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Welcome to this week's edition of the Computer Kindergarten Newsletter.
Today is Sunday, September 20, 2009
In this Issue:
Special Feature: Ten Tips for Creating Secure Passwords
Tips & Tricks: Google Tips
This Week's Topic: Backing Up Your Files
Question: Email: Plain Text vs. HTML
Websites of Interest: Yom Kippur; Fuel Economy; How to Remove a Splinter; Reverse Dictionary; Postal Code Lookup
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Special Feature: Ten Tips for Creating Secure Passwords
The following article is from Mark Shead of productivity501.com
http://www.productivity501.com
If you do anything with computers, you deal with passwords and you probably have a handful of different passwords for different sites and systems. The best password is something that you will never forget, but even your family or closest friend would never guess.
In my experience people either have extremely secure passwords like J!*xurQ1# that are so difficult to remember that they have to write them down (which defeats the security of a password) or extremely unsecure to start with, like Jonny (the name of their spouse). The goal of this post is to give you some ideas on how to generate secure passwords. The tips start out with some simple ways to come up with terms and end with ideas of how to combine these terms into secure passwords.
It should be obvious that you should not directly use any of the examples shown here. However, some of these ideas should be useful in generating your own secure passwords.
Here is a collection of tips for creating useful passwords.
1. Use Different Character Classes - Many systems require that your password be from a variety of character classes. The letters a to z are one character class, A to Z is another, 0 to 9 is another, and the symbols are a fourth. In general the more character classes you use in your password, the more secure it is. So “guitar” is less secure than GuiTar which is less secure than Gu1T&r. One simple way to add different character classes is to capitalize all vowels or consonants.
2. Use Letters from a Phrase - Use the first letter from each word in a phrase, line from a song, etc. “There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea.” could become Tahitbots.
3. Numbers From Word - Use your phone keypad to convert a word to its numerical equivalent to use as part of your password.
4. Keyboard Patterns - Creating terms from rows of adjacent keys. 12345 is not very good, but \][po combined in the ways specified below can make for a secure password that would be very difficult to guess and is fast to type.
5. Use More Than One Word - Single word passwords are easy to break. If a hacker runs a program to try a bunch of words from the dictionary, they shouldn’t be able to figure out your password. Choose words that you will remember, but that someone else will not be able to guess. So a password like shinynail or flyingrock or tallwater are more secure than single word passwords.
6. Ideas for Passwords - Sometimes coming up with a password can be pretty difficult. Keep in mind you need to choose terms that you will not often talk about. Here is a list of ideas to help come up with words:
* Choose two objects from a picture that you will always remember. For example: a drawing at your grandparents house, the illustration from a children’s book, a painting at an art museum, etc.
* Choose two terms from a memorable purchase. For example: bluev6 (first car), thinibm (first computer), gold3crt (engagement ring), 7ftgrand (piano), pinedoor (first house), sunshore (honeymoon destination).
* Look through a catalog and choose terms based on something you see.
* Look up a random article on Wikipedia and choose a word found or related to a word you find in the article.
7. Separate Your Two Words With Symbols and Numbers- For example: pine&1&door, kit!2!cat, etc.
8. Modify the Password For Each Site- In theory, the most secure password strategy is to use a completely different password for each system. In practice, this means you will have to write them down. By choosing a secure password and modifying it based on where it will be used, you can keep from having to write passwords down, but still have a slightly higher level of security. Here are some examples showing how they were created
* blue.Mv6 for Amazon.com - blue and v6 from first car. M from the second letter in site name.
* blue.Av6 for SAP logon - same as above.
* thin!5!ibm for Amazon.com - thin and ibm from first computer. 5 from the number of letters in the site name.
9. Multiple Passwords for Different Types of Sites - Another option to keep from using the same password on every site is to use two or three passwords based on how secure the site is. For example, your banking sites might all use derivations of the bluev6 password. Ecommerce sites might all use a derivation of a different password and community type sites might use a third. The goal is to make sure that a rogue administrator at a forum you frequent is not able to get to your 401k.
10. Date Based Component - Some systems require you to change your password every 180, 90, or 60 days. (One client had set up their system to require a password change every 30 days!) If you are familiar with the cycle, you can add a date based component to your password and change it each time it is required. For example, J10 could be added when you need to change your password in June of 2010.
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Tips & Tricks: Google Tips
The following article is from worldstart.com)
Google is by far the most popular search engine on the planet. However, most people don’t really use Google to the extent they can. People would just rather type in their search query and expect Google to guess what exactly is on their mind. So, here are five little tutorials to help you effectively unleash the power of Google!
1.) Use Double Quotation Marks for an Exact Phrase Search
You want to search for a Web page with the exact phrase “women who love football,” but when you perform the search on Google, it brings up too many results. Most of them don’t even contain all the words in the same page.
Here’s the trick: when you want to search for an exact phrase in a Web page, you have to put it within quotes. Google searches the exact keywords in the order that you put them.
For example:
Women who love football – 34,600,000 results. Not all of them are relevant.
“Women who love football” – 45,500 results. As you can see here, the quotes help us eliminate a lot of unnecessary results.
2.) Wildcard Search With the Asterisk
The asterisk ( * ) can be used as a wildcard in your phrase search. The asterisk denotes the placeholder for a single word, meaning that an asterisk in a search query is like a blank slot that will accept any word. This is extremely helpful if you want to search for a phrase, but have forgotten one of the words in it.
For example, you know about the “the bridge on the river xx,” but no matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to find the name of the actual river! In this case, you can just go and search like this:
“the bridge on the river *”
There you go, it's the river, Kwai.
You can also use multiple asterisks for multiple wildcard words. The query given below searches for pages that have “wine” and “monks,” with two words between them. “Wine ** monks”
3.) Specify to Include or Exclude the Site
The “site:” operator tells Google to search only within a particular site, or within sites with a certain domain suffix. For example, you want to search for Kobe Bryant at ESPN.com. You can use “Kobe Bryant” site:ESPN.com for better results.
Similarly, if you want to exclude a particular site from the search results, that’s also possible. All you have to do is add a “ - “ (minus sign) sign before the “site:” operator. For example, you would like to download the Yahoo! messenger from a non-Yahoo! Web site. For this, you can use "Yahoo messenger" -site:yahoo.com.
The minus sign tells Google to omit the search results from the site of yahoo.com. Now, if you wanted to search an “essay on American history,” but you only wanted to search on .edu Web sites, you would use “Essay on American history” site:.edu.
4.) Including Synonyms in Your Search
By placing the “~” (called a tilde) right in front of a word, with no space in between, you can instruct Google to search for the word following the tilde, as well as its synonyms. For example, if you wanted to search for a bass fishing tutorial, you could type in “Bass fishing” tutorial.
However, if you added a “~” in front of the word tutorial, Google will search not only for tutorials, but also for words such as basics, hints, guide, etc. for even more information.
5.) Find Definitions
Google’s “define” operator can help you look up word definitions. You simply need to include this operator in your search phrase to access definitions with just a click.
For example, to find out the definition of bass fishing, you would type define: bass fishing.
And, ta da! There you go!
Another way to find out about something is to use “what is” in the search phrase. Using this, not only yields the definition of the phrase, but it also performs a regular Google search using the same search phrase.
To search for bass fishing, you would type What is bass fishing?
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Today's Topic: Backing Up Your Files
Question: Both of my children told me I should put all of my files on a USB drive for safe keeping. Can you tell me which one to buy and how to do this?
Answer:
First of all, you need a USB drive, also known as a flash drive, data stick, or thumb drive, big enough to fit all of the files you want to store on it. Here are the steps to determine what size drive you will need:
If you are using Windows XP
Since most people save their files in My Documents, you will have to find out the size of that folder.
You may have a My Documents icon on the desktop. If you do, right click on it; a menu will open. Left click on Properties. It may take a few moments for the computer to calculate the information. When it is done, it will display the size of the documents in the folder, the amount of space it is using on the disk, and the number of files and folders contained in the folder. Click OK or the X button when you are done noting the file size.
If you do not have the My Documents icon on the desktop, right click the Start button; a menu will open. Left click on Explore. This will open Windows Explorer. The window will be split in two parts. Look for My Documents on the left (you may have to scroll up or down to find it).
Right click on My Documents; a menu will open. Left click on Properties. It may take a few moments for the computer to calculate the information. When it is done, it will display the size of the documents in the folder, the amount of space it is using on the disk, and the number of files and folders contained in the folder. Click OK or the X button when you are done noting the file size.
If you are using Windows Vista
You may have an icon for the Documents folder on your desktop. If you named your computer, for example, with your name, you will see an icon with your name right under it. If you did not name it, look for an icon that says User’s Files.
When you find the icon, double click on it. A window will open, split in two parts. You should see Favorite Links with a list under it, including Documents, Pictures, Music and more. Look for the word Folders, at the bottom left. To the right of Folders is a small up arrow. Click on the arrow.
You will now see a list with the word Desktop on the top. Beneath that you will see your name (if you named your computer) or User’s Files. Double click on that. A list will display; Documents will be one of the items on the list.
Right click on Documents; a menu will open. Left click on Properties. Click the General tab at the top. It may take a few moments for the computer to calculate the information. When it is done, it will display the size of the documents in the folder, the amount of space it is using on the disk, and the number of files and folders contained in the folder. Click OK or the X button when you are done noting the file size.
If you do not have the icon on the desktop, right click the Start Orb; a menu will open. Left click on Explore. A window will open, split in two parts. You should see Favorite Links with a list under it, including Documents, Pictures, Music and more. Look for the word Folders, at the bottom left. To the right of Folders is a small up arrow. Click on the arrow.
You will now see a list with the word Desktop on the top. Beneath that you will see your name (if you named your computer) or User’s Files. Double click on that. A list will display; Documents will be one of the items on the list.
Right click on Documents; a menu will open. Left click on Properties. Click the General tab at the top. It may take a few moments for the computer to calculate the information. When it is done, it will display the size of the documents in the folder, the amount of space it is using on the disk, and the number of files and folders contained in the folder. Click OK or the X button when you are done noting the file size.
Now that you know the size of your files, you can determine the capacity of the USB drive that you need. If the size of the files is measured in MB, then everything will fit on a 1GB drive. If, for example, the size is 3.6 GB, then you will need a 4 GB drive.
Since the price of storage has decreased so significantly over the last few years, you may want to buy a USB drive larger than you need right now. This will give you room for files created in the future.
In the next newsletter, we will learn how to save all of your files to your new USB drive.
Visit our newsletter archives to learn what a USB drive is:
http://www.computerkindergarten.com/html/092307.html
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Question: Email: Plain Text vs. HTML
Sometimes when I am working with or reading about e-mail, I see the terms Send in Plain Text and Sent in HTML. What does this mean?
Answer:
There are two ways to work with and send email: HTML or Plain Text.
Plain text emails contain only the text that you type. You cannot change the font, size or color of the text or include any pictures or graphics in the email. The advantage to plain text is that the email is smaller in size and therefore is sent and received faster. They also cannot carry viruses.
When you format text in an email, the email program puts in codes to indicate the font type, size and color that you have chosen. Some email programs allow fancy backgrounds to be used (sometimes called stationery) and graphics can be inserted right into the email. HTML emails include the text that you typed along with these codes.
There are several disadvantages to HTML emails:
-- They are larger in size so sending and receiving take longer (a consideration for people using a dial-up connection)
-- There are some viruses out there that can get sent in HTML. (If your antivirus program is up to date, this should not be a concern).
-- Not all e-mail programs can read the HTML codes in an email. If the recipient of your email is using a program that cannot, he or she will see a screen full of gobbledygook (the computer codes) instead of the nicely formatted email that you took all that time to create.
Some email programs will automatically send in HTML text; others will allow you to choose.
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Websites of Interest:
Yom Kippur
Thursday is Yom Kippur. Learn more about this holiday at this website:
http://www.jewfaq.org/holiday4.htm
For the children, you’ll find coloring pages, greeting cards, games, and more at this website:
http://www.torahtots.com/holidays/yomkipur/yomk.htm
Send Yom Kippur greeting cards online to your friends and family.
http://browse.postcards.org/postcards/cards/0925/
Fuel Economy
Improve the MPG of your vehicle with the gas mileage tips you will find at this website.
http://fueleconomy.gov/
How to Remove a Splinter
It may seem pretty simple, but there are many different (pain free!) ways to get rid of that annoying splinter.
http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-a-Splinter
Reverse Dictionary
The word is on the tip of your tongue but you cannot think of it? Check out this website for some help.
http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml
Postal Code Lookup
Don’t know the Zip Code? Look it up here.
http://www.addressdoctor.com/lookup/default.aspx?lang=en
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