Spambox.us

One thing most people have aside from 2 credit cards (or more) is 2 email addresses (also maybe more). For myself, I have 3 email addresses. Hotmail for personal, Gmail as a online storage and Mailcity as a dummy account (you won’t believe the amount of crap that gets send to the last one). Here’s a screenie.

Alot of us have had to register at various sites in order to;

1. view contents,

2. download stuff,

3. get redirected to another site (some won’t even tell that you need to subscribe but harvest your email anyway – damn them).

Being in the ‘business’ of evaluating softwares, I get my fair share and needless to say, suffer through the inevitable spam that follows. I’d normally enter a dud email address (eg. someone@somewhere.net) to see what the registration wizard does. If it’s a harvest attempt then they can very well have my dud email. If not, then I’ll have to re-register again as the first time confirmation was sent to the dud email account. (Nevertheless, spam still arrive at my dummy account and I had to purge it weekly).

I can cut down the number of steps considerably by using a service provided by Spambox which essentially creates a temporary email inbox and then forwards all mails that goes there to your regular inbox - till the time you specified expires and the temporary inbox gets purged (Spammer will now receive a bounce notification of a non-existing mailbox ). This might be especially helpful if you’re registering at a site that needs to be finalized with a user-action confirmation email. Just set your Spambox time limit for a day, get confirmed, and your record is wiped clean when your temporary mailbox is purged after a day.

http://spambox.us/

Spherebox

Joined Spherebox as a contributor beginning of this week (via invite from Shockw@ve). Go here for info on what Spherebox is about.

Two of my software reviews only available at that site at the moment are:

1. Review of Ghostzilla Web Browser
2. Review of Windows Live Write Beta

Head on over if you wanna read it and lend your support.

Encrypt with Truecrypt

Today we’ll go over a simple way to encrypt sensitive files on your hard disk, external hard disk, usb thumbdrive and CD. TrueCrypt is a free, open source encryption application that works on Windows and Linux. It creates a virtual hard drive in the form of a single file that will read and write encrypted files on the fly.

1. Download TrueCrypt, install and launch.

2. Select “Create Volume” which will launch a walkthrough wizard. Choose “Create a Standard TrueCrypt Volume” and select Next. Hit the “Select File” (it really should be called “Create File” actually) button and navigate to a location to create your virtual encrypted drive file – which is really a file that acts like an encrypted folder. Type a name for it. I’ve created it in “C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\My Documents\stuff.ben”. try to pick a non-important filename (naming it private or encrypted will only make people more curious). your file can have any or no extension (i made mine *.ben). Hit Next.

3. Choose an encryption algorithm from the dropdown box. Next. Choose the size of the virtual encrypted drive file. You have to comit to a size (realize that it’s non-growable and regardless of how many files you throw inside, it will always show that size.Next.

4. Choose a password. If you don’t choose a badass 20-in-length alphanumeric password, TrueCrypt will complain, but you can choose to accept your wussy password as well .

5. Format the virtual encrypted drive file. (Don’t worry, you’re not formatting your hard drive but preparing the virtual encrypted drive file.) This is where the coolness factor comes in, TrueCrypt gathers random information from your system like the location of your mouse pointer to incorporate into the encryption algorithm. Done. Exit or create another…

6. Now you’ve got a virtual encrypted drive file, you need to mount it to use it. Choose “Select File” and navigate to the location in which you created it. Select an available drive letter from the list and then hit the “Mount” button, and enter the password.

7. The virtual encrypted drive will be mounted. Go to My Computer and listed alongside all the other drives on your computer, there will be a new one listed corresponding to the drive letter you selected. Drag and drop all your sensitive data to this drive and work from it as if you would any other disk.
8. Once you’re finished working with the data, in TrueCrypt, select the mounted drive and hit “Dismount”. The drive will no longer be available and it’s now totally encrypted.

How to use it on your external hard disk & USB thumbdrive.
TrueCrypt does need not be installed to work. Just dump truecrypt.exe, truecrypt.sys, and your virtual encrypted drive onto a tumbdrive or external hard disk. On the move, just stick it in any computer, launch truecrypt.exe, and browse to your virtual encrypted volume.

How to use it on a CD.
The cool part about using a CD is you can use the autorun function to launch truecrypt.exe whenever you pop it into a CD-ROM drive (unless autorun has been disabled on the machine). To create an autorun file, open a notepad and insert these lines:

[autorun]
OPEN=truecrypt.exe

and save it as Autorun.inf.

Burn truecrypt.exe, truecrypt.sys, your virtual encrypted drive and the Autorun.inf file to your CD root. The uncool part? it’s read only (naturally being a CD-ROM).

AccidentCam™…made by malaysians for malaysians :)

how many times have we experienced the traffic jams caused by an auto accident not because of the accident itself but because of the gawking drive-by onlookers? pretty normal occurance in malaysia no matter which state you’re from. call it curious, call it malaysians fascination with gore, call it ‘kaypohchee‘, it’s a fact of life in malaysia. You hear radio annoucements (to move on and don’t stop) and jokes (alex yoong and him slowing down when there’s a crash at the race) about it.

We have products designed “by gamers for gamers” and smart tags (the toll ePayment contactless drive-through system), so along the same line, I now introduce you to a device that would hopefully ease the accident-related traffic congestion the next time an accident happens – the AccidentCam™. With 8x zoom, full spectrum low light mode down to 0.05lux, linux-embeded computerized item-focused & tracking, motorized pan/tilt (200°/70°) 100/s rotating base, 10″ LCD screen HUD, and options of velcro straps, you don’t have to slow down to ‘enjoy coverage’ of the accidents on the affected lane ever again.

The AccidentCam™

Simply mount the device (on your dashboard, roof or wherever you think will get the best view). Direct the camera as you’re coming up the the vehicle(s) involved in the accident (the only interaction needed from you to power up the AccidentCAM™ and start the sequence), and let the embedded computer take over. AccidentCAM™ then uses it’s item-focus lock-on to the spot (targeting is shown on the 10″ LCD HUD) and the camera starts capturing “the moment”. the camera even rotates the full 200° arc to capture the scene as you drive past. you can later review the footage by interfacing it with your personal computer. The joy is in the unlimmited replays, zooming, sharing it with your like-minded malaysian friends and family, and not missing the minute details as you ‘relive’ the accident at the comforts of your own couch.

object-focused targeting & tracking view from the 10″ LCD HUD.

Get your AccidentCam™ today and never miss an accident, no accident-gawking-related-jams, never needing to shift gears to slow down and never being too late to jot down that license plate number to punter at your local 4D/Magnum shop. Now how cool is that? Retailing now at RM299.99 at wherever they’re selling one.

Next up: MatRempitCAM Edition by the same people that brought you Crittercam. Designed by NatGeo in association with Putera Umno chairperson Abdul Azeez Abdul Rahim .

file defraggers

Contig from SysInternal is a handy app that lets you do a defragmentation on a single file(or flies) but don’t want to bother running the Windows defragger and waiting overnight for it to finish. Usefull for those who are continiously working on big files. eg. compressing/uncompressing those rar01, rar02 files from bit torrent or adding/removing files to those iso files.

Download from here.

To defrag registry hives, pagefiles and other files that are being locked-down for exclusive access, PageDefrag (also from SysInternal), is the app I recommend.

Download from here