Facebook Tries Letting You Share Emoticons Of Exactly What You’re Feeling, Reading Or Eating

Calendar Views, Frozen Macs, and Address Bar Shortcuts

Whitson Gordon

Readers offer their best tips for making Google Calendar easy to read, finding out when your Mac has frozen, and getting to Firefox's address bar quickly.
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.

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Use a Customized Background to Differentiate Weekends in Google Calendar

CSGeek shares a couple of custom backgrounds for Google Calendar:

I uploaded this background to my Google calendar to help differentiate between weekdays and weekends (weekends are blue). These are PNGs images so it's easy to alter the colors to suit your taste. Three flavors for the three different day grouping preferences:

• Saturday and Sunday together before the weekdays
• Sunday, then the weekdays, then Saturday
• The weekdays before Saturday and Sunday together

Unfortunately, Google Calendar keeps a white background over all of your events (as you can see in the image), which is kind of annoying, but it is a handy little tweak.

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Discover Freezes on Your Mac with a Flashing Clock

Judacris can tell when his Mac has frozen nearly instantaneously:

My Mac freezes sometimes and I've learned that a frozen clock on a menubar can mean a frozen Mac. Having the time separators blink will cut questioning yourself if your Mac is not responding down to a second.
(Blink the time separators by heading to Date & Time in System Preferences.)

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Simplify Awesome Bar Uses the Address Bar Whenever You Start Typing in Firefox

Brett discovers a handy little extension for Firefox:

Just found a cool Firefox extension called Simplify Awesome Bar. After you install it, you can just start typing anywhere to start typing in Firefox's address bar. No need to hit Ctrl+L or click on the bar! You can also select text to copy it to the address bar, integrate it with bookmark keyboards, and do a lot more.