Readers offer their best tips for cooling burned fingers, getting wrinkles out of your shirt without an iron, and using touch screens with gloves on.
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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, share it here, or email it to tips at lifehacker.com.
Touch Burned Fingers to Your Earlobe for Quick Cooling
Photo by Travis Isaacs.
Branchan shares a quick way to cool off your fingers after touching something hot:
Suddenly touched something hot like a pan on a stove or a dish from the microwave? Nothing gives you a faster cooling sensation better than grabbing your ear lobes (the ear lobes being one of the cooler parts of your body) - it seriously works!
Note: obviously does not help extended burns to your skin, you should then probably seek medical attention if not at least run cold water over it.
Of course, if you have cold water and/or ice handy, you'll probably want to use it. This is pretty nice if you, say, touch the hot hood of a car in the summer and it hurts but doesn't actually burn your hand.
Use a Hair Straightener As an Impromptu Clothing Iron
Photo by Carol329.
Dixmitty lets us know another way to get wrinkles out of clothes:
I don't like to iron shirts, and because of that, the collars on my cotton polo style shirts are always wrinkled or pointing in different directions. The solution I have come up with, is to use the wife's hair straightening iron and run it over the front of the collars before leaving for work. Now I don't look like a complete hobo at work!
Since the straightener doesn't create steam like an iron, you'll want to be a bit more careful, but with a quick swipe or two (and perhaps a dash of water), this'll work in a pinch.
Use Touch Screens in the Winter Without Taking Your Gloves Off
Pojken shares a simple tip for using your smartphone in the cold winter months:
In Sweden, it's currently below freezing - a perfect time for this hack which I discovered recently out of necessity.
When using a touchscreen, instead of taking off your glove and having your entire hand freeze, just pull it off enough to expose the thumb. That usually is enough to answer the phone or change some setting.
It's that simple! This is for those of us who don't have special gloves or haven't hacked our gloves using conductive thread.
Use FaceTime as a Delivery Tracker
Raj tells us how he uses his FaceTime camera when away from home:
If you're expecting a delivery very soon but you know you won't hear the doorbell from where you are (say on the top floor of your house) you can rig up a ghetto CCTV if you've got a Mac and a FaceTime compatible device. Just start a FaceTime call between your Mac and your iPhone/iPod and rest it against the window after switching the cameras around.
Then when your delivery man arrives (pizza in my case) you won't be caught off guard.
This goes especially well with our previously shared script that will automatically answer incoming FaceTime calls.