Mac Friday - Easily Protect and Remember Web Passwords with 1Password

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or by Email.
Thanks for visiting!

I have an insane number of website accounts and profiles to keep track of. It goes with the territory of one who makes his living in the virtual world. Between my own profiles on dozens of social media sites, various email accounts, the blogs I own, banking and online bill paying sites, web hosting accounts, and the client work I do - it can truly get nuts sometimes.

The problem is twofold. First I need to keep the passwords someplace that’s organized where I can find them all. Quickly. The old paper and pencil password log I kept back in the day wouldn’t be able to keep up.

Then there’s the security issue. Paper and pencil is a bad idea. Even worse is keeping a spread sheet or text document on your computer with all your passwords in it!

Secure AND Easy

Fortunately 1Password keeps track of my passwords for me while keeping them secure at the same time. It was one of the very first purchases I made when I got the first Mac here at SuccessCREEations and at just under $35 for a single license is arguably some of the best money I spent getting started.

I’ve been using 1Password for about a year now and the program is easy to use, secure, and saves me countless hours hunting for my passwords.

1Password Makes Browsing More Secure

With all the social media sites that folks can join the the temptation can be strong to just use a standard password on all these different accounts. That’s a very bad idea.

And with 1Password it’s unnecessary too.

Because the program securely remembers all your passwords for you, there is no longer any need for passwords that are easy to remember. Now you can use truly random character strings for your passwords and still have them available in all your browsers.

Even better

Coming up with a random sequence to much bother for you? No worries.

1Password can generate truly random strings for you within parameters you can set. All you have to do is click your mouse and get remarkably strong unique passwords for every account you have.

That makes it much less likely that someone will hack your online information. Even if one site were to be compromised the damage is isolated to that account because all your others have randomly different passwords.

And they are even working on a web based version that will give access to this great service for Windows users too. Very nice.

Check out this video. If you are on a Mac and have too many passwords to manage, 1Password is worth a look.

Mac Friday - Screenshots

Screenshots.

No, we’re not talking about the big guy on the right here spraying gobs of bullets on the silver screen, as entertaining as that is.

A screenshot is simply a way to capture what you are looking at right now on your computer screen so you can use it later, or share it with someone else.

An Example

Say for example you took a silly little online brain test to see if you were more right brained or more left brained in your thinking.

And then suppose your results were strange enough that you wanted to share them with some folks.

Apparently I’m ever so slightly more right brained than left brained. At least according to that test.

Now my question is this. How did I use more than 100% of my brain that day?

Weird.

And it’s one of those things that is much easier to explain when folks can look at the screen shot.

All I did was capture the screen shot, open the image in Photoshop, and add the circle and text. Then I resized the whole thing uploaded it and now everyone can see that I use more of my brain than I have.

On a Windows computer capturing a screenshot is pretty straight forward. The keyboard has a Print Screen button.

But what about on a Mac?

It can still be done fairly easily with a little know how.

Read more

Mac Friday: Choosing a Web Browser

Switching to Mac has had some challenges. Most of them are fairly minor.

For example, what web browser is the best one? That’s a question that can spark some heated debate depending on what circles you ask it. Wanna have fun at a tech-geek gathering? Ask it to a group of Mac users and then sit back and watch the fireworks.

It’s sorta like pulling the pin from a hand grenade, and tossing it into the middle of the room to see what will happen.

Anyway this whole thing started because FireFox was beginning to give me problems. Over time it seemed to be hanging up longer and more often. With my current severe scheduling challenges, sitting waiting while a web browser checks out for sometimes several minutes at a crack was getting frustrating to say the least.

I’ve been a FireFox fan for quite a while so when it started giving me fits I felt a little like I was starting over. Everyone’s got their own opinion. Every browser seems to claim they are the fastest. What follows is far from scientific. I’m not a full blown tech-head. So take it for whatever it’s worth. Read more

Mac Friday - 3 August 2007

Well it’s now been about 2 weeks since my Mac Mini arrived. And things are going well.

I overheard Gorgeous telling a friend that she doesn’t hear grumpy noises eminating from my office anymore. I take that as a good sign things are going well.

Before I got the Mac I was at the point where I was loosing about 20 minutes out of every hour on my machine waiting for things to process or rebooting. That doesn’t happen anymore.

One Hitch

Well, there was one morning this past week. For some reason my mouse laser stopped registering clicks. It would track around the screen fine, but wouldn’t click on anything.

The scroll function wasn’t working either.

I fought with it a bit to see if I could get it reset easily. I was hoping to figure out if it was something screwy I did or not. Smart money is on operator error.

Finally I just did a hard shut down of the computer, turned off the wireless mouse and keyboard, and powered everything back up.

Things have been purring along nicely ever since. One hitch in two weeks is so much better than the several times a day that I was dealing with that

MS Office Work Around

I don’t yet have much need for MS Office with what I do here on this machine. But occasionally clients will send me a Word document from time to time.

I’ve found a serviceable work around with Google Docs. It is right there alongside my Gmail account and can import and export Word documents just fine. It isn’t perfect. But it does work for those occasional documents you need to get out.

Eventually I’ll probably get MS Office for Mac, although I hear Open Office is pretty good too. Maybe I’ll try that first.

A Mac Resource

Was pointed to a great resource for news on things Mac by a friend. If you are interested in that sort of thing, check out Think Secret. It’s chock full of insider info.

Before I check out this morning, let me leave you with a little PC vs. Mac humor.

Enjoy!

Mac Friday - 27 July 2007

Well it’s now been a week since my new Mac Mini arrived and I thought I’d share a few things about the whole experience with y’all.

Dang that Mac is Small!

The very first thing Gorgeous and I couldn’t help but notice is that the stinking thing is small. I mean really small. We’re talking about a highly concentrated processing-power-to-volume ratio.

I’ve got hardcover books on my shelf that are bigger than this thing. Gorgeous asked if that little box could really do everything the HP tower that I was using did.

“No Honey. It does a whole lot more.”

I call it the Return of the True Desktop. Right now the Mini is parked on the corner of my desk behind my phone. It’s in a spot that previously held general clutter.

The Mini is much better looking than the clutter was.

The Big Part

I opted for the big screen. 23 inches of wide screen HC goodness. I can have my browser window open in the middle and various chats, my calander, email, and misc. other stuff all open on either side, watching while I’m working.

Way cool.

One down side is that I haven’t yet mastered dragging things across that big old screen. I keep running out of mouse pad.

I’m used to working with a track ball on the other machine. Might have to go that route if I can’t get a grip there.

But the picture! Oh yeah!

I put one of my Band of Brothers DVD’s in and Wow! Amazing picture quality.

Glad I got the big screen. Read more

Odds and Ends

Got a few odds and ends to share with y’all this morning.

Great New Series

Easton Ellsworth has started a new series over at Business Blog Wire on Small Business Blog Help. Easton has been following business blogging for a long time and I consider him the go-to guy when it comes to Fortune 500 blogging.

I’m looking forward to seeing how he applies what he knows from big business to small business folks. Go check it out for yourself.

Bloggers Noticed by Mainstream Media

BusinessWeek is standing up and taking notice of some top tier bloggers. If you’ve ever wondered How Top Bloggers Earn Money then you should spend a little time looking through that slide show. (The navigation for the slides is in the upper right below the banner ad. Not as obvious as it could be.)

My New Mac is Arriving

I say “arriving” instead of “arrived” because yesterday the keyboard, monitor and mouse were delivered. Unfortunately the guts of my Mini are taking the slow boat to Savannah. They didn’t make the Friday outbound cutoff, apparently, didn’t start rolling until Monday and won’t be here until Friday according to FedEx.

So now I’ve got a couple of boxes here in my office that I’ll have to wait until the weekend to unpack.

Good thing I’m scheduled to be off this weekend! I suspect I’ll be plenty busy!

Enjoy!

Switching to a Mac

We’ve got enough going on here at SuccessCREEations these days that it is time to upgrade my computer. I’ve been putting it off for quite a while now but decided the time had come.

This computer has served us well in spite of me asking it to do far more than it was designed to handle. When we bought our current machine a couple years back, we bought it in a hurry.

We had to replace our computer that died suddenly after serving us well for over 7 years.

I decided to buy a basic machine then with the idea that it’s primary roll would be for Gorgeous to use for email and internet browsing. The plan was that the next machine would be a more powerful one for me to use for my work at SuccessCREEations.

Of course no plan survives first contact with the enemy and the next machine we needed was a laptop with Gorgeous. Between her parents failing health and a string of conferences she was to attend, we needed her to have portable computing power.

So I kept using the old machine for my work here. Read more