Online hotel review service Oyster features a Photo Fakeout category in their blog that gives a reality check to hotel reviews, pitting a hotel’s promotional images with actual photographs.

The only disappointing thing about Oyster’s Photo Fakeouts is that there aren’t more of them—and that this isn’t the dedicated feature of any site we can find. Popular travel planning and review site TripAdvisor allows for user-submitted photo uploads, which are nice, and I’ve sometimes had good luck searching Flickr for the name of hotels, but it’d be great to see something like these Photo Fakeouts in an easily searchable database.

As weblog Of Zen and Computer points out, it’s worth noting that pictures can be manipulated to look bad in much the same way as they can to look good. That said, sometimes the difference is clear and egregious, and it’s nice to get a reality check before you book.

If you’ve got your own methods for searching out the reality of your hotel before you book, let’s hear your tips in the comments.

[ Visit Photo Fakeout ]

Accidents happen to even the most cautious drivers. If you find yourself in one, AccidentSketch is a simple web-based tool that can help you draw up a picture and generate a report to give to your insurance company.

AccidentSketch uses a simple template system. Cars, road segments, signs, pedestrians, and more all snap to the grid and in the case of small objects like signs can be moved from there. You can change the colors of things, zoom in and out to get as close or wide as you need, and even assign information to parties involved like the license plate numbers of the cars in the accident.

Once you create a diagram you can also generate a text-based report to fill in details that can’t be easily conveyed by the picture. When you’re done you’ve got a tidy accident sketch and report to submit to the interested parties. The service is free and requires no registration.

Have a handy tool and tidbit for dealing with insurance companies and life after a fender-bender? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

[ Visit AccidentSketch ]

With MarineTraffic.com, you can pick your patch of sea and see who’s out there right now, including naval vessels from various nations, research ships, cargo ships, tankers, and even cruise and luxury ships making way between ports of call. The site is a Google Maps mashup with common sealanes laid out in a grid that you can click on at any time to see where a certain ship at sea is located at any time.

When I drive by one of the cities near me, the highway runs right past the docks, so I get to see a lot of the cargo ships and naval vessels that are docked and in-port for a while. Some of them stay for weeks or months while others are only around for a few days, but all of them get me curious about what their names are and where they’re from.

With MarineTraffic.com, and I can visit my city on a Google Map, zoom in on the docks, and see which boats are docked, the flag they sail under, what types of ships they are, and more. MarineTraffic.com even shows me whether the ship is docked or underway, and where the ship is headed if they’re already out to sea. The service even shows me the dimensions of the ship I’m looking at.

MarineTraffic.com refreshes every 100 seconds with updated vessel positions and information If a new ship has entered the range of your search area, you’ll see information about it, and since the service is built on top of Google Maps, you have all of the features any Google Map has to offer. Hover over the map to and you can mousewheel zoom in and out on a particular area, and you can use the smaller map in the lower right corner of the screen to click and drag the viewable area around.

You can also filter the items displayed on the map so you can see everything, only passenger ships, only cargo vessels, tankers, high-speed craft, yachts and other private boats, buoys and navigation aides, and even unspecified ships where the service has no information (these are usually military or naval vessels). You can also choose to show ship names right under the ships and mark ports and other naval stations on the map.

MarineTraffic.com also has tabs across the top of the page you can click to see all vessels the site has in its database at one time, along with their direction, type, speed, course, destination, and ETA. You can also see similar information on all of the ports of call listed in the site’s database, and see photos of ships that users have uploaded.

The site is a collaborative project of universities around the world, non-profit weather and meteorological organizations, and a variety of boating and shipping enthusiasts who help collect the data on ship positions. If you’re looking to sail the high seas without leaving your desk, you can take a trip around the world with MarineTraffic.com.

[ Visit Marintraffic ]

Disposable email services are a great way of hiding an email account during account signups on the Internet. Many Internet services (and some computer programs as well) require an account before the service can be used. Some of these websites send unwanted emails to the user or sell the data to other companies that will then flood the email inbox with spam. Disposable email addresses are a solution to this problem. Users who want to signup for a service use one of the freely available disposable email address services to do so. All emails that are send from that website (or from spammers that bought the email address) will land in the inbox of the disposable email service. Most services of this kind delete email addresses that have been created regularly to block incoming spam.

Thrashmail.net uses a slightly different system. The service will forward incoming emails to another email address. Many other disposable email address services offer an inbox on their website which removes the requirement of having to hand out another email address.

The life span of the email address and the number of forwards can be specified on the website. The Firefox add-on for the service adds lots of comfort to using it. The add-on can be used to create new Trashmail.net email addresses and to manage previously created email addresses.

The settings are highly configurable and contain all options that are offered on the Trashmail website including a prefix for new email accounts, the lifespan, forwards and to enable a response system that will filter incoming email messages by a captcha system.

A new context menu entry is added by the add-on that can be used to add a new disposable email address to a web form. The manager displays an overview of all email addresses that have been created by the add-on. This is one of the best ways to keep track of previously used disposable email addresses.

The Firefox add-on can be downloaded from the Mozilla website.

Oone of the coolest JavaScript applications. Works for sure in chrome and a newer Firefox.

[ Try it! ]