Geek

Cross-posted from my tech blog. Hopefully you’ll find this helpful.

So last night I was sleeping peacefully when my iPhone and Nexus 7 lit up the bedroom like a beacon in the dreamscape. Startled by this (it’s almost as bad as the phone ringing in the middle of the night), I jumped up, wide awake, to see what the urgent message was about.

The message was something to the effect of, ‘Someone tried to get into your Facebook account and we’ve locked it.’ Since the account was locked, I knew it could wait until morning, so I went back to sleep. Kudos to Facebook for being proactive with my account security.

So what I needed to do this morning was change my passwords on my accounts. I was due for a password change anyways (I try to do it once a quarter or so), so I thought I would share my little password generation method with the masses in hopes that you’ll find it helpful.

We all know that passwords are a pain in the butt. They need to be something that you’ll remember, but they can’t be something that will be easily guessed. The days of using “password” as your password should be long, long gone. However, I do use a password that can be easily remembered. I start out with a phrase or word that is meaningful to me. For example, on my wedding day, I made a promise to my husband, so I’ll start with that word:

promised

One thing that you should always do is use a mixture of both lower- and uppercase letters in your password, so let’s change the first letter to an uppercase letter.

Promised

It’s still a pretty simple word to guess, right? The second step in my password generation is adding an adjective or an emotion to the word. Not only does it make the password harder to crack because you’re changing the password to a phrase, it also makes it easier to remember. My promise to my husband makes me happy, so I’ll add a word that indicates this.

Promisedyay!

The exclamation point at the end drives the point home and makes the password even more secure.

The next thing we want to do is we want to change the vowels to symbols that look like their alphabetic counterparts. This is a loose interpretation of leet speak and it adds another layer of security to your passphrase.

Pr0m1s3dy@y!

The last thing I do is add an indicator as to what service this password is going to be used on. Now some people might find this odd, but this gives me the ability to use the same password or phrase on all my accounts but still have unique passwords for each. I am going to use this password for my Facebook account, so let’s add that to the mix.

Pr0m1s3dy@y!FB

One approach to this might be if Facebook is the first thing you go to in the morning, put the FB at the beginning. If you have a Twitter account that you tend to go to after you go to Facebook, you could put that at the end, so you’d have

FBPr0m1s3dy@y!
Pr0m1s3dy@y!TW

Your password still has meaning to you, but is much more secure because you’ve added these different layers of customization and security to it.

Happy surfing and feel confident knowing that you’re surfing safely!

So I recently purchased a new laptop. The latest piece of technology in the house is a Lenovo ThinkPad T430 laptop. For the technically curious, it has an Core i7 vPro processor with 16GB RAM and a 500GB 7200 rpm hard drive.

This baby is fast.

The new laptop arrived on Thursday. I made the recovery discs (since they no longer come with a new computer) and then went ahead and wiped it out, installing Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Linux in it’s place. I found it ironic that I chose to do this on the day that Windows 8 was being released to the world. I know a lot of people are excited about Windows 8, but using the new version of Windows for only an hour made me feel like the most ignorant or stupid computer user in the world. Everything was different and I didn’t have a touchscreen, and Windows 8 was clearly made for a touchscreen. Flinging my mouse off the right hand side of the screen to bring up a neutered version of a start menu did not feel intuitive for me. For a person that’s been using Windows in some fashion since 1988, I was completely lost.

Ubuntu Linux is not windows and it has a different user experience from Windows (if you want it to), but it still feels intuitive to me. Things are different, but they make sense. And there’s no need for a touchscreen.

If you want to learn more about Ubuntu Linux, please feel free to check it out here. I’m a bit of a Linux evangelist, so if you are curious and have any questions about using Linux, just drop me a line. I’ll help out where I can. I use Linux both at work and at home.

And now I have some Macs for sale. A couple of them, as a matter of fact. I’ll post the specs online sometime this weekend in case anyone is interested.

I’ve been asked why I would want to move away from the Mac and onto Linux. They’re kind of close cousins in the way that they work under the hood (Macs run a flavor of Unix and Linux is Unix-like) so at that level I feel very comfortable with either. The thing about using a Mac is that Apple is locking users in even more than they used to be into the “Apple walled garden.” For example, one used to be able to subscribe to their MobileMe calendar using a third-party service such as Google Calendar, but this is not possible with the advent of iCloud.

I want my bits and bytes to be open and free. I want to be able to share my information with whatever application I choose to use and with whomever I want to share with, regardless of what operating system they’re using on their computer. Linux gives me that luxury, Mac OS X doesn’t always provide for that.

If you’re looking for a new computer to run Linux, or even Windows on, I highly recommend the Lenovo line of products. I love their hardware. It has a nice, solid feel to it and the ThinkPad keyboards can’t be beat (even the new iteration of ThinkPad keyboard that appears on my new laptop). Highly recommended.

I love this commercial.

So today Apple announced a new version of their popular iPad, the iPad mini. As the “mini” name implies, this iPad is smaller in nature than the iPad that is near and dear to the consumer’s heart and is designed to compete with the Nexus 7, the Amazon Kindle Fire and the smattering of Windows 8 tablets coming out later this week.

During the announcement, Apple also announced the replacement of “the new iPad” (aka the iPad 3) with a bigger, better, bolder model. While the iPad 2 is still available on the Apple store, the new iPad (aka the iPad 3) has vanished without a trace and has moved to the halls of obscurity. Like those that carry the original iPad, those with the iPad 3, which was available for somewhere around six months this year, will get laughed at, mocked and sneered at by the Apple Elite.

Somewhere a man is already in line for the latest gadgets that don’t come out for a week or two. That’s what Apple people do.

I have to admit that the forced obsolescence of my new iPad kind of has me ticked off. It’s bad enough that my iPhone 4 has been deemed too slow to give me turn-by-turn navigation through that crappy iOS maps app that Apple sprung on everyone (even though several other apps can handle the task just fine) and that my iPhone 4 has been deemed too slow for Siri to tell me she can’t figure out what I mean, but it’s almost a given that in the fairly near future the new iPad will be deemed too slow to do things such as fling birds at pigs and play YouTube videos. This is how Apple operates now; they don’t even wait a year between product releases. We must move move move move move those old devices into landfills as quickly as possible so we can get the latest and greatest innovations such as Siri’s convenient response of “I’m sorry, but I can’t give you flight information.”

By the way, download the Google Search app and ask for flight information and you’ll get it, on an iPhone 4.

Not having the latest and greatest doesn’t hurt my ego in any way. I think my irkedness (is that a word?) is fueled by the fact that both Aperture and iPhoto were randomly crashing this morning while I was trying to export my photo library on my Mac Mini. What happened to, “It just works”? That motto applies less and less these days and that bothers me. Why pay a premium price for the same old subpar experience I could get from a crappy computer from Wal*mart (Always White Trash, Always)?

I could kind of see this forced obsolescence if Apple was announcing new features with these new devices, but they do the same old thing as the old devices but with just a better display and a new connector that is in no way compatible with any other iDevice we have in the house, unless we buy a special cable for $30.

Since I will eventually have to replace my iPhone 4 that can now barely hold a charge between meals and I’ll be forced to use all new accessories anyways, I’m seriously considering jumping out of the Walls of the Fruit Garden™ and into something else. I find Google Now to be a pretty nifty thing and it will segue beautifully into the upcoming Project Glass from Google.

Now that is innovation.

So last week I declared on Twitter that I was giving up on Google+ as one of my social network outlets. I had had enough with trying to make a go of the service and I was going to swear it off completely. It was a declaration worthy of golden gilt.

I lied.

Over the weekend I decided to give Google+ another try. This attempt goes hand in hand with the app.net (or ADN) service, a $36/year service that is aiming to compete with Twitter.

I have to admit that Twitter hasn’t really been blowing my skirt up as much lately. I use it to share random thoughts and to keep up on what other folks are thinking in the world but I don’t really see it as an outlet for one-on-one communication. Google+ lends itself to that a little more than Twitter. Of course, Facebook tries to do it all, and I enjoy reaching out on Facebook, but sometimes I can see only so many of those cleverly* worded e-Cards before I want to throw a lamp or something. Idiocy tends to make me hostile.

So I’ve been trying Google+ again (I think this is the sixth time or so) where I embrace my geekiness and talk about techy stuff. I occasionally talk about other things as well, I’m not all about bits and bytes but since that sort of thing makes up much of a day, it tends to be my focus. Plus, there are a few tech guys that use ONLY Google+ and they share everything they find on there: news bits, tech news, personal adventures, travel photos and the like. I think that’s kind of cool. I kind of get offended when people use these sites as an outlet for hookups; I think the mainstream social networks should be kept to a PG-13 rating at most and honestly, I’m not looking for that sort of thing so don’t even waste my time. A shirtless pic can be enjoyable but don’t show a photo of your dismount off the pile of guys. It’s just my thing. I’m an old fashioned gay, I guess.

So I’m trying to fall in love with my iPad again. I know that I am a very lucky geek to have the new iPad, and I do enjoy using the device, but I’m trying to love it. I’m trying to convince myself that I don’t need to bring a laptop along when I go somewhere, that my iPad will do everything that I want it to do.

I can watch television on my iPad (I just finished “Downton Abbey” and am now ready for the new season), I can read magazines, I can go through email, browse websites, hunt down porn if I so choose and I can be connected to the internet anywhere there is cell service with this nifty little device.

The one thing that I struggle with is writing. And quite frankly, I love to write. The lack of a keyboard on an iPad is the issue; I usually end up using an Apple bluetooth keyboard, but it feels kind of weird to haul such a keyboard into a Panera or other café. It sort of feels blasphemous.

A few months ago there was a Kickstarter project for a device called The Brydge, which basically added a keyboard to your iPad and turned it into something quite like a MacBook Air. The Brydge is rather pricey though at around $180, $200 if you want upgraded speakers. This is a nifty idea, I suppose, but I’m really picky about keyboards. Because of the speed at which I am able to type, it’s really important that I have a full-sized keyboard. Back in the days of my original iPad, I had a case with a built-in keyboard but it was this Barbie’s Doll House version of a keyboard and my fingers didn’t know where to travel to. My brain was more confused than usual when my pinky was aiming for an “a” and all I got was a caps lock light turned on. Any by the way, who needs a caps lock key anyway? I find any prose written in all caps to be quite offensive to my eyes and sensibilities. Didn’t we give up caps lock around the release of the Apple ][e?

So I’m trying to find a way to love my iPad and make it work as my primary portable device. I know I wouldn’t want anything smaller; I have my iPhone 4 to handle those duties. I guess I just need to find a way to get the perfect keyboard attached to the thing. The Brydge? It’s a possibility (though quite pricey). I feel funny asking about iPad keyboards at the Apple store because the associate will quickly gasp in horror before composing himself back to Apple-standard friendliness. Maybe I need to go to Best Buy or something of that ilk and see if there are some keyboards that I can try out.

I’d love it if any of my Apple happy/iPad using readers have a suggestion.

I have officially fallen in love with Netflix’s streaming service. We have used it on and off since it was introduced a few years ago, but after watching the entire single season of “The Event” at my convenience, I am now seeking out other series to watch in the same way.

A couple of weeks ago I started watching “Downton Abbey” from the beginning of the series. I just finished the season one this morning. I’ve also picked up on “Heroes” again, starting with the plot reboot midway through the third season, and that is something that I have been enjoying for the most part. (“Heroes” went way off the rails for a while, there).

Even though I used to make my living writing ad copy for radio and television commercials, I have come to absolutely loathe ads. I can’t stand to watching advertising during television broadcasts, I always buy a paid version of an iPhone or iPad app so I don’t have to see ads floating all over the place, I dislike the ads that are constantly being flung around the LED ribbon at the Carrier Dome during SU games and I go out of my way to avoid internet services that are ad supported. Ads are one of the reasons that I also struggle with Hulu Plus; after paying $9.99 a month I don’t believe I should be watching ads, even if they’re less in number. I’m canceling the Hulu Plus subscription this week but keeping Netflix because there’s no ads being sent my way on that service.

With the ad supported internet services, it’s not that I worry about data mining or sharing my personal preferences, my life is hardly that interesting, I just don’t want services trying to sell me something that I most likely don’t need.

I’m looking forward to starting the next season of “Downton Abbey” tonight. The writing is smart, the score is brilliant music and the show has done a good job of keeping me engaged. And the cool thing about Netflix, of course, is that I can pause watching the show on my computer, pick up in the bedroom on the Apple TV right where I left off while I fold laundry and then pick up again on my iPad when I go to workout or something.

Wicked cool. That’s probably not a phrase in any of the scripts of “Downton Abbey”.

Originally posted on my Google+ stream.

Today I added a new clock to my master-slave clock collection in the house. This one is from 1940. All of the clocks in the collection were made by The Standard Electric Time Company. The are minute impulse clocks, so the make that click-click sound once a minute that was common in American schools in the 20th century. They run on 24VDC and are controlled by a relay board connected to a Pentium II 233Mhz running Debian Linux. The program used to advanced the clocks was written in BASIC by me a couple of years ago and compiled using FreeBASIC. Uptime on the server right now is 340 days.

This particular clock hangs on the wall in my office, replacing a bigger version of one from the same era. It is a smaller, 9-inch model, which would usually found in small offices scattered through a school. Most classrooms had a 12-inch clock hanging on the wall. Gymnasiums, auditoriums, cafeterias, etc tended to have the 15-inch version.

I started collecting these clocks in the mid 1990s. I became fascinated with these clocks on my first day of kindergarten back in 1973.