Some of you may know some of these tips, but if you’re like a lot of people out there, you may not know them all. Today, I present 4 tips that will help speed your life along while working at the computer. If you know some other PC timesaver tips, by all means, don’t hesitate to drop them down in the comments and let us all in on them.

1. No need to type www

That’s right! When typing a URL into a Web browser, there’s no need to waste time typing the www part. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and type mentafloss.com into the browser and watch what happens. [ed. note: As some readers have correctly pointed out, this is only mostly true. Some URLs still require the full www. But that shouldn't stop you from trying it first without!]

2. Alt + Tab (Apple key + Tab)

This is an easy way to toggle between the applications you have open. So let’s say I’m typing a document in MS WORD and want to copy and paste some of the document into a spread sheet open in EXCEL. No need to take your fingers off the keyboard, just hold down the ALT key (for Mac users it’s the Apple key) and TAB through your open applications until the highlighter lands on the EXCEL icon. When you let go, presto! you’re in EXCEL. This trick is also great for switching quickly when your boss comes up behind your cubicle and wants to talk to you. If you happen to have mentalfloss.com loaded on your browser (and why wouldn’t you?), just TAB to that PowerPoint presentation without touching the mouse and he’ll have no idea you were goofing off on company time. (Not that anyone actually goofs off by reading mentalfloss!)

3. Tab through forms

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Don’t you hate when you’ve got a hankering for a banana but all the ones in your fruit basket are green? Or you want to slice some avocado into your salad but they’re hard as, well, unripened avocados? Here’s a trick my mother taught me some years ago:
Place the bananas or avocados in a brown paper bag with a ripe apple inside. The fruit will emit ethylene gas, a naturally occurring hormone, which speeds up the ripening process. (It also stimulates flowers to open and leaves to turn colors in the autumn.)
Make sure you use a paper bag because plastic ones don’t breathe well and moisture may build up in the bag causing the fruit to rot.
Interestingly, I’ve also heard that you can speed up the ripening process of a mango by doing the same trick only inserting a ripe banana into the bag, rather than an apple. (My hunch is the apple will work just as well.)
This classic ripening tip also works for kiwis, pears, plums, peaches, nectarines, apricots… just about anything. Give it a whirl and you’ll see how great it works.

Check out previous IQ-tips here.

If you’re like me, your CDs get pretty scratched up. With or without a jewel box, with or without a plastic sleeve, invariably they develop nicks and cuts as my son will decide to scrape one around on the wood floor for fun, or I’ll just mishandle it while in the car, or, or, or… There are myriad ways in which these soon-to-be obsolete discs get ruined, causing us to curse and throw the things in the trash, or just catalog them back in a CD booklet hoping one day in the future some miracle chemical cure-all will be invented to unscratch ‘em.

Whelp, the future is here, only the cure-all isn’t a toxic chemical, but rather, a banana! Check out the later half of the Howcast.com video below to learn how to resurface them, or just see the list.

1. Peel the banana
2. Rub the banana on the CD in a circular motion
3. Use the underside of the peel and rub the banana in deeper
4. Wipe away the residue with a lint-free cloth, like you’d use to clean your car windows
5. Using another cloth, remove smudges with a spritz of Windex
6. Voila, she is like new!

Check out previous IQ-tips here.

In the past, I’ve dropped a lot of useful tips in this feature. Here are a few you might recall:

How to save money at the pump

How to wash a sponge

How to make free directory-assistant calls

How to remove a bumper sticker from your car

But today I’m doing a twist on the IQ-tip and turning it around. You see, my wife and I bought a house back in April and there were 3 cute little tree ferns on the property. They looked as if they’d been there for decades. (The house was built in 1926.)

But over the past months, one has died and the other two have been slowly following suit. The worst part is, we can’t figure out why. Not especially knowledgeable about trees and shrubs, we put our heads together and came up with an exhaustive list of ideas to help save the ferns:

1. Watering

You see the problem. So… anyone have any ideas? We think it’s in the cyathea atrox family, if that means anything to anyone. Or maybe it’s an Ostrich fern. I remember eating fiddleheads once as a kid, which I believe are the curled-up, immature fronds of Ostrich ferns. They were pretty tasty but I don’t recall what the trunk of the Ostrich fern looks like. As you can see from my photos, these ferns have short-ish, stumpy trunks.

Any green-thumbs out there have a real idea about how to save our ferns?

Because we’re still up to our ears in boxes in our new home, with half the kitchen still MIA (note to self: when moving next time, be a little more liberal when labeling boxes. “Downstairs sh*t” doesn’t help much when trying to locate the remote controls or extension cords), my wife and I find ourselves making a lot of little, quick, easy meals.

Lately my favorite has been an avocado/cheese melt. To make it, all you need is a tortilla (I prefer flour over corn), half an avocado and a slice or two of your fav cheese (I like provolone). Mash up the avocado, spread it on the tortilla, slap the cheese over it and heat. Once the cheese melts, take it out and dash on some red hot-sauce. It’s delicious and takes a whopping 5 minutes to prepare.

The New York Times had a long list of 101 quick meals in their Dining/Wine section the other day. Here are the top ten, all of which sound rather easy except #5. Mussels just don’t belong in any recipe with the words easy or quick if you want my opinion. What about you all? Have a quick, easy dish I can make in less than 10 minutes? (sans microwave, if possible)

1. Make six-minute eggs: simmer gently, run under cold water until cool, then peel. Serve over steamed asparagus.
2. Toss a cup of chopped mixed herbs with a few tablespoons of olive oil in a hot pan. Serve over angel-hair pasta, diluting the sauce if necessary with pasta cooking water. (more…)

You guys are either going to love this or roll your eyes, but when I heard about it, I couldn’t NOT post about it.

DoMyStuff.com is a relatively new site that enables you to outsource simple chores, errands, or projects. Need a closet organized? A website revamped, your lawn mowed, a pint of milk picked up? Join DoMyStuff and let people bid on the job. It’s really that simple. Check out some of the posts expiring this morning. One of my favorites has a women trying to score some Oprah tix:

I have been wanting to go the Oprah Winfrey Show now for years but it’s impossible to get tickets. Her new season will start taping in August and I would like to attend with 4 other people…so a total of 5 tickets.

I’m not sure I’m lazy enough to post, but it’s been entertaining, if nothing else, sifting through the gigs. Although, hmm, now that I think about it some more, maybe I should find someone to do my _floss blogging for me…

From the woman who brought you Zipcar – Robin Chase – comes an amazing new idea called GoLoco. In a nutshell, it goes like this: you create a profile on their website (sorta like a dating profile only without the “I’m just as happy staying in as I am going out” rat-a-tat), and start hunting for folk you want to carpool to work with.

GoLoco’s motivation? Chase cites the facts that 20% of CO2 emissions in this country come from cars. That the site takes 10% of the ride fee (unless the driver doesn’t charge the passengers), surely doesn’t hurt either.

I don’t know about you guys, but as gas prices close in on $4/gallon, I’m thinking GoLoco will catch on sooner rather than later. What do you think? Is Chase loco? I’m sure single folk will have a different answer than coupled or married folk, no?

We always knew it would take green to get the green movement afoot. By that I mean, people see money in going green. The latest example? Hearst has a beta version of its Green Magazine online (your one-stop shop for all things good for the environment).

One of the more interesting aspects, once it gets going, will be the eco-tip of the day. Though I’m still not convinced there actually exist  365 different things you can do each year to conserve energy or act more efficiently in the name of the environment, I do applaud the effort. So far the tips are the usual fare: don’t use paper OR plastic (bring your own), change your light bulbs over to compact fluorescents, that sort of thing.

We know you guys must have some more original tips to share, right? So slap ‘em down for all to benefit. I’ll single out the most original in a post later this week.

By now everyone’s heard about Bill Gates’ charitable endeavors and the enormous sums of money he’s giving away. But did you know that you can get involved, too, now? With Microsoft’s new “I’m Making a Difference” program, you can now donate money to one of 9 different charities every time you use their new instant-messaging service. (Hence the IM in I’m. er, the I’m in IM?) National AIDS Fund, Sierra Club, StopGlobalWarming.org, and the U.S. Fund for Unicef are a few of the beneficiaries on the list.

The best part about it: in the tradition of Goodsearch.com, (which is still my favorite search engine) making a difference doesn’t cost you one penny!

Check it out at http://im.live.com

I’ve got to admit I’m not a big online chatter. This, despite that I once wrote a novel in which half the dialogue took place through IM windows.

But I have enjoyed the occasional chat with family or friends, especially when I was living oversees and the cost of international calls were much higher. I remember at one cubicle job I had, the server blocked us from using any chat software aside from the intranet version, which was rather useless. Even AOL’s online version – where no application is required – was blocked.

But now there’s Meebo, which not only allows you to chat without downloading a thing, but also consolidates all your accounts into one. That means you can be signed into all your AOL screen names, your Yahoo!, your MSN, ICQ, Google, whatever you’ve got going on there – at the same time!

And it works remarkable well, complete with a very nifty sound effect every time someone contacts you. So check it out and spread the word. They also have a chat interface you can put right in your blog, for those with ridiculous amounts of free time on your hands. (That’s envy speaking, not redicule.)