Handy Household Tip: Stop the Jingling

Zipper with
shrink tubing

Like many people I have several nylon bags with metal zippers. They're light, they work well and if they're good quality they're near indestructible. But they jingle. Those metal zipper "handles" rattle against each other and against the zipper, creating a jolly jingling sound that gets amazingly annoying after a while. A backpack with three or four zippers makes you sound like a cat with a bell around its neck.

Here's an easy solution: Take a piece of heat shrink tubing (everyone's got that at home, right?), and stick a piece on each handle. If you've got one of those heat-shrink tube sets with tubing of different sizes you're bound to have a piece of large-diameter tubing that you have little use for. It doesn't work completely - the handles still rub against their own fasteners - but it cuts don on the noise a lot. As a bonus they become much easier to grip, and if you're feeling particularly hipsterish you can get tubing in various colors instead of plain black.