Readers’ Tips Send travel directions to your phone

My job involves lots of travelling and I only recently realised you can now send directions from Google Maps on your PC to your phone as a text message or email. This is brilliant because it means I can work out my directions at home then follow them on my phone.

First, go to maps.google.co.uk on your PC, click ‘Sign in’ and log in using the email address you use on the Gmail app on your phone. Next, type your start and end points into the relevant fields, select your mode of transport, then select the route you want from the list of options. Now, click the send-to-phone icon (see screenshot below). You’ll see three options – to send the directions to your device as a notification, to send them via an email, or as a text message. The latter two options are useful because they contain links that let you navigate to those locations with one tap. I find it fiddly to open my laptop’s disc tray, so I was happy to stumble upon Nircmd – a free Nirsoft program that lets you create a desktop shortcut that will open it.

To install the program, go to www. snipca.com/23358, scroll to the bottom of the web page, then click the ‘Download Nircmd 64-bit’ link. Extract the downloaded zipped files, then drag the ‘nircmd.exe’ file to your desktop. Next, open My Computer, and check the letter of your DVD drive (usually ‘d’).

Now, right-click any blank area on your desktop, move your cursor to New, then click Shortcut. Click the Browse button, navigate to the ‘nircmd’ file on the desktop and click OK. Next add a space, then type the following line at the end of your ‘nircmd’ desktop location: nircmd.exe cdrom open d: (‘d’ stands for your DVD