Find the Person Behind an Email Address

You get an email from a person with whom you have never interacted before and therefore, before you reply to that message, you would like to know something more about him or her. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?

Web search engines are obviously the most popular place for performing reverse email lookups but if the person you’re trying to research doesn’t have a website or has never interacted with his email address on public forums before, Google will probably be of little help.

No worries, here are few tips and online services that may still  help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.

#1. Find the sender’s location

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.

Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the location of the email sender.

#2. Reverse email search with Facebook

Facebook has 450 million users worldwide and there’s a high probability that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.

Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the sender into the Facebook search box and you’ll immediately know if a matching profile exists in the network.

If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download his profile picture and then upload it to Google Images (click the camera icon in the search box). This acts as a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.

#3. Check all the other Social Networks

You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.

If the email address of the send is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probably that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.

#4. People Search

Finally, if nothing works, you should try a people search service like Pipl andSpokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.

Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.

Source :- labnol.org

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An Easy Way to Download APK Files from Google Play

Android apps are packaged as APK files. You can use any File Manager app to copy these files from the computer to your Android device and then touch the .apk file to install, or sideload , the corresponding app on your device.

There are various reasons why you may want to download the APK installer of an Android app from the Google Play store:

1. Google Play Store says that a particular app or game is incompatible with your Android device though you know that the app would work just fine.
2. Sometime an Android app may be not be available for download in the Google Play store of your region or country.
3. An app is listed on the Google Play store but you want to install that app on another Android device, like the Amazon Kindle tablet, that doesn’t have the Play Store.

How to Download APK Files from Google Play Store

Evozi, an Android app developer, offers a one-click online APK download app that lets you download the APK installed of any Android app that’s listed on the Google Play store. The downloader app can be accessed at apps.evozi.com.

To get started, enter the web URL of any app listed on the Google Play store and click the “Generated Download Link” button. The APK download app will fetch the APK file from the Google Play store and will host it on its own servers from where you downlaod the file.

Since the APK files are directly fetched from the Google Play Store, it’s unlikely that the Android App will be infected with any malware. Also, to prevent app piracy, the APK downloader only lets you download free apps and games from the Google Play store, not the paid ones.

Source:- labnol

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Quick Tip: The Correct Way to Create Curved Text

Insignias and retro logos are popular and many of them have some sort of text along a curved path. Most people use the Text Warp tool but it ends up deforming the text. In this tutorial, you’ll learn why they look deformed and how you can properly create text along a curve without deforming the letters.

Why Curved Text Looks Deformed

Have a look at the two badges below – the one on the left was curved with the Warp Text tool while the other was created on a curved path. At first glance, they both look the same but look closely at the text and you can see that the left-image text is deformed (letters upper-half are enlarged).

Here’s another example with just plain text to better show how the text gets deformed.

Don’t use the Warp Text tool

First of all, never create curved text with the Warp Text tool. This tool can be found in the options bar when you have your Text tool selected and it can be quick and easy, but the results are amateur. The Warp Text tool should only be used for warping the shape of your text such as making it bulge, pinched, etc.

How to Create Text on a Curved Path

The proper way is to create a vector path then add your text to the path. We’ll show you how.

Step 1

First, select the Ellipse tool from your toolbar. You can pick any shape you like or use the Pen tool (P) to draw your own path that your text will follow. For our image, the Ellipse tool is the most suitable choice.

Step 2

In the options bar located below your Photoshop menu, click on the dropdown menu and select Path.

Draw a path on your document. You can hold the Shift key while dragging to get a perfect circle (or square/polygon if you are using another shape tool).

To reposition the path, switch to the Path Selection tool and drag the path.

Step 3

Next, switch to the Text tool (T) then click anywhere on the path. When you hover over the path, your cursor should change to a text cursor with a curved line across it.

Type in your text. If you want your text centered, remember to set it in the options bar.

Step 4

We have our text, but it’s not quite aligned. First, to position the text in the center, you can adjust the start and stop points. On the path, you’ll find two points. Switch to the Path Selection Tool then drag the point to reposition your text. Your cursor should change to a text cursor with two arrows. As you’re dragging, you can hold the Shift key if you want to position the points perfectly in the center.

Step 5It appears that our text path is too large and the text isn’t centered with the badge. To fix this, you can resize the path using the Transform tool. Press Ctrl/Cmd+T or go to Edit > Free Transform. While holding the Shift and Alt keys, drag the corner nodes of the transform box towards the center to scale the path. When you hold the Alt and Shift key, it forces your transformation to transform from the center and in the same aspect ratio. Press Enter to apply the changes

Our text is now in the center

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Additional Text Settings

Here are more ways you can creatively create text along a path.

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Flip Text Along a Path

With the Point Selection tool selected, simply drag the point towards the center of the shape to inverse the text.

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Change Text Orientation

With the Text tool selected, click on the button in your options bar.

Final Results

Note on the Badges

Do you like the badges shown in this tutorial? These amazing badges were designed by Zeppelin Graphics – purchase them on Creative Market.  And case you’re wondering, yes the text is created on a vector path (no warped text) .. 

All over. 

Source :-  Photoshop Tutorials

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