Tag: introspective

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Padlock and code image

Some time back, I wrote a post listing the steps required to migrate passwords stored in Chrome to Firefox. 

That post was a bit convoluted, so this post is hopefully an improvement!  My intention is to make this process as simple, and reliable, as possible.  To succeed, you will need:

There are five main steps.  Let’s get started!

  1. In Chrome’s address bar, paste:
    chrome://flags/#password-import-export

    …then hit enter.

    Chrome flag screenshot
    The option in Chrome should appear like this. Enable it!

    In the option that is highlighted, Select Enabled and then Relaunch.

  2. Now, in Chrome, navigate to chrome://settings-frame/passwords, scroll down and click Export.  Save the file with a .csv extension.
  3. Locate the CSV file and right click > Open With > LibreOffice Calc (Alternatively, start LibreOffice Calc and open the CSV file).
  4. Using LibreOffice Calc, you will need to modify the CSV file to import it into Firefox.  Do the following:
    1. Right-click on row 1 and select ‘Insert Rows Above’.  This should insert a single row at the top of the sheet.
    2. Copy the following and paste into cell A1, using Shift-Ctrl-V (to ensure you paste as plain text):
      # Generated by Password Exporter; Export format 1.0.4; Encrypted: false
    3. You need to move one column, B, to where column D is – but we don’t want to overwrite your data!
      • At the top of column B, right-click and select Cut.
      • Then right-click again and select Delete Columns – this should remove the now-empty column, and shift-left columns C and D, to positions B and C.
      • Now, on column D, select Paste.  Your url data should now live in column D.
    4. Paste the following into cell A2, using Shift-Ctrl-V:
      hostname username password formSubmitURL httpRealm usernameField passwordField

      When pasting, you may be prompted to select the data format.  Select “Unformatted Text” in the list and click OK.  We are ok with overwriting other cell contents, so “OK” that.  Note, you may need to separate out the headings into columns, left to right.

    5. Finally, we’re ready to export this data!  Go to the File menu, select Save As…In the Save As requester that appears, at the bottom check ‘Edit Filter’ and select ‘Text CSV (.csv)’ in the format drop-down:

      Select these options to correctly export your data!
      Select these options to correctly export your data!
    6. Before we get too excited, there’s just one more step to perform – some textual clean-up!Open up the exported CSV file in your favourite plain-text editor.  In the first row, you may see this:
      "# Generated by Password Exporter; Export format 1.0.4; Encrypted: false",,,,,,

      Delete the leading ” and trailing “,,,,,, from that line.

      Secondly, do a Find/Replace on double-commas (,,) making them ,””,  (with two quotes inserted) instead.  You may need to perform this Find/Replace twice.  Now save the file again.

  5. In Firefox, click on the burger menu and select Add-ons (or just go to about:addons).  Find Password Exporter and click Preferences.  In the Preferences window, click Import Passwords.  Now locate your saved CSV file and load it.You should finally see something like this:

    Importing saved passwords into Firefox. Not easy, but definitely rewarding!
    Importing saved passwords into Firefox. Not easy, but definitely rewarding!

 

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Here is the solution to Emacs mastery (from someone who watches other people’s YouTube videos…):

Learning

More Learning

Yet More Learning

Practice, More Practice…

Time to repeat.

 

Yet… More challenges:

Lots to learn

Huge number of options

Infinitely configurable

Which way is best

Vast software selection

Lots of online sources, spread around

 

Keys to overcoming challenges

Master self-confidence

Pick one problem at a time, and work hard on it

Take time to enjoy the new power gained. Feel rewarded.

Choose the next option.

(if this helps) Document what you did.

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Jetpack's homepage is your standard, modern affair.
Jetpack’s homepage is your standard, cloudy affair.

If you are a blogger, and you use WordPress, you will undoubtedly heard of Jetpack.  Jetpack for WordPress provides a ton of enhancements to any WordPress install.   Among the goodies is something for the socialite in all of us: the ability to automatically “broadcast” our blog posts to social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, via the Publicize feature.

All this free stuff of course comes with a “price” – having a user account on WordPress.com itself.   But, if you are a blogger – or at the very least you read other people’s blogs and contribute comments – this is not exactly a hardship.

Set-up and Testing

Setting up Jetpack is as easy as installing a WordPress plug-in.  If you are familiar with the process, you will probably have already seen Jetpack in the Add Plugin page.

The Publicize feature is equally easy to set up:  you simply click on the button corresponding to the social network you wish to link with, a page/pop-up opens to allow you to authenticate with that social network, and then you return to the Publicize page with a “Connected as…” confirmatory message.

Jetpack confirming account connections.
Jetpack confirming account connections.

The next step is to write a post and then publish it.  Simple, huh?  Well, not quite.

Content Formatting

Due to the different ways social networks publish posts, your “write once, publish many” WordPress post may need a little tweaking before it looks as good as possible.

Google+

Image of G+ post
Google+ rendered my blog post with lots of ! 😐

 

Facebook

 

Facebook produced a worthwhile post, with backlink.
Facebook produced a worthwhile post, with backlink.

Twitter

Twitter rendered my image sideways
Twitter did what it does best: stays brief

Links:

plus.google.com/+SteveDowe/posts/5eSkkPVLAfb

twitter.com/doweio/status/629950053499584512

Further Testing

Finding the most effective way to post requires more testing.  My main aim was to find a way in which one post can look great on the three main social platforms (Google+, Twitter and Facebook – not that I care too much about the latter).

[ This is a legacy-published post, originally written but unpublished on 13 August 2015.  Some details may not longer apply to recent software releases. ]

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20150808_093127
Brasilia style – a good option for any Saturday morning

I’m consciously reworking my way through Taylors’ range of filter coffee.  Many times before we’ve had the Italian style medium roast and, in addition, we’ve also gone for the number 6 strength “Hot Lava Java”.  But sometimes you need a milder option, to more gently ease you into into a state of caffienated bliss.

Score out of 5 … 3. It’s a mellow cup, but perhaps missing some depth to the flavour. Not disagreeable at all though.  Would still recommend.

 

#coffeeftw

 

 

 

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I am the first to admit that I am a product of the old guard.  What do I mean by this?  Well, when I started running a business in 2001, when the internet provided unbridled commercial opportunities and there was a scarcity of talent to develop for them, there was a certain modus operandi: keep your cards close to your chest.  Shedding this behavioural axiom feels like the equivalent of standing up naked, in front of a live TV audience, promising them you really are still going to the gym and it’s all a work in progress.  You can expect mixed reactions.

But in the last thirteen years, a lot has changed.  We have seen the meteoric rise of internet-enabled devices and the framework, especially via social networking, for people to express themselves more freely.  In fact, not just “more” freely, but FREELY, period.  With this certain stream-of-consciousness we have also seen how businesses, once the “big blue”s of this world – hidden behind glass and steel, dictating the new world order – have become much more bottom-up, and even grassroots in appearance, if not in total nature.

I would argue that smaller teams in larger businesses will become more fashionable, because they tend to get things done more efficiently.  The challenge has become less about the big wins, and more about how the small, inter-connected wins can be made to work well together.  This, after all, was the original spirit of Web 2.0 (remember that?!).  What Web 2.0 represented was the idea that instead of developing a monolithic web site or business platform which covered all functionality, you could actually interact with other sites and use them too.  And they could use you and your services/data.

This is very much the case today.  How many web sites do you visit where you can log in using credentials from another service/site? This flexibility and openness is not necessarily less secure, though some might argue against global logins – and there are good reasons to be cautious of this.

But, authentication is one of many possible services available on the web, and exploring this loosely-coupled architecture is becomming faster and easier than ever. Through a much greater spirit of discovery, we are bearing witness to an age of more open experimentation, more open discussion, and more open engagement amongst interested parties.  Clients, friends, rivals, competitors.   Finally, we can also celebrate the “failures” too.  The increasingly scientific nature of modern thinking allows egos to be left at the door, and the excitement and joy of new adventures in technology to be more fully appreciated.

Many of us are into technology because of this excitement and enlightenment, myself included.  It’s childlike and, IMHO, a desirable quality in a person.  When you accept you are but one person, you accept a universal truth shared by everyone – and in so doing, acknowledge that while your time is precious, sharing whatever you can from it is a great investment.

On that basis, I am intending to up my blogging rate ten-fold, to try to document the events of my days and weeks and the challenges I face in them.  My experiment will be to see if in doing this – i.e. openly blogging much more of what’s going on in my microbusiness, there is a positive effect on people around, the interest in my business services and, ultimately I suppose, a positive effect on me.

And I will be open about the result.  Stay tuned!

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Regain security
Regain email privacy & security

Part #3 of the Data Liberation series

Is there ever time in the day to reconsider your online security? I mean, really consider it?

Take the most common access point for communication in the 21st century – email. Yes, you read that right. It’s still email. Email is the root of online authentication for people worldwide, not only allowing them a “safe place” to recover lost account credentials, but also facilitating properly secured communications with the use of PGP signed and encrypted email. But is your email storage secure?

The woes of web mail

The “problem” with email is that its ubiquity spawned, some years ago, the explosion of “free” web mail services. All the big players provide it. These services are advertising-supported. In other words, the cost of providing such services are met by revenue generated from scanning your email and providing “relevant” adverts within your browser to click on. Each click is tracked and the advertiser billed accordingly.

An issue here, then, is that your email is scanned. All your emails are read by an indexing process which scours every single nugget of information. What information could that include? How could it be used? How about this little list for starters:

  • the date & time
  • the sender’s name and email address
  • their computer’s name
  • their network (i.e. their email provider, their ISP, any intervening mail routers)
  • their probable native language
  • their approximate location when sending the message (obtained from their original IP address)
  • your approximate location when reading the email (based on your IP address)
  • yours and their exact locations if using any location service

That’s not all

If the sender is using the same “free” web-mail service as you:

  • if they use a calendar in that service, what they were doing when they emailed you (giving an insight into the sender’s thought processes…)
  • if they maintain a contact list / address book in that web-mail service, that service may “know” you are a friend or family member of the sender
  • in this case, it will also know their friends – and your friends – and any shared friends too.  It can start to build up a map of contacts – who knows who and possibly why.
  • Knowing “who knows who” means those related contacts’ web-mail services can be interrogated for commonalities, such as shared events (in a calendar), shared interests via a social network, and so on.

Web cam

There are yet more ways your data can be exposed. If they are not using the same “free” web-mail service, but are using another service which they log into using their web mail service’s credentials:

  • that web-mail service provider could poll the other services to see what data you are sending (e.g. what you are posting) to those services
  • it can map any correspondence to or from your contact via its services even when not in relation to your email – e.g. It can expose a contact’s movements, their communications and interests in a given time-frame.
  • they can even be exposed by their use of related services from that provider. For example, new photos into a flickr or instagram account which is public, can be mapped back from their date, time and location to the IP address that was used to query location services.

Finally, a crucial problem with all online services is that there is no guarantee your data is actually deleted when you choose to delete it.  After hitting “delete” through a web site, this could simply flag the email to be removed from your visible account and stored in MegaWebCorp’s vault of “deleted” email, remaining there forever.  Or until needed…

This is the risk of putting data into another provider’s hands – what gets uploaded or stored in your name, stays there in your name, forever.  What goes up, sometimes stays up.

Resolving the privacy crisis

Coming back to email, then, the first priority for someone who wants to maintain some privacy with respect to their life activity needs first to remove the source of indexing from MegaWebCorp’s database – the link between all things you do, your email address.

When the email address is removed from the purview of MegaWebCorp’s systems, your online activity can start to become your business – not the advertiser’s.

Getting your own address is simple.  You can register a domain name with any of numerous providers around the world and sign up for a low-cost hosting plan.  For any person who values their privacy and the sanctity of anonymity, this is a small hurdle to overcome.

For the gain in privacy you can achieve by hosting your own web site, the price attached to a “free” web-mail account may seem rather high.

Bootnote

ArsTechnica has an interesting article published yesterday (30 March 2014) on “metadata as surveillance” .

 

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If there is one thing I become acutely aware of, as time rolls by, it’s that the effort to write a page on my blog never diminishes. As the length of time since my last post increases, so does the psychological pressure to produce the next post. But one has to question, why is there this innate need to compose something, share it to the world and possibly see no return for the effort?

As strange as it sounds, I am intrugued by blogs that appear to have “stopped” at some point in time. When you come across a really useful post from a blog that was last updated three years ago, you can’t help feeling a bit sadenned by it. What happened to the poster? Did he/she get busy doing more even interesting stuff – so much more interesting and so much more busy, that they have neither the time nor the inclination to share?

This is a problem I have and I suspect I’m not alone. Sharing what goes on in my daily life is sometimes not possible. People count on me to provide web hosting support the moment they need it, not after I write a blog post. Working with a number of UK graphic design agencies, my days are kept busy and varied. Staying on top of the latest technical developments – often blogged by others in the industry, means I have little time to share this newly-acquired knowledge myself.

To address this issue, I am going to start worrying a little less about the content of my blog posts and more about their timeliness. Sound strange? Perhaps. Having read others’ blogs, though, it seems that social, political and technical comment is still a sought-after item of value in cyberspace. It all comes down to trust. Do you trust the opinion of the writer of this blog?

In our increasingly exposed digital world, establishing trust is something that comes from interactions and being able to judge a person’s character through what they share. As time rolls on, I will attempt to share more of my thoughts and observations through this blog and other social media sites, and worry a little less that I’m not providing a how-to on “everything you ever needed to know”.

If you have any comments, please feel free to add them below. Thanks.

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When making my morning brew, I started pondering how to make it more interesting.  Sure, you can add flavour (and waistline) “enhancements” like cream, sugar, maybe some vanilla…  But such unimaginativeness doesn’t last long.

Image courtesy of oddee.com. You can
also buy coffee from the dark side.

What’s needed is a whole new coffee experience. 

Scouring the web for new things to do often turns up very interesting results.  For instance, there’s a whole web site dedicated to Putting Weird Things in Coffee.   Some of those weird things include cheese, meat (!) and even black pudding.  The fascination with meat is prevalent elsewhere, too. Hmm.

But you don’t need to go so far to enhance the flavour of coffee.  One simple food-enhacing staple – salt – has also been used extensively and blogged about for some time.  Clearly, it might be worth trying.

Spices, of course, have provided that added “something” to a good coffee for many years.  Adding spice instead of sugar is also a neat dietary trick for those careful watching calorie consumption.

Taking it up a level

What you put into coffee is only half of the story though.  How much caffeine you ingest daily is another thing.  Curiously, at the time of writing, 66 people “Like” this Facebook page entitled “Extreme Coffee Drinking“, which has no content and not even a picture.  As one quote says, “Coffee: do stupid things more quickly and with more energy“.

Extreme coffee drinking seems to be a sport amongst some.  It’s not merely a question of having multiple cups per day.  Whether the evidence is conclusive that lots of coffee each day can kill you, is certainly still to be debated.

Things can get a bit extreme, though.  Death Wish Coffee, as reported here, promotes extreme levels of caffeine as its USP.  A step too far?  Maybe.  But, it can hardly be contested that we love coffee, and our interest in all things joe-related, together with its growth in the West, continues unabated.  Coffee is recognised as a personal experience, so the growth of single cup products may indicate that social coffee drinking is diminishing in favour of a more insular, smart-phone focused experience.

Taking it too far?

While at university, I recall many a lovely coffee in what is now claimed to be the world’s oldest internet cafe – CB1 (Google Maps link).  I’m not sure about the validity of this claim, but there’s no disputing the charm of a good coffee shop.

But these days, though it’s not all academia, with bustling coffee shops populated by artisans, guarded closely by the intelligentsia.  Caffeine addiction and dependency/withdrawal symptoms are a real problem for some people.  Luckily, the web has many suggestions to combat this.  I suppose one could make a visit to an internet cafe and research this on his or her own…

Perhaps indulging in a caffeine kick is not the best long term policy, but it certainly starts the day well.