Check if your email is read by you only

Idea not mine but from here and here.

by Richard M. Smith

With all of the controversy about the news that the NSA has been monitoring, since 9/11, telephone calls and email messages of Americans, some folks might now be wondering if they are being snooped on. Here's a quick and easy method to see if one's email messages are being read by someone else.
The steps are:

Set up a Hotmail account.
Set up a second email account with a non-U.S. provider. (eg. Rediffmail.com)
Send messages between the two accounts which might be interesting to the NSA.
In each message, include a unique URL to a Web server that you have access to its server logs. This URL should only be known by you and not linked to from any other Web page. The text of the message should encourage an NSA monitor to visit the URL.
If the server log file ever shows this URL being accessed, then you know that you are being snooped on. The IP address of the access can also provide clues about who is doing the snooping.
The trick is to make the link enticing enough for someone or something to want to click on it. As part of a large-scale research project, I would suggest sending out a few hundred thousand messages using various tricks to find one that might work. Here are some possible ideas:
Include a variety of terrorist related trigger words
Include other links in a message to known AQ message boards
Include a fake CC: to Mohamed Atta's old email address (el-amir@tu-harburg.de)
Send the message from an SMTP server in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
Use a fake return address from a known terrorist organization
Use a ziplip or hushmail account.
Besides monitoring the NSA, this same technique can be used if you suspect your email account password has been stolen or if a family member or coworker is reading your email on your computer of the sly.

This wouldn't actually tell you if your mail is being read, so much as
it is a way to try to get someone (or something) to add your mail to the
"watch list". It is not a good idea to try this if you hope to ever
again fly on an American airline without first being strip-searched by
the TSA monkeys.

Make Aperture run on any Mac

Run Aperture on any Mac

Partially in desperation after discovering my Mac wouldn't install or run Aperture, I figured out a solution to both and want to share it with others wanting to use Aperture on your more than a year old Mac that Apple wants you to replace.

You need HexEdit and BBEdit or TextWrangler.

To disable the installer check:
1) Create a writable image of your Aperture DVD with Disk Utility. Eject the DVD and open the image file.
2) Hit command-shift-g in Finder and enter '/Volumes/Aperture/Aperture.mpkg/Contents'
3) Open Distribution.dist in your text editor
4) Search for 'function installationCheck() {' and enter 'return true;' on the next line. Save and close the file.
5) Et voilà! Aperture now installs with any CPU/GPU.

To disable the application startup check:
1) Install Aperture (after modifying the installer script as described above)
2) Open HexEdit and browse to '/Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/'.
3) Open 'Aperture'. HexEdit saves a backup automatically to 'Aperture~' when you write changes to the file, so you don't have to worry about messing up. Be aware that HexEdit is quite buggy in 10.4. Don't click anywhere I didn't tell you to click.
4) Hit cmd+f. In the 'Find' field, enter '49 48 48 32 6D C9'. Make sure 'Matching:' is set to HEX. Hit return.
5) Click the bar of the 'Aperture - Data' window. Replace the selection with '49 48 48 32 59 59'.
6) Click the search window. Using the procedure in step 4 and 5, replace
'49 4C 48 32 6D 35' with '49 4C 48 32 58 C5'.
7) Save and close the file.
8) Done! Have fun : )

Entire Newton museum collection out for sale

Newton museum is selling their entire collection on eBay.
And I am probably happy about the fact that I don't have access to a credit card available now.

How To Know Whether Or Not You Are Ready To Have Children

Mess Test
Smear peanut butter on the sofa and curtains. Place a fish stick behind the couch and leave it there all summer.

Toy Test
Obtain a 55 gallon box of LEGOs (or you may substitute roofing tacks). Have a friend spread them all over the house. Put on a blindfold. Try to walk to the bathroom or kitchen. Do not scream because this would wake the child.

Grocery Store Test
Borrow one or two small animals (goats are best) and take them with you as you shop. Always keep them in sight and pay for anything they eat or damage.

Feeding Test
Obtain a large plastic milk jug. Fill halfway with water. Suspend from the ceiling with a cord. Start the jug swinging. Try to insert spoonfuls of soggy cereal into the mouth of the jug, while pretending to be an airplane. Now dump the contents of the jug on the floor.

Night Test
Prepare by obtaining a small cloth bag and fill it with 8-12 pounds of sand. Soak it thoroughly in water. At 3:00 p.m. begin to waltz and hum with the bag until 9:00 p.m. Lay down your bag and set your alarm for 10:00 p.m. Get up, pick up your bag, and sing every song you have ever heard. Make up about a dozen more songs and sing these too until 4:00 a.m. Set alarm for 5:00 a.m. Get up and make breakfast. Keep this up for 5 years. Look cheerful.

Ingenuity Test For School Assignments
Take an egg carton. Using a pair of scissors and pot of paint, turn it into an alligator. Now take a toilet paper tube and turn it into an attractive Christmas candle. Use only scotch tape and a piece of foil. Last, take a milk carton, a Ping-Pong ball, and an empty box of Cocoa Puffs. Make an exact replica of the Eiffel Tower.

Automobile Test
Forget the BMW and buy a station wagon. Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment. Leave it there. Get a dime. Stick it into the cassette player. Take a family size package of chocolate chip cookies, mash them into the back seat. Run a garden rake along both sides of the car. There, perfect.

Physical Test (Women)
Obtain a large bean bag chair and attach it to the front of your clothes. Leave it there for 9 months. Now, remove the beans and let the bag just hang there.

Physical Test (Men)
Go to the nearest drug store. Set your wallet on the counter. Ask the clerk to help himself. Now proceed to the nearest food store. Go to the manager's office and arrange for your paycheck to be directly deposited to the store. Purchase a newspaper. Go home and read it quietly for the last time.

Final Assignment
Find a couple who already have a small child. Lecture them on how they can improve their discipline, patience, tolerance, toilet training and child's table manners. Suggest many ways they can improve. Emphasize to them that they should never allow their children to run wild. Enjoy this experience. It will be the last time you will have all the answers.

Another hot air study

Another hot air study.

" Japanese ladies appear to simply fart for fun; with nearly half of them practically pumping their way through the first year of marriage. Equally unsettling is that a staggering 29% couldn’t even manage two years without reeling off the odd rasper."
"To finish up this item of trivia, they persuaded one of the wives who had never passed gas in front of her husband to try to do it, so their hidden cameras could capture this moment for posterior-ity…"



Well, I know a lot of people who would be very lousy Japanese housewifes.

Engineer and Management

A man in a hot air balloon realized that he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted.

"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The woman below replied. "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.

"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.

"I am," replied the woman. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is, I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."

The woman below responded, "You must be in management."

"I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is, you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, you've managed to make it my fault.

Mail.app of OS X 10.4 shows some letters garbled, e.g. instead of ä, ö, ø, å, è, é, ñ, ã, õ.

Mail.app of OS X 10.4 shows some letters garbled, e.g. instead of ä, ö, ø, å, è, é, ñ, ã, õ. The mail receiver sees letters as squares, symbols, Asian characters or other wrong encoding.

User side is often PC (Windows, Linux; Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Kmail and so on); sometimes even Mac OS X 10.4, 10.3, 10.2, 10.1, OS 9.x, 8.x.

Verify if it is caused by a bad font. Mac OS X fonts list and Turning fonts off can be useful.

Unfortunately some of the people annoyed by this are graphics and other who have a need for hundreds of fonts, and who are unwilling to find a font among hundreds or thousands to be the problem; enabling then half of the fonts back, then some more and so on until a bad one would have been identified. And in some cases the problem is not a bad font but something else.

What seems the ultimate solution - here. Just take normal Terminal or command line precaution: careful with what you type. A letter MAKES a difference.

Locate Terminal in your Applications > Utilities folder. Open it.

Enter in terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"

(including the "") and press enter.
Now it should behave correct.

Man hits 1,003,625 frequent flyer miles

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - After two months of zig-zagging across Canada by plane, frequent flyer Marc Tacchi has reached his goal of accumulating one million miles of credits -- and become something of an Internet celebrity in the process. # 2 # 3

On his blog "The Great Canadian Mileage Run 2005," Tacchi reported on Wednesday that he had racked up 1,003,625 mileage points and spent 56 of the last 61 days in an airplane.

By reaching the 1 million mile goal, Tacchi gets the equivalent of about 10 round-trip business class flights from Canada to Australia, which he has estimated would normally cost about C$70,000.

He plans to redeem his travel points to take his family to Miami at Christmas, then maybe go to Hong Kong or Thailand.

When he wasn't flying to collect travel points, Tacchi works as a contract pilot. Once a week, he flies a Boeing 747 cargo plane to Europe or Asia.


Now THAT is some serious travelling.