Password Managers
I want to give a shout out to using a password manager. Ye olde days of using junk passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” and “dadof3g8kids” just isn’t going to cut it in today’s online world, especially now that hackers use computers that can brute force guesses at 8 billion guesses per second. (Those two passwords mentioned were cracked in a matter of minutes)
Strong Passwords
A few years ago, I would have thought that dadof3g8kids would have been just fine. However, with today’s cracking programs like Hashcat, the assault is on. Crackers today have lots of weapons, like dictionary lists, rainbow tables, and more importantly, millions of cracked passwords to make better guesses. People who use their own simple systems like a decent base password and then add something to the front, like adding amzn in front of Jimmy1995!@ for their Amazon password are tempting fate. Worse, if Amazon sends out a notice that a password change is required, what will the new one be? “1-amznJimmy1995!@“? Good luck trying to remember that.
2013 Mac Pro
Apple is releasing a new Mac Pro in the Fall. It has no internal expansion, so we’ll all be dongled to death. Sadly, I think this picture sums it up nicely.
Kiley is nine months old
Kiley started out her ninth month sick, along with her mommy, while daddy was out of town flying. Luckily, she started to feel better before Laura did and was able to entertain herself and play on her own while Laura recovered. She spent a lot of time in her excer-saucer spinning around on her own and pulling on toys to change her position to see new things in the room. She is also loving her cardboard books and enjoys turning the pages.
Kiley loves to sleep on her side and this month rolled over to sleep on her stomach for the first time. Also, when she’s a hot mess, we’ve found that she will calm down to polka music and fall asleep! Depending on the music, she will also be-bop and shake her head like Stevie Wonder.
Continue reading Kiley is nine months old
Budget Setup
This budgeting guide linked above, showed up in my inbox today from Dave Ramsey. It’s a fast, easy, and simple read on how to get started on a budget for you or your family. Most everyone knows that simply starting a budget is the probably the hardest part, and sticking to it comes in a close second. If you don’t have a budget, or you simply don’t know where every dollar you spend is going, I encourage you to spend 10 minutes and look over this booklet.
One suggestion that I will make that the booklet does not is incorporating Mint.com into your budget. Once you have a budget setup, it takes time and some math to roll over balances each month into their new categories, and all your expenditures need to be entered into the budget. While doing this manually can help teach discipline, I think it can often lead to failed budgeting. Enter Mint.com where your math and transactions are electronically followed and done for you. Easy! Give it a try, the booklet and Mint are both free.
Selling our home
After making a website for the sale of our house at 537.tobylaura.com we got an offer that we accepted within 30 days! This is certainly great news because the Groveport market has been really slow, with homes sitting for as long as a year. The buyers are supposed to close on our house in mid-April and right now we are just hoping the deal goes through. The house passed inspection with flying colors, which makes me especially happy because of all the hard work Laura and I have put into it over the years. The buyers truly are getting a great old home.
It’s bittersweet for us to leave this cozy place we’ve called home for the last nine years. We’ve made lots of fond memories here, from getting married, to bringing home Gus, to hearing Kiley’s sweet laugh echoing down the stairs. As we pack up our things and the rooms slowly start to empty, it’s as if we are leaving behind an old friend, where all we will have to remember him by are fading memories. The good news is that this house will forge ahead, providing shelter and warmth to a new family, where new memories will be made.
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Are you backed up?
Would you be concerned if your hard drive crashed today? Would you lose any irreplaceable data, like photos, work projects, or vital documents? What if you dropped your laptop on the kitchen floor or into the tub? Without a good backup, everything that is not backed up will be gone forever.
Thankfully, there are lots of easy solutions to keep all your electronic data safe from disaster. The easiest solution for me is the one that does it automatically, without my input. Out of sight and out of mind means that backups will happen without any actions on my part. This is good because if I have to do it manually, it won’t get done. Here are some quick, cheap, and simple ideas to keep your most important things safe. This post is Mac centric, but the principles can be applied to almost any OS.
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So God made a farmer
Paul Harvey delivered this speech at a 1978 Future Farmers of America convention.