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.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind
| Digital Tools | Essential Tools | Freeware | Identity Theft | Passwords | Security
I need a new USB extension cable. (I stepped on the last one, crushing the female lead.) I go to Newegg (best computer hardware store in the known universe) and find this user-written review of the BYTECC 6 ft. Type A Male to Type A Female USB 2.0 Extension Cable Model USB2-6MF-K - Retail:
You complete me.
Reviewed By: Andrew on 4/15/2009
Rating + 5
Pros: It works.
Cons: Someday it will die, like everything else in the world.
Other Thoughts: Ah, beautiful USB extension cable,
You complete my connections.
When I am over here
And my flash drive is over there
You bring us together.
When I am over here
And my iPod is over there
You bring us together.
When I am over here
And my Flip Ultra video camera is over there
You bring us together.
Everything I ask of you,
You provide.
Because of you, I no longer reach around to the back of my computer
To unplug something else in my USB hub
Drat! Knocking down the beverage on my desk
Cascading water like tears on all my worldly possessions.
Because of you, I hot swap.
Because of you, I am charged.
Because of you, I run at high speed.
Blessed USB extension cable.
Well now I have to buy it.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Reviews
Anatomy of Social Media Marketing presents an interesting analogy: the social media as a body. The Website is the Heart, with your Email Listserv as the Blood. The Blog is the Stomach:
We have to "feed" our blog new content. The blog then breaks down the content and turns it into things like loyal followers (people who regularly read your blog), happy search engines (search engines love new content and good keywords), greater credibility, and increased traffic to your website - just as our stomachs break down our food into the essential nutrients our body needs.
And Social Networks are the Hands and Senses:
Social networks are a lot like our hands because connecting is one of the main functions - we grab onto new contacts and hold onto existing contacts. They are our mouth because they are forums to share our message and tell others about who we are and what we do. Lastly, they are our eyes and ears because if you are active you will definitely get feedback - particularly if you're doing things wrong (bad social network etiquette).
Of course, according to Everett's Law of Pareidolic Comparisons, All Analogies Are Fatal, since we tend to focus on the aptness of the analogy itself, and because an analogy encourages us to read too much into the analogized relationship. ("If Facebook is your hands, is Technorati your ears?") But I liked the way this puts together the various pieces of the internet puzzle. (There I go, analogizing again!)
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Social Networking | Social Software
"Even before the data banks had been connected up it had started from 'I think therefore I am' and got as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off..." Via Kerim.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Mad Science | Physics
| Lists | Reputation | Search | Twitter | Web Tools
Not a search engine, it's a computational engine.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind
Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there. And check out this great customizable Mother's Day video -- which is, also, a very clever bit of political viral marketing.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Mother's Day | Political Ads | Viral Advertising
The University of Minnesota researchers who run movielens (collaborative filtering for movies) have an interesting twist on tagging:
Dubbed "Tag Expression," this new approach to tagging will add more feeling to your tags. When you add a tag, you now have the option of specifying if the tag represents something that you like about the movie or something that you dislike about the movie.
Here's what it looks like:
You'll have to imagine the AJAXy drag and drop. Size here indicates tag frequency for that movie, and color indicates collective mood. The redder the tag, the more the users dislike that aspect of the movie; the bluer the better.
A ways back I thought there should be two kinds of tags -- "left-handed" tags that were subjective, and "right-handed" tags that were objective. (Yes, sort of like whuffie.) So, for example "Sean Connery" and "Science-Fiction" and "giant floating head" might be right-handed tags for Zardoz, while "fantastically bad" and "LSD substitute" would be a left-handed tag. But I think I like this method better, since it adds the dimension of feeling.
Incidentally, while tagging a movie I ran across one referring to the Bechdel Test for films, which goes as follows:
The strip popularized what is now known as the Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel/Wallace test, the Bechdel rule, or Bechdel's law. Bechdel credits her friend Liz Wallace for the test, which appears in a 1985 strip entitled "The Rule", in which a character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:
- It has to have at least two women in it,
- Who talk to each other,
- About something besides a man.
There is, of course, a blog dedicated to the test. Our regular readers will, of course, have already noted that Bechdel Test follows Stigler's law of eponymy.
| Collaborative Filtering | Movielens | Semantic Web | Tagging | Tags
Recently, Debbie and I took the kids on the "old house" tour of the Main Line, to show the boys where we grew up. First stop on the tour was my old house on Summit Grove Avenue in Bryn Mawr.
It wasn't there.
There was just a parking lot where my old house had been. Which was worse, in a way, than if someone had torn it down to build a new house. Or an office. Or, well, anything.
So I can understand how many must be feeling on hearing the news that GeoCities is shutting down, after all these years. (Since 1995!). Like so many websites, Ishbadiddle got its start on GeoCities -- you can still check out the old site while you get the chance.
I used to say that blogging was what really democratized the web. First there was desktop publishing, which was going to make it possible for anyone to create professional-looking media. But there was no distribution for citizen media, and unless your zine was in Factsheet 5 no one other than your friends would ever read it. The web was supposed to solve the distribution problem, but changing a site was even harder than desktop publishing -- meaning that most people just had a never-updated GeoCities page with pictures of their cats. Blogging changed that.
I suppose with the new social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) we're back to the distribution question -- how do you get people to read what you say?
So good-bye, GeoCities, and thanks for giving Ishbadiddle its start. Sorry you're going to become a parking lot. Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
posted this | this entry's link | 2 comments | Social Networking | Social Software
I found XXCOPY a ways back when I was looking for a tool to "flatten" a directory (i.e., take all the files out of subfolders and put them all into one big folder). I'd been meaning to point to it, but forgot until this Gadgetopia post reminded me. It's a Really Useful Tool, if you don't mind going old-school command line, with a gazillion options to do anything you'd probably want to do when moving and/or copying files. Also recommended for day-to-day use: SuperCopier2, which replaces Windows native copy function. SC2 lets you choose options like "overwrite all" and will actually tell you if you don't have enough room to copy a batch of files. Things that the OS should do automatically, but somehow doesn't.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Freeware | Really Useful Tools
Bedpost. I wonder if Flight of the Conchords is getting royalties off their tag line?
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Dating | Quantified Self | Sex | Statistics | Web Tools
happy 5th birthday, subservient chicken (via MeFi:
We needed to make less than 400 video clips seem like millions through sleight of hand and clever ambiguousness. I came up with some Actionscript, inspired by a program I had written when i was like 10 on my Commodore 64, which was in turn Inspired by the movie War Games. Replaced "How about a nice game of Chess?" with "Have it your way," and we were off to the races.There were two things about this that made it really exciting for me. First was that I had not just done simple keyword matching, where you would get all the results that matched a given word. I devised a system for matching phrases, words and fragments. Then the script would give a score for each possible video clip based on those phrases, and serve the highest scoring video. Second was that we decided to have everyone in the company participate in adding words and phrases to the data set. The catch was, that only a few people in the company knew what any video clip was supposed to be. So, we had people describing clips not based on what was shot, but what they perceived to be the shot. (The former psychology student in me LOVED this methodology). It made all the difference. Stuff we never thought about when making the shot-list magically seemed more descriptive of the video clips than the original.
Hard to believe that was five years ago. Blogdex. Remember Blogdex?
| Chickens | Fast Food | Memes | Viral Advertising
Instant infection check for this computer virus du jour. Via Waxy.
posted this | this entry's link | 1 comment
"34% use Advertising, 12% a Variable Subscription model, and 8% each for Virtual Products (typically digital downloads), Related Products (typically a large software company offering a free product to attract you to their platform) and Pay-Per-Use." Ah, I remember when Sell / Exit ("Create a popular application/website, then make it someone else's problem to monetize e.g. YouTube") was the only way to go. 1999, where did you go?
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind
RegExr. Useful.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Useful | Web Tools
Thru-You. Via Big Ink, our Washington Correspondent.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Mashups | YouTube
Yet Another Reason Not To Use Adobe Reader: Slashdot | PDF Vulnerability Now Exploitable With No Clicking. Friends don't let friends use bloatware: Foxit, people, Foxit!
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Freeware | Malware
Fake parking tickets lead unwary to malware.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Malware | North Dakota | Social Engineering
How cool is my dad? He sent over this article from Knowledge@Wharton on Joss Whedon's Plan to Monetize Internet Content -- basically the Dr. Horrible Business Plan. (Man, I would love to write a case about Dr. Horrible.) Required reading for both Whedonites and Other People Who Think About Internet Content And Money.
Related: The Economics of Giving It Away, how Monty Python used YouTube to increase their sales by 23,000%, and Kevin Kelly's piece last year on The 1,000 True Fans business model (or, how to live like Jonathan Coulton). Read and discuss.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Intellectual Property | Jonathan Coulton | Joss Whedon | Kevin Kelly | Monty Python
I resisted the Twitter for a long time, but no longer!
I'm no stranger to the social networks. (Remember Orkut? Friendster?) I've been using Plaxo for years as a way to keep up with people's address changes. (It's still good for that, even as they try and make it more of a social network.) Then there's LinkedIn, which is hugely helpful for work (and looking for work) in all kinds of ways. It's by far the best business networking tool since the Rolodex.
Enter Facebook. (Yeepers, I need a new photograph.) At first I thought, what do I need to join Facebook for? I've got a blog. (Which, of course, everyone in the world is reading, right?) But I eventually caved and signed up, although I refuse to superpoke or give out eggs or any of that silliness (any more). I mean, everyone has a Facebook account now, right? (Welcome aboard, Chris!)
But Twitter? Really? I mean, I have a blog and Facebook now -- do I really need another means of broadcasting my minutiae to the world at large? Kerim was the one who convinced me, with this post: Twitter for Facebook Users. He quotes: "Twitter does one small thing, and does it well." As I'm a sucker for simplicity
To keep myself sane, I'm using HelloTxt so I can update all my networks via email. (I still don't do SMS.) I have one account that will update my status on business networks (Plaxo and LinkedIn) and another for personal networks (Twitter and Facebook), because presumably my professional network does not really want to know what I'm having for breakfast.
If you want you can follow Ishbadiddle via twitter, at least if the plugin works. It should tweet the latest posts. (And this is me).
So, do you Tweet?
| HelloTxt | LinkedIn | Plaxo | Social Networking | Twitter | Web Tools
