Choosing a Secure Password

Choosing a Secure Password - Boing Boing: "As insecure as passwords generally are, they're not going away anytime soon. Every year you have more and more passwords to deal with, and every year they get easier and easier to break. You need a strategy."

To which I propose a modest change: have one good password be your LastPass password, and let LastPass take care of providing the rest of your accounts with very long complex passwords.

App-pocalypse Now

App-pocalypse Now: "... it's amazing how quickly we went from "Cool! Phone apps that finally don't suck!" to this sad, eye rolling, oh-great-of-course-you-have-an-app-too state of affairs."

My recommended Google Chrome extensions

If you use Google Chrome, or are thinking of trying it, be aware of these extensions, which I have found useful:

• Adblock Plus:
  Removes annoying, obtrusive advertising from web pages, but allows unobtrusive advertising. I know, I know, advertising is what keeps the web mostly free, but sometimes it gets to be too much. You can choose to unblock advertising on specific sites, which I have chosen to do on many sites that I like and visit regularly; you can also choose to block specific ad elements.
• Antisocial:
  "This extension blocks social plugins and widgets from loading, as they can (and do) slow down the loading of sites that they are used on. Antisocial was born out of my annoyance at visiting sites and trying to scroll, click a link, etc., only to find that the Chrome was either locked up or slowed to a crawl as these social widgets were loading."
•  BlogThis:
  "Adds a BlogThis! button to the browser toolbar, which lets you post to your Blogger blog from any webpage with just one click."
• And I'm using the following start page/new tab page on different computers:
  Bookmark Home Page:
  "a starting page displaying all your bookmarks in a two list tree view."
  Minimal New Tab:
  "... displays bookmarks from Bookmarks Bar and number of new messages in Gmail (including Google Apps)" and does so without favicons; nice simple start/new tabpage.
• Checker Plus for GMail:
  "Get desktop notifications [even when the Chrome browser isn't open], read, listen, archive or delete emails without opening a Gmail tab & easily manage multiple accounts"
• Email This Page (by Google)
  "...adds an email button to the toolbar which allows you to email the page link using your default mail client or Gmail."
• Extensions Update Notifier
  "Google Chrome Extensions are auto-updated. This is cool, no doubt about it, but how do you know when an extension is updated? You don't until you install this extension." This is important, given the recent revelations that extensions may be purchased by the bad people that want to use them to spread adware/malware.
• Gestures for Google Chrome:
  Mouse gestures are great for surfing with more efficiency. I use this to basically open links in new tabs by dragging and dropping them, and closing pages by drawing a simple two-line shape with my mouse. This extension is one of the few I could find that hasn't converted over to doing bad things (as of this writing)
• LastPass
  The best and most secure password manager out there. Now it *is* possible to have good an unique passwords for all web sites, and this will manage them for you. You only have to remember the one master password. It also supports a fingerprint reader that my work laptop uses.
• Magic Actions for YouTube
  Automatically makes YouTube videos larger and in HD, and cuts ads; many other options
• Neat Bookmarks
  Easy access to bookmarks: search them, open whole bunches of them at a time (for example, I have morning and evening folders with many bookmarks that I open with just a few clicks). Note: this one is clean, I switched to it when the other one, with I think the same name, started injecting it's own advertising all over web pages.
• Personal Blocklist (by Google)
  "Blocks domains/hosts from appearing in your Google search results." For example: I use it to block tech support sites that show the question but hide the answers until you sign up/pay.
• Remove Google Redirects
  "Google adds redirection to all shared links to learn what links you click. This extension removes Google's redirection from all products of Google to protect your privacy & to prevent click tracking. The advantage is, shared links will load faster as they are no longer passed to Google for redirection."
• To Be Read Pro
  If you land on a web page that is too long to read now, or has a recipe you want to save for later, this extension will save it in a list for later perusal.