Things I didn't know (and there are many!)

A few years ago, a friend of mine watched me tie up a garbage bag by grabbing the top of the bag in two sections and tying the sections together in a knot.  He was blown away ("How did you do that?  I've always had to have a twist tie to tie closed a garbage bag!").

I've had lots of moments like that. It wasn't until my 20s that I learned "Righty tighty, lefty loosey" (it changed my life!). Learning things that the rest of the world seems to know but I somehow missed leaves me feeling both silly and enlightened.

Here's the latest one that I didn't know until I ran across it on this post (where people were confessing things that it took them a surprisingly long time to realize they were doing wrong or could have been doing differently):

• The space bar can be used to page down a website
• Shift + space bar can be used to page up a website

Wow. How did I not know this?

Are there any "techie" things you've run across that you can't believe you didn't know?

Comments

[Greg Barniskis]

My favorite "surprise" techie trick is changing a Web page's magnification by holding the Ctrl key and spinning the mouse scroll wheel. Works in both IE and Firefox, and I don't know how I lived before I learned that.

And BTW, I totally got sucked into that metafilter post you cited, and... Say what??? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlchxfTWXSw

Amazing. Is that a magic spell she's reciting, or is it simply Japanese for "see, this is how you fold a shirt, dummy!"

[Pat]

Wow, didn't know there was a way to navigate a web page via the keyboard. Nice!

As to the link on how to fold a t-shirt in 2 seconds... I wonder how many hours it will take me to finally get to 2 seconds? I can't wait to get home!

[Jane J.]

I've been trying to remember the space bar=page down for ages. Thanks.

[Jane J.]

Forgot to ask - someone showed me (or I accidentally discovered) how to get to the next page of results in a webpage. Say you're looking at the list of a hundred bestsellers on Amazon, I think I was once able to use the keyboard to get from the 1-25 page to the next 26-50 page. Is this my imagination? Is there a keyboard shortcut?

[Kerri]

Jane-- I'm afraid I don't know of any keyboard shortcuts for advancing through pages of search results. I did some looking out on the internet and did run across a couple of extensions for Firefox and Chrome for "endless pages" that automatically load the next page just before you reach the end so you don’t have to click “Next” or wait... but didn't find anything about keyboard shortcuts.

FastestFox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9825/

FastestChrome: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mmffncokckfccddfenhkhnllmlobdahm