I thought I’d share this good tip for remembering & keeping track of passwords with you, which is part of a post on Lifehacker.com (see link below for original article). It’s not a new article, but has some good info. This password technique is almost identical to the one I’ve been using for the better part of a decade now.

I have a LOT of passwords for my various accounts and very rarely have trouble remembering them because I have a system. Developing systems is a great way to make things easier for yourself in all areas of life, not just remembering passwords.

Here’s the tip from their site:

5. Never have to write down countless, unique passwords with a single master pattern

The safest place to store your passwords is in your head, and you don’t want to use one password for all your logins. This isn’t so much a “memory” hack as an efficiency tip, but it only forces your noggin to come up with one really great password system rather than lots of highly forgettable variations. Choose a base password, like an abbreviated or acronym version of a favorite phrase or song, then create a system for changing it up site to site, like using the first three letters of the site name, the first four consonants or first two vowels, whatever fits for you. Clicking “Forgot your password?” and waiting on verification emails will be a distant memory, one you can feel just fine about forgetting.

Source: Top 10 Memory Hacks

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

I’ve been helping make computers easy for people for about 16 years now as a professional, but have been an avid computer user for well over a quarter century at this point.

There are a lot of people who think computers are hard to use, and need my help to make heads or tails
of them.

It’s not your fault if you feel this way, but I wanted to give you a quick “computer history” lesson to help you understand that computers are in most ways *much* easier than when I started using them, and to help you understand they’re only getting easier as time goes by.

I also wanted to share a website with you that lets you look into the Internet of the past to see what it was like before the days of the World Wide Web – what I used to use back in the day before most people had even heard of email.

When I got my first computer back in the 1980s, it didn’t come with a modem. I had to spend hundreds of dollars to buy a dialup modem which ran at “1200 bps” – that number may not mean anything to you, but in relative terms compared to a modern cable or DSL modem it was like walking compared to driving a fast car at top speed.

VERY slow!

Not only was it slow, it was a “dumb modem” which meant that every single time I used it I had to manually configure it to work properly, something I had to do by memorizing and typing in a string of letters and numbers that would look like gibberish to most people.

Once I was connected to the Internet I didn’t have bookmarks or search engines to find things, I had to
know the exact address of a site I wanted to connect to, then type another special command to connect to it.

Everything was done by typing commands and you often needed to have a great deal of knowledge about exactly how your computer worked “under the hood” to know the correct commands to type, and if you typed one letter or number wrong it just wouldn’t work!

A far cry from today where you can grab a mouse and double-click on an icon and then from there click a link or a button to get where you want, or at most type in what you’re looking for in a search engine.

If you want to get an idea of what it used to look like back in the day, there’s a website which simulates the Internet as it was about 20 years ago before the Web came along, when just about the only people using the Internet were complete computer geeks like myself.

Go to: http://telehack.com/

and you’ll see what it was like. You have to type commands to get around (a list of commands is shown
when you arrive) followed by the Enter or Return key to “send” the command.

I’m just sharing this with you for fun, and to give you a little perspective on how things have changed. The good news is, things are generally getting easier as time goes by.

On the down side, of course, we do face a lot more potential threats and risks to our privacy and security
on the modern Internet than was around back then.

In my next email I’ll tell you about one type of threat that can put you at risk no matter what kind of
computer you use (yes, including Apple Macs).

Fortunately, this particular threat is one that can be defeated by knowledge, and I’ll share a new lesson
to give you that knowledge so you can stay safe.

So keep an eye out for that lesson – I’ll be posting it in the next few days.

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

Just wanted to post a quick update to let readers know that some of my computer training audios are now available for purchase on iTunes!

So far, there’s only two available, but there are five others that have been submitted and should be available soon. This is something I’ve been planning for some time now, and I’m very happy that it’s finally going live.

At this point, I’m not aware of any way to get my video lessons available through iTunes, but audio training is a great way to learn on the go or wherever you are. You can, of course, not only listen to the audio lessons on your computer but will be able to put them on your iPhone, iPod, or iPad as well.

I’ll be adding more audios in the future, but for now, here’s a link if you want to take a look:

Worth Godwin’s Computer Training on iTunes (link will open in new window and will launch iTunes if you have it installed on your Windows or Mac computer.

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.

I thought I’d start posting the occasional interesting link on the site in addition to the computer lessons — mostly links to something that relates to computers; in this case, another example of how things change so rapidly in the computer world.

This is a really interesting find – I just stumbled on this article and find it really interesting how it breaks down blog use and design in a very granular fashion.

From the perspective of 2010, it’s very interesting how much has changed in the mere seven years that have passed since the study is done.  I wonder, for example, what percentage of the blogs would have video on them if the same study was done today — amazing to think not even one in the study used video, given how commonplace it is now!

I also find it funny how the article consistently refers to the sites they studied as weblogs instead of just blogs — clearly the term was being used already as it’s mentioned in the article, but nobody calls them “weblogs” anymore (and I suspect a lot of people have never heard the full term); another example of how rapidly things change in just a few years.

Very interesting.

Audio and video lessons also available via computer training podcast.