published Saturday, July 17th, 2010 at 4:41 am by
Mark
The longer your passwords are the harder they will be to crack. How long should they be and what sort of characters should you use? Steve Gibson on episode 256 of Security Now suggest ten characters. Both upper and lower case with numbers. This gives you 7.6×10 to the 17th power possible character combinations. You could also use twelve characters numbers and lower case alphabet (easier to type) to get a similar amount of randomness. Use Lastpass to generate and manage the passwords securely.
published Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 12:58 am by
Mark
My apologies to anyone viewing this blog in a RSS reader. I know you’ve been receiving a lot of duplicate post. I’m sorry I’m still trying to tweak some settings on the new theme. This however was not the problem with the last post. I was having a problem getting Audacity to make the file a reasonable downloadable size. Although I lost a little quality I got it down to 7.05MB. That’s pretty small for a program that’s over an hour long.
In the future I will try not to repost anything but I ‘m a pretty bad speller and typist and I find mistakes later. I’ll try not to post until they’re ready from now on.
published Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 12:50 pm by
Mark
For the last six months I’ve been using Lastpass a password manager that is truely extraordinary. Lastpass is easy and safe. Lastpass is everywhere you are. It works on PCs, Macs, Linux and other operating system. It works with Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome and nearly any other web-browser. Adroid phones, iPhones iOS, Blackberry and many other smartphones are supported with apps included with the premium service, cost $12 per year.
Some of Lastpass features are…
- Automatically fill forms! See Demo
- Synchronizes across browsers!
- Store secure notes. See Demo
- Easily Import existing passwords form many different sources.
- Secure password generator! See Demo
- Access from anywhere on any platform.
- Save to USB key for easy secure access anywhere.
There are so many features I can’t list them all in this post. The best thing to do is check out their website for a full description or listen to this excerpt from Security Now with security expert Steve Gibson. Steve tells you about the features and the its terrific security.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
published Sunday, July 11th, 2010 at 9:59 am by
Mark
When you want to send a link to a Google Map to someone you know how long the URL can be. If your tweeting it could take up the whole 144 characters and more. You could use a URL shortener link “Bit.ly” or “Tiny URL“. That’s no long necessary because Google Maps has its own URL shortener.
Open Google Maps, click on the green flask in the upper right hand corner and enable “short URL”. Refresh the page. Create or open a map. Now click on “Link” above and to the right of the map and you will see the is now a short link, example…
Before: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Louisville,+KY&daddr=Atlanta,+GA&hl=en&geocode=FZ62RwIdUWrj-ikR1VuzGgtpiDEy_XEgKLTT1A%3BFQP4AgIdclf4-imNCZNpXQT1iDELYwuZL97-Zg&mra=ls&sll=33.748995,-84.387982&sspn=0.299738,0.435333&g=Atlanta,+GA&ie=UTF8&z=7
After: http://goo.gl/maps/ngim
published Sunday, July 11th, 2010 at 2:06 am by
Mark
The new Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is by far the best Ubuntu ever. I installed it on several computer. The installs have been flawless. Every easy! It is much more difficult to install Windows. Lucid finds all of the drivers except of course my Broadcom wireless drivers but it found a proprietary driver and ask me if I wanted to install it. I click OK and Ubuntu did the rest. The user interface is pretty much the same. All the same free software you grown to love. (Open Office 3.2.1, Firefox 3.6, Empathy IM Client and many more.) Of course you can easily install more free software using the Ubuntu Software Center. I love Ubuntu 10.04. I use it much more than Windows. Lucid is simple and powerful!
