You know it's important to pick good, secure passwords. But more important is picking unique passwords. The last thing you want is for someone to login to your bank account right after you created that free account on freekittenwallpapers.com or when that trustworthy social site gets hacked.
Let's admit it, it's hard to come up with a good password, and almost impossible to do it when you're in a hurry. Luckily, there's an app for that. A bunch of them, actually. My pick's Advanced Password Generator.
It offers batch generation of random characters passwords (pviiag3r2m34), pronounceable passwords (datercheekth), and Memorable passwords (ShoeSpews37Bumps). Pick your poison, then copy it over to your favourite password manager and you're done.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Friday, August 24, 2012
Passwords manager
You've got dozens of passwords to remember. Not an easy feat...
Android to the rescue!
There's an overwhelming number of password managers available in the market (or Play, as it's now called). Should you use free software, or are the paid alternatives better? What features are you looking for?
To make it simple for you, here's my pick: Pocket.
It's a free app that looks great and is very simple to use. It uses strong cryptography to protect your sensitive information and allow you to sync your encrypted database to Dropbox. That means you'll have a backup in case you loose your phone, and you can sync it between many devices.
A desktop version is also available as a windows application and cross-platform java jar file. Having the option to enter your passwords from your computer's keyboard is valuable, especially when you're getting started and importing all your existing password.
No more excuse for those post-it under your keyboard!
Android to the rescue!
There's an overwhelming number of password managers available in the market (or Play, as it's now called). Should you use free software, or are the paid alternatives better? What features are you looking for?
To make it simple for you, here's my pick: Pocket.
It's a free app that looks great and is very simple to use. It uses strong cryptography to protect your sensitive information and allow you to sync your encrypted database to Dropbox. That means you'll have a backup in case you loose your phone, and you can sync it between many devices.
A desktop version is also available as a windows application and cross-platform java jar file. Having the option to enter your passwords from your computer's keyboard is valuable, especially when you're getting started and importing all your existing password.
No more excuse for those post-it under your keyboard!
Thursday, August 16, 2012
SSH Revisited
Things change, and they change fast in the Android world.
My trusty SSH client, ConnectBot, got abandoned by it's developers.
Luckily, development and maintenance now continues in two forked projects. Of those, my pick's Irssi ConnectBox. One of it's major feature is support for physical keyboards, including CTRL and TAB keys. Whether you've got a bluetooth keyboard or a tablet with a keyboard dock, that's a godsend.
On the server side, there's a new player: Dropbear SSH Server. It's a free, open source, full featured SSH server with a clean interface. It does seem to require root permissions to run though, so if you're on a stock unrooted ROM, you may have to stick to SSHDroid (free with ads).
My trusty SSH client, ConnectBot, got abandoned by it's developers.
Luckily, development and maintenance now continues in two forked projects. Of those, my pick's Irssi ConnectBox. One of it's major feature is support for physical keyboards, including CTRL and TAB keys. Whether you've got a bluetooth keyboard or a tablet with a keyboard dock, that's a godsend.
On the server side, there's a new player: Dropbear SSH Server. It's a free, open source, full featured SSH server with a clean interface. It does seem to require root permissions to run though, so if you're on a stock unrooted ROM, you may have to stick to SSHDroid (free with ads).
Monday, August 13, 2012
Expense tracker
I have to admit I'm pretty bad at keeping a budget. I think one of the reason is that I never found the right tool for the job.
I actually hunted down money management apps twice. The first time around, I was looking for a complete budget solution. My main criteria was cloud sync, or at least PC sync, to do most of the work from a computer. The Android app would follow me around but wouldn't be the only interface. I was also looking for something to manage multiple accounts, income sources, scheduled repeating expenses, and everything else related to money management. I didn't find my holy grail, and gave up.
This time around, I looked for a smaller, more focused solution. Keeping the heavy lifting to the PC, I searched for an expense tracker for recording day to day spending.
After much searching, installing and trying, I settled on AndroMoney. It's high points are it's intuitive and efficient interface, good looks, and it's useful graphs and summaries. You can take pictures of your bills from inside the app, but that's of limited use since the saved images are of too low resolution to be readable. That'll hopefully change in a future version...
If you're looking for a way to keep track of that fleeting money, give AndroMoney a try.
I actually hunted down money management apps twice. The first time around, I was looking for a complete budget solution. My main criteria was cloud sync, or at least PC sync, to do most of the work from a computer. The Android app would follow me around but wouldn't be the only interface. I was also looking for something to manage multiple accounts, income sources, scheduled repeating expenses, and everything else related to money management. I didn't find my holy grail, and gave up.
This time around, I looked for a smaller, more focused solution. Keeping the heavy lifting to the PC, I searched for an expense tracker for recording day to day spending.
After much searching, installing and trying, I settled on AndroMoney. It's high points are it's intuitive and efficient interface, good looks, and it's useful graphs and summaries. You can take pictures of your bills from inside the app, but that's of limited use since the saved images are of too low resolution to be readable. That'll hopefully change in a future version...
If you're looking for a way to keep track of that fleeting money, give AndroMoney a try.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Got Ads?
I know money makes the world go round, and I also know that there's a bunch of developers making great apps that make our life easier and it's just fair that they're paid for their work.
But I can't stand ads. Banners on my screens are like flies in my soup or cockroaches in my bed.
Since I got my 1st Android, my tool to remove such annoyances was AdFree.
The concept is simple: To display ads, applications contact a web server on the internet and ask for a banner. Said server logs the information it receives and provides the banner, more or less tuned for your demographics.
To contact that server, it needs it's address. DNS is the directory service that provides computer's addresses to requesting programs. But before asking a DNS servers, a local "hosts" file that contains name-to-addresses mappings is consulted. If, instead of containing valid mappings it contains "broken" ones, it'll prevent the communication from happening.
There's a few online services that provides lists of ad servers for which broken entries can be created.
To leverage those lists, my pick is now AdAway. My previous app failed after an upgrade, at which point I found this one. It downloads a few lists, merge them, and updates your hosts file. Note that your device must be rooted for this to work. Otherwise you don't have the privileges necessary to update system files.
Some of the good features of AdAway include customizing the list of URLs from which to fetch hosts lists, adding whitelisted items and using an included local webserver to serve fake ads and prevent some applications from crashing or displaying lenghty error messages because they can't reach their ad server.
But I can't stand ads. Banners on my screens are like flies in my soup or cockroaches in my bed.
Since I got my 1st Android, my tool to remove such annoyances was AdFree.
The concept is simple: To display ads, applications contact a web server on the internet and ask for a banner. Said server logs the information it receives and provides the banner, more or less tuned for your demographics.
To contact that server, it needs it's address. DNS is the directory service that provides computer's addresses to requesting programs. But before asking a DNS servers, a local "hosts" file that contains name-to-addresses mappings is consulted. If, instead of containing valid mappings it contains "broken" ones, it'll prevent the communication from happening.
There's a few online services that provides lists of ad servers for which broken entries can be created.
To leverage those lists, my pick is now AdAway. My previous app failed after an upgrade, at which point I found this one. It downloads a few lists, merge them, and updates your hosts file. Note that your device must be rooted for this to work. Otherwise you don't have the privileges necessary to update system files.
Some of the good features of AdAway include customizing the list of URLs from which to fetch hosts lists, adding whitelisted items and using an included local webserver to serve fake ads and prevent some applications from crashing or displaying lenghty error messages because they can't reach their ad server.
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