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Filed under: Utilities, Web services, Social Software, Web

Twitter Twerp Scan relaunches, now better than ever

Twitter Twerp ScanWe first covered Twerp Scan back in April of last year. At the time we commended it as a useful way to scan your list of followers for accounts that are simply following you as a way to get onto your list and hopefully be noticed - in other words, Twitter spam followers. Since then, Twerp Scan has gone through a rather dramatic redesign, and has added the ability not only to scan the accounts that are following you, but also to scan the accounts you are following.

Twerp Scan then gives you a very nicely laid-out grid of those you are following or your followers depending on what you chose. You can sort on any of the column headers, including number of followers, number following, ratio of followers to following, number of tweets, and time of last tweet. For your followers, for example, very low ratios (anything under about 1:5) typically indicates a spam account - these are people that nobody wants to follow, but follow others very indiscriminately.

Even if you don't want to use Twerp Scan to eliminate spam followers because you want to hold onto all of the followers you've got to boost your follower numbers, it is also a useful tool for viewing and managing the Twitter accounts that you are following. You get all the same column headers, and the ability to sort the list any way you like, including sorting on multiple headings. You can also click on any row in the grid to get additional details about that Twitter account.

Filed under: Security, E-mail

VirusTotal scans email attachments via... email

VirusTotal email scan
If you're not sure whether or not it's safe to download that email attachment your nice new friend from Nigeria sent you, odds are you shouldn't. But if you want a second, third, and 14th opinion you might want to forward your email to VirusTotal.

All you have to do is hit the forward button, and send your message to scan@virustotal.com. Change the subject line to SCAN and delete anything in the body of the message you don't feel like sharing. Note that there's a 10MB file size limit, and if you forward a message with multiple attachments, VirusTotal will only check one.

VirusTotal will scan your file using a variety of anti-virus tools including AVG, ClamAV, Kaspersky, and McAfee. When it's done, VirusTotal should send you an email letting you know the status of your file. But it may take a while to get that response if the server is busy.

You can also upload files directly to VirusTotal's main page for a quicker scan. But that only works if you've already got the potentially infected file on your computer.

[via Digital Inspiration]

Filed under: Design, Photo, Windows, Macintosh, Adobe

How to scan money in Photoshop

Scanning money in
PhotoshopPhotoshop has a charming "feature" that prevents you from importing images of money. It's an anti-counterfeiting measure of dubious value, and if you're a designer who wants to make fair use of images of money in a piece, the restriction is a huge pain. Fortunately, there's a way around it, as described by Deke McClelland in this video at O'Reilly's Digital Media blog. It's a really easy trick that basically boils down to this: Every version of Photoshop comes with ImageReady. ImageReady doesn't have any anti-counterfeiting technology, and Photoshop implicitly trusts anything ImageReady sends its way. Presto!

[Via Boing Boing]

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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