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Readers offer their best tips for getting the quickest browsing experience out of bookmarks, checking out local businesses using Google Maps, and setting up family wish lists for holidays and birthdays.

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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.

Use IP Addresses in Bookmarks for Fast Browsing

rovert.haegenschlatt shows us another way to shave a few milliseconds off our page loading time:

When I bookmark commonly accessed websites such as Google, instead of typing the web address into the bookmark, I type in the IP address instead. This way, I can get around DNS and makes my surfing a bit faster.

To find the IP address of a specific site, you can use the ping command in your OS’s command line program (i.e. ping google.com). You can also do it in the address bar of your browser if it supports custom search engines. Also note that this only works for the domain itself – maps.google.com’s IP address will just take you to google.com, for example – also, some sites (like Lifehacker) just plain don’t work for some reason or another (at least when I tried it this morning). Pretty useful for some bookmarks, though.

Use Google Maps to Find Popular Local Businesses

soldstatic lets us know how to find local businesses in other communities:

There’s a google maps labs tool that puts a * in your search bar and searches for it. Kind of stupid, but what IS cool is that if you go to a residential neighborhood and search for *, you’re likely to see some peoples’ home based small businesses pop up. In Lenexa, KS my own small DJ biz popped up, but also a lady that does flowers who I’m going to contact about doing flowers for my own wedding.

Local small and home based businesses usually cost less than the big names, and you usually get more too. I’m all about bang for the buck, and this is a neat idea to find some other small businesses you may not have known you needed.

keep in mind, neighborhoods are NOT equal. Certain areas likely won’t have very many reputable businesses, small or big.

Use Wiki Software to Organize Holiday Wish Lists

dongola7 shares his family’s holiday wish list method:

We’re now using a mediawiki installation to host all of the wish lists for my family.

Over the holidays, I set up an individual wish list for each of my family members and seeded the lists with their e-mailed Christmas lists (that way they would have a good starting point). Each wish list belongs to the “Wish List” category, making it easy to quickly find all of the pages.

For the holidays, each family member kept their wish list up-to-date. The rest of us used the discussion pages to list what we had bought or discuss future gift ideas. The owner of the list knew not to look at the discussion until _after_ the holidays.

This kept us organized and worked very well. We’ll be using the same system year-round for birthdays and other minor holidays.

Use Bubble Wrapped Mailers as a Laptop Sleeve

Stan sends along some instructions for a super cheap laptop sleeve:

I needed a laptop sleeve for my iBook, but didn’t feel like waiting days for a glorified computer glove. Using a bubble-mailer is a cheap replacement if you plan on carrying your laptop in a schoolbag.

The bubble mailer itself is a sufficient sleeve for the duties of a backpack. I wouldn’t want to drop-test it, but so far have no complaints. I also added a simple Apple logo to the front using transparent printer sheets. If you don’t already own these, it might be cost-prohibitive (at least in the sense of using a bubble-mailer to protect a laptop.) I bought my pack in the clearance section of Staples. My Mac is an iBook, so I picked a representative apple. Choose yours accordingly.

The last modification was the strip of Velcro. The section at the opening comes with a plastic strip protecting the sticky side. Over time the plastic strip begins to peel away and defaults to melding with the other side, turning your sleeve into a ready-to-mail package. I don’t want to mail my laptop, so I put Velcro on to replace the glue strip.

That’s it! I’ve been using it for a couple weeks so far and it’s working great. I hear the occasional bubble pop once in a while, but for a total cost of three dollars it’s worth it.

Be sure to check out Stan’s original blog post (linked above) for more tips on the sleeve, including putting stylish logos on the front.

Facebook Lite is a streamlined and often faster-loading version of the social network all your old friends from school use. If you like how it rolls, you can make it your default view whenever you visit Facebook.

Head to Facebook Lite, hit the Settings icon to the left of the search bar, and select the “Default” category, where you’ll get options similar to those shown above to customize how things look when you log in. If you need to access something in the full-fledged Facebook, don’t worry—there’s always a link in the upper-right corner.

Update: oneshot719 offers a direct link to the Lite default settings page for those already logged in. Thanks!

Windows only: Explorer’s integrated search is fine for most things, but more powerful searches or sorting through long lists of similar files isn’t exactly easy—Listary gives you hotkeys, wildcards, and commands to help you quickly find anything in a folder.

In Windows Explorer, you can jump to a file by typing the first few letters of it’s name at any time—Listary expands on this method by adding a search box that makes this “quick search” far more powerful. It runs in the background and allows you to start typing at any time, and when you do, a search box pops up in the corner. Listary will show you items in the list that correspond to what you’ve typed, and you can scroll through the results with tab. You can insert wildcards with the * or ? symbol, giving you the same control you’d get with the full Windows Explorer search bar, but with much greater speed and ease. It even has a few commands, such as /cd, which will let you change directories without even taking your hands off the keyboard.

At first you may not be entirely clear on how to use it, but it just takes a few minutes to understand how it useful it can be. For example, when searching through a list of files using Listary, you have to either start with the first character of the filename or use a wildcard (like you can see I’ve done in the screenshot above). Similarly, getting used to the one-word autocomplete using tab takes a minute—but just like many programs that keep your hands on the keyboard (such as Quicksilver or Launchy), after just a bit of initiation, you’ll find that sifting through files becomes extremely fast and easy.

Listary is available as a free version and a pro version available, but the free version has the features most of us would want to use—however, the pro version does include regular expressions and exporting list content to CVS files.

Listary is a free download, Windows only.

The official Firefox 3.6 release changed where new tabs open from clicked links—to the right of the tab they launched from. Liked it better the old way? Here’s the quick fix.

The Mozilla Links blog points out a few about:config tweaks that Firefox 3.6 users might be intrigued in, especially if the new version handles things a bit differently than you’re used to, and you don’t want to spend time getting used to the new scheme. To set new tab behavior back to its old ways—opening in the right-most slot—enter about:config into your address bar, click that you’ll be careful, then enter browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent into the search bar. Set that value to “False,” and your new tabs will open where they used to.

For more Firefox 3.6 tweaks, visit Mozilla Links’ post, which details tab preview behaviors in detail.

App discovery is a problem on smartphones. The way I find apps is from friends’ recommendations. Sometimes I’ll peruse the list of top downloads or search for something that sounds useful. But sometimes I don’t know what I want, or could never dream of my phone having a function that an app allows.

Take ShopSavvy, for example, available in the Apple AppStore and Android Market. When you’re out shopping, ShopSavvy lets you scan a barcode with your phone to finds prices on the same item in other local stores or on the web. A friend of mine got a head massager for Christmas. I wanted to know where to find one. A quick search with ShopSavvy led me to a $3.99 product on Amazon.com. This’s something I would never have dreamed my phone could do. And I only found out about it by word of mouth.

But what about when you’re the most app savvy of your friends? How do you discover new apps for your phone? Do you riffle though the AppStore or Android Market and take on an app at a time, looking for the next mobile godsend? The best way to find new apps is to use one of the 20 or so directories out there that try to make sense of the thousands of apps. I’ve thumbed through these directories over the last week. Here are my top picks:

Top Android App Directories

4.) Android.com – An easy way to browse the top apps in the Market, but it has no search bar or any other features besides “Top Paid”, “Top Free”, and “Featured.”

3.) Androidapps360.com – tracks over 5,000 Android Apps, also includes different categories.

2.) Androlib.com – One of the largest Android App directories, also includes a statistics page for what apps are available and have been downloaded.

1.) Mplayit.com – (pictured above) tracks over 100,000 iPhone Apps, 15,000 Android Apps, and 3,500 Blackberry Apps. This is the one-stop-shop. It includes an overview, reviews, videos, and a way to share with friends through Facebook.

Top iPhone App Directories

5.) AppAdvice.com – doesn’t just have tons of app reviews but also includes many “AppLists” such as “Back to School Apps” or “Pocket Music Box Apps” or “Make Your Friends Say Wow Apps.”

4.) Appolicious.com – has many app reviews, as well as video overviews of the apps and a way to share apps with your friends.

3.) Yappler.com – currently tracks over 130,000 apps. Each app has a page for overview, and reviews. You can create lists and share your favorite apps through social media.

2.) Apptism.com – currently tracks over 140,000 apps. Each app has a page for an overview, activity, news, reviews and more.

1.) Mplayit.com – my top pick for both best Android App directory and best iPhone App directory. It includes an overview, reviews, videos, and a way to share with friends through Facebook.

This week’s BusinessWeek cover story is about the increasingly competitive relationship between once-cozy Apple and Google. It contains a bold forecast by Jonathan Yarmis, a research fellow at consulting firm Ovum:

Yarmis thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices, primarily to cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. [Apple CEO] Jobs might cut a deal with—gasp!—Microsoft to make Bing Apple’s engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine, Yarmis says. “I fully expect [Apple] to do something in search,” he adds. “If there’s all these advertising dollars to be won, why would it want Google on its iPhones?”

Well, Apple would want Google on its iPhones because it sells phones. Hands up, who wants a Google-less iPhone?

But there’s a nagging truth here: Search engines on mobile devices haven’t been figured out yet. Typing text into a little box is aggravating. Voice-powered search tools have a high goof rate.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have spent millions on R&D, but it feels like mobile search needs a breakthrough app — the sort of thing Apple loves to do.

Yarmis agrees. “[Google chief executive] Eric Schmidt has said that the search problem is 99% solved, but, boy, is that self-serving,” he told BusinessWeek. “The fact that I have to go to a search bar at all is a sign of failure.” Fix that, and you could sell a lot of phones.

The control and shift keys have long been the imprecise means of selecting multiple items on a Windows system. The How-To Geek’s blog away from Lifehacker reminds us that, as with Vista, Windows 7 users can use check boxes instead.

As always, the How-To Geek’s site has an extensive, step-by-step screenshot guide to flicking on the check box selection tools in Windows 7. For those who know their way around, however, the process is simple: Enter “folder options” in the Start menu’s search bar and hit Enter, click the “View” tab on the resulting window, and then check to enable the “Use check boxes to select items” option. Hit Apply and OK, and you’ll see check boxes pop up next to the items you’re hovering next to with your cursor.

The Youtubian bookmarklet makes YouTube lighter and simpler by turning the site into a one-page ordeal. It places search results and full videos on one page to avoid reloading, while advanced features like video download links are added to the sidebar.

To activate the Youtubian version of YouTube, just navigate to a video on YouTube and click the bookmarklet—the page will reload with the video, a search box on the right, related videos on the bottom, and download links for Flash, MPEG, and mobile versions of the video. If you search for a video using the page’s search bar, the results show up below the video, and can be opened on the same page—no reloading or redirecting necessary.

The gain in features comes with the loss of some other features—such as video comments. But the nice part about it is it’s not a script that always changes YouTube—you only get the minimalist version when you use the bookmarklet, so you’re never locked out of any of YouTube’s functionality. You can always go back to regular YouTube by hitting the “Expand” button at the top of the page and using any of those links to get to the home page, your account, or anywhere else.

Facebook has another redesign on the way, we mentioned last month with screenshots. Today Mashable reader Alex Hempton-Smith sent us further evidence, from the homepage to the header buttons to the refreshed profile pages.

This new design is being tested with a select group of users, and is expected to go live for everyone very soon.

The screenshots display the key changes we’re highlighted:

- notifications move from bottom right to top left

- huge search bar to make search a core part of Facebook

- preview your inbox on your homepage (same as notifications)

- numerous design tweaks

What do you think of Facebook’s design tweaks? Better? Worse? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: design, facebook

Mac/Linux: If you can’t get Flash working right, or just like a Flash-free viewing experience, Minitube is a full-fledged desktop client that searches and plays YouTube videos, in HD when available, in a very minimal, sleek interface.

Minitube isn’t a complicated app. There’s a search bar when you first start it up, a list of results on the left, and a video window on the right. You can toggle HD viewing on and off, switch to full-screen mode for longer clips, and scan through the video—or open the YouTube page, if you need more context. That’s about it, but if you’re looking for a way to check out YouTube clips outside the browser, it’s a really elegant solution.

Minitube is a free download for Mac and Linux systems.