Lastpass Password Manager

Uncategorized

If you are interested in an easy way to manage a multitude of passwords, we recommend Lastpass for secure, encrypted password storage and login credential sharing.

It is available as a mobile app and as a browser extension. The free level is usually good enough for most users. They have premium, business and family paid versions too.

A couple videos to let you check it out if you’re interested in learning more
quick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3tvjNHPmAw
in depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLaCE_YmDVo

and some links
website: https://lastpass.com/create-account.php
chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/lastpass
iphone app: https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/lastpass-password-manager/id324613447
android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lastpass.lpandroid

Only the encrypted files are stored at Lastpass and only you have the master key.

lastpass

What the heck is going on at Googleplex HQ?

Technology

There’s yet another google venture
https://www.google.com/business/how-it-works/
Then there’s Google Local, Google Places, Google Maps… After they kill G+, apparently G+ for business is going to be a thing.

Google I’m starting to hate you just a bit and I’ve been a enthusiastic user since before most knew who you were. How about this… if you have a new idea you just revise and add to an existing product and stop scrapping and reinventing everything. How many times am I going to need to verify my business and jump through a whole new set of hoops? #sodamnannoying

Innovate, improve, revise, expand, don’t pillage, dismember, kill and start over under a new initiative.

You are damaging your image. Sit in on some good business 101 classes, get back to your original mission, have a clear business plan and get laser focused.

Thoughts on Apple

Assorted Rants, Technology, , , , ,

In the wake of the controversy around Apple slowing down older iphones, a friend recently asked if I thought Apple was sleazy

Apple makes great, solid & beautiful hardware. They push technology forward and they can be great innovators. I love this about them.

What I don’t like about Apple is they rarely adopt any open standards. They come at most everything with an attempt to lock you into their ecosystem. They want to make it very hard for you to leave their platform and they want licensing fees on every little proprietary plug and dongle they can create. Frankly, I’m surprised they support bluetooth and more recently USB-C.

I prefer open standards. It is better for consumers and in many ways the environment (use of plugs/wires/chargers… across people and devices). If they hadn’t kept trying to push me into using their proprietary software I would still be using an iPhone.

I see this bad behavior from many of the big companies right now. Amazon won’t allow Google products in their store or allow Google apps on the Fire tablets. Microsoft does a lot of the same. Xbox doesn’t have Google play movies. You can’t rent Amazon movies on the Xbox’s amazon app.

In the end, it is the consumers who pay big for all this fighting to own us and the companies often lose too. I left IOS because of it and I prefer a Roku for streaming because Amazon, Microsoft and Google refuse to play well together while Roku offers access to all services.

So in many ways, I think Apple is truly great but they really don’t need to adopt these lock-you-in practices to get customers. People would be flocking to Apple even if they were more open to allowing the innovations of other corporations on their platform and their customers would probably love them even more.

Setting the Active Navbar item with Bootstrap 4 and jQuery

Programming, Web, ,

Following in the footsteps of the fine answer at StackOverflow for “How to extract class from body element using jQuery?” using regular expressions, if you are adding your navbar as an include (following DRY principles), here is a nice clean way to not only automatically enable the active item in the navbar and its submenu, but also append the <span class="sr-only">(current)</span> for screenreaders, to the appropriate link text.

Now, all you need to do is on each page, add a ‘page-*‘ class to the <body> tag, which will connect with a matching class that you add on your .nav-item or .dropdown-item, like so (observe the highlighted lines):

Notice how, in the dropdown markup above, the individual dropdown items get one class each, but the nav-item containing it gets each of them appended, so that both the top level nav gets highlighted as active, as well as its entry in the submenu

Bootstrap 4 Beta navbar with active dropdowns set via jquery

Now that’s slick. Check it out on Codeply

Malware and Viruses

Technology, , ,

Who do you blame?holy-crap
I can never really decide where the bulk of the blame lands when it comes to malware and viruses on the windows platform. Of course, the authors of the viruses and malware suck, but after that how much blame lands on MS? Personally, I’ve had little trouble. When I have cleaned other machines it is always traceable down to a stupid “yes” click or shady install of some malware. #malware  #viruses   #microsoftwindows

My Malware/Virus removal toolbox *
=====
I always download from the original software vendor’s site to avoid fakes and add-on crapware. Here are some of my primary removal tools:
AdwCleaner, https://toolslib.net/downloads/viewdownload/1-adwcleaner/
MalwareBytes, https://www.malwarebytes.org/antimalware/
HitmanPro, http://www.surfright.nl/en/hitmanpro
HijackThis, https://sourceforge.net/projects/hjt/
* The best way to be sure your system is clean is to reinstall the OS, but very few people want to do that out of the gate.

I always run a realtime virus scanner like ESET. You may want to try their free online scanner in a pinch http://www.eset.com/us/online-scanner/ . Your best defense is knowing the software’s source is safe before you click install. Microsoft Security Essentials seems to be pretty good too (and free) but I recently cleaned a machine that supposedly had it running. Of course, no virus software that I know of is going to protect you from manually installing bad software.

A new look for CSS3 Sprites

Programming, Web,

It’s interesting to realize just how long ago this technique began to be used, and in terms of web technology, the fact that it still sees widespread usage is pretty telling how groundbreaking this was back then.

Now, with more and more browsers supporting CSS3 transitions, it’s now possible to add fancy fading effects to your sprites without even needing javascript, and with minimal impact to the usual css3 sprites code for rollovers, and a bit of :active for mobile devices to at least catch the fade-in on click.

Starting with a typical sprite used for social media links ;  150×100 with 40px icons centered in a 50px matrix:

typical sprite used for social media rollovers

The markup is pretty simple:

But the CSS gets interesting:

It starts off pretty typical, but around line 23, instead of repositioning the css sprite on hover we do something a bit different —  using the CSS pseudo-class :after to hold the re-positioned image in the same place as the original but with an opacity of 0 (so it’s completely transparent), we adjust the opacity on :hover/:active to 1;

The even fancier bit comes from the new transition property where we adjust it over a 0.8 second span to create the fadein/fadeout effect.

The result?  Sexy.

The CSS for this feels a tad more elegant as well. Plus since this sort of fanciness requires no additional javascript, you save a tad on your website download payload to the client browser.

What’s the difference between a domain forwarder and an alias?

Technology, Web, , ,

(1) There are 2 typical types of multi-URL setups: the Forwarder and Alias.
(2) Both types will involve changes at the registrar; creating an alias involves some setting adjustments at the host server.

The forwarder:
There is an existing website at www.SiteA.com and you have another url www.SiteB.com. If you want people to type in www.SiteB.com and get forwarded to www.SiteA.com (and see www.SiteA.com in the address bar) this is a forwarder.

The alias:
A visitor types in www.SiteB.com and they see all the content from www.SiteA.com but the www.SiteB.com address is the one seen in the address bar. Some hosting systems call this a “parked” domain.

Years ago I liked aliases but with the changes in search engine optimization I generally recommend forwarders over aliases these days.

—   ###   —

#forwarder #dns #aliases #parked domains

#POSSE

Web,

“POSSE is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. It’s a Syndication Model where the flow involves posting your content on your own domain first, then syndicating out copies to 3rd party services with perma(short)links back to the original version.

POSSE lets your friends keep using whatever silo aggregator (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) they’ve been using to read your stuff.

It’s a key part of why and how the “IndieWeb” movement is different from just “everyone blog on their own site”, and also different from “everyone just install and run StatusNet/Diaspora” etc…”

ref. http://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE