Listimatum

Do you use the internet? Chances are you do… which means you’ve probably signed-up for a bunch of different on-line services like email, on-line banking and social network sites. For each of these services you need an account and before you know it you have half a dozen username password combinations taking up space on your mental hard drive.

Everybody knows that they should select a hard to guess password that contains at least one digit and a special ch4racT3r! To make sure your password is secure some sites will enforce password rules but because remembering random characters is hard most people use a very simple strategy to generate weak passwords.

Even if the password is meant to protect very important information like a bank account most people end up using something like Lastname1. On top of that most people use another shortcut; using the same password over and over again. Reduce, re-use, recycle is good for the environment but not as the key to all your personal information.

Solving this problem is not complicated. All the passwords I use on the internet are different, random and secure. I can also say that I’m not a freak (depends who you talk to!) and I didn’t spend months learning a bunch of random alpha-numeric strings by heart. In fact, I don’t even know what my passwords are!

You’re probably wondering how I can log into my accounts if I don’t even know the passwords? Easy… I let the computer do the hard work for me. It generates and remembers the passwords so I can use the limited space in my head for more important stuff. I use a little program that lets me store all my passwords in an encrypted database that is itself protected by a password.

Now I don’t need to worry about forgetting usernames or passwords for the gazillion different websites I use and I know that all my passwords are secure. By storing the database on my portable drive I can use it from any computer with a usb port. The only thing I need to worry about is not losing that database, but I’m pretty confident I got this covered.

If you want to use secure passwords too and don’t want to spend time memorizing them, then learn about KeePass Password Safe. It’ a free open source utility that can run on both Windows and Linux and can be found here:

http://www.keepass.info

Let me be clear if you are using the mouse more than the keyboard, you are doing it wrong! Everyone who uses a computer daily should learn how to use it properly. You might think that keyboard shortcuts are only useful to programmers and geeks but these days people spend a lot of time in front of their computer screen and could really benefit from learning how to drive it ‘manually’.

Even the younger crowd, borned with a technology degree, uses the mouse too much. Their thumbs are genetically modified to type on the miniature keyboards of their phone but they still need training wheels when it comes to switching between applications on their computer. Watching this feels like listening to someone the first time they pick-up a violin.

Using a computer should be like playing a musical instrument. When a guitar player plays a chord he doesn’t look at the strings and his fingers to figure out where they should land on the neck. He just thinks about the sound he wants and his fingers know where to go. Now compare that with someone who uses a computer every single day, and still needs to look at his screen when doing a simple operation over and over again!

They can’t strike a chord on their computer because they don’t use the right tool. A guitar player can learn to play notes with his eyes closed because he uses a very powerful tool: repetition. Humans are experts at memorizing patterns and repeating them. When we talk, our tongues make the same movements over and over again. When we walk all of our body balances itself without you having to think about it. Why is it that when using a computer, day after day, most users still can’t perform basic tasks with their eyes closed?

Most people react to there computers. When you use the mouse and the cursor, you need to get visual feedback from the screen and think about how you can accomplish what you want to do. Wouldn’t you rather think about the task and execute it, instead of performing cursor acrobatics on the screen?

Here’s a simple example: saving your latest report in notepad, Windows basic editor. First, you take your hand off the keyboard and grab the mouse. You move it a bit to find the cursor on the screen. Once you’ve located it, you start moving to the top left corner of your window. You align the cursor with the ‘File’ menu option, then you click. You wait for the menu to appear, once you get visual confirmation you search for the ‘Save’ option. Then you align the cursor with it and click. How many steps did it just take to simply save a file?

The problem with the mouse is that it can only do one thing, point and click. You might want to save or open a document or copy some text. Doing this with pointing and clicking requires multiple steps with half of them involving waiting for visual feedback (ie. a pop-up menu) and then reacting to it.

On the other hand, if you associate a key on the keyboard with a task then accomplishing that task becomes very easy. You also give muscle memory a chance to do its magic and soon you can issue commands with your eyes closed, just like playing notes on the guitar. All of the click-ety-click from the previous example can be replaced with the following keyboard shortcut:

CTRL + S

That is, you press the Ctrl and ’s’ keys at the same time. That’s it… you’re done. Whether it is faster or slower, easier or harder than using the mouse is irrelevant. It is easily repeatable and it doesn’t need visual feedback! Instead of responding to the computer you’re actually controlling it.

If you think you are ready to take the training wheels off and want to start driving your computer manually, start learning the basic keyboard shortcuts for the actions you repeat most often. You can start with things like copy (Ctrl+c) and pasting(Ctrl+v) text, switching between applications(Alt+Tab) and moving to the next field(Tab) of a form on a web page. And don’t worry, nobody on the internet will notice that you stalled when the light turns green!

If you want a list of default keyboard shortcuts follow this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts

After losing all the data on my thumb drive when it died, I decided to implement a backup process to make sure I don’t lose all the data on my computer. It’s been running for about a week and I feel confident that my data is safe now.

I got a new thumb drive and before I started using it, I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t cry the day it stopped working. The solution I came up with is not as automatic as the one I described last week but it’s very easy and simple to use. For my computer backup I scheduled a task to run every night and sync the data from one computer to the other. Since my thumb drive is not always connected to my computer I had to find another solution.

I decided to back-up the drive when it is inserted in the computer. There are two obvious obstacles to this solution. First, we need a way to detect that the drive has been connected and then run a script to sync the drive. Then, we need a way to determine in which computer the drive has been connected. The backup must only happen when it gets connected to my home computer. I wouldn’t want to backup my data on my work computer for example.

Fortunately these two problems are easily resolved. Windows has something called autorun that lets you run a program when a drive is inserted. Also, it turns out that figuring out which computer we are connected to is not necessary, we can cheat by storing the backup script on the computer instead of on the thumb drive. This way it will only run on the desired computer.

Using autorun is very easy. All you need to do is create a file named ‘autorun.inf’ on the thumb drive and put the following in it:

[autorun]

label=My Traveler Disk

open=c:\rsync_thumb.bat

action=Sync Me!

This was a good starting point. When the drive is inserted in the computer, I get a pop-up window asking me if I wanted to sync the drive. Now all that is needed to sync the drive is a double-click. And if I click it by mistake when I’m on another computer, the command will fail because the script doesn’t exist.

Now if syncing was all I was worried about this setup would have been good enough. Unfortunately, all the data on my thumb drive is encrypted, which means that I need to run another program to access it. Autorun can only be used to run one program which means I can’t use it to for the backup script and the encryption software.

This is where PStart comes to the rescue. It’s a little program that let’s you create a custom menu to easily start your programs. I created a menu with two items, one for the encryption software and one for the backup script. Then I set an option in PStart to auto launch the encryption software.

The custom menu can be seen at the top of this post. The following screenshot shows the autorun window, which lets me start my custom menu, which automatically launches the encryption software.

Follow this link for more information on PStart:

http://www.pegtop.net/start/

Here’s a great article on how to customize your thumb drive using autorun.inf:

http://dailycupoftech.com/usb-drive-autoruninf-tweaking/

The inevitable happened this weekend. I inserted my thumb drive in the USB port of my computer and instead of seeing the cool blue light flashing I saw – nothing! Not even a pop-up window on my screen, and after a few hours of CPR on the poor thing, I had to accept it, my portable drive was dead. Of course, I didn’t have a backup so I cried for a few hours…

After I came back to my senses, I started working on something I should’ve done a long time ago. We all know we should backup our data, but the vast majority of the people don’t. I wanted a simple and free solution. I quickly came to the conclusion that for this new process to work, it would have to be automatic. All I needed was a way to do a folder sync from my computer to another.

The first utility that came to mind was rsync. Rsync is a supped-up version of the copy command that lets you sync files between two locations. The other very interesting feature of rsync is that it does incremental copying. If a file being copied already exists at the destination, it will only send the differences between the two files. This is perfect when you’re doing a regular backup as most of the files will be identical or will only be slightly modified. This makes the folder sync much faster.

The computer where most of my data is stored runs Windows. Fortunately, I found a windows version of rsync here. Then I had to setup the rsync server on my linux box, which has a lot of free disk space and will now be used to backup my data! A quick look at the man page and I added a line to each of these two files:

/etc/services

rsync 873/tcp

/etc/inetd.conf

rsync stream tcp nowait root /usr/bin/rsync rsyncd –daemon

Then I edited the /etc/rsyncd.conf file to add a single writable module:

[backup]

path = /home/eric/backup

read only = no

And then, as if this never happens on the first try, using the rsync client on the windows machine to connect to the rsync server on the linux machine didn’t work. I took a quick look at the linux box and realized that inetd wasn’t running… strange. It turns out, it wasn’t even installed so I issued this command:

sudo apt-get install xinetd

And then, just like magic, files where flying from one computer to the other. I could smell victory already! All I needed to do now, was to automate the process. I wrote two little batch files, one for the backup operation, and one for the restore. Here’s what they look like:

rsync_backup.bat

rsync -avz c:\save/ me@linux_comp_address::backup

rsync_restore.bat

rsync -avz me@linux_comp_address::backup/ c:\save

Now, all I have to do is place all the files that need to be backed up in the ’save’ folder. A double-click on the rsync_backup.bat file and all the files are copied to the linux computer. A double-click on the rsync_restore.bat and all the files saved on the linux computer are transferred back to their original location on the Windows machine. It doesn’t get easier than that.

The final step of this backup process is to automate it. Unless the backup script is run regularly, all of this is useless. I needed to get the computer to do it for me or I would eventually forget about it and loose my data once again. A little googling pointed me to Windows Scheduled Tasks. Basically, you select the program you want to run, in this case the rsync_backup.dat script, tell it how often you want it to run (ie. daily), and at what time. Voila, a simple automated backup process.

When I get a new thumb drive, I’ll need an easy way to move the data from it, to my ’save’ folder so that it gets backed up with the rest of my data. It should be fairly easy but I’ll keep the details for another post.

I found some interesting links that discuss more advanced backup systems using rsync:

http://www.sanitarium.net/golug/rsync_backups.html

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Want more info on Windows Scheduled Tasks? Follow this link:

http://lifehacker.com/software/feature/hack-attack-using-windows-scheduled-tasks-153089.php