From the Tips Box: iPhone Videos, Hard Drive Sleeves, and Alarm Clocks [From The Tips Box]
Author: James Cliff
Readers offer their best tips for playing just the audio of video files on the iPhone, cushioned sleeves for external hard drives, and making sure your alarm clock wakes you up in the morning.
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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.
Play Just the Audio of iPhone Video Files
Photo by Dan Taylor.
Rick Betita shows us how to stop the video from playing and draining battery on iPhones:
One of the most annoying things about the iPhone is that you can’t listen to the audio of a video file unless the video is playing. Let’s say I’m watching a TEDTalk video podcast where the visuals don’t add much to the content: if I lock my phone or press the home button, playback will stop (rather than continue underneath like an audio file).
To get around it, I lock my phone while I’m watching the video (stopping the playback) and double-tap the home button to bring up playback controls on the locked screen. From there, I can press play and lock the phone again, allowing me to listen to my video file with the screen locked.
If I want to do something else on my iPhone while the audio of the video plays in the background, I press the home button during video playback and lock the screen immediately afterwards. Then I double-tap the home screen as before, hit play, and unlock the phone. It brings me to my home screen while the audio continues to play.
Use Drink Insulators as Hard Drive Sleeves
kamosaurus gives us a nice clever use for our portable external hard drives:
I have found that the collapsible koozies are perfect cheap sleeves for portable external hard drives. They fit snug and they give you a little “bump” protection without you having to go buy an expensive portable hard drive case. I’ve never had a case where the hard drive got too hot from being in the koozie but it’s more about the transport anyways.
The best part of all is that they are cheap and customizable!
Move Alarm Clocks Around to Ensure Waking in the Morning
Photo by Bernt Rostad.
virtourist shares his tips for waking up in the morning:
The problem with my alarm clock is that I’ve gotten so used to the ‘off’ button that I can turn off the first alarm and cancel the second in my sleep. I have a roommate, so I can’t do something ridiculous like put the alarm clock on the other side of the room.
My solution: Wrap the alarm clock in a t shirt and always place the clock in a different orientation/location on the nightstand. That way, I have to be awake and coherent enough to do some searching for the off button without just using muscle memory.
grewal12 adds his solution to the mix:
I have the same thing going on…kind of. I have two alarm clocks. One is the regular kind, right next to my night stand. The other one is my phone which is on the other side of the room. They both go off at the same time. BUT, I have another alarm on my phone that goes off 15 minutes later. So I have to go through the menus and stuff to turn it off. Because if I don’t, it goes off while I’m in the shower and wakes everyone else up.
Take Bathroom Breaks on Different Floors to Get Heart Rate Up
Photo by Russell J. Smith.
fisher.seth lets us know how he keeps from feeling lethargic at work:
To get my heart rate up multiple times during my otherwise very sedentary working day, I only take restroom breaks on the ground floor of a five-story building (of which I’m located on the 5th floor). I take five flights of stairs down, use the restroom, then back up the stairs, two-at-a-time, as quick as possible. After a quick stop at the top to catch my breath, I’m back at my desk within 3 minutes.
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Tags: 
Downside to the alarm clock, if the power switch (mains) is next to you as well.
So many missed mornings.
Big_Adam
@Andy Little: Never done shift work, eh?
Compro01
@Dizzy: Isn’t this a recurring joke in Scrubs?
warsaw_andy
@elSpanielo: Completely agree.
Especially on the occasions where I work in US offices. Why the hell do you guys make stalls that you can see in?!
warsaw_andy
But.. isn’t retaining heat a bad idea? Just use those rubber bracelets that every cause has. Good traction, lifts the drive off the surface a bit and makes it easy to get your fingers under the drive when you need to set it down or pick it up.
Rj Dollen
@Logan Hinds: The next time you see a person in a wheelchair, you should say, “Just get up and walk. It’s not that hard.”
Alternately, you might want to keep in mind that people who have persistent problems with sleeping (and subsequently, with waking) have probably already tried pretty much anything you can think of.
spanky
The audio one for iPhone is great! It works in the YouTube app too, so if you just want to stream some music it’s a great method.
Ted Avery
@Andy Little: Not all of us can fall asleep when we want to, and some of us unintentionally oversleep which can also be bad.
Jeff Jerousek
If you have a phone that can set multiple alarms, just set 2 or 3 alarms that will go off within 5mins of each other. Usually by the 2nd alarm I come to my senses and wake up. The 3rd alarm is the extra insurance.
golderOptimizer
@Andy Little: That’s easy for someone who expects to always wake at the same time every day to say.
But some of us have important special events when we have to wake up earlier than our normal hour.
Like the occasional work day when you have to be there VERY early, and so have to wake up far earlier than you normally would. You can’t just go to bed early and expect to wake up precisely when you want to.
2 replies
@Terry: OK, I may be a little rebellious, but I wake up to jazz music. It helps me wake up gradually, unlike you poor souls who suffer through the music you wake up to.
wtfnuggets
@sea3d: I wrote a program quite like that in BASIC back in college. It would blare the PC speaker until I entered the correct solution.
That’s how I discovered I can ctrl-alt-del in my sleep.
MichaelTV
In college, I pulled apart an alarm clock, took out the speaker and soldered it to the board with a really long pair of wires, feeding the wires through the speaker holes. Then I put the clock under my lofted bed and the speaker right next to my head. Due to the proximity, it was loud enough to wake me but not so loud to disturb the roommate. Plus, I had to jump out of bed to turn it off.
fiji.siv
@Terry: Mine’s on the christian station. At 6am there is some random hymn playing on most days. It’s enough to make me sit up just figuring out what the hell is going on.
Keeter
I once turned my alarm clock off without even leaving a dream state. I woke up about five minutes after my clock should have waken me and I could remember hearing my alarm in my dream. I have been setting two alarms since; the odd thing is I normally wake up 5-15 minutes before my alarm.
UthmanBrizo
Alarm Clocks: go to bed earlier. Barring any medical conditions/sleep disorders/other stuff of that ilk, if you have trouble waking up on time you’re probably not going to sleep early enough.
Andy Little
@sea3d: That’s amazing! Man, the genius alarm clocks these days…
Whitson Gordon
I think it’s age, too.
Teenagers can easily sleep until 1PM. And I am surely not alone wondering why the hell Grandpa gets up at 6am when he’s retired.
jeffk
My old routine was to put the alarm in a different room, one half way to the bathroom. I also slept on a loft, so the effort of getting down and over to the alarm was enough to give me the momentum to continue to the shower, but not enough to try to climb back into the loft. Worked great.
I used to hit bathroom breaks on different floors just to avoid the busy toilets on my floor… more time away from the desk was a bonus.
woktiny
@Logan Hinds: It’s a habit problem, people get in the habit of not getting up and it becomes harder to get up.
woktiny
Android: I’ve just started using Math Alarm Clock app on my my phone. I love it and wonder where this app has been all my life. It works by forcing you to solve math problems in order to disable the alarm. It has settings for how many problems and how difficult. Mine is set for three medium level questions which is just what i need to get my brain to wake up.
sea3d
I always prefer a #2 at work on a different floor… I don’t like my coworkers knowing what goes on.
elSpanielo
@Logan Hinds: For some people it really is that hard. Even beyond being a night owl there are medical conditions and disorders that make it very very difficult to wake up/get out of bed.
sxyskeksis001
I always put my alarm clock on the other side of the room. And to ensure I make sure I don’t get back into bed, I pee in my bed before I shut off the alarm clock. I’m always on time for work but damn it if my paychecks are always spent on sheets.
otko
@warped2049: More importantly, I presume, says the one who doesn’t have ludicrous work/ I can’t speak for work, but rather, for student schedules. Sure, it’s largely a product of forcing that into our schedule, but I thought it wasn’t hard to wake up before I really experienced not sleeping enough week on week on end; it makes trying to wake up sometimes depressing.
Kin
Ok that HDD sleeve is genius. Pure genius. I’ve had one of those laying around for months and, just now I found out it fits my external perfectly!
McGoogles
@DangerousLiberal: Im going to hurt you, btw
ruffus910
@Dizzy: I have this problem. Please do be reasonably careful, ive gotten a pretty nasty gash after falling over from this.
ruffus910
I know a way you can get your heart rate up without even leaving your desk. Take a wild guess.
[You know you were thinking it]
Lord_Data
fisher.seth needs to know about micturition syncope; [en.wikipedia.org] .
To save you the trouble, it means passing out during or shortly after making water.
It’s because of the drop in blood pressure associated with urinating. It happens mostly when fellas get up out of bed or up from a chair too quickly and run to the bathroom, not giving their bodies enough time to adjust. They’re still experiencing low blood pressure from being at rest, and suffer a further drop while doing #1 and then wham! They’re on the floor wondering what the heck happened to them.
Why do I mention it? It’s a little more rare but a similar thing can also happen when you climb or descend quickly on stairs or take an elevator before going; or when you exercise immediately after doing the business. It’s much more likely if you have a tendency towards lower blood pressures.
Take a leisurely walk on the same floor before or after going to the bathroom. Exercise at lunch or at least give yourself two minutes of no-stairs/no-elevator to adjust before and after watering the plants.
Dizzy
@Terry: Japanese speed metal.
DangerousLiberal
@Logan Hinds: So says the morning person…
warped2049
Regarding alarm clocks: You could just actually wake up when it goes off. I figure why spend more time trying to rig up some contraption? Just wake up people. It’s not that hard.
Logan Hinds
seems like those koozies might also make good ipod/iphone/itouch protectors too
lincolnlogs
Bathroom break warning: Use caution if you work on the ground floor and are planning to use the restroom on the 5th floor. It’s a long way to go while having to wizz only to find out Ken from IT is gonna be a while.
jupiterthunder
Here’s my alarm clock trick: use a clock radio, and set it to a Country station. It assaults my senses so badly that I can’t help but wake up.
Disclaimer: I loathe Country music. You can substitute whatever genre bothers you most.
Terry