Too Many Passwords!

How many have you forgotten so far?

It's bound to happen you know. Just ask yourself how many emails you're maintaining (e.g. one for work and another for personal emails, etc.). Think too of the many accounts you have in social media. There are so many sites that matter to us personally and they too, verify our identity! That's not to mention the more important ones like the bank (how many again?), and utilities, and school and others.

Many smart people have been trying to solve this problem without giving up on security. None so far has given us a real solution.

What have you tried? Did you try to use the same password for all accounts? Sometimes they work, most of the times they don't as for example sites don't have the same validation for passwords. Some require four digits (they're still alive!), some 8. Newer and security conscious sites require combinations of letters and numbers, and some even require non-alphanumeric characters! Plus the small letter and capital letter combination!

Think too that these sites force us to change our passwords! It's a real hassle I know, but you can't do anything about it - it's for security reasons!

Don't forget some sites require two password combinations, and too, some even use an additional layer using a device that generates random numbers (are they really random?) outside of the original password. What's going to happen if you lose your number generator and it takes the institution (usually banks) ages to send you a new one? It's difficult to imagine...

So what are we to do? Most of us do things that compromise security. You'll find some passwords jotted down on cards (think of your ATM), in a tiny piece of paper in the wallet, stored in the mobile phone too! How could you do this? It's laziness sometimes.

If you're so sure you can remember all the passwords that you use without using anything, just the plain old noggin, then think too what's going to happen if you get into an accident and forget everything! Oh gosh, there's just nothing that we can do that is full proof.

So, we just that what we need to do...hopefully someday something will come to solve this very simple yet confounding problem!

Excellent Smartphone: Samsung Galaxy S4

This phone can do the basics very well and more. It can make and receive calls; write, send, and receive SMS and MMS messages; connect and browse the internet; install apps and run them.

All these things plus playing music and videos, taking photos and videos, reading ebooks, viewing all sorts of documents are effortlessly achieved in this smartphone. Come to think of it, are you going to buy a smartphone that can't do these basics? No way Jose!

If you're the type that only needs a phone to communicate, then this beast of a phone (and expensive too!) is not for you. Go get something that lasts weeks in one charge. This is one thing that a powerful smartphone owner can't run away from, the power drain problem.

The S4 can last one whole day in a normal use environment (phone calls, sms messages, email checking, light Facebook browsing). But if you're a gamer, even social gaming where colorful candies or gold drops down or disperses in the screen added with heavy use of cellular or internet voice calls, you'll be happy with an 8-hour battery life. If you're such a user, I recommend getting one of those external batteries that can re-charge your S4 one or two times.

The S4 is beautiful to look at and in addition, feels very nice to touch. It's a shame to wrap it up with something to protect it from accidental drops and collisions, but that's a modest thing to have to protect a significant investment. After all, the S4 costs much.

One question that I'd like to answer is: Does the S4 offer something compelling for S3 owners to upgrade? My personal answer is NO.

If you're an S2 owner and are planning to get a new phone, then the S4 is a significant upgrade. I am an S3 owner, and I'm not going to to upgrade to S4. My other half has the S4, and I like looking, touching and "tinkering" with it. I'm sure most of us would. I stand by the title I've given to this post, the S4 is an excellent gadget. I'll say it again, if you're looking for a new phone, this is a very good choice to make.

Facebook Mystery Event

Update: So now we know! You can record and share 15 seconds of videos in Instagram. Not even an original idea! 

The last time there was a mystery Facebook Event, the social networking site's stock price popped! But it turned out to be a failure (at least for me!) Android App called Facebook Home. A lousy one that makes Facebook your "Homepage" in your mobile phone or that's what I heard, as I didn't even take a look. There's too much Facebook in my life already I want to get rid of it!

However, it has become an effective tool for me to communicate with family and friends that it's almost impossible to drop it altogether. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Now there's another Facebook mystery event on June 20! I wonder what that will be. I'm not counting on it to be earth shattering. I'm guessing it's the same as the previous one. The style to hype an event up has become jaded I guess. It doesn't help that what they deliver are boring (that includes new announcements from Apple and other technology companies.  Google actually has not shied away from new things. The recent internet using balloons and the Google Glass are quite ground breaking.).

These companies spoiled us bad with new gadgets and ways to do things (interface) that when iterations come, we're not as excited as before!

Yes, I'll be watching out what Facebook will ship in a few days, but the excitement level has definitely died down for me.

Overkill Backup

A 3-Terrabyte backup disk is too much space!

I thought I needed a good backup system which could handle data from two laptop computers so I went to my friendly neighborhood computer shop and searched for the cheapest I could get. There were disks that cost 700HKD for 2-Terrabytes and 899 for 3-Terrabytes while other brands of the same capacity were from 100 to 300 HKD more.

I only need 1.5 Terabytes of backup space (one laptop has 1-tb disk space, and the other has 0.5, so a 2-Tb disk should have been okay. However, if you compute the amount per terabyte, it seems like adding an extra terabyte of space was a steal, right?

After backing up my data from the 1-tb laptop, I only used up 300 GB (0.3tb) of space! So I over-bought space that I may not need after all. What a waste of money. That's because I ended up buying a 3-tb Seagate Expansion disk for 899HKD.

Now, the disk itself was fine. The transfer rate of raw copying of files (no compression) was from 85 to 100 mb/s using USB 3 interface. I got what I needed: a lot of space and fast I/O.

If you want backup software instead of using windows explorer, you need to get one of those disks that come with backup software.

One thing I wasn't able to do was make a system backup using Lenovo Onekey Recovery software that's already in my laptop. I've set it up to the point where you click the "Start" button to start making the recovery disk but it just wouldn't budge. The start button was not clickable (not a processing option at that stage). I wonder why...

In all, I'm again happy with my purchase albeit a little bit overkill for my needs.

#WhatsUp with Tags?

It's the in thing I guess, but what's the big deal? It must be to many as so many are using it and having fun, and it suits them. Again, we'll charge it to "to each his own" meme.

Sure it serves the purpose of aggregating like ideas or what not, but does anybody agree with me that they look ugly? Think about it, one guy posts a photo of a newly bought red shirt and tags it with #red #shirt #new #mall #etc and you call that pretty? Not to me, but as said, to each his own! Enjoy hash tagging guys, peace.