Last week we talked about how to create a good password (or p1a2s3s4weobrady) and I mentioned that there are some programs out there that can help you manage all of your passwords.

For those of you who took my advice and are using Firefox (available on Windows, OSX and Linux) you may have noticed that there is a built-in password manager. It is even able to lock people out of your passwords if they don’t have the master password, but I’ve run into some glitches with it and it doesn’t help if you have to use InternetExplorer or Opera or the new browser that Google recently released.

KeePass

My suggestion, and the program that I use to manage all of my passwords is a program called KeePass. KeePass is available for just about anything you’re running – Windows, OSX, Linux, BlackBerry & PalmOS; you’re also able to put it on a USB thumb drive and take it with you to make sure you don’t run into a situation where you’re away from your computer and don’t have your bank password.

The creators describe the program this way:

KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known…

I’ll describe it this way – it can make passwords, it can keep passwords, it can fill in password forms for you, it can let you take your passwords with you and it makes them easy and secure to copy and paste from the program itself. Also, the program doesn’t get all grabby, it lets you export all of your passwords and usernames to a file if you want to use a different program instead and it will import them from Firefox.

There are a full list of features here.

Using It

After you download and install it using your normal processes, you can get right to it. Let’s start with setting up your database and then we’ll talk through the options and more powerful uses.

First click the New Database button, or go to File -> New (or hit Ctrl-N for you shortcut fiends).

You’ll get this awesome little box up, you start by creating your password for the database. You can use a relatively simple one, but remember this database will have all of your passwords in it. I’d suggest using the techniques we talked about last week.

As you start typing it in, you will notice that it blocks it out (so people can’t read your password over your sholder. You can click the button on the right and see your password characters.

Also, the colored bar indicates the quality of your password and how complex it is (and how hard it will be to hack/guess it).

Good. Great. Secure.

Crap. Garbage. Poo.

Also, you have the option of tying it to a second file on your system. The added security feature is based on the fact that you hide this file in a random spot so that someone can’t just easily steal  your database and make off with your “life”. I would reccomend using this if you use this portably. I don’t use this feature, but I can see why you would. You can also use by placing the Key file on a portable drive so that it only works when you have that specific drive connected to the computer.

This is what the side of your main screen will look like now. As you see they expect that the KeePass application will be useful in a number of settings and for different reasons. Currently, I only use it for my internet passwords, but I am starting to input passwords for FTP servers and my home b anking program.

Now to create your first password file, hit this button (or Ctrl-Y).

You’ll get this window:

You’ll get an image like this. I have inserted the information for the example Johnny.Crusade@gmail.com account. Click on it to see what the data will look like. Make sure you read the Help file for more info on how to do this! (Hit F1.)

When you get your info entered, your database will show some of the filled in info like this image above.

Also, it provides security so that when you are walking away from your computer you can lock your database at the press of a button. (Or two Ctrl-L.)

As you set up things more, make sure you look at the options (Tools-> Options or Ctrl-M).

You don’t need to change much of anything if you don’t have specific preferences for what you want your user experience to look like. The only one that I would say that you NEED to change is the “Security” tab, make sure you check the one that says “Lock workspace when locking Windows, switching user or sleeping.” The other security feature of locking it after a few seconds is nice too.

I would suggest you look at this image and check the highlighted boxes (leave the dull ones alone):

Let me just say before I sign off, keeping your passwords secure is essential for your safety and security online – get to know this program and make sure you (and no one else) knows your password.

I’d also suggest taking the advice I shared in April about how to learn any program – and by that I mean: read the tutorials in the help menu – you can get to it by hitting F1.

Now, remember stay secure and don’t just let anyone near your passwords.

While I am not a Mac user, I know that many of CruTech’s readers are and I think about you all often while I keep my eye out for things that may help your lives as well.

I came across a list at Lifehacker (one of my favorite tech-blogs) of that seems to have a number of useful things that Macs are inherently are able to do. Here’s the list:

1. Say anything.
2. Show off Stacks and Expose in slow motion.
3. Activate screen corners.
4. Display custom hard drive icons.
5. Look up words in the dictionary with a keystroke.
6. Launch applications from Spotlight.
7. Tab between all controls.
8. Zoom WAY in on a page.
9. Show the date on the menubar.
10. Double as an external drive.

To see what all of these mean, head over to the post at Lifehacker (it would be rude/illegal for me to copy the entire content of their post).

To be honest some of these things don’t make any sense to me (what is Stacks and Expose?), some are just for “pretty” (the custom hard drive icons), but others seem way useful – looking things up, launching applications, tabbing between controls and doubling up a drive.

Here is my challenge to my Mac-lovers out there – tell me what you love about your Mac. Three things that I will not accept as good reasons are: they’re prettier (I agree), they run better (not always true), they don’t get viruses (neither does my Windows/Linux machine).

I already shared a few weeks ago a short list of shortcuts that are useful in getting the most out of Windows. Before I share more, let me list some of the reasons I am a proponent of keyboard shortcuts:

1. It’s quicker.

That’s all.

Quite simply, you can work quicker as you learn and remember more and more keyboard shortcuts and as you work to make them a part of how you work. Think about this, how long would it take you to minimize every window you had open right now? I have 7 windows open right now, for me to go and hit the “minimize” bar on the top of each window would take about 6 seconds total, for me to hit the Windows key and the letter D together (Win+D) takes about 1/2 a second – tops. (I know that Macs have a Mouse Shortcut for this, which works very well indeed.)

Most people already know some keyboard shortcuts and they don’t even realize it, for example Ctrl+C for Copy, Ctrl+V for Paste, Ctrl+X for Cut, Ctrl+P for Print and Ctrl+S for Save. I’ve even mentioned F1 for the Help menu a couple of times.

Take a few minutes and peruse your menus in the programs that you have open. For example, under the File menu you’ll find options that look like the image to the left. Here you can see that Ctrl+T opens a new tab while Ctrl+W closes a tab.

One shortcut that is common to just about every Windows program is Alt+F4 which closes the program down. It works the same as hitting the button at the top right of the window.

Also, to switch programs you can hold down Alt and hit Tab (Alt+Tab) to file through the windows you have open rather than clicking the items on your taskbar. Ctrl+Tab works within a single program – say to switch between documents you have open in Word or tabs in Firefox.

I’ve found a number of lists of shortcuts that I want to list here. Check some of them out and take advantage as you gain more of your time to work (and a better control over your computer use).

• Common Windows Shortcuts
• Mac OS X Shortcuts
• 230+ Keyboard Shortcuts for Top Web Services
• Gmail Shortcuts – there is an option in Gmail to turn these on and off.
• Microsoft Word Shortcuts
• Microsoft Excel Shortcuts
• Microsoft Powerpoint Shortcuts

Links via [Lifehacker & Mashable]

Some of my most-used features of Firefox are the advanced bookmarking techniques. First is the “Keyword” feature. Let’s go through bookmarking a site and setting up and using the keyword feature to get into StaffWeb fast.

Click on the Bookmarks menu and choose Organize Bookmarks. If you click on the New Bookmarks button at the top left.

This box will pop up.

In Name you can put StaffWeb. In Location http://staffweb.ccci.org (or http://staff.uscm.org if you go there more often). Here’s the awesome part – just put the word “staff” in the Keyword box and hit OK.

Close the bookmark window, type “staff” into your location bar and hit Enter. Voilà! It goes right to the GCX login screen and to the staff site of your choice.

In my Firefox I have this set up for my email login, my feedreader, church website, router settings, ebay, online voicemail access, calendar and a number of other sites… if you combine this with the CTRL-L (or CMD-L for Macs) shortcut that takes your cursor directly to the Location Bar I can be to my Inbox in 5 keystrokes!

Last week we talked about Firefox and why (I believe) it is the best general web browser available and got it downloaded and installed for you (hopefully). Today we will talk through some of the menus in the menu bar.

If you have everything installed and nothing else going on, your screen should look something like the image above with normal web browser menu names displayed. Let’s walk through them and I will explain some of the items that might require it.

File
New Tab – Like we talked about last week, one of the advantages of Firefox is its tabbed browsing capabilities. Where you would have opened a new window before now you should open a new tab. You can do that by going to File -> New Tab or hitting Ctrl+T.

Open Location – All this does is take your cursor to the location bar at the top of the page where you type in the webpage you want to go to.

Close Tab – It closes one tab at a time, rather than closing down the whole of the Firefox browser.

Import – This is for importing bookmarks that you might have from another browser or saved as a document.

Edit
About the same as the Edit menu in just about every program.
Note: In non-Windows versions of Firefox this also contains the Options menu which is covered in the next post in the Beginning with Firefox series.

Find in This Page… – When you have a lot of text in the page you are viewing and you want to find something specific.

Find Again – Looks for the next instance of the search you just executed.

View
This is the first one with real power to change your ongoing browsing experience.

Toolbars – Toolbars are the “bars” at the top of your browser that add functionality to it. The menus that we’re looking at now are a toolbar, below that is the navigation toolbar and your bookmarks toolbar. In this sub-menu you can turn on or off toolbars that you have installed and you can customize them as well. If you click customize you’ll see a window that looks something like the image to the left.

Here you’ll be able to add buttons to your toolbars that are available in the menus or you can rearrange items. For now all I’d suggest you do is click the “Use Small Icons” box (unless you have bad vision). My favorite “hack” using this box is that you are able to drag the Location Box and the Search Box up onto the Menu Bar and give yourself that much more screenspace by disabling the Navigation Toolbar (I’ll write about this later.)

Sidebar – Like your toolbars, but here you can look at all of your bookmarks or browse the pages you’ve recently visited; and it’s on the side.

Status Bar – This is the bar at the bottom of your screen which gives you relatively vital information such as the location of the link that your mouse is over. Plug-ins that we’ll add to Firefox in the future will also display info here. Keep it checked.

Text Size – If you have bad vision, this will be your aid on pages that have small text. The newest version of Firefox that should be out by May 1 will actually enable you to enlarge the whole page to view it better!

Everything else in the View bar should probably be left alone if you don’t already know what it is. The only other thing that might be useful is the Fullscreen option which hides all the toolbars except for your tabs and makes the most use of your screen size.

History This one is pretty self explanatory, you can look through your browsing history here too.

Bookmarks Everything here is pretty self explanatory as well (if you ignore the thing about Add-ons which we’ll talk about in a later post), there are just a few things that I want to note.

Bookmark All Tabs… – You know how to bookmark one page a time, this will allow you to bookmark everything that you have open right now. Say you have been researching a school and have a bunch of tabs open about Podunk State University click this and save them all as links in a folder in your bookmarks.

Subscribe to This Page – We talked about Feeds/RSS a little bit last time. This is the simplest way to subscribe to a page (remember to look for the RSS Feed Icon – read more about it in the Wikipedia article on RSS), if you click on it now it will allow you to bookmark the future updates for CruTech. (If you decide to do this choose the options of LiveBookmarks and place it in your Bookmarks Toolbar.)

Bookmarks Toolbar – This is the toolbar at the top of your browser that should contain bookmarks that you use virtually every day or feeds that you want to keep up with. Right now you probably just have the “Getting Started” and “Latest Headlines”.

Tools – Let’s hold of on this one, there is as much there as this whole post. Next week.

Help – This is your best friend on any new program. Whenever you’re trying to figure out how to do something in a program that you’re not familiar with use this menu (or just hit F1) to bring up the help box… it’s very helpful.

For Internet Explorer Users – If this is you, check this one out, it’s a few articles in the Help box that may help you adjust to the changes that Firefox will bring.

That is all for this week. Take some time and explore some pages in the Help box to learn more about FF. Next time we’ll explore the Tools menu and the Options box.

I do already have a number of ideas for what I hope to post here when I’m back from Florida and North Carolina, a couple of them are actually already being covered by Rob over at 170spoons.

• My own tech-biases (or “why I need someone who can write about Macs”)
• Firefox, why it’s better than what you’re using.
• Google, and why they’re the opposite of evil
• Gmail
• Greader
• Gcal
• Google Apps
• How to learn to use any program
• Why your mouse is not always best (or “Shortcuts are your friends”)
• Basic computer upgrading
• Social networking tips
• iTunes, MP3s and Podcasts
• Open Source programs (or “Techno-Democracy”

In the mean time, I will be soaking up some rays at Cape Canaveral and then D-ing some MPs in North Carolina.