Da caixa de dicas: Fácil acesso ao brilho do iPad, 4,5 GB de armazenamento gratuito no Dropbox, banimento de cabos de carga

So there I was telling my buddy about how I like my jailbroken iPad because I can install extra tools to do the things the iPad doesn’t do very well on its own. I gave the example of installing SBSettings so that I could quickly access the screen brightness slider without having to go into the settings menu. At that point my buddy pointed out that you can do that with a stock iPad by simply double clicking the home button (which pulls up the Multitray) and then swiping to the right. I’ve been jailbreaking since before they introduced the Multitray so that’s clearly a feature I overlooked. I figured I’d write in about it, given the chance that many other HTG readers probably don’t know about it either!

Dropbox is rolling out a new Photo Sync feature. If you get in on the beta test (which you can do by simply downloading the beta release of the new Windows Dropbox client), they’ll reward you with up to 4.5GB of extra storage space. It’s pretty simple. The beta isn’t on the front page (you’ve got to visit this forum post) but once you’ve found and installed it, you just start syncing photos and video from your mobile devices/cameras. For every 500MB you upload they’ll give you 500MB of storage (up to 4.5GB). It only took two syncs with my 4GB camera SD card to max out the free storage. Totally painless. Definitely the easiest way I’ve ever gotten extra Dropbox space.

I was recently on a business trip with a colleague. When we were unpacking our stuff, she practically dumped out a file cabinet’s worth of cables. She had a cable and wall charger for every device she’d brought with her. The thing is, most of the cables and chargers were essentially interchangeable. Aside from the charger for her laptop, everything else could have effectively been mixed and mingled. Her kindle and her Bluetooth headset both used micro USB. Her iPhone uses the propriety Apple connector but the cable for the Kindle and Bluetooth headset could have been plugged into the iPhone wall wart. There were additional gadgets that all shared various connectors and charging schemes.

My point, if I’m getting a little long winded, is that she had gotten so used to everything needing a cable and a charger that she hadn’t stopped to look and see that they were all virtually interchangeable. After helping her par down the pile, all she really needed was her laptop charger, a USB wall wart (from the iPhone), one micro USB cable and one Apple sync cable. In reality very few of her devices needed to be charged constantly (like the Kindle and her Bluetooth headset), so it wasn’t necessary to bring a powerstrip’s worth of cords.