Tuesday, June 11, 2013

More Headphone Mods, Tablet Stands, and the Google Now Menu

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 in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they're a bit too niche, maybe we couldn't find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn't fit it in—the tip didn't make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments, email it to tips at lifehacker.com, or share it over at our user-run blog, Hackerspace.

We recently shared a tip for making your headphones more comfortable, but jupitreas shares an alternative:

The velour pad mod almost always changes the sound of the headphones, particularly if another brand's pads are used. I know for a fact that swapping pads on the Audio Technica ATH-M50 (pictured in the article) changes their sound dramatically for the worse, both with the Beyerdynamic DT250 and the Shure SRH940 pads that are typically used for this mod.

A far better (and cheaper) solution is the 'sock mod'. Simply cover the leatherette pads with soft cotton or another similarly pleasant material and sew it together at the base of the pad. The resulting pads might not look as spiffy as factory-made velour pads but they are just as comfortable, while not affecting the sound of the headphones.

I haven't tried this one myself, so I can't speak to how much it affects the sound, but it's a good alternative to the velour pad mod.

Stephen Blake discovers a great trick for his Nook. Just stick a pen through the hole and it stands up on its own.

MsCassLopez discovers some extra shortcuts in Google Now:

You may not be aware that if you're using Google Now on a cell phone, the menu at the bottom of the results page that reads "Web Images Places" is swipeable and offers a bunch more choices when swiped.

Mark has some trouble with a recent app update:

Today, Google+ updated on Android but it wasn't showing up on my phone. Droid Life posted a good tip: you can just update it from the web. However, one of their commenters had an even better tip, and that is to just go to Menu > Accounts and re-select your account to "refresh" Google Play. There are a bunch of ways to do it, supposedly, but this worked for me.

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