Track your emails

Have you ever wanted to track emails that you have sent out of your personal email id? (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail & other free service providers). Are any of the below tracking features useful to you?

•  E-mail read Read Notification
• Duration the recipient reads your email
• Delivery Status
• Recipient Browser and Operating System
• How many times your email has been opened
• Whether your recipient is using a proxy server to hide the actual IP address.
• Find the organization name and Internet Service Provider (ISP) of recipient
• Determine whether your e-mail is being forwarded to another person
• Expiry E-mail
• Attachment and Link Tracking

Welcome to world of E-mail tracking which is a method of monitoring the status of e-mail delivery on a recipient. There are a lot of E-mail trackers available on the net, all of which work by embedding a small invisible image to your mail.

WhoReadMe is a tracker which lets you associate your existing email id and send mails from it, so that your mails always originate from the email ID you own and use. Any replies to the mails you send will therefore end up in your existing email inbox like Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail.

There are two ways to send tracked e-mail. You can login to your WhoReadMe account and send e-mail using their Website. Alternatively, you can send tracked e-mail from your favorite e-mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc... All you need is adding a suffix .whoreadme.com to your recipient e-mail address. For example, if you want to send an e-mail to maaary@example.com, the recipient address will be maaary@example.com.whoreadme.com. You do not need to install any additional software. The notifications are delivered via email and IM.

WhoReadMe lets you send 20 free email or to 20 recipients everyday.

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How much is your website worth?

Have you ever fancied finding out how much is your blog valued? You might not want to sell, but it could give an indication of the popularity of your blog / website.

Jump to http://bizinformation.org and simply enter the domain name and you will get an approximate value within seconds. The valuation is based on various statistics such as visitor count, popularity in social bookmarking sites, referrals etc. There’s also a badge feature available which will display the value directly on your site.

Just trying out with this blog and according to this site, it’s valued at $5976!

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Softwares I cannot live without

Below is my list of “Top 21 freewares”. While compiling the list have thought of categories and softwares that are essential in order for me to survive in front of a computer for a long time.

Blogging tool: Windows Live Writer

There are very few softwares from MS which have found a fan following from both pro & anti MS enthusiasts and this is one of them. Makes blogging very very easy.

Internet Browsing: Google Chrome

Redefined the meaning of “Fast Browsing”.

PDF Reader: Foxit Reader

Adobe Acrobat Reader is not the only software that can open PDF files. Foxit is a lightning fast pdf file reader.

PDF Writer: PDF Creator

Create quality PDF files from any windows application with advanced features such as copy protection, password control and others.

Text File Reader: Notepad ++

Tab windows is the life line for any multi tasking person. With syntax highlighting, auto completion, ability to add plugins, this makes text editing and programming much much easier.

Compressing software: 7-zip

Fast, light weight, and enhanced compression make it a better choice than any other software available.

File Search: Windows Search 4.0

Inbuilt in Vista & 7, and available as an addon for XP, another product from MS which does exactly what it is supposed to do. Search -> Results –> Open. Quickly. Natural search is also supported.

System Housekeeping: CCleaner

It optimizes system, removes unwanted logs, internet history, temp files and is a must for keeping any system spic and span. It saves on hard disk space and also had a registry cleaner helps in keeping the registry in top shape.

Anti spyware: Spybot Search & Destroy

An anti spyware which is still the best amongst the host of new anti spywares that crop up every single day.

File copier: Fast copy

Fastest copy / delete software on windows. Period.

Codec: K-lite

A necessity because it makes viewing of any types of media files so much easier. know know VLC player is there, but guess habits are hard to die.

File Renamer:

Lupas Rename 2000 – Has been previously reviewed over here.

FTP Client: FileZilla

Forget the command line / explorer to do file transfer.  Filezilla supports FTP, FTPS and SFTP with an intuitive graphical user interface.

Download manager: Free Download Manager

With integration support for Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, there’s no reason why one should choose ANY other download manager. I Keep trying other managers and then keep coming back to using this. Supports video downloads and increases download speed manifold.

Web content filtering: Privoxy

It’s a Web proxy based on Internet Junkbuster with advanced filtering capabilities for protecting privacy, filtering Web page content and removing ads, banners, pop-ups, and other obnoxious Internet junk.

Password Bank: Keepass

The only software that I entrust with all my passwords, except the banking ones, which continue to remain in my head ;), though there is no reason why I should not transfer it on this.

Image editor & viewer: Irfanview

The Best image viewer. Simple yet powerful. You can use this for viewing to converting to creating images. Don’t forget to download the plugins available which enhances the experience of using this masterpiece.

Music Player: Foobar 2000

An amazingly light piece of software that does best what it has to do. Play music.

Audio & Video Converter: Super

Have had a high success rate for converting multimedia files with this software. It might take some time to get used to the interface. But once you are aware of the features, it is a very powerful application. It can convert audio and video files to virtually any format. Their website has the comprehensive list of possible conversions.

Torrent: uTorrent

The homepage of this software says everything, “A Powerhouse With a Tiny Appetite”. Look forward to a future post explaining the whole torrent business, if you are not aware of what exactly is a torrent.

CD/DVD Burner: CD Burner XP

Have tried lots of softwares for burning CD / DVD. The simplicity and reliability of this one makes it a must for everybody.

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Runpee.com suggests best time to pee during a movie

Jumbo cola and a thriller / horror movie is a deadly combo. You need to control your bladder and heart from explosion.

RunPee.com comes to your assistance by letting you know the best time to break out for a pee whilst watching a movie. It also tells you what is going to happen during that 3 minute break.

They have also added an iPhone app which can be downloaded from iTunes so that you can check the break time right from the theater.

It has been developed on a very practical idea. Do you find it useful? You decide!

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Bing

Year 2009 is proving to be a good year for Microsoft. First was the awesome Windows 7 (which is there on my to-blog list) followed by it’s latest search engine Bing http://www.bing.com. With Bing, MS is seriously looking to eat into rival Google’s marketshare.  Within 10 days of it’s launch, Bing has already crossed Yahoo to  the 2nd rank in search engine marketspace.  I have already replaced Bing as my default search provider in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

To get straight to the facts. Why should you switch over to Bing?

1. Bing has come on par, if not better, with Google in terms of the interface, search results & the speed
2. Bing will display the categories, related searches and the search history on the left.

1. Bing Video search makes it possible to play videos directly on the results page and also offers a plethora of options on the target video’s duration, screensize, resolution and the source.

1. Bing’s image search displays image results on an infinite scrolling page with options to filter images by size, layout, color, style or people

1. Bing’s image search has the ability to display only wallpaper images in the image search results. This is done by searching for a term in Bing image search and clicking on the Size category in the left sidebar. It will automatically display various size filters including one called wallpaper. This will display only images that have the exact size of the computer screen resolution.
2. The parameter contains will tell the search engine to only look for websites that contain that search term

1. Bing’s Best Match & Deep Links feature is designed to make finding relevant information easier by cutting down the number of clicks and getting you to your final destination faster. Results include customer service numbers for retail sites, the ability to track a package right from the search page, deep links to common pages within the site and much more.

1. Quick Preview is an additional window that expands over a search caption to give more information about the site's relevancy

1. Instant Answers is a feature designed to provide information within the body of the search-results page.

So, are you ready to go and bing? If you want to make it the default search provider for your browser, click here.

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Wolfram|Alpha

Most of us have got accustomed to the google search engine for our daily requirements. What if there was a search engine which went a step ahead and gives you a handful of computational answers depending on your search query?

Enter Wolfram|Alpha (http://www94.wolframalpha.com). The next generation search engine which might not kill google but it is definitely an alternative to many of the questions that google does not answer at one shot.

It's a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links. Eventually you should be able to ask it about essentially any kind of systematic factual knowledge. You can get an idea of what it covers today by looking at the examples. It gives you real time answers on weather, stock quotes, time zones, all of mathematical computations, chemistry, physics, socio economic, people, culture etc..

You will get hooked onto it once you have started using it. Spent about 10 minutes on the site and found out some interesting details

• My surname is ranked 831st in the world and one in every 7133 people have this surname. So guess it’s not very uncommon.
• I’m 10,377 days old and there was only 11 hours of daylight on the day I was born.
• 1 million rupees is currently valued at $20,980.
• My country is ranked 7, 2 and 12 among the biggest countries in terms of area, population and GDP respectively.
• I’ve learnt the full native name for my country just now. Shame on me!

Stephen Wolfram and his team certainly weren’t short of humor when they built this search engine. People have been finding some interesting easter eggs within Wolfram Alpha, triggered by specific questions or events. Ben Parr has posted a collection of these which at

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/wolfram-easter-eggs/

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/better-wolfram-easter-eggs/

Would definitely recommend everybody to spend some time time on Wolfram|Alpha, go through the examples, screencast, community forum.. You will certainly learn something new every time you pay a visit.

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Free Temporary Email Address

Have you ever come across a website that required you to fillup a registration form with valid email id to give download link or software key or just to validate email before getting registered on their site?

Did any website reject your gmail, hotmail, yahoo & other free webmail id?

Do you have the necessity of creating an email id for temporary use only (say minutes or hours)?

If you have answered yes to any of the above questions, then the below websites will be very useful (in order of my personal preference). All of them provide free temporary email address.

10MinuteMail (http://www.10minutemail.com)

• Any e-mails sent to that address will show up automatically on the web page.
• You can read them, click on links, and even reply to them.
• The e-mail address will expire after 10 minutes.
• You can also extend the expiration for another 10 minutes.
• The domain names are not fixed and keep changing.

YopMail (http://www.yopmail.com)

• Lets you choose your own username @yopmail.com
• Is feature rich and has an interface similar to any other realistic webmail provider.
• Provides RSS Feeds, ability to delete mails, forward to other mail id.
• Messages are kept for 5 days.

Mailinator (http://www.mailinator.com)

• Alternate domains
• Provides RSS, widgets for checking mails
• Messages are kept for a few hours

Do not provide your personal email id for temporary or common registrations. Use a disposable email id instead.

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