How to remove a stripped screw

Almost everyone whose done some DIY project or handled an electric drill have found themselves at one time or another enjoying the ease of powered hand tool, only to apply too much torque and strip the screw clean. What to do when you’ve stripped the screw, but don’t have a specialized extractor kit?

Sometimes a screw is just stripped enough that none of alternative sizes work. You’ve still got hope! A rubber band may aid in providing enough grip to remove, or at least loosen, the screw. Place a wide band rubber band inbetween the screw driver (we recommend bumping one size up from the screw head which caused the strip) and the screw, then apply hard, but slow force as you turn. If you’re fortunate, the rubber band will fill in the gaps caused by the strip and allow extraction.

via Apartment Therapy

Customise the Google mail notifier checking interval

If you’re using Google’s Notifier in your menu bar to check your Gmail, you might have noticed that there is no option to change the check interval, which is set to 10mins, luckily there’s a simple way of customising this interval…

You can adjust the interval by clicking on the mail icon and then holding down the Command and Option keys while clicking on Preferences. This will pop open a box for a key/value pair. Use AutocheckInterval as the key (case-sensitive) and then set the interval (in minutes) for it to check as the value.

via Mac OS X Hints.

Keep a list of useful server shares in your dock

Here’s a useful little tip for anyone using a network server for storage, I found keeping a folder in the documents folder, dropping it into the dock, then dragging any network shares you use into it, to be hugely useful as the way OS X handles shares and server to be somewhat bizarre at the best of times.

One bonus is that you can drop folders within shares into the docked folder (drag it whilst holding down cmd + alt), you can also rename any shortcuts to add more recognizable labels.

Disable spotlight on the iPhone to improve iOS performance

If you want to give your old iPhone a bit of poke go to Settings / General / Home / Search Results, then untick all the options, this removes all search results in spotlight but will give your old phone a new least of life, removing some of the application/os lag that seems to return quickly with any iPhone OS update.

via Gizmodo

How to enable Aero Peek in Chrome to preview tabs in Windows

Here’s a great tip from the geniuses over at Lifehacker, now you can enable Aeropeek in Windows 7 so you can get preview of each tab rather than each Window (much like ie8 supports)

If you want to enable it, all Chrome builds (including the stable build) will let you add the flag –enable-aero-peek-tabs after the quoted path in the shortcut on your desktop or in your taskbar (if you hold shift when you right click you can go to properties and add it there).

This is very handy if you’re anything like me with one window but lots of tabs open at once.

via Show Chrome’s Tabs as Separate Aero Peek Thumbnails.

How to restore a Media Center session after using Remote Desktop

This is an excellent tip for media center users, who would prefer to administrate their pc’s remotely rather than direct, this enables users to quit a session and restore the account to the local account…

All you have to do is run a simple command that will log you off and return the system to it’s console.  Create a shortcut on the desktop called End RDP and use this command as the target…

%windir%\System32\tscon.exe RDP-Tcp#0 /dest:console

A couple of things to remember.  If you find it not working, check the user session that you are using on the RDP.  Open Task Manager and check the users tab.  See the session tab at the right?  That number, in this case it’s 0, corresponds to the number in the command.  RDP-Tcp#0

One thing to note, this tip doesn’t work the hack to enable remote desktop access in Windows 7 Home Premium as home premium doesn’t include tscon.exe, which is unfortunate but a small downside to a very handy hack.

via Home Server Show.