Thinking Out Loud
Art is a big subject, so I shall keep this brief. Art has a massive impact on shaping our personalities, whether we think it does or not. Consider for a moment, any online service that requires you to write a profile about yourself. Something that is designed to provide a summary of your personality, abilities and your likes and dislikes. IE Facebook, a dating app or even your online resume. Frequently, these profiles will require us to define ourselves by what we read, watch and listen to. Yes, other information is included in such profiles but directly or indirectly, we are asked about our artistic preferences. Possibly we do not consider such a line of questioning to be about art but essentially it is. So we dutifully state which art we cleave to and then look for reciprocal taste in others. Does this not prove that art is important?
Thinking Out Loud is a recurring post in which I present a selection of thoughts and ideas that have crossed my mind recently. As always, some of these could be developed into blog posts of their own but that really isn’t the point. Thinking Out Loud is a vehicle for brief, rhetorical musing rather than log form analysis. I just put a virtual pen to paper and get some of my thoughts written down for your consideration. As always, please feel free to leave a comment.
The Importance of Art
Art is a big subject, so I shall keep this brief. Art has a massive impact on shaping our personalities, whether we think it does or not. Consider for a moment, any online service that requires you to write a profile about yourself. Something that is designed to provide a summary of your personality, abilities and your likes and dislikes. IE Facebook, a dating app or even your online resume. Frequently, these profiles will require us to define ourselves by what we read, watch and listen to. Yes, other information is included in such profiles but directly or indirectly, we are asked about our artistic preferences. Possibly we do not consider such a line of questioning to be about art but essentially it is. So we dutifully state which art we cleave to and then look for reciprocal taste in others. Does this not prove that art is important?
Are You Wealthy?
HSBC bank recently conducted a survey in the UK about people’s perception of wealth. It is a very interesting analysis with some stand out facts. The biggest being a major regional disparity between the South and the North of the UK, regarding how much you need to earn a year to be considered wealthy. Londoners cited £290,000 as an annual salary, where in the North East it was £80,000. House prices have a lot to do with this. There were also some interesting social markers that some deemed to imply wealth. Having investments, being able to regularly travel and retirement were mentioned by about half of people surveyed. There were some curious additional examples, such as having an island in your kitchen or having a cleaner, gardener or any help with domestic chores. There was also a strong trend to equate wealth with mental well being. Money worries are seen as a key source of stress.
Doing Things Spontaneously
Spontaneity covers a lot of things, so allow me to be specific with regard to the point I’m making. Consider the following thought experiment. You decide on a whim to visit a place of interest. You also consider going to a restaurant afterwards and enjoying a leisurely meal and a few drinks. However, when you arrive at the place of interest you find that it is totally rammed. You can’t find anywhere to park, or the venue limits the number of people entering. You’re advised that you should have checked the website in advance and booked tickets for a designated time slot. You then go to your restaurant of choice, only to find that it is similarly full. Disappointed, you head home only to run into major traffic delays that you were totally unaware of.
This is something that has happened to me and Mrs P on several occasions. She favours doing things spontaneously. Sadly, the world is becoming increasingly averse to such a philosophy. Museums, galleries and places of historical interest are more often than not, subject to a booking regime. Reservations for dining out are also commonplace nowadays. It simply comes down to the number of people pursuing leisure activities, especially with a growing retired population in the UK. You’ll encounter the same problem when entertaining children during half-term. Personally, I like the piece of mind that planning a day out brings but Mrs P hates the fact you can’t always do things on a whim.
Password Managers
I wrote four months ago about replacing my existing password manager, after years of using LastPass. At the time I was going to move to Bitwarden. However, I ended up creating a free account with Proton Pass, developed by the Swiss software company Proton AG. Proton Pass can store login credentials, email aliases, credit card data, passkeys, 2FA secret keys, and notes in virtual vaults that are encrypted using 256-bit AES-GCM. The company seems to have a strong customer service ethic and the free version of the software is not lacking in functionality.
Car CD Players
Mrs P is the designated driver in our household as I don’t drive. Mrs P bought a new car in 2020. A Skoda Scala. It did not come with a CD player as the car industry now expects drivers to connect a streaming device via Bluetooth, to the vehicle’s “infotainment system”. Mrs P doesn’t especially care for technology. Nor does she have a phone contract with an adequate data allowance or indeed a spotify account. She does like CDs. So I bought a portable CD player with Bluetooth. Sadly it refused to connect to her Skoda, which upon further research, is a common issue. So it was returned to Amazon and the quest for a tech friendly solution goes on. In the meantime she has found a country radio station which has proven adequate.
Password Managers
As we get older, we acquire more of the following three things. Keys, items that need charging and passwords. All of which are a pain in the butt. Your key collection grows mainly because you’re an adult and someone thinks you’re responsible. Hence you not only have your own keys but a set for work and possibly spares from members of your family. As for items that need charging, that seems to be pretty much all technology these days. It’s why power sockets now come with a USB option. But this is the world that we live in and until it changes, we just have to try and get by the best we can. Today I want to talk about passwords. The fact that we have so many of them and what is the best way to manage them. But before I move on to the subject of password management, let’s go over the basics of what is actually considered to be a “good” password and by good, I mean one that is hard-to-crack.
As we get older, we acquire more of the following three things. Keys, items that need charging and passwords. All of which are a pain in the butt. Your key collection grows mainly because you’re an adult and someone thinks you’re responsible. Hence you not only have your own keys but a set for work and possibly spares from members of your family. As for items that need charging, that seems to be pretty much all technology these days. It’s why power sockets now come with a USB option. But this is the world that we live in and until it changes, we just have to try and get by the best we can. Today I want to talk about passwords. The fact that we have so many of them and what is the best way to manage them. But before I move on to the subject of password management, let’s go over the basics of what is actually considered to be a “good” password and by good, I mean one that is hard-to-crack.
Let’s not bullshit each other, most of us do not follow a good password policy. Lots of us favour a combination of letters and numbers that we can remember easily and simply use various permutations of it across multiple sites and apps. These tend to be the names of children and pets, dates of birth or some sort of pop culture references. However, they are not that secure and therein lies the problem with them. Furthermore, people (and I include myself in this) are inherently lazy. We consider the risks to be minimal and assume that nothing bad will ever happen to us. As a result, we will use the same password or variations of them, again and again just to make our lives easier. The problem with such an approach is that if one of your passwords is compromised, it leaves you exposed across multiple applications and websites.
According to Microsoft “a strong password is at least 12 characters long but 14 or more is better. It should be a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. It should not be a word that can be found in a dictionary or the name of a person, character, product, or organisation”. Now that’s all tickety-boo in principle and the underlying logic is clear. Such a complex password is a lot harder to crack. However, what it means in reality is that you’ve got a password that looks something like this. o96sj=Y@)l;^1mb. It is highly unlikely that you’ll be able to remember a string of characters and symbols like that, let alone a dozen or so of them. Which means that you’ll need to write it down in a log book or something similar. I know several people that use a rolodex. Alternatively, if you don’t like such an old school solution, you can use a password manager
I have used LastPass as a means of storing and managing all my online passwords for over a decade. The account is protected by a master password and several other authentication requirements. A browser extension then allows me to access my password directory while online. It can autofill both username and password fields on a logon screen if directed. LastPass can also generate secure passwords for you if required and can also store other details that you may use online regularly, such as payment and address details. Hence it makes all aspects of password management a lot easier. There is a free version available for a single user or you can pay a subscription to have access across multiple devices. However, despite the benefits of this software there is still a requirement for the user to do some “housekeeping” from time to time. It is also worth noting that password managers are not bullet proof.
As you can imagine, after a decade plus of use, I have built up quite a lot of passwords in LastPass. So today I logged into my vault and manually trawled through all the passwords that were stored there. I deleted about 50 or so old and obsolete passwords. Many were for services that are no longer available, such as old forums and websites. I renamed some entries to make them more intuitive and then I took the precaution of exporting all password details as a CSV file. This is because I cannot upgrade my LastPass account any further due to legacy issues and I am considering moving to an alternative password manager such as Bitwarden and using it across all my devices. Out of all the companies providing such a service, Bitwarden seems to have the best track record and to date, hasn’t been hacked or compromised in any fashion.
Passwords management is a loaded subject. It is something we all tend to approach through a haze of cognitive dissonance. We know exactly what we should do but more often than not do the complete opposite. Then we whine when things go wrong. I’m sure I’m not alone in having a prodigious quantity of passwords. The current count is 282. Admittedly if some were lost it would not be a big deal. But there are some where it would be a real inconvenience to have to reset them. Which is why I force myself to be organised and stay on top of this issue. Mrs P handles things differently and uses a password log book which she scrupulously keeps up to date. Whether your solution is high or low tech, it is better to have some sort of system in place, rather than having to start one from scratch after some catastrophic disaster.
