Get Temporary Email Addresses with Hotmail

A temporary email address could come handy in situations where you don’t want to share your primary email address because of the risk of spam.

Now there are quite a few services on the web, Mailinator and 10MinuteMail for example, that have long offered temporary email addresses for free but with certain limitations.

For example, these services provide receive-only inboxes so you can’t send email to someone using your temporary address. Second, these addresses auto-expire after a certain time and then you may have to generate a new one. Finally, we don’t have much of a clue about the companies that run these services and their privacy policies.

If you have been looking for a more reliable temporary email service but without any limitations, it’s time to log in to your old Hotmail account at mail.live.com.

Microsoft has added a new feature in Windows Live Hotmail that will let you create aliases for your main email address and the good part is that all these aliases can be managed though the same Inbox. Google Apps also supports email aliases but not Gmail.

I really like the way they have implemented aliases in Hotmail (see the video above). All incoming email for an alias gets stored in a separate folder, outside your main Inbox, and if you are getting too much spam for an alias, simply delete it from your account.

You may associate up to five different aliases with your Hotmail account.

Technically, this is quite similar to creating a new Gmail account that auto-forwards to your main Inbox and then you set up a filter for routing those messages. However, for people who aren’t that technically inclined, Hotmail’s approach is a winner.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/temporary-email/18632/

Clean Up the Right-Click Menu in Windows

The context menu in Windows, the thing that pops-ups when you right-click anywhere on your desktop or inside Windows Explorer, is often misused by software vendors. They keep adding useless options to that menu without asking and the more programs you install on your machine, the more confusing your context menu will become (see example).

Fortunately, there are several free utilities that you may use to clean up your Windows Context Menu by removing all the unnecessary entries that you no longer need.

The most popular option is ShellExView, a tool that scans your Windows registry and displays a comprehensive list of every single shell extension that’s installed in your Windows. Sort this list by “Type” and focus on items that have “Context Menu” as the Type. You can disable any of the items you no longer use with a simple click.

A problem with ShellExView is that is too geeky a tool for most average PC users. Another good option is Context Menu Editor – this program was written for older versions of Windows but it works just fine on Windows 7.

With Context Menu Editor, you can easily remove links to any of the programs – like WinZip, your Virus Scanner, etc. - from the Window Context Menu. The only downside is that these changes are permanent and you can’t add the removed items back into the menu.

My next recommendation is FileMenu Tools – it lets you remove items from the context menu but if you change your mind later, you can always re-enable them. Open the program, switch to the “Commands of other Applications” tab and prune all the useless stuff. The same tool can also be used for de-cluttering the SendTo menu.

Both Context Menu Editor and FileMenu Tools make changes to your Windows registry and you therefore need to run them as administrator else they won’t be able to save your changes.

How to Test your Eyes Online

They say that you should get your eyes checked every two years but if haven’t had the chance to see a doctor all this time, you can test your vision on your computer as well.

Of course these self eye tests are no substitute for visiting your doctor but if you follow the steps well, you may get some idea about how good (or bad) your vision is.

The Snellen Eye Chart

Most of us are familiar with the Snellen Chart that is made of rows of alphabets of different sizes – you read these letters from a distance, usually twenty feet, and the smallest row that you can recognize accurately indicates whether you have normal vision or not.

The various eye testing tools that are available online make use of the same Snellen chart.

Test your Eyesight Online

You should start with University at Buffalo's IVAC tool. Use a physical ruler to measure the length of the line on the screen (the length will vary depending on your screen resolution). Also measure the distance of your eyes from the computer screen. Now read the row of letters on the screen and press ‘smaller’ to display more rows in decreasing sizes.

While performing the test, you need to cover one eye and when you have read all the characters from top-to-bottom, read them again but cover the other eye this time. When you can no longer read the letters, stop!

Another Flash based eye testing tool is hosted on thinkquest.org – this can work accurately only with computer monitors that are either 15”, 17” or 19” in size. Stand four feet from the screen and then follow the on-screen instructions. When the characters are no longer readable, hit the stop button and it will display your visual acuity.

Finally, if you are looking for more DIY solution, try this. Open the Snellen Chart image on your computer screen and measure the size of the big letter E using a ruler. Multiply that number by 2.838 and stand that far from the screen while taking the test. Now try reading the different letters, top to bottom, to check your vision.

A Simple Way to Protect Images from ‘Casual Copying’

If you don’t want other people to download images from your website, don’t put them online because – the way the web works - it is almost impossible to prevent someone from copying or saving your images.

However there’s one little trick that may discourage the less-technical people from casually copying, or even hot-linking, to your web images. To give you an example, try saving thefollowing image to your computer using the standard “save as” option.

The “save picture” option under right-click is still available for the above image but instead of downloading the actual photograph, all it would save is a blank image. Also, the URL for the image (under Properties) would appear as some junk characters (it’s called a data URI) and thus would deter the non-techies from hotlinking to that image.

Here’s how you may implement something similar for your own images:

The standard embed code for an image looks something like this:

<img src="photograph.jpg" width="500" height="250">

What you need to do is change the value of the src attribute to point to a blank image and then add a new style attribute to render the actual image. Also make sure that the value of the height and the width parameters are exactly the same as the actual image.

<img style="background-image:url(photograph.jpg);"
     src="data:image/gif;base64,
     R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw=="
     width="500" height="250">

This is like overlaying a completely transparent screen over your photograph and anyone trying to save the image will end up downloading that screen instead of the image.

Obviously, there are simple workarounds to get around the above method. For instance, a copy of the full image will still be available in your browser’s cache. You may look at the HTML source or may even save the image using screen capture but again, these techniques may not always be known to the non-technical users of your website.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/protect-photos-from-copying/19992/

Google Chrome is now Bundled with Adobe Reader

Not long ago, the Google Toolbar was bundled with some popular software programs including Skype, Adobe Reader, Real Player, WinZip and more.

Next on the bundled software list is probably Google Chrome. If you are on the Adobe.com website to download Adobe Reader X, you may also be prompted to install the Google Chrome browser on your computer (screenshot).

This looks a strange combination to me for one very-obvious reason.

A majority of people could be using Adobe Reader primarily for viewing PDF files on their computer but the newer versions of Google Chrome include a built-in PDF viewer by default. Would people still want to install Adobe Reader on their machines when they’ve already got Chrome, courtesy Adobe?

Yes, Adobe Reader is a more powerful and capable software that Chrome’s PDF viewer but for reading simple PDFs, wouldn’t the latter tool just suffice?

http://www.labnol.org/software/chrome-with-adobe-reader/20123/