Look up any stored password, and then some
We need to connect a PC laptop to our wireless router. The computer can find the network, but I don’t know the password. Where should I look?
You can find passwords in your keychain using the Keychain Access utility, which you can find, along with everything else on your Mac, through Spotlight, or by going to Macintosh HD/Applications/Utilities.
To display your passwords in Keychain Access:
Open Keychain Access, located in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder.
Select a keychain.
Click Passwords in the category list.
Use the Passwords category disclosure triangle to reveal the types of passwords, and then choose a password type.
Double-click a keychain item.
Select the “Show password” checkbox.
Enter your keychain password.
To display your password, click Allow. [Editor's note: don't choose Always Allow, or Keychain Access will always diplay that password without entering your master password.]
- Open Keychain Access, located in /Applications/Utilities.
- Click Show Keychains if the Keychains list is not open, then select the keychain you want to use (if your keychain is locked, click the lock icon then enter your keychain password to unlock it).
- Choose File > New Secure Note Item.
- Type a name for the note that will help you remember what it is.
- Type the information you want to preserve in the Note box, or paste text you’ve copied or cut from another document.
- Click Add.
Store and provide easy access to more than one account for any website. Correctly handle financial websites which often disable storing passwords in Safari’s AutoFill. Integrate with multiple browsers, including Safari, Fluid, Firefox, DEVONagent, OmniWeb, NetNewsWire, Flock, Netscape Navigator, and Camino. Eliminate the need to synchronize your data between browsers. Support multiple identities, such as personal and business identities. You can even create fake identities for websites you do not trust. Fill credit card information with one click. Import information from a multitude of sources. Integrate a strong password generator directly into the browser for quick and painless generation of super strong passwords. Sync your information to the iPhone/iPod touch, as well as Palm devices.
Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog
Bookmarklets for your fun and convenience
I’ve come late to the game of public — or “social” — bookmarking using Delicious, but it’s so freaking useful. Instead of adding a bookmark to Safari or Firefox, I post it to Delicious, where I can tag it with multiple categories, and share it. A friend and I are planning a trip, so as I collect relevant pages, I can save them on Delicious, tag ‘em with “triptowherever”, and then me and my pal can always go to http://delicious.com/jjmarcus/triptowherever to see what each other has found.
Now, if I’m surfing in Firefox, I can use the great Delicious plug-in. Safari, however, isn’t as easily extensible as Firefox, and regardless of the browser, one can get some nifty functionality using bookmarklets: little bits of JavaScript that can take information from your current browser page and perform some quick action with it. Adding a bookmark to Delicious is an excellent example.
(I should mention that I do use some fantastic Safari extensions such as SafariStand and Inquisitor; find a full list at PimpMySafari. But I digress…)
In this post, I’m going to forego writing instructions for creating bookmarklets, but I will list the ones I have found useful so far. PimpMySafari has a long list of these, too.
Here are mine (the links contain the code):
- Spreeder.com: Speed-read with spreeder
- Evernote.com: Clip to Evernote
- Post images from Flickr to Facebook (iPhoto ‘09 makes this less necessary).
- Bookmark on Delicious.
- RemembertheMilk.com: Add to Remember the Milk
I put them all in a folder in my Bookmarks Bar, for quick access.
San Antonio realtors can switch to Mac
I meant to put this out sooner:
The San Antonio Board of Realtors contracted an MLS developer to allow agents and other members to use Firefox and mobile browsers, such as that of the iPhone, to browse real estate listings. This is a huge deal for this market, and potentially for our business.
End User: Music, Stat!
Published in San Antonio Current, August 1, 2007
Once again, the government wants to kill our good time. Last week, the House Government Reform Committee called peer-to-peer file-sharing software such as LimeWire a “national security threat.” LimeWire and the Gnutella network it uses are a popular means to share music and video — often copyrighted — across the internet. Chairman Henry Waxman and his peers warned Mark Gorton, CEO of LimeWire, that his software could turn a computer into a weapon.
The Committee’s concern stemmed more from an accidental misuse of the software than from any deliberate leaking of sensitive material. LimeWire would be a pretty dumb tool for terrorists, but it is also a really dumb thing to install on a computer that contains classified information. Of course, there are a gajillion other ways to get files across the ’net. The mere act of connecting Microsoft Windows to the internet can compromise your digital stuff. Why wasn’t Bill Gates in this hearing?
While the recording industry does not seem to be directly involved with this particular attack on LimeWire, the RIAA has made 2007 its banner year to prevent you from actually hearing the music it records. It has threatened internet radio [“Dead Air,” July 11-17] and sued college students for sharing music. So this seems a fitting time to list some more above-board, even legitimate, ways to get great tunes for free.
First I’ll list some “streamed music” services. Streaming typically means that you can listen in one direction only — forward — and that you don’t get to store the music unless you use a parlor trick (easily learned) to record the audio your computer is receiving. I love turning people on to Pandora. This site asks you to create a “radio station” by entering an artist or song. Pandora then uses its database of “music genomes” to construct a list of songs related to your original selection. Pandora is one of the most high-profile services imperilled by the crackdown on internet radio.
Wolfgang’s Vault is a crazy good time. Bill Sagan discovered and bought the collection of concert recordings and memorabilia of late legendary rock promoter Bill Graham, and Sagan’s company has spent a considerable amount of time and resources documenting all of those recordings and posting them online for your listening pleasure.
Real.com offers Rhapsody, a neat subscription that lets you choose from millions of tracks, store and share your choices. You can pay for “unlimited” access. I know many people who dig Rhapsody, though I found the site more clunky than others, and it crashed two of my browsers and wouldn’t work with the third.
Now comes the double-plus fun. Without installing any security-menacing software, you can find MP3s from all over the internet, yours to keep. Google can track down music files. You can look up the tricky syntax for the searches (Google “how to find mp3 with Google”), or use a site like www.b3ta.cr3ation.co.uk to do the geek-work for you.
Somewhat newer to the scene are music or MP3 blogs, where fans discuss music and post listenable and viewable files. Sites such as Hype Machine (hypem.com) and Elbo.ws scour, track, categorize, and sort the content of these blogs.
But here’s the magic: Whenever you do a search in Hype Machine, a link to a “feed” is generated for you. You can ask iTunes (or another music app) to subscribe to that feed. Click “Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast …” and iTunes will start downloading the top song result from your search. Then you can ask it to grab more. A constantly refreshing set of songs from your artist is downloaded daily (or hourly, weekly, etc.), ready to be synced to your iPod (or another portable music device).
Hype Machine was the recent discovery that made me get up and do a little dance. (No, I didn’t post said dance on YouTube. And by the way, if anyone says “cat playing piano” to me again, I’m gonna drink Drano.) They let you play your search results in their own little window, but the ability to find and keep a track you like is just golden. And it’s just the kind of gold that the music industry wants to deny us, even though it ultimately attracts ears and purses to their product. So take a cue from Janis, and get it while you can.
End User: The Littlest App
Published in San Antonio Current, June 20, 2007
I wanted to like MySpace. But it’s atrocious: ugly, clunky, ad-ridden, the polar opposite of Google. And like so many atrocities, it’s hugely popular. I got nothing from MySpace, however, except spam from pretend women, and as all the tech podcasters I listen to have shunned MySpace and emigrated to Facebook or Virb, I thought I’d give the former a try.
One of Facebook’s features is to scan your address book and look for email addresses of existing Facebook users. Also, searching in Facebook is more efficient, and within two weeks, I got howdy-do’s from three different high school classmates, all of whom I’m glad to hear from.
Turns out that one of my old ’mates, John Lilly (not the late Day of the Dolphin guy), is now COO of Mozilla, the non-profit org that manages development of Firefox, the free, open-source web browser that currently enjoys about 15% browser market share in the U.S. (“Mozilla” was the codename of Netscape Navigator, the first popularly available web browser.)
If you own a Windows computer, and you still use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, your fly is open and waiting for some nasty digi-bug to crawl into your PC’s trousers and have its way with you. Plus, you’re missing out on blocked web ads and saved browser sessions. (If you rock a Mac, you’re safe on the ’Net, but you should check out Firefox, or Camino, a browser made for the Mac on top of the Firefox engine.)
Coincidentally, my reconnecting with John came at a fun time for browser buffs. First of all, Firefox 3 is on the horizon, with some lovely features such as private browsing. Next, this last Monday, June 13, Apple Computer made a couple of piquing announcements: It has released for Windows a beta version of Safari, the web browser that comes with every Mac; and the iPhone (June 29, y’all!) will run a full version of Safari, supporting Web 2.0.
I hear ya: What the @#$% is Web 2.0? To oversimplify, it’s the movement to make the web less boring than it used to be. You know how, on Netflix, you can put your mouse over a film’s name, and a little balloon pops up with plot and director info? Or if you go to www.apple.com, there’s a search blank at top right that now drops down search results as you type. That’s all Web 2.0. Google Documents and Spreadsheets are pure Web 2.0. Which means that, if Apple’s promises are fulfilled, then boom, the iPhone has word processing… IF you have an internet connection. And you will, and it will cost you.
The latest versions of Windows and Mac OS X also have mini apps, called “widgets” or “gadgets,” depending on who you ask. Many of these are created with the same kind of code that makes Web 2.0 tick, and I sniff that Apple intends to make these insta-apps playable on the iPhone.
In his presentation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs presented his vision for the web’s future, in which Internet Explorer and Safari will dominate to the exclusion of all other browsers. So I couldn’t resist asking John Lilly what Mozilla’s thoughts were on Apple’s news. He first got me a very diplomatic statement from Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering: “Mozilla’s mission is to promote an open, interoperable and participatory Internet. We encourage Apple to put their weight behind open standards and the open Web to help ensure all browser users, regardless of operating system or browser, can enjoy the best possible Web experience.”
I suspected that somewhat stronger feelings ran through the Ethernet at Mozilla HQ. John confirmed this with a post on his blog: “There are a couple of problems [with Apple’s view]. The first is that this isn’t really how the world is. The second is that, irrespective of Firefox, this isn’t how the world should be. A world of tight control from a few companies … destroys participation, it destroys engagement, it destroys self-determination. And, ultimately, it wrecks the quality of the end-user experience, too. Remember when you had to get your phone from AT&T? Good times.”
Yes, I remember that, and I also remember the browser wars between Netscape and IE, when you’d find the words “This site best viewed by Internet Explorer.” To paraphrase Bill the Cat, pppphptpt! I found a thing I wrote about the browser wars back when I didn’t get paid to do so, on a proto-blog in 1998: “Computers connected to the internet will not be truly functional until they all speak the same language.”
I tried Apple’s new Safari, and am pleased that it works better on sites with which Safari used to have problems, sites that until now I have needed Firefox to view. So now I have more choice, and that’s fine. If Apple is simply encouraging development for cool little apps on the iPhone, I like that, too. But if the goal is control, I’m gonna start using Firefox more.
