WiFi access point security password etiquette.

Now that more and more people are carrying devices capable of browsing the Internet via wifi, your chances of being called upon to share your wifi access point have gone way up. Alright, maybe the only thing that’s gone up is the number of people in your home who wish they had access to the Internet via your wifi router, but are afraid to ask for your password.  They’re afraid to ask because they don’t want to put you on the spot, fearing that our Wifi password may not be the simple low tech unique password it ought to be.

How passwords are hacked or stolen varies based on what the password is for. Website passwords can be hacked  from a computer most anywhere. Those passwords  should not be a word found in the dictionary, they should include a mixture of upper and lower case letters and numbers. Best practice is to vary these passwords by sites. That way if you’re password is compromised at one site other sites are not left vulnerable. To gain access to your account on a password protected site, hackers use computer programs that can automate the process for them. Often referred to as the brute force method its basically the same as someone trying your pets name or your kids names or your birthdate in different combinations until they get in.

Wifi access is different from web site security in that to gain access to your network your attacker needs to be close enough to your router to attempt to gain access to it.  In a neighborhood it may be obvious that there’s a car parked nearby with someone who doesn’t belong. But if you live in an apartment or condo there may be people trying to access your network at their leisure. If you fear this maybe the case you may choose to change your router password once a month or so. Not using a simple common word your pets name, street name or other obvious piece of information is a good idea. Wifi access is very low fruit for those wishing access to something they shouldn’t have access to. Email, banking and shopping sites are far, far more valuable. So much more valuable that the idea of someone working hard to gain access to your network is a relatively low risk.

So I propose wifi passwords should be secure enough to keep your neighbors off your network, but friendly and simple enough to share with visiting friends or family. They should be different than all your other passwords. They can be a phrase “theflowersarepretty” “onein1million” or a number and name “2354schwartz” The idea is it should be different than your important passwords easy to share, easy to remember and  easy to change.

When I started this site four and a half years ago, I all kinds of enthusiasm and strong intentions that quickly faded. But now my interest has been rekindled by a friend who has started a blog that is actually read (or at least visited) by people he doesn’t know. It helps that his blog www.frontageroads.com is focused on all things bicycle. I hope to one day find a focus for this blog, but until then I’ll continue to share what ever interests me at the time.

BTW. It’s my buddy John’s birthday today. In my life, John has held the position friend longer than anyone else. He’s been my best man, twice! He tolerates our differences and remains a solid steadfast friend in spite of me.  Here’s to you, John!  Happy Birthday.

image of new site design

Recently 3 of my friends came into the fold of fellow iPhone owners. Here’s a listing of what apps I currently have on my iphone and why I like then or why I never use them.

Screen one (the left side) has the apps I use most often. The Chronometer app is a collection of watch faces. They’re a mixture of fictional and actual watches. The best of them will tell you the phases of the moon, the time of the three stages of dusk and in what direction the sun is from you and how high it is off the horizon at any time or date. If you’re at all interested in Time and Solar astronomy this app is amazing.

NetNewsWire is an iphone version of an extremely popular RSS reader for the Mac.  This is the app I’m most likely looking at while out at lunch or waiting for a haircut or anytime I’m looking to discover something new. RSS feeds allow you to scan the articles from most any website very quickly and then clicking though to read the entire article if I’m interested.  I found my car via RSS feeds from Craig’s list.

Google app.  Love this one.  I use it  most often when I’m having touble spelling something or when I need to answer some kind of question quickly.  It allows me to say the search terms. It listens and returns the results. It also offers suggested searches as I type (when not using the voice feature) Basically if I’m going to the web in search of an answer, I start here.

AccuFuel.  Gas mileage records that I can email myself as a CSV file. It also shows a graph of your mileage at each fill up. I tried several of these apps before I settled on this one. My only wish for this app would be for a notes field.

GPS MotionX.  The best app on my phone.  Create tracks, waypoints, take geotaged photos that export via email or facebook.  See satillite images of your location or view topographic maps of the trail you’re hiking on.  Can’t say enough about this app.  Turn off your bluetooth and Wifi to conserve batteries while using this one.  www.meritline.com offers cheap car lighter power adapters for the iphone. That’ll help keep this battery hungry app satisfied for long drives.

Facebook.  I use this more than the facebook website.  Easy enough for me.

Tweetdeck and Tweetie.  I’m really liking Twitter the more I understand it. I never have to hear what ice cream flavor someone is, or what cocktail they are while reading twitter. Twitter is more conversational and immeadiate.

Blossom. Is a app for viewing my Smugmug photos and videos. It’s fast easy way to access any photo from my smugmug site on my phone. No need to carry every picture in my phone. If it’s on my smugmug site and can get it. Contact me if your interested in a discount coupon for signing up with Smugmug.com.  As photo hosting sites go this one effcient, pretty, priced right, customizable and offers unlimited storage.

Lose it! So far I’ve lost 21 pounds with this one. It’s basicaly a database of foods that allows you to log what you’re eating. It makes it easy to identify the foods that push you over the daily calorie recommendation it sets for you based on your goals.

iProRecorder. From Bias. A voice recorder that’ll record at any of three quality levels. you can email the files it creates of connect to  your phone via Wifi to access the files.

Jott.  I started using thiss app when Jott was comepletely free. Now I pay a few dollars a year to use this service.  Basically, I speak into my phone and Jott transcribes my voice and sends the text to me in an email along with a link to listen to the original recording. Great when your driving along and you’re thinking about checking out a website, or you want to learn more about somehting you heard on NPR. You “Jott” yourself so that you’ll recieve an email when you’re at your computer later. The perfect reminder.  You can also “Jott” your friends.

AudioBoo.  Still heve to give this a try. this one will record a 3 minute voice clip that get posted to a website where you can link to it.  It also integrates those posts to you Twitter account.

Alright that was page one. I’ll be more brief now. Of note on page 2:

Homedigo, A remote control access to my homes X10 lighting controls. Units. Convert any measurement to any like standard. Very useful. Converts currancies as well.  Shazam. listen to a song via the phones mic and returns the title and album sources. Links you to the itunes store incase you need to buy it right then. Shovel.  a reader for the social news sharing site, digg.com. Remote. This is a must have. It allows you to control your itunes on your PC from anywhere in the house. With an Airport express connected to you stereo you can listen to all your music and control the volumn form your easy chair or the dinner table. Decibel. A sound pressure meter in your pocket. I dig on this.  Gmail. I use the phone Mail app primarily for email. I’ll open this when I want to see messages threaded the way gmail does on the web, or to search all my mail on Gmail.  Craigslist.  This app sucks.

Page 3:

Spreadsheet. This is cool. Create a spreadsheet on your phone or transfer on to your phone from your computer. I’ve written a spreadsheet to manage my times during a rally. Very convienient to have the power of Excel in the palm of my hand. Stopwatch.  Multiple stopwatch timers each with lap timers. The results can be emailed from the phone. Nightcamera. The iphone camera’s before the 3Gs phones are not very good cameras. This app foreces the shutter release to wait until the phone is heald still before releasing. A good idea, but I don’t really use this much. Amazon. You’ll need this. I’ve actually bought stuff through this app.  It works great. Ebay. Same thing.  You need this. Pandora. Based on the Music Genome project. You pick an artist or a song and pandora will stream that music plus others they believe you will like. Cool for discovering new artists. Google Earth.  Yeah that Google Earth, in your pocket. Air Sharing or Datacase. Both are like a thumbdrive on steriods. you can view pdf, jpeg and excel or word documents on your phone, Air Sharing pro will actually print from the phone through a Mac with printer sharing turned on. Autostich.  Take a series of photos on your iphone and this app will stich them togerther and save it.

I’ll post pages 4 -6 later.

I love the idea of websites that host pictures. I have photos scattered a few different services on the Web.

I started with a service called PBase.com. I liked Pbase (my account has expired, but the pictures are still there) because of it’s classy interface and because it categorizes the equipment used to take a photo. For instance you can search for images taken with a certain lens or camera. I also used Picasa, a free service of Google. The main draw here is it’s free and it integrates somewhat into my other Googles services such as Gmail. I also have pictures hosted here on my own site, (see the photos link above).

I  also use my website EVRange.com as my photoblog. But now I have signed up with another site called Smugmug.com. Why another service? Smugmug offers unlimited photo hosting and virtually unlimited bandwidth to display my pictures. They’ll automatically resize pictures and offer them in a variety of sizes and with a variety of themes in neatly organized galleries. I can also modify my Smugmug site to share the appearance and header/navigation banner of this site. Once that’s done it’ll integrate it into this site so it will appear to be a part of it.

So stay tuned, for a slick new integration of Smugmug into this site.

First off, it’s called, “Cooking for Engineers” That appealed to me immediately. It’s full of pictures to help keep a guy on course as he prepares whatever. Someone else has to think this site is as useful as I do.

Albeit a bit rough at the edges, and definitely low budget, Alex Rose and his business partner Jay Adelson have started an online television network of sorts, sometimes called IPTV. Most of their programs appeal to geek culture and technology issues, but they’re cool. Check out revision3.com to see for yourself.

I think this is cool, and I wish I could make it work. Driftnet is a program which listens to network traffic and picks out images from TCP streams it observes. The user of this software would observe an ever-changing mosaic of all the jpeg images that other users of his LAN (local area network) were seeing. Unfortunately, to use this program, the user must compile it himself. That means what you downnload is the basic instructions to make the program. Maybe some day I’ll learn how to do that. I’m posting this to show how easy such a thing is do.

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A shy 8-year-old Long Island Boy Wonder is making money hand over fist by teaching grownups how to master Halo.

Click on ‘read more” to see the article.

read more | digg story

Here’s one for the frequeent travelers out there. A definitive, comprehensive guide to airport wireless connections in the USA. Which airports offer wifi, who offers it and how much is it.

read more | digg story

“A simple animated geographical visualization that shows the relative impact different countries have on climate change over the timeline of watching the application. Different icons represent the statistical data of countries in the context of its birth & death rate, & its carbon dioxide emission.” Via infosthetics.com. It’s important to realize that the CO2 emissions that cause global warming is from CO2 that was taken out of our present bio-cycle some 65 million years ago. There is a naturally-occuring, and cycling level of CO2 in our environment all the time. It’s the constant release of ancient CO2 that’s a threat.
After following the link below, mouse over the different countries to compare their birth and death rates.

read more | digg story