This page contains random tips and tricks. Basically, when I discover useful tips, I will put them here. Most things will be tech related but could include other topics as well. Some of these are likely to be very specific but I figure they might be useful in case someone else is in a similar situation.

Here are the random tips and tricks:

  • If a website replaces the default right click menu with their own menu, holding shift while right clicking brings up the default menu
  • You don’t need a phone to generate 2FA (two-factor authentication) codes! You can also use a device that is offline. These codes are generated using a mathematical algorithm (TOTP), and all that algorithm needs is the current time and a secret string provided by the company. You can scan the QR code given to you with any app, script or browser extension that supports the TOTP algorithm. If you don’t get a QR code when switching on 2FA, click “I’d like to use a different authenticator app” or similar and you should get a QR code. See here for more information.
  • Vim has a built-in spell checker, just type :set spell to enable it
  • In YouTube on a desktop, press < and > (without pressing shift) to move backwards and forwards by exactly one frame
  • If you have a computer where you are unable to boot into its operating system, you might find Super Grub2 Disk useful. This is a bootable image which can boot most Linux and Windows operating systems.
  • If you have a site that uses Jekyll and the Minima theme (like this site), don’t use h1 headings in your posts. This is because the page title is automatically made h1 and using more h1 headings causes h1 headings to be smaller than h2 headings. Start with h2 headings and for subheadings use h3, h4 etc.
  • If a website has a paywall (or tries to make you pay to reject cookies), you might be able to get around this by disabling JavaScript. This only works some of the time, since some sites won’t send the full content from their server until you log in. To do this, press F12 (#F12IsNotACrime), click “settings” and scroll down until you see the option to disable JavaScript.
  • You don’t need to install Balena Etcher to burn an ISO file to a USB stick. You can just use core Linux commands like cat! See this ArchWiki page for more info.
  • Single quotes and double quotes are not the same in Bash. A string in single quotes will be interpreted literally and none of the characters will be replaced. Double quotes are very similar but will interpret the characters $, `, \ and ! differently. See bash manual page for more details.
  • You can officially dual-boot different versions of Android on some devices, possibly without needing to unlock the bootloader! See the Android documentation about Dynamic System Updates and Generic System Images for more details.
  • If you have the VSCode Vim extension installed and your key re-mappings don’t work (e.g. caps lock to escape), you can make them work by setting keyboard.dispatch to keyCode in the settings json
  • If you’ve installed the pycryptodome package with a Linux package manager but python still says No module named 'Crypto', try importing Cryptodome instead of Crypto
  • If Firefox is automatically downloading files despite you selecting the ‘Always ask you where to save files’ option, then set the browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline option to true in about:config
  • If you’re at a UK train station which only announces platforms a few minutes before departure, you can use sites like https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/ to predict the platform and get on the train before the rush of passengers after the platform is officially announced (probably not 100% reliable)
  • The train operators Great Northern and Thameslink are the same company and label their trains interchangeably