Lee’s World Famous Blog

Hey! I wrote this post using the new Wordpress app on my Android phone.

Online security is obviously an important issue and passwords are the first line of defence.

Recently the company I use to host this web site and my emails was hacked so I had to reset a large number of my passwords, just in case the hackers managed to get hold of any useful information. This made me think about what my passwords should be and where I should store them. I have been guilty of using the same, or similar, passwords for many different web sites, so that once someone knew one password they could have a good guess at some of the others. This meant that I had to have a way of coming up with unique and hard to guess passwords for each site.

To cut a long story short I have decided to use Passpack. Passpack is an online password manager that can generate random passwords and store them so that you can access them securely from any browser. This is handy if you travel a lot or use a number of different PCs. I did consider using a simple encrypted spreadsheet, or a PC based password manager, or storing some data on a USB memory stick but, IMHO, all of these have problems if you use multiple PCs or you lose your USB stick. Obviously you’ll need a userid and password to log on to Passpack so you’ll need to remember these all on your own. Passpack also uses an additional pass phrase so if someone gets hold of your password then they will still need to know the pass phrase. Don’t write them on the same Post-It note! The session uses https so all the data is encrypted over the internet.

I have now used it to generate and store new passwords for all my key web sites. It has a handy feature where you can add a button on to your toolbar so that when you go to the logon page for one of the sites stored on Passpack you can press the button and it will automatically log you in. It can’t log you in to web sites that use multiple passwords or PIN numbers spread over multiple pages, such as banking web sites, but you can use it to store all the information so that you can refer to it when you need to.

I’ve been using it for a few days now and it seems to do the job.

If you don’t want to use an online password manager then you could just do something relatively simple like using an encrypted spreadsheet and back it up on to a USB stick that you can carry around with you. My USB stick has the PortableApps application installed on it. This allows you to install and run other applications directly from the USB stick on any PC (assuming it runs Windows). You can install OpenOffice on your PC and on the USB stick and then use the Calc (Spreadsheet) app to create an encrypted spreadsheet (save the file with a password) that you keep a copy of on the stick. Just make sure that you have multiple copies of the spreadsheet and that you keep them in sync. You could also keep a copy of the spreadsheet on one of the many online storage options available now. Microsoft will give you 25Gb for free using their SkyDrive offering. Use your Hotmail ID to log in. Skydrive explorer allows you to view the online storage as if it was an extra disk on your PC.

OK, I think that’s enough about passwords for now.

Here’s a rather geeky overview of how I subscribe to various RSS feeds and Podcasts.

“What is an RSS Feed?” I hear you ask. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is a way of monitoring your favourite web pages or blogs or Podcasts for any changes. Rather than have to visit your favourite sites on a regular basis to find out if new articles have been posted you can use RSS feeds to alert you when a change has been made.

First things first, you need an RSS reader program that you use to keep track of all your subscribed RSS feeds. There are many of these available but I use Google Reader.

The next thing is to add subscriptions for your favourite pages to Google Reader. When you visit a page that supports RSS you will see (in Firefox) a symbol in the address bar. Other browsers will handle it in a different way but you should find it somewhere. What you want to happen is that when you click on this icon Firefox will automatically add the RSS feed to Google Reader. You can ensure this happens by going to Tools, Options, Applications and setting the Web Feed option to ‘Use Google’. Now when you click in the icon you will be shown a ‘Subscribe to xxxx Feed’ option. Select this and the feed will automatically be added to your Google Reader account.

You can do the same for Podcasts. The Podcast page will either have the RSS icon or, in some cases, it will give you a list of possible RSS readers and Google Reader should be one of them.

Having subscribed to some RSS Feeds and Podcast your Google Reader page should now show them all in a list. You can group similar feeds in to Folders by clicking on the small down arrow beside each feed and either creating a new folder or selecting an existing folder.

By default Google Reader will show all the entries for each feed, both read and unread. You can set it to show only the unread entries by selecting ‘Show updated’ on the Subscription heading. I have also selected ‘Show unread count’ here so that it shows how many unread entries there are for each feed.

When you select a Podcast feed you can either listen to the podcast via streaming or you can download it to listen to later.

I use iGoogle to create my home page. There are various gadgets that you can add to show your RSS feeds on your home page but none of them appeal to me. Instead I have set up a new Tab which enables me to show the Google Reader page in full. To make this work, first create a new Tab, next add the Any URL gadget and then customise this Gadget to show the Google Reader URL http://www.google.co.uk/reader/view/?hl=en&tab=wy#overview-page. I find that this method works best for me as it enables me to have a Home Page with a number of tabs that I can easily switch between.

Here is what my Google Reader home page tab looks like at the moment..

RSS Page

In an idle moment I thought that I would allow people to leave comments about my blogs.  Give it a whirl.

In order to block spam comments I have to approve each comment first before it will appear. If my spam filters work well then I will remove this restriction.

As you probably know it is 40 years since man first went to the moon. This was a big event in my life and has filled me with amazement ever since. Obviously there is plenty of coverage out there in the media so here are a few sites that have caught my eye..

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which is orbiting the moon right now, has taken the first photos of the original landing sites. You can’t really see much as each pixel equates to 4 feet, but hopefully they will put an end to the ‘we never really went there’ theories. See http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/main/index.html.

http://www.wechoosethemoon.org/ is following the Apollo 11 mission as if it were happening in real time today with ‘live’ audio, video, photo and twitter feeds. Good fun.

The BBC has a Doctor Who story published especially for the event, http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/s4/misc/general/blue_moon_01_page_01

This might interest someone.

I use iGoogle to define my customized home page. As well as allowing you to add ‘Gadgets’ to your home page showing various snippets of information, you can also group gadgets together under their own tabs within the home page. The picture below should give you the idea.

This week Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided to change the way that they implemented the tabs so that they were displayed down the left hand side of the page, taking up a lot more space on the screen. See the picture below.

iGoogle with new tabs on left

Google had already made this change on the www.google.com/ig home page some time ago, which caused an uproar on the blogs. The solution that most people used was to switch to using the UK version at www.google.co.uk/ig, but now Google has changed that to use the new version as well.

Thankfully there is a fix that works, at least for the moment. You can use www.google.co.uk/ig?hl=all which reverts to the previous method.

I hope that this is of some help to someone.

Don’t you think that it’s always a sad day when you start the downhill slide towards Winter?

Since my last Swine Flu post Emily’s school was closed for a week because of it and Sophie was actually put on Tamiflu. Thankfully it was all a false alarm which will hopefully be the case for Swine Flu in general.

We went to Barcelona for a long weekend and I would highly recommend it to anyone.

E has just come back from a trip to Belgium and France visiting war graves so I hope to have some photos to upload soon.

I have updated the web site with some more social networking bits and bobs. You can now catch a glimse of what music I have been listening to, thanks to Last.FM, and I have added a Twitter feed. I can’t imagine that I’ll ever post anything to Twitter but it’s there just in case I do.

Summer is well and truly upon us and we haven’t booked a holiday yet.

Oh yes, Sophie is doing a sponsored walk in the Namib desert of Namibia. Should you feel so inclined then you can read about it here and sponsor her here.

It’s still far too early to say how bad this is going to get. The media are in overdrive, as usual, but I guess the fact that the WHO have just raised the threat level to 5 is an indication of the seriousnes.

There are some maps, here, and here, which give a good impression of the spread, and this describes many of the maps available.

I’ve embedded one of them below.

View 2009 H1N1 Flu Outbreak Map in a larger map

I’ve had a minor spring clean and given the web site a new look. I’ve upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress and I’m now using the ‘atahualpa’ theme.