Wednesday, March 28, 2012


Can Google Employees Read your Gmail?

All your private emails are stored in Gmail. Can Google employees working on the Gmail product read your messages?
gmail logo
All your private and confidential emails are stored in your Gmail mailbox but are they secure? Can a Google employee working on the Gmail product read your messages?
In theory, the answer could be yes. Christopher Nguyen, who was earlier responsible for Google Apps operations at Google, shared this on Quora:
A small number of GMail related engineers have access to the servers as a matter of necessity to do their jobs; a very small number of people actually access the contents as a matter of necessity to do their jobs, and even then, almost always only the associated metadata.
The rest have to file a request and justify any access they ever need, which is extremely rare. All have to sign paperwork re users’ privacy at the risk of dismissal & legal action, knowing that whatever they do is discoverable. And ultimately, an internal culture of respecting users’ privacy helps keep one another in check.
Google also serves contextual text ads in Gmail and these ads are triggered based on the content of the email message that your currently reading. Obviously it is the bots that are scanning your Gmail messages for relevant keywords but Microsoft, with a hope that some Gmail users will shift to Hotmail, is using this point to target Google on privacy.
Some email services, like Gmail, actually read the contents of your mail (both sent and received, even if you aren’t a Gmail user but just sending to someone who is) in order to decide what kind of ads to serve up to you. They may call it “scanning” and attempt to equate it with less invasive activities like “checking for spam” but it’s quite different. For you, and the people you send mail to, it’s not spam, it’s personal.
Microsoft has also released a video, titled the Gmail Man, highlighting this Gmail behavior. Microsoft uploaded the video to YouTube, a platform owned by Google, and it isn’t therefore surprising that the video has garnered more dislikes than likes – after all, most YouTube users are also Gmail users and they aren’t buying Microsoft’s argument.
Thankyou@dattu

Access Your Orkut Account from Facebook, Write Scraps and more


Something very interesting for web users who are active on both Facebook and Orkut.
You can now easily integrate your Orkut account with your Facebook profile courtesy a new Orkut app for Facebook that's not developed by Google but an Amazon employee -Jeetu Mirchandani.
add orkut to facebook
The best part about the Orkut Application is that you need not supply your Google Account or password, just type the full URL of your Orkut Profile and that's sufficient to bring your Orkut data into Facebook.
Once you add the application, you can read the Orkut scrapbook of anyone, write new scraps, browse photos uploaded by other Orkut friends and more.
Add Orkut to Facebook here - you won't feel the need to visit Orkut.com as this Facebook app will let you do everything with Orkut without leaving Facebook.
And it's a good way to expose your community of Orkut friends to Facebook friends (and vice-versa). Facebook friends, who are not on Orkut, can know about your Orkut community without ever visiting that site. They can also view the Photos and Videos that you have shared on Orkut. How much fun.
access orkut in facebook
Read some workarounds on how to access Orkut, Facebook and other restricted websitesat school or work.
Imagine what happens to Facebook traffic if someone develops a similar Facebook app for the MySpace crowd. You can already check your GMail email message inside Facebook using FMail app.
thankyou@dattu

Modify PDF Documents without Adobe Acrobat

edit pdf documents with acrobat alternativesSince Adobe PDF is an output format, you cannot edit or recreate the PDF file unless the source documents are available.
Agree, Adobe Acrobat does allow you apply numerous modifications to your existing PDF documents (like editing text, changing font attributes, inserting images and more), Acrobat is an extremely expensive software.
If you are on a budget and wish to edit PDF documents without Acrobat, the easiest option is to make edits in the original document itself and recreate the PDF using Google Docs or any of the free PDF writers.
When that is is not an option because you don't have the PDF source files, the PDFill PDF Editor (link) can help you manipulate PDF documents though it may work with password protected PDFs.
edit pdf files 
The PDF Editor is freeware and lets you make basic changes to PDF files - you can reorder the sequence of pages, crop a PDF page, add text information in header and footer, add image stamps or even merge multiple PDFs into one.
PDFill PDF editor is still limited like it won't let you edit that phone number or address in the PDF - another option is to download a trial version of Adobe Acrobat Professional - it works like a charm for 30 days.

Thankyou@dattu

How to Reduce the File Size of Google Fonts for your Website

Google Fonts make web pages look beautiful but external fonts can also increase the page load time of your website. Learn how to reduce the size of Google font files.
Google Fonts
Google Fonts is a collection of open fonts that you can use in your websites, documents and other design projects without any restrictions around licensing.
It takes a single line of code to embed any of the Google Font families into your website design. Just substitute the font family in the following code (line #2) with the name of Google Font and copy-paste it inside the <head> tag of your HTML template.
<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=GOOGLE_FONT_FAMILY_NAME" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Page Speed and Google Web Fonts

While Google Fonts can make your website look good, there’s one related problem – they increase the page load time of your website because the font files have to downloaded on the visitor’s computer and some of them, like the Cabin Sketch font, can exceed 100 KB in size.
There is however an easy workaround to help you reduce the file size of the Google Fonts so that they do not reduce the load time of a web page. Instead of using the entire Google font family, you can specify a limited set of letters or digits that are used in your text and Google will dynamically generate a new font file containing only the requested characters.

How to Reduce the Size of Google Font Files

All you have to do is add a new text parameter to the Google font request URL and value of this parameter will have all the letters that you need.
For instance, if I need to render the text Digital Inspiration in Cabin Sketch font, the modified CSS requesting the Google font file will look something like this:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cabin+Sketch&text=DigitalInspiration' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' />
The original Google font file was around 101 kb but with this limited text, the font file is reduced to 7.6 KB.
google_fonts_characters
Google Fonts are commonly used to render the text of logos and and headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.) on a web page so you can modify the CSS accordingly. Alternatively, if you wish to request all alphabets and numerals in the Google Font but none of the extra glyphs, your font CSS will looking something like this:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cabin+Sketch&text=1234567890ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz%20' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' />
The font file in this case is 37 KB in size and that’s still 64% lower than the original Google font file. Also, if you are wondering why I have included %20 in the text list, it represents the encoded space character. Similarly, you can add %27 and %22 to the list for single quote (‘) and double quote (") respectively.
Thankyou@dattu

Tuesday, March 27, 2012


Monitor your Website’s Uptime with Google Docs

Do you wish to receive an email alert as soon as your site is down? You can use Google Docs to monitor your site's uptime and downtime without any limits.
Do you have a website? Would you like to receive alerts on your email address as soon as your site goes down or becomes inaccessible to users?
You can either subscribe to one of these website monitoring services to track your site’s uptime (and downtime) or you can build your own site monitor with the help of Google Docs. The one big advantage with Google Docs is that it can be configured to check your website status every minute and thus you’ll instantly know if your site is down. And it’s free.
Website Monitor - Logs

Website Monitoring with Google Docs

It will take a minute to configure Google Docs as an uptime monitor for your website.
  1. Assuming that you are signed-in to your Google Account, click here to make a copy of the Google Docs sheet.
  2. Put your website’s URL in cell E3 and your email address in cell E5. This is the address where you wish to receive notifications for downtime and uptime.
  3. Go to Tools –> Script Editor –> Resources –> Current Script’s Triggers and set a Time-Driven trigger for every minute (or 5 minutes).
  4. Save the Trigger and Google Docs will show a big red warning asking for authorization. Just accept it and Save the trigger again.
That’s it. The Google Docs sheet will monitor your website in the background at all times and will send an email alert whenever it has trouble accessing the website. If the issue is resolved, you’ll get another notification saying “all’s well.”
Also, the downtime details (including the server responses) are logged in the Google Docs sheet itself so you can later analyze the downtime in greater detail. You can browse the source code to understand how monitoring works behind the scenes.
One more thing. If you know a bit of programming, create a new Twitter appspecifically for tracking your site’s uptime and Google Docs can then alert you through tweets and SMS text messages if your site is having problems.
Thankyou@dattu

Monday, March 26, 2012


How Google Policies & Principles Will Directly Effect the User .

GOOGLE STORES THESE INFORMATION ON YOU:

Acc. to new Policies Google is  collecting the information about the services that we use and how you use them, like when you visit a website that uses our advertising services or you view and interact with our ads and content. This information includes:


Device information
We may collect device-specific information (such as your hardware model, operating system version, unique device identifiers, and mobile network information including phone number). Google may associate your device identifiers or phone number with your Google Account.


Log information
When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we may automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This may include: details of how you used our service, such as your search queries. telephony log information like your phone number, calling-party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls. Internet protocol address. Device event information such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and referral URL. cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your Google Account.


Location information
When you use a location-enabled Google service, we may collect and process information about your actual location, like GPS signals sent by a mobile device. We may also use various technologies to determine location, such as sensor data from your device that may, for example, provide information on nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers.

Source : (https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/)

Thankyou@dattu

Sunday, March 25, 2012


A Simple Way to Protect Images from ‘Casual Copying’

Learn about a simple trick that may prevent people from casually copying or even hotlinking to images and photographs hosted on your website.
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 the following 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.

Thankyou@dattu

How to Remove Passwords from your PDF Files

Are you looking for a free tool that can remove password protection from your PDF files?
You have a bunch of PDF files on your computer that are protected by a long and complex password. You know the passwords but it still feels inconvenient and boring typing them each time you have to open a PDF file.
Is there a tool available that can remove password protection from PDF files? Someone asked me this question on Twitter the other day and the answer is obviously yes.
pdf password

Removing Password from a PDF File

There’s a free Windows utility called BeCyPDFMetaEdit that can help you remove passwords from PDF files* but without make any other change to the document. (I am not sure why the developers picked such a complex name for this useful utility).
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Launch the program and it will ask your for the location of the PDF file.
2. Before you select and open the PDF, change the mode to “Complete Rewrite.”
3. Switch to the Security tab and set the “Security System” to “No encryption.” Click the Save button and your PDF will no longer require a password to open.
Thankyou@dattu

HTTPS and VPN Explained in Simple English

Google has added a couple of short and useful videos that explain technical jargon like HTTPS, VPN, WPA (for secure Wi-Fi) in simple English.
You know that HTTPS (Secure HTTP) and VPN (Virtual Private Network) are a more secure way to browse the web but what exactly happens behind the scenes when you use either of these options? Why do you need to use a VPN when you have already turned on HTTPS?
The Privacy Team at Google has recently added a couple of short and useful videos toYouTube that try to explain technical jargon like HTTPS, VPN, WPA (for secure Wi-Fi) in simple English and why these are important. Take a look.
HTTPS in Simple English
VPN in Simple English
The basic idea is that you encrypt traffic between your computer and the web server so that eavesdroppers cannot see any of that information. HTTPS will only encrypt traffic between your browser and a particular website while VPN will encrypt all traffic between your computer and the Internet.
ThankYou@dattu

How to Choose a Perfect Picture for your Social Profile

Advice and tips on how you can choose a perfect profile picture for your social profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks.


This excellent presentation from Social Media Hive offers useful advice and tips on what factors should you consider before choosing a profile picture for your social profiles.
The presentation primarily focuses on picking a profile picture for Twitter but there’s no reason why you cannot apply the same guidelines to your other online profiles be it Facebook, Skype, YouTube or the new Google+.
The characteristics of a good profile picture, according to the presentation, are:
1. You should be recognizable in an instant (use close up shots).
2. Use a smiling shot as people are more likely to connect with you then.
3. Illustrations as profile pictures are fine but avoid using cartoon characters as that will make your profile appear less-professional.
All social sites require profile pictures of different sizes and they may resize your picture, thus degrading quality, if you upload one of a different size. It may therefore be a good idea to crop pictures yourself before putting them online and here’s a good tool for doing that.
profile_pictures
Thankyou@dattu

A Search Engine for Programmers

If you are a programmer /developer who often shuffles between writing code in multiple languages, check this search engine for all programming related documentation.
If you are a programmer or a web developer who often needs to shuffle between writing code in multiple languages, check out searchco.de – this is an instant search engine for all programming related documentation and nothing else.
You type a function name and searchco.de will pull a list of all languages where that function is available along with the syntax and description. Alternately, you may prefix the function name with the language name – like php delete – to limit your search results to a particular language.
In addition to regular programming languages, searchco.de also indexes documentation for Windows and Linux commands.
However, if you are looking to search for code snippets or to debug problems in your existing code, Google’s Code Search is still your best friend. You can even find code using regular expressions, a feature that is not available inside Google’s web search.
Google Code Search is part of Google Labs so am not too sure if it will survive once Google retires the Labs section altogether.
code snippet search
Thankyou@dattu

How to Check Multiple Gmail Accounts Automatically

Learn how you can automatically log in to multiple Gmail accounts and check all your mailboxes simultaneously.
gmail accountsIf you have multiple email accounts on Gmail – say one for your personal emails and other for your business – you don’t have to log out of one email account to check the other mailbox.
Google, as most would probably know, allowsmultiple sign-in so you can easily log in to two or more Gmail accounts simultaneously inside the same browser. And this works with Google Apps accounts as well.
There’re however some limitations here. One, if you sign-out of one Google Account, you will automatically get logged out from all your other Gmail / Google Accounts as well. Second, if you are launching a new browser session, you’ll have to log in to all your Gmail accounts separately because you can switch from one account to another.

Alternate Approach – Sign-in once for all your Gmail Accounts

Let’s say you have three Gmail accounts – one is your primary account that you need to check throughout the day while the other two email accounts aren’t that important.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just log into your main Gmail account and automatically get signed into all your other Gmail accounts as well but without having to type the login credentials of any of those accounts? The trick is really simple.
Gmail offers a useful feature called Email Delegation where you can share your inbox with other people (say your spouse) but without revealing your password. Once you delegate your Gmail account to someone, they get instant read-write access to your mailbox and they get signed in to your Gmail account as soon as they sign in to their own Google account.
If you apply the Email Delegation facility to your own Gmail accounts, you can check all your mailboxes by simply logging into your primary Gmail account. Here’s how:
Sign-in to one of your secondary Gmail accounts and go to Mail Settings –> Accounts –> Grant Access to your account (screenshot). Choose “Add another Account” and specify your primary Gmail email address here. You’ll now get a confirmation email (screenshot) in your primary mailbox. Accept the request and repeat these steps for all your other Gmail accounts.
That’s it. Once you sign-in to your main Gmail account, you also check all your secondary email accounts by choosing the “Switch Account” option in the upper left corner of your Gmail window. There’s absolutely no need to manually sign in to any of the other email accounts.
gmail delegate
Should you use email delegation instead of multiple sign-in? It depends.
This delegation option is only limited to Gmail so while you can check your email account from another Google account, you would still need to sign-in to access your Google Docs, Calendar, Google Plus and other Google products.
Second, while multiple sign-ins allow you to check a Gmail account from a Google Apps account, delegation would only let you share your mailbox with accounts withing the same organization (i.e. email with the same domain name).
Thankyou@dattu

Where do Messages Disappear in Facebook and Why?

Are you not getting messages or emails in Facebook? Check the Other folder and the missing messages could well be hiding there.
Your friends, friends of friends and everyone else on Facebook can quickly send you a message by hitting the Messages button on your Facebook profile. Outsiders, or people who are not on Facebook yet, can also message you on Facebook by simply sending an email to your not-so-secret* @facebook.com email address.
facebook messages

The Problem with Facebook Messages

When you get a new message in your Facebook Inbox, Facebook will send a copy of that message to your main email account, you’ll get a text on your mobile and the Messages icon in Facebook will shown the “unread count” as in the above screenshot.
However, there’s one little thing you should know.
Facebook only offers notifications for messages that are coming from friends, friends of friends or from people with whom you have exchanged messages in the past.
All other messages go straight into the “Other” sub-folder and this folder is only visible when you click the Messages link in the left sidebar. The more surprising part is that the “unread mail” indicator won’t offer any hint even when you have new messages in this “other” folder.
Thus, if you would not like to miss messages from people with whom you are not connected on Facebook or messages coming from external email addresses, the only solution is that you keep checking the messages folder regularly because the message could be silently waiting for you in the “other” folder.
This behavior has been around ever since Facebook introduced Messages (see video) but looks like quite a few of us have noticed it only recently so probably worth mentioning again.
[*] Anyone can easily determine your Facebook email address from the URL of your Facebook profile. If the profile URL is facebook.com/xyz, your email address is xyz@facebook.com.

Thankyou@dattu