I have become a big fan of opening some of my most used web services/applications in my browser sidebar after starting to use a widescreen monitor. It gives me good use of the extra space I have in the browser with most sites I frequent being fixed width and don’t really have to be as wide as the monitor.

Here are a few things I open in a sidebar right now:

• Open Google Calendar in browser sidebar
• Open Google Docs in browser sidebar
• Open Remember the Milk in browser sidebar

Open Google Talk Gadget in Sidebar

I have been using the Gchat within Gmail for a while now. I have the Faviconize tab Firefox Extension and the Gmail Favicon Alerts Greasemonkey script to get the Firefox tab flashing when there is activity in Gchat. But, I would have to either keep my eye on the tabs (I tend to have a dozen open) or miss someone’s IM for a while until I go back into Gmail.

I recently came across a cool bookmarklet for Google Talk gadget and figured I could use that to open the gadget in my browser sidebar. I love this as the Google Talk gadget offers a few more options than the Gchat in Gmail. You get a ‘Call’, ‘Group Chat’ & offline message (Gchat goes to compose window when a contact is offline) with Google Talk gadget. Plus, chat sessions with different contacts appear in neat tabs. When you get a new message, it creates an easy to notice yellow message blurb even if you are on a different tab.

Also, you get to see your contact’s profile picture in the gadget if they have one.

Here is how you do it:

1. Drag this link to your browser bookmark bar GoogleTalk! OR right click and copy the location and save it as a bookmark
2. Right click on the saved bookmark and open Properties
3. Choose ‘open in sidebar’ option (Firefox & smiliar browsers.. not sure if it’ll work in IE)

That’s it! In Firefox, you can use F4 to toggle the GTalk gadget sidebar window. (Update: This is true only if you are using All-In One Sidebar Firefox extension as that gives you a hotkey to toggle sidebar)

I realize this post isn’t for everyone but with wide-screen monitors replacing the regular ones, I figured you might find it useful.

I love to find new things and would love to hear how you go about using Gchat/GTalk. I am sure this is not the only way and I am always open to new ideas.

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Can you spot a fake email when you see one? Especially, one that might be trying to steal your PayPal login information.

Here is an email that I received, at first look, from PayPal. It warns me if i didn’t sign in and update my billing information, my account might even be deleted!

As authentic as the email might seem - notice the phishing attacks are getting better, the English isn’t as broken as we would see, there is a big giveaway if you know what you are looking for.

Clue #1:

Look at the URL of the link they want you to click in the email. It is made to look like a AOL.com address but all they are doing is using aol.com to redirect it to a IP address which has paypal.com word in the url.

Clue #2:

If you failed to sense something is amiss in the link, you can still spot a major flaw. After you click on the link in the email, if you looked at the Location bar in your browser, you’ll see the url as http://201.155.199.155/icons/www.paypal.com/managament/cgi/. But, look how identical the web page looks like compared to an original PayPal page.

The URL shows that it isn’t a paypal.com address you are at. You are at some other server that has the words paypal.com in it’s URL. This should send a big red warning signal to you. IP location software points this server to be located at Cordoba, Mexico.

Once you have missed the second clue, it is very hard to turn back after that because they have copied everything from the real Paypal login page except they have their own PHP script behind the login form. All the links in the fake page actually point to the PayPal’s website as is common in most phishing sites.

Here is the fake PayPal login page:

(fake PayPal login page)

Here is the actual PayPal login page:

(actual PayPal login page)

Once you enter your login credentials and hit Login, you have just given access to your PayPal account to someone else.

Clue #3:

There is another subtle clue that may not be apparent. The page has some extra characters that is totally out of place but hard to spot. I don’t know if it’s a typo or carelessness or if it’s a code for the phishers but mostly likely a typo.

How can you protect yourself from phishing attempts?

You might not be using PayPal but there are many phishing attempts everyday at many financial websites such as Bank websites, Credit Card websites, etc. And it will pay to be careful when you access your accounts from emails such as this.

Here are a few things you could do to protect yourself:

• Look for the clues mentioned above and as you can see they are nothing special but just common sense.
• If you really believe the email could be a real one, just login to the website from your own bookmark to the website or by typing the web address in the browser instead of clicking the link in the email. By practicing this all the time, you wouldn’t even be vulnerable for that one time when you might be tired or not so alert or sleepy and click the link in an email.
• Use a secure browser such as Mozilla Firefox, which has a phishing filter and shows a warning when you access a known phishing site. Internet Explorer 7 and newer browsers also have a similar feature so it pays to upgrade your IE 5/6 to newer versions.

If you are Internet savvy, this is all too familiar to you. But, we all know someone who may be unaware that such attempts are made everyday and we should try to educate them so they won’t be caught unawares.

Update: 6/24

I received a second PayPal phishing attempt and you can read it about it now.

Welcome to ShanKri-la’s Reference page.

This will be an evolving list of links to websites, services, tutorials, tips, guides, manuals, resources that I use or find useful. It does not contain referral links and if I add it in the future, it will say so.

Consider this to be my ultra-filtered, no BS, premium bookmarks.

Updated: Oct 06 2007

Browsing | Getting Things Done | Finance |Firefox | Photo | Telephony | Webmaster | WordPress

Browsing

• PopURLs - One page for all major headlines, pics and videos. An excellent time sink.
• StumbleUpon - A wonderful place to discover new sites of interest.
• Sputtr - Search multiple sites from here.

Getting Things Done

• Remember the Milk - Great online task management application.
• d-cubed - A GTD web application based on TiddlyWiki concept.
• TiddlySpot - A hosted place for a variety of TiddlyWiki’s like d-cubed, MonkeyGTD, etc.

Firefox

• Top Firefox Extensions - A categorized list of top Firefox extensions compiled by truly yours.

Finance

• Wesabe - Online web 2.0 money management.
• Mint - Another excellent online web 2.0 money management application.

Photo

• Flickr - sharing and storage
• PhotoBucket - sharing and storage
• iStockPhoto, Yotofoto, Stock.Xchng - if you are looking for royalty free images for blogging

Telephony

• Free 411 - Google’s free 411 service. Get text message with directions to your mobile.
• GrandCentral - One number for life (recently acquired by Google)
• Jajah - Dial-around service. 3 cent international calls.

Webmaster

• Google Analytics homepage - Get snazzy reports and graphs of your website traffic.
• Google Webmaster Guidelines - Guidelines for a webmaster from the big G.
• Google Webmaster Tools homepage - Submit your sitemap, robots.txt and view your site indexing stats, etc.
• MyIPNeighbors - If you are shared hosting, view your ip neighbors.
• Collection of robots.txt files - From Daily Blog tips. Good starting point.
• Text Link Checker - Check your site for links to nad neighborhoods.
• Website Grader - A quick tool to analyze your website.
• Xinu - Look at a wide variety of stats in one cool interface. (Xinu project)

WordPress

• Adding a Sitemap to your Blog - by Garry Conn
• Global Variables and the WordPress Loop - For Wordpress hacks
• Separating Comments & Trackbacks - WordPress Hack

Without a doubt, one of the most exciting moments in the gadget world is today’s Apple iPhone launch. Scores of people across the United States are already in line for the official launch today at 6:00 PM.

I have written my thoughts about iPhone here a few weeks back. But, I am closely following the happenings around iPhone and find myself drawn to it like a bug to the night lamp. When I follow something or read something that may be useful to my readers I share it here. But, I don’t want to dilute the content here with a lot of talk about iPhone even if it is a technology that would be a part of our daily lives if we end up getting an iPhone.

So, a new blog has born to talk just about everything under the sun about iPhone.

With great pleasure, I present to you our Top iPhone Resource blog. I am aiming it to be a ‘one stop shop for iPhone tips, news, tutorials, accessories information, iPhone apps, etc’. This will be a niche site focused on an iPhone user and hope to be an invaluable resource with new content added everyday.

To get continuous updates on iPhone related posts at , consider subscribing to Top iPhone Resource feed.

I think RSS is the next best thing to sliced bread. Really. I even think if I hadn’t found RSS and it’s usefulness, I wouldn’t have started consuming so much information from hundreds of websites without spending a lot of time everyday. And I wouldn’t have felt the urge to create ShanKri-la and share these tidbits with you!

Mashable has put together an excellent list of anything and everything under the sun about RSS named The Ultimate RSS Toolbox. If you haven’t found a RSS reader you liked, I’m sure this list will help you find something that will work for you.

The list includes not just RSS readers but others related to it as well. Here is a quick glimpse..

• RSS Readers - Windows
• RSS Readers - OSX
• RSS Readers - Linux
• RSS Readers - Cross Platform
• RSS Readers - Web based
• Mobile RSS Readers
• RSS to email converters
• RSS Feed Validators
• RSS-related plugins - Firefox
• RSS-related plugins - Wordpress
• RSS-related plugins - others
• RSS managers
• RSS mixers
• RSS ping tools
• Feed directories
• RSS tips & hacks
• Miscellaneous RSS-related Tools

Did it make your head swim? No worries.. the neat categorization makes it easy to find what you want and I’m stumbling this page as well as adding it to my del.icio.us bookmarks. If you are a StumbleUpon user, say hi to me over there and I’ll get to know you and your favorites as well.

I like GTD (Getting Things Done) applications to a fault. We featured the use of Remember the Milk (RTM) as a GTD tool a short while back. My first experience with a tool of this kind was MonkeyGTD followed by d-cubed. d-cubed won me over from monkeyGTD but now I am torn between d-cubed and RTM and have been using them together for over a month.

d-cubed is based on the TiddlyWiki line of applications which I have a fascination for. But, RTM is winning me over with its simplicity and ease of use. Granted your preference would swing based on what you use it for.

This article assumes that you have started using Remember the Milk and are looking to make it do more for you. We recommend starting here if you haven’t used it yet.

One of the powerful aspects of RTM is the ability to create Smart Lists. This alone will supercharge your lists..

If you are like me, your lists in RTM are probably are titled plainly like ‘Home’, ‘Bills’, ‘Work’, ‘Leisure’ etc. These will do fine to begin with. But, when tasks in your lists grow longer and the number of lists increase, you may find yourself using the ‘Search’ box more and more.

That is when you might notice the ‘Show Search Options’ link under it. Hmm.. is that an advanced search? You click on the link to find out that it is.. huh!

Ok. Let me find all the tasks with Priority 1 and status ‘incomplete’ from all my lists! You want to tackle the urgent stuff first right? Like mowing your overgrown grass, sending in that weekly status report. So, you choose the priority and hit ‘Search Tasks’.

So, you are shocked at the sheer number of tasks screaming ‘URGENT’ at you. But, this is when you play it cool. And narrow the list further down by entering ‘work’ in the ‘Tagged with’ field. Let’s take care of business first.

Alright.. this list of tasks isn’t that scary but it is still long and you are scratching your head to figure out where to begin. So you ask yourself err RTM, what’s due this week?

Now, you have your list of tasks that are Priority 1 and incomplete and tagged ‘work’ and due in a week. Cool. You roll up your sleeves and get to work.

But, similar questions are popping up in your head several times a day. No worries. RTM lets you save this search as a Smart List. Notice the grey tab named ‘Save’ in a box under the search box? Save this search as ‘Do it now’ smart list.

Now, you are probably thinking this is just a saved search. What’s so smart about it?

What are Smart Lists?
From RTM’s help page:

Smart Lists are special lists that are created based on criteria that you
define, and are automatically updated as your tasks change.

Smart lists are dynamic lists that keep track of all the changes that you do with your tasks. In the above example your smart list might have had 10 tasks. But, after you go through them you are updating your lists with ‘complete’ status. Your ‘Do it now’ smart list will automatically update itself.

Another cool feature. If you add a task to the ‘Smart List’ instead of your regular lists, it inherits the properties of the Smart List!

So, if you have a high priority work related task that need to be done within the week, just add it to the ‘Do it now’ list and it will automatically set its Priority to 1, a due date and tag itself ‘work’.

Hope this makes managing your lists in RTM easier! Also, check out this Demo from RTM’s help page.

Remember the Milk has one of the very resourceful help pages with bite sized information. Make sure you make full use of it.

How do you use smart lists? I am sure everyone can benefit from a tip or two.

Updated May 16, 2007:

Remember the Milk blog has a very useful list of 21 searches to make us even more productive! Some of it were suggested by users in the forum and some put together by the RTM team. Thanks for the great list!

The timing couldn’t have been perfect. Today, ShanKri-la’s subscribers as you can see is at 100! (definitely a big milestone for us)

I know when I discovered what RSS does and started using it, I opened myself up to a whole new world in the internet. I religiously try to make my friends use two things: Firefox and RSS.

Looking at my success rate, which isn’t very good, I need some help. And I came across this video link in Digg.

This video from Common Craft is a must watch for anyone wanting to know what that ubiquitous orange button called RSS does!

[bliptv Leelefever-RSSInPlainEnglish369]

Now that you are ready to try RSS, you probably want to know what Feed Reader to use. The video suggests a few good readers like Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. I use Netvibes as my personal home page and feed reader as well as the portable version of Great News in my USB drive.

Lorelle has a great post with a link to an extensive directory for RSS Aggregators. The list needs some work on readability but still is a great resource.

Go ahead and discover RSS! Also, leave a comment on your favorite feed reader.