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  • Managing your passwords – my recommendation

    Image courtesy of Joshua Davis

    When it comes to computer passwords there are 3 things I’d always recommend…

    1. Give each site, or piece of software, a different password – never re-use!
    2. Make your passwords complex
    3. Never record them in a spreadsheet!

    Basically, when I sign up to a site I find out how long and complex they’ll allow a password to be and create it to that limit! Up to 16 characters line with both upper and lower case and numbers accepted? Find, then it’s 16 characters of mixed case and numbers. The bigger and more complex the harder to crack. Short of getting one of the computer forensics degrees, here are some more tips for you.

    Many people use browser based solutions such as LastPass. Apart from the fact that these are restricted to your browser you are also leaving all your passwords with a single company in “the cloud”. A single security flaw and you could loose them all. Look at Sony’s issues this year as a perfect example!

    My solution is secure and isn’t tied to a browser. It’s downside is that it’s tied to only computers that I use (which many may also see as an upside!).

    I use the excellent open source KeyPass software. However, I use the portable version installed in my Dropbox folder, with an encrypted and secured password file saved also in Dropbox.

    The result of this is that wherever I have Dropbox on a PC I can access KeyPass and the resulting file. There’s even a version of the software for Android and I download the latest version of the password file using the Dropbox Android App to access it.

    Dropbox, by itself, is not secure. However by encrypting and securing the password file saved onto it even if someone gets hold of it they can’t access the passwords within it. As a result all my bank and other financial passwords, amongst many others, are long, complex and hard to crack – I can afford to make them impossible to remember because I don’t need to. And, although KeyPass won’t fill browser fields in automatically, it will generate highly secure passwords for you.

    Do you have an alternative, secure recommendation? Add a comment and let me know!

  • Are you sure you wish to unsubscribe?

    I have a bit of a zero tolerance when it comes to unsubscribing – if there’s no immediate option (i.e. either no option at all or only one that involves emailing them) then they get the SPAM button.

    B&Q, thankfully, do have an immediate option (I’m not sure why I started getting emails from them – I reserved some items recently, but didn’t make any request for them to start emailing me as a result). However, I was met with the following message…

    Now, that’s a lot of asterisks’. That email could be anything (and as it’s my own domain I could have a number of similiar email addresses set up – none of which may be distinguishable). Besides, why does it need to be covered up – other sites don’t do this?

    Bizarre.

  • How to use the Android 4 Roboto font on your website

    This site previously used the font named Droid, which is the open source font used by Android. With last week’s introduction of Android 4, however, they’ve created the Roboto font – this has been designed for HD screens, so is perfect for websites.

    You can learn more about the Roboto font from a Google+ post by Matias Duarte, the Director of the Android User Experience.

    If you wish to use a non-standard font for your website then there are a number of ways to do this. However, I prefer to use the font-face CSS option. It’s not without its disadvantages, so read up on it before proceeding.

    For each font that you wish to add simply add the following code to your CSS…

    @font-face {
    font-family: 'DroidSansRegular';
    src: url('DroidSans-webfont.eot');
    src: url('DroidSans-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
         url('DroidSans-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
         url('DroidSans-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
         url('DroidSans-webfont.svg#DroidSansRegular') format('svg');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
}

    You’ll need to change the font-family to the name that you wish to give the font. Then there are 5 references to the font files – 4 different types to cover different browser requirements. Again, these will need changing appropriately.

    If you wish to use either Droid or Roboto I’ve bundled them up ready for font-face (i.e. with each of the 4 formats that are required).

    • Download Droid – There are 3 versions of the font – standard, bold and mono space.
    • Download Roboto – There are 2 versions of the font – standard and bold.

  • Copying to clipboard in WordPress

    I was recently asked, as a commercial request, to create a WordPress plugin that would allow users to click a button and copy text the clipboard. It seemed an easy enough thing to do – 2 weeks later, though, and I’ve thrown in the towel.

    Using JavaScript to capture contents is the easy bit – adding it to the clipboard is a lot more difficult. IE has a JavaScript command built in, other browsers vary. Unfortunately, other browsers (e.g. Firefox) also restrict this ability for security reasons. This is because the ability to write to the clipboard also comes with the ability to read from it as well – quite why this functionality can’t be detached and restrict just the reading I don’t know.

    So, using JavaScript is problematic.

    Thankfully I’m not the first to come across this problem and a third party script named ZeroClipboard is available. This uses Flash to update the clipboard, which doesn’t have the same security limitations. Of course if you’re viewing from a device that doesn’t support Flash (cough, splutter, iPad, iPhone, cough) then you’re still out of luck. None-the-less this seemed a perfect solution.

    Unfortunately, my limited JavaScript skills failed me – I found the program to be over-complex for what I needed and failed to be able to get it to work.

    At this point I found an alternative – ZClip uses ZeroClipboard but is controlled via JQuery (which is built into WordPress) and provide a much easier and friendly method of access.

    I was now in a position where I had a working plugin. Until I used Admin Bar. That seemed to affect the positioning of the Flash overlay so you had to click slightly above the “Copy to clipboard” button to get it to work.

    The customer, though, didn’t have an issue with this and I could only hope that they didn’t have anything else within their theme or plugins that could affect it in this way (I did try contacting the developer of Zclip but got no response).

    What really ended it all though was the limited way of capturing text in zclip, which I hadn’t appreciated earlier on. ZClip can capture in 2 ways – from static fields (e.g. the text between a SPAN) or dynamic (e.g. from a field). The first doesn’t capture any formatting, even paragraph breaks – returning everything as one long line of text. The second did, but by capturing the HTML.

    The customer wanted the customer to be able to copy to the clipboard long paragraphs of text – neither offered a neat solution to this.

    Then I gave up. One day I may return to it – certainly ZeroClipboard will probably allow me to do what I need it to, but I’ll have to get my head around how to first.

  • Why the next iPhone shouldn’t be the iPhone 5

    Why the next iPhone shouldn’t be the iPhone 5

    The recent  announcement of the iPhone 4S was met, pretty universally, by disappointment. People were expecting the iPhone 5.

    However, the release of the 4s is quite consistent with Apple iPhone releases.

    (more…)