I use PasswordMaker so many times a day it's a wonder I haven't written it up yet.

I can't tell you how many times someone who's tech-savvy has admitted to me "I use the same password for everything." Or someone who gives me a password that's straight out of the dictionary. At my last job (a dot-org!) some of our admin accounts had easily-guessable passwords -- I remember when I raised a hue and cry someone said it was unlikely that anyone would even bother to try cracking our site, so what was the big deal? (It's since been fixed.)

People, let me make this plain: you must not use a password that can be guessed. Especially in this age of identity theft. (Is your password on this list [warning NSFW language]) The problem, of course, is that un-guessable passwords are nearly impossible to remember. Hence the use-one-pass-everywhere strategy (do I need to point out why this is a bad idea?), or using something like "8675309", or writing it down on a post-it on your monitor, or storing it on a usb-key you might lose, etc.

Enter PasswordMaker. It takes the URL of the site you are logging into, combines it with your easy-to-remember password, and spits out a password like "Gj4=:QdA". Unlike most random password generators, PM will create the same password every time, given those two inputs (and the same parameters). So you just have to remember your master password. (For a little extra security, I take the nth letter from the URL and append it to my master password.) It takes about 15 extra seconds for me to log in when I use PasswordMaker.

There's an online version and a Firefox extension so you're always covered. And it's free.