James Ward» Blog | James Ward, Digital Coach http://www.jamesward.eu Thu, 20 May 2010 14:30:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 An easy way to remember a complicated password http://www.jamesward.eu/an-easy-way-to-remember-a-complicated-password/ http://www.jamesward.eu/an-easy-way-to-remember-a-complicated-password/#comments Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:40:55 +0000 James Ward http://www.jamesward.eu/?p=391 I was talking to Andrew and Georgey on BBC Radio Leeds this morning about staying safe online. I didn’t have time to mention one of the most important things you can do: use a secure password.

A secure password shouldn’t be a word at all – they’re too easy to guess. It’s better to use a random collection of letters and numbers. However, that’s not easy to remember, so many Brits resort to their pet’s name, birthdays, children’s name or mother’s maiden name.

A simple method is to think of a sentence. Something like “Kick off your morning with Andrew & Georgey from 6 to 9″. Then take the first letter of each word and use that as your password:

koymwag6t9

The chances of a criminal guessing that password are 3,656,158,440,062,976 to 1. (Your chances of winning the National Lottery are only 13,983,816 to 1.)

3,656,158,440,062,976
]]> http://www.jamesward.eu/an-easy-way-to-remember-a-complicated-password/feed/ 1 Make your Twitter stream less noisy http://www.jamesward.eu/make-your-twitter-stream-less-noisy/ http://www.jamesward.eu/make-your-twitter-stream-less-noisy/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:09:24 +0000 James Ward http://www.jamesward.eu/?p=54 When you start to follow more than just a few people you might find that your stream of tweets becomes overwhelming. One of the reasons for this is that, by default, Twitter shows you all of the public replies that your followers send to other people. This can lead to you seeing half conversations, which mean little to you. You can change this option, within your Twitter account settings. Here’s how:

Log in to Twitter and click on settings:

Click on settings in your Twitter account

Click on settings in your Twitter account

Click to the notices tab, where you will find three options in the drop-down menu:

The options for @ replies

The options for @ replies

You can choose to see:

  • all @ replies – this is where you end up seeing one side of conversations
  • @ replies to the people I’m following – this means that you will only see @ replies where you are following both parties
  • no @ replies – this options means you will never see public replies (unless they are addressed to you)

Experiment with the settings and see which suit you best.

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