If you’re a heavy web user, chances are high that you have a gazillion and one accounts and logins to various web services. Unless you’re a system admin or have training in computing security, chances are you’re also only using a couple of passwords across all of those services. Chances are also fairly good you’ve never had an account hacked and so you’re going to ignore what I’m about to say, but trust me: this is a bad thing. Here’s a model for you to consider using instead of just recycling the same old passwords over and over again. If you’re on a mac, go grab ciphsafe, and if you’re on a pc, go grab keepass. Each contains tools for automatically generating passwords of configurable levels of security, each endeavors to make it easy for you to copy and paste said passwords into whatever form you need to dump the credentials into, each is tiny and uses almost no system resources, and they’re both free. Now start using it. If you’re like me and use many different computers, go one step further. If you don’t already have one, buy yourself a cheap thumb drive and attach it to your keyring. Store the data file for the app on the thumb drive, and use file encryption if you’re on the mac to protect that file (keepass on the pc provides tools for protecting the data file in the application). Make sure to also make a backup of the data file on your primary computer periodically as well.

And if like me you have logins to sensitive stuff you really don’t want folks to be able to get into, use the ultra high security password generator. (yeah, I really use that for some stuff, and yeah I know it’s basically overkill but what they hey, I’m copying and pasting).

[update]

Discovered that there’s a linux/mac port effort underway for Keepass which you can scope out on the project page. It’s not quite ready for non-geeks yet (you have to grab the source from their subversion repository and compile it) but if you understand what I just wrote by all means go for it.

Rarely has a company so completely mis-managed itself. If I owned shares in Palm I’d be wishing for a shareholder lawsuit for managerial incompetence. For those who haven’t been paying any attention, last year Palm sold its operating system assets to the Japanese company Access. Yesterday Access announced that they were killing off further development of Palm OS and would fold a backwards compatibility layer for Palm apps into a forthcoming version of a linux-based operating system for handhelds and cell phones. This is the absolute end of the road for Palm. By the time this proposed OS is released there won’t be enough folks clamoring for backwards support for their apps to make it worth bothering with it, supposing it’s even released on devices you can buy in the US.

It’s really a shame. I’ve owned and used Palms for years, almost since they were first released, and my current model, a Tungsten|c, has an excellent design:

and has served me well for the last several years. But Palm completely blew it – they owned the market 5 years ago and proceeded to blow through a series of crappy product releases, a purchase of BeOS which amounted to nothing, all while failing to upgrade their OS in any significant way. Products like the ipods and devices running Windows Mobile focused on performance, connectivity and multimedia playback. Palm seemingly focused on….sucking.

Fortunately for me my new employer is providing me with a Blackberry. If that doesn’t work well for me I’ll end up buying a Windows Mobile device, probably one with a gps in it. Meanwhile, I bid Palm a sad farewell.

Meanwhile, anyone want to buy a Tungsten|C, in great condition with a few extra accessories?

Dia is an excellent diagram creation tool most similar to Visio for Windows. It runs natively on linux using GTK+ and can (with some finagling) be installed on OSX using Fink. Things are easier on windows with the Dia for Windows binary installer. You’ll also need to install GTK+ for windows but that’s trivial. Instructions and links are on the Dia for Windows site. If you’ve needed a diagramming tool on Windows but can’t swing the cost of a Visio license Dia is an excellent alternative.

Check out What’s Up?, a novel flash-based visualization tool for news. As events make it into the global news stream they’re plotted visually onto a map of the world that’s broken up into regions. Mouseover a region when you notice an event occurring and you get a quick summary and can click through to the story, or turn on the balloons and the headline will pop up for big stories. This is pretty cool, though I found the balloons distraction more than helpful. This would make a perfect widget for osx too.

[via metafilter]

Picturecloud is a new web service that offers free 3d object photo processing and hosting. Simply shoot 12 or more photos of an object from various angles, upload the photos to their server, and they process and host the completed 3d image, using flash to deliver it to your browser. This is great for folks who want to sell stuff on ebay, or have a 3d photo of themselves or their loved ones, or for tons of other possible uses. It’s free, well designed and easy to use. This is not going to replace software I already own that does this kind of work and outputs it to QTVR, but for folks who only need the occasional 3d object photo or are unable to pay for commercial software and can live with the trade offs (flash only, lack of fine grained control over the output quality) this is ideal.

Check out the Gorillapod, a $25 octopus-armed tripod that allows you to fasten your camera to almost anything. This would be super-handy when I’m out hiking. I wish they mentioned the weight on their site though. Depending on what those arms are made of it could be fairly light or relatively heavy. This goes on my wishlist.

[via gizmodo]

If you’ve ever spent any time with linux chances are you’ve seen the multiple desktop metaphor many of the GUI’s use. The idea is you have multiple desktops and you can plant various application’s windows on separate desktops. When you want to work with your browser, switch to the desktop where it lives, want email? Switch to that desktop, and so on. Once you get used to it it really helps with window clutter. There have been implementations of this for macs going back to the System 6 days, and some of them were essential tools for me over the years, though all seemed to be relatively buggy. I happened across a pretty solid OSX implementation today that’s free, desktop manager. It’s pretty slick – it puts a navigation window on your toolbar, and you can pop up a larger navigation window if you like. It seems pretty stable in a workday’s worth of testing, though it seems to be a little wonkey interacting with expose. It’s well worth a look despite this though – hopefully the expose issues will get straightened out, and in the interim it’s still a decent implementation of the virtual desktop f0r OSX.

Bleezeris a competent little blogging client. What’s most interesting about it is it’s truly cross platform – MacOSX, Win32 and Linux. It’s also free and could be a perfect solution for a campus environment where you’re trying to standardize your blogging tool on all platforms. Spell checking, integration with the popular tagging systems, media uploading and support for the major blogging platforms are all there. It’s also has a tiny footprint and runs relatively quickly despite its use of Java.

I mentioned artrage some time ago. They’ve just updated, adding a host of features and a paid version of the software. A slightly updated free version includes some of the new features and a very reasonably priced ‘Full’ version comes with tons of new stuff for only $19.99. MacOSX and Win32, and well worth a look if you’re interested in natural media painting apps.