“If you invited me to try and crack your password, how many guesses would it take before I got it?”, asks blogger and Internet standards expert John Pozadzides. The top ten list of common passwords includes your city, college, football team, your birthday, your partner’s name, or your pet’s name, perhaps followed by a zero or one. Learn how to choose better passwords by avoiding these common traps. Read more at Lifehacker.
If you travel with a Blackberry, iPhone or other web-enabled phone, many airports and airlines are now accepting electronic boarding passes in lieu of paper ones. In addition to the green benefit of not using paper, the digital boarding passes are convenient for those traveling with just a phone and without access to a printer. If your airline and airport offer it, you should see the option on the screen when you check in online. To learn more, read this overview from the TSA.
When downloading Flash videos for offline viewing or transferring to an MP3 player, detailed how-to instructions vary, depending on where you are grabbing the video from, and what browser you are using. For example, Firefox users can use the Video Download Helper extension for most situations, and You Tube videos can usually be grabbed by the YouTube Downloader application. For details and examples, read Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Ripping and Converting Video.
Twitter recently announced a new feature that optionally adds your location to your tweet. The Tweet With Location feature is off by default (thank goodness!) and you’ll need to opt into the service before you can use it. After you’ve opted in, you still have the choice to turn off location reporting for each tweet you sent. For more details see Twitter’s Help Resources “How to Tweet With Your Location” and “About the Tweet With Your Location Feature“.
Last week Google released a number of new Gmail features to the public, taking them out of Gmail Labs, which is a beta or testing platform. These include message color coding, search autocomplete, forgotten attachment detector, YouTube previews, and vacation away messages. At the same time, some test lab features were killed. To learn more, read CNN “Gmail Holds Graduations and Funerals“.
Launchy is an open source Windows and Linux utility that lets you quick start applications with just a few keystrokes. Forget your start menu and the icons on your desktop, Launchy hides in the background until you hit ALT-SPACE. Then just enter a few letters of the program you are looking for, and hit enter when it has been found.
This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the Adobe Photoshop. In the last twenty years, “shopped” has come to mean manipulated with an image editor, and “photoshop” is sometimes used as a verb. Here on Adobe TV, is a television snippet that explores Photoshop’s early years.
Ever needed to share large files with friends and family? Many sites, such Dropbox offer free space on their servers, but the Opera browser offers a different approach that keeps the files on your own computer yet enables sharing. The feature is called Opera Unite, and the behind-the-scenes magic will stream shared content such as music and photo galleries, or even let you host a Web page. Learn more from Opera or Lifehacker.
Google recently announced Google Buzz, a social media platform that integrates social networking into Gmail and other Google products. To check it, login into your Gmail Account and look for Buzz in the left-hand column. Is this going to impact Twitter or Facebook? Will you be jumping on the bandwagon? Let me know what you think by posting a comment at my blog.
Twitter has recently been hit by a rash of phishing attacks, where users get email messages with fake Twitter login links, in an attempt to steal Twitter account passwords. If you receive a notification from what looks like the real site, do not login. Instead, type “twitter.com” directly into your browser address bar. As a precaution, now is probably a good time to go directly to twitter.com and change your password. For more about the attack, read CNN.
