We appreciate things that simultaneously make us feel smart and obscure tangible evidence of the reality that we really aren’t.
Example: KeePass Password Safe.
Many thanks to Rich Niejelski at RoyalSaltMedia for tipping us off to this invention. He always finds cool stuff.
KeePass lets you stop worrying about remembering a different blasted password for every login in your life or, conversely, worrying that your bad habit of using the same stinking password for every login in your life has you roaring down a road to ruin. With KeePass, all you remember is one password, the one that opens the password safe where you have all those easily forgotten user names and passwords stored.
The company calls its product a “password manager.” And it’s free! Open source, too. The source code is available at the site, in case you’re a geek who likes to tinker.
But even the least geekish can download this application with ease. Stick it on your hard drive, if you want. They have downloads for Blackberries and Palms, too. We decided that the most cleverest thing would be to download it to a USB stick so we can carry all our user names and passwords with us everywhere we go for use on any machine. Don’t we sound technically savvy? As long as we don’t drop the stick in the driveway and back the car over it by mistake, we’ll be fine.
In KeePass you create a database of user names and passwords. These are locked down by your most holy of holy passwords, the last one (theoretically) that you will ever really have to remember. Behind this wall you enter the URL of every website that makes you log on, along with the user names and passwords for each. When you need to go online, you can jump straight into a site from the KeePass app and drag and drop the user name and password where needed. You can do the exact same thing with internal logins for networks and hard drives. It’s very clean and lightweight.
So, now we can make up passwords with reckless abandon. “Bligitybloppter456″ works. Who gives a damn? You don’t have to remember. Just make a record of it in KeePass and live in bliss always remembering to back up now and then, of course.