Readers offer their best tips for putting your laptop to sleep, keeping your gadgets in one place, and making your keyboard’s number pad better.
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.
Put Your Laptop To Sleep With Fn+Esc
Luke Krasner shares a shortcut for many laptops:
Maybe everyone knows this, but I survived with no sleep key on my Dell Studio 1558 for years, until I recently mistakenly discovered this works.
This might not work on all laptops, but I tested it on another of my friends (don’t remember the model) and it did. For a little background, I have the function keys set to use their media key functions by default, i.e. you must hold Fn normally to activate F1-F12. Pressing Fn+ Esc is not labelled for anything, however it does put the laptop to sleep, which is how I normally like to keep it.
Photo by Iain Buchanan.
Turn A Toiletry Kit Into A Gadget Organiser
James finds a great way to keep his gadgets together:
Perhaps I’m the last to discover that a toiletry bag makes an excellent organiser for gadgets and their associated cables, adapters and other peripherals. I picked up an REI Grande Shower Kit and poured a huge assortment of these items into it. It has the added bonus of being able to stand up, plus you can hang it as well. The removable inner bag is perfect for little adapters, and the flat see-through pockets are great for cables.
You can see more pictures of James’ organiser here.
Get A More Calculator-Like Number Pad With AutoHotkey
Dustin Luck scripts his way to a better number pad:
I whipped up the following AutoHotkey code to fix a couple minor annoyances when using the Windows calculator. The most useful change is remapping the Num Lock key to the ESC key, making the number pad much more like a traditional 10-key calculator. The other thing it does is ensure that numbers are sent regardless of the Num Lock state.
#IfWinActive ahk_class CalcFrame
NumLock::Send {ESC}
NumpadIns::Send 0
NumpadEnd::Send 1
NumpadDown::Send 2
NumpadPgDn::Send 3
NumpadLeft::Send 4
NumpadClear::Send 5
NumpadRight::Send 6
NumpadHome::Send 7
NumpadUp::Send 8
NumpadPgUp::Send 9
NumpadDel::Send .
#IfWinActive
Photo by Tony Cuozzo.
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