no way to “see” your passwords as you type them — which is a problem if you use randomly generated, stronger passwords. Sometimes it’s easy to lose your place or mess the whole thing up if you type one wrong character. My fix: I just type the password in the “Username” box so I can see it as I type, copy and paste it into the password box, then type my username. Just make sure no one’s looking over your shoulder writing down your password.

This may work for Android too, though I believe most Android password prompts let you show the password with a checkbox.

Divide Chores Up By The Time They Take (And When You Do Them)

Bogartcat shares a simple method for keeping track of chores:

My housemate and I had developed a cleaning system that we really loved; it kept every other housemate on top of things. I still use it even though I live alone.

We created a list of things that needed to be done daily, weekly, and monthly, and put them on the fridge with magnets at the top. The weekly and monthly lists weren’t things like “clean the bathroom” but “bathroom sink”, “toilet”, “bathtub” and so on; we broke it down into little things. Each thing on the daily list took about 1-3 minutes, everything on the weekly about 3-5, and the monthly stuff 10-15. You just do 1 or 2 things from the daily list, 2 or 3 from the weekly list every day, and 1 or 2 from the monthly list every week or so (depending on how long the list is and how many people live there), and move the magnet down to the next thing. So you just know what needs to be done, and you can do that brief task while you’re waiting for your water to boil or torrent to download, and you don’t have to think about it at all. Because you thought about it when you broke everything down into those bite-sized chunks in the first place.

Photo by Rob Enslin