From The Tips Box: Hacked Emails, Laptop Cord Management

Readers offer their best tips for wrangling laptop cords, clearing your clipboard fast, and knowing if a virus is sending spam from your email address.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or send it using the contact tab on the right.

Know When Your Email Has Been Hacked Or Compromised

Outie5000 offers this great tip for immediately knowing if your email has been hacked or a virus is spamming people with your account:

Setup an account or two in your contact list that’s [email protected] or something similar, so when the virus sends out mail, you get the notification of a failed mail attempt and you can change your password and run a virus scan.

Photo from Apartment Therapy, who also posted this tip via Reddit

Wrap Laptop Chargers With A Sunglasses Strap Or Arm Band

Patrick O’Neill has two suggestions for wrangling your laptop battery charger and cord:

I use both of these techniques, rather than use a small and often forgotten rubber band.

First I repurposed one of those old, dorky sun glass straps that look like such a good idea when you are in Florida, but serve no purpose at home.

I just cut off the ends, burnt them and cinched it.

My second way, and probably the easiest for most people is to use and arm band. Just wrap the arm band around and you are good to go.

Laptop bricks usually come with velcro straps already, but using one of those Livestrong bracelets might be a quicker way to keep the charger and cords organised.

A Shortcut To Clipboard Privacy/Security

Moon tells us how to clear the clipboard with a shortcut, if you don’t want anyone snooping on what you’ve copied:

Someone at a forum left a tip for clearing the clipboard from the cmd line, using the [clip.exe] tool that’s supposedly part of every modern Windows system.

The command goes:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c echo off | clip

I made a shortcut to that from the Desktop, and pinned it to the Taskbar. Because it’s the third item, Win key + 3 runs it for me, fast. It runs it even faster when I use AHK to remap Win3 to ALT key + 3 on the keypad.

What it’s good for… It shuts my screen reader up in a hurry.

To make the shortcut yourself, right-click on the Desktop, choose New > Shortcut, and type in the command above in the wizard.

Turn Google+ into a Journal

Not really making much use out of Google+? You can use it as a journal. Bhagwad Park explains:

Picked up this tip from a post here: [plus.google.com] [Joel Richard]

Basically you just create an empty circle called “Journal” and post to that. You can update it with comments, add photos, videos, anything you want!

Just make sure you’re selecting the right circles each time you post if you try this.