Create strong passwords!

If you are like me, you may have a hard time keeping track of your passwords to your online accounts.  I try to create a new password for each new account, just to protect them from hackers.  Many folks create one password and use it for multiple accounts, however (you don’t really do that, do you?) because they have a hard time remembering multiple passwords.

Recently, I watched a tutorial on how to create strong passwords at Explainia. In a nutshell, the tutorial advises that a strong password should be at least eight characters and include small letters, capital letters, numbers and punctuation marks.  It might look something like this: miN@5_2k?

According to this month’s AARP Bulletin, among the easiest to guess and steal passwords include: password

 123456

 12345678

qwerty

 abc123

Now, you haven’t really used any of these as passwords, have you?

Has the internet killed reading books?

Because I teach in the English Dept. of a large Midwestern University, I am surrounded by people who love to read books—students and faculty.  Therefore, I am always puzzled when folks lament that no one reads books anymore because information on the internet is both pervasive and ubiquitous.  As a reader of books and a writer of them, the idea of the internet replacing books for reading pleasure gives me pause. You probably feel the same.

Thus, I was interested to read this article from The Atlantic, “The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart.” Of course, the study is a little skewed, as the author of the article acknowledges, but still.  Makes me feel better. How about you?

A tool to create print documents from your blog or website text.

Yes, it seems that the world is going paperless, and that is a good, green thing, but sometimes you just need a print version of a web text.  Why? Maybe you need a promotional piece to take to a book bookstore or library visit.  Or perhaps you need your website bio in print as a speaker introduction to a book talk.

One free tool in the cloud that allows you to instantly convert any web site text to a print version is printfriendly. At this site, you simply type in the URL of the page you want to make print friendly. In my case, I needed a print bio to send to a writers’ directory, so I typed in my website home page www.marilynwseguin.com and this is the print version   I got.  No need to transcribe the text from the website!

There is also a free widget you can embed  into your website or blog if you want visitors to have the ability to print directly from your site.  And just as soon as I can figure out where to place the HTML code, I plan to embed the widget into this blog!