Readers offer their best tips for motivating yourself to listen to your audiobooks, organizing cables in your backpack, and getting notifications for UPS tracking.
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About the Tips Box: 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 on our tips and expert pages.
Keep Audiobooks on a Separate MP3 Player to Motivate Yourself to Listen
Photo by tonystl.
Dee Tee tells us a good way to keep pushing through those audiobooks:
To improve my commitment to listening to my self-improvement audiobooks, I've loaded them onto a different media player than what I listen to my music on. If you have an MP3 player, keep your music on that and maybe load your audiobooks onto your phone or vice versa. iPhone owners just need a second iPhone (kidding).
Store Extra Cables in a Glasses Case
Photo by Andrew Watson.
t4stywh34t shares another clever use for that old glasses case:
As a student who uses a laptop but prefers carting everything around in a backpack, having a bunch of random cables/cords/adapters can get annoying. One day I found an old eyeglasses case laying around, and voilà, instant management. Now I keep an extra phone charger, earbuds, iPod cable, and various other odds and ends securely in one spot in my bag.
We've mentioned another good use for these before, if you don't have a lot of cables but are overflowing with USB drives.
Get Notifications for UPS Package Tracking
Ben shares a lesser-known feature of the UPS web site:
This could very well be a well known thing, but I just recently discovered it, and it has been very useful. It deals with checking up on delivery status of UPS packages.
The UPS tracking page now allows you to set up notifications for various things: delays, exceptions, delivery, etc. I use my "dumb"-phone's email address [email protected] and I get a text message when any of the notifications I set get triggered. It's been really helpful, and saved me a lot of time I would have otherwise wasted going to the UPS site and checking the status.
Use su in Ubuntu Minimal
Photo by Dan Lynch.
Cinnamonster shares a tweak for Ubuntu Minimal:
Update on the minimal install for Ubuntu. I have discovered that among other things, I can't run Synaptic because it won't accept my password (which is accepted in terminal and Users and Groups). A quick Google search and I found the answer. Turns out for some reason, it's using the wrong authentication method (
suinstead ofsudo). To fix this, run this in terminal:gksu-propertiesand select sudo instead of su. Close and it should work from now on.