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Ok, not really 101 uses for a Password Manager, but many more than you thought, about 30.

Use A Password Manager

For the last few years, I’ve been trying to get anyone with more than 5 passwords to remember to start using a password manager, PM, as part of increasing your desktop security. Below I’ll go into a few alternate uses for that password database beyond just storing computer and website passwords.

In this Tax season, I find myself needing to share sensitive documents with relatively unsophisticated people and organizations. How should I share my files with them?

The Options

There are a few options to get those sensitive files to a provider. I will attempt to list the options, then describe the problems with each. Sadly, there aren’t any good solutions unless the service provider already has a solution setup. In my experience, be it an accountant, lawyer, doctor or shipping company, they do not.

1. Encrypted Email with PGP or OpenPG or GnuPG
2. Encrypted files, probably ZIPped attached to emails with a shared password
3. Encrypted shared file service – perhaps Dropbox or sftp
4. SSL Encrypted web portal with non-trivial userids and passwords

Sadly, there is no universal standard for sharing files, securely.

I’ve been having issues with the X/Windows on the system that I’d like to use for a desktop. After trying different drivers and new drivers, I decided that the GeForce 7600 GS may not be up to the task. While getting a haircut, I looked across the street to see … Microcenter. It was loudly calling me to buy a new video card.

GPU Selection

I’d done some research and built a list of reasonable cards for consideration. $50 was my target price. Now I’m staring at a wall filled with nVidia and ATI cards. I really wanted a GT 440, but they didn’t have any in my price range. They did have hundreds of GT 430s – some in my price range and there was a $48 GeForce 9800 GT. This was ideal, but the GT 430 was intriguing. I needed to know more, so I asked the youngest guy there who looked like a nerd to help. He pulled up a GPU comparison website and was entering 9800/430. They were very comparable, the GT 430 was just a tad slower, but it used half the power and supported DirectX 11. Lots of thinking – ok, I’ll get it now and if the card appears to be crap when I perform my research at home, then I can return it. Research done. I’d gotten lucky with this card, especially for the $54AR price.

The last few weeks my corporate email account has received about 10 of these messages every day with a ZIP file attached. The wording is reasonable for an English speaker, which is odd for spam. Usually the English is so poor as to not be an issue and is a clear sign of spam email. These DHL email are being caught at the server and put into the junk folder along with the get a doctorate degree spams.

Anyway, I’d like to warn everyone not to open these DHL emails or any ZIP attachments.

Why not?

• Did you provide DHL with your email address? I never have.
• Are you expecting a package? I’m not and 99.9% would NOT come from DHL.

Seems to me that DHL would know my name, address, and provide a package tracking number in all correspondences. These emails had none of that information – i.e. spam.

Many of you know that I’ve had stability issues with the proprietary nVidia video drivers for a few years. Lockups after just a few days, but especially when running any video applications like mplayer or VLC. This was new with Ubuntu and dual monitors. Previously I used the nVidia drivers on the same single monitor without any issues. Stability was good.

Failure – jump to the bottom to see why I undid use of the Nouveaux driver

A few months ago, I removed the X/Windows server from my main desktop and had it running only as a server – accessing it from remote systems or purely with the text/console interface.
I attempted to load the Nouveaux driver a few months ago, but never figured it out and life got in the way. Since removing X/Windows, the system stability has been impressive. ZERO lockups with Ubuntu Server x64 v10.04 LTS during that time, as you would expect.

This morning, I really needed the screen real estate that dual 24" monitors provide, so I started googling again and trying to get the Nouveaux driver installed so stability could be experienced/tested with it.

Sometimes we all need enter non-ASCII characters for some reason. In Linux, it is fairly easy, provided you have access to a unicode table . There is nothing special about that unicode link – any of them should work.

The trick is to press “cntl+shift+u” as a cord followed by unicode keys for the specific character. For example, “00f1” will enter an “ñ” character. “ooe1” does “é”. Sometimes you don’t need to enter any leading zeros.

The main characters that I need are:

• 00e1 – á
• 00e9 – é
• 00ed – í
• 00f3 – ó
• 00fa – ú
• 00f1 – ñ

My needs are simple.

I use Firefox with just a few extensions. Seven (7) are enabled right now. I have 3 tabs open, including the window I’m typing this article into.

So, why is Firefox using almost 1GB of RAM on my system?

  PID USER          PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
30488 userid        20   0  973m 673m  26m S    9 33.5 445:22.42 firefox-bin        

Seriously, I’d like to know. What could Firefox v3.6.13 be doing that needs more than 100MB of RAM? I see this happening almost every week.

What sort of memory use do you see with Firefox?

On UNIX/Linux operating systems, you can easily schedule jobs to be performed later with at. At is like cron, but more flexible for 1-time tasks to be run later.

echo "wget download-some-file-later" | at now + 1 day

This command will take whatever the current time is and add 24 hours to it, then it will run the wget command provided. Time specifications are pretty easy to use. A few more examples:

echo "wget download-some-file-later" | at now + 2 months
echo "wget download-some-file-later" | at now + 1 year
echo "wget download-some-file-later" | at Friday
echo "wget download-some-file-later" | at Tuesday
echo "wget download-some-file-later" | at 6/1/11
echo "wget download-some-file-later" | at 5 pm 3/1/11

A nice article on Lubuntu_ … Lubuntu is my current desktop and has been for a few years.

Not Just for Old Hardware

The article implies that Lubntu is only for old hardware. It isn’t, though it does work well on P4 systems with 1GB of RAM (my Mom’s). It is worth checking out, even on current, modern hardware like mine, a Core i5 with either 6GB or 8GB of RAM. My daily laptop runs Lubuntu in a virtual machine with 1.5GB of RAM and 10GB of disk. It runs nicely on all these systems.

Other Options Besides Lubuntu

If you really want a small, light weight Linux, check out TinyCore. Sure Puppy and DSL are options too, but with TinyCore, you get to load the apps that you want and completely control the amount of excess storage and RAM required.

I’ve been playing with XBMC on an Asus Eee 1008H for a few months, but never bothered to set it up as the main player in the house. This weekend, I attended a demonstration of XBMC at a local computer security meeting and was impressed. Very Impressed. Below are some tips that I learned setting up XBMC on my home network.

Oct 2013 Update