Say your password for website badwebsite.com is the same as the password for goodwebsite.com. Now if the website badwebsite.com gets compromised (or the owner is malign to start with), they’ll know your password. Chances are that your username is the same (email address) for both websites so the badwebsite.com people can can easily log in to your goodwebsite.com account and impersonate you.

Yeah, there are quite a few reliable Password Managers that serve as a strong room for your complex passwords but that they require you to install specific software on the computer. What do you do when you want to check your web email on a different computer where you do not have your security tools installed and you do not remember your secure, random, email password?

In addition, I doubt you can memorize all your passwords for each and every website, if they are secure from brute-forcing and unique, that is.

Write your passwords down on a paper

What I am trying to solve is to give users a simple way of generating strong passwords unique to every website they visit using just a piece of paper, credit card-sized, that you can carry in your wallet.

What you need is just a piece that has a unique (per card) combination of secret letters to help you create a unique password for each website. You may use the RAND() function in an Excel spreadsheet to generate unique password cards.

To create a password, take each letter of the website you want to create a password for and then take the corresponding code from the table. For example, if you want to create a password for www.amazon.com, it would be:

1st letter is a –> a (Column 2, Row 1)
2nd letter is m –> jv (Column 7, Row 2)
3rd letter is a -> AN6
4th letter is z -> xs7
5th letter is o –> enb

So the password for your Amazon website becomes ajvAN6xs7enb.

You can optionally (make sure you do this with all your passwords) intertwine the generated password with a memorized password – it could the city name where you were born, your childhood hero, name of your favorite author or anything memorable.

For instance, if you were born in Philadelphia, the password for Amazon.com would be ajvAN6xs7enb intertwined with Philadelphia: PahjviAN6lxs7aenbdelphia. This would ensure that your identity consists of something you know (Philadelphia) and something you have (the paper password card).

Even if a malicious administrator of website badwebsite.com retrieves your password for that website, they cannot impersonate you on say PayPal or Amazon because you aren’t reusing passwords anymore.

It is a bit cumbersome to use if you had to use it to type in passwords each time, but when used in conjunction with your everyday "remember password" feature found in every browser, you get extra security at the cost of just tiny real state in your wallet.

Security involves trade-offs, in this case is between usability, portability and robustness against collusion or more sophisticated attacks. Arguably though, for a vast majority of people, this is more realistic than carrying an electronic password generator.

The writer, Andres Torrubia, is the co-founder and CEO of Fixr, an eBay like online marketplace for homeowners and contractors.

Related: How Strong is your Password ?

Keep Your Passwords Safe on a Piece of Paper

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Got a jacket with a hood? Then watch this video as it explains how you can quickly turn your hooded jacket into a laptop carrying bag.

The video is part of the Just Undo It series by Antonio Scarponi that shows how you can transform a simple hoodie into useful stuff like a pillow, a backpack or even a baby carrier. More videos follow:

Thanks Swiss Miss for the tip.

Make Your Own Laptop Bag with a Hoodie

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Week 1: Eeshan Chatterjee from Manipal, Karnataka

Week 2: Viren Mehta from Mumbai, Maharashtra

Week 3: Namita Guj from Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra

Week 4: Sidharth Bhan from Bangalore, Karnataka

Grand Prize: Namita Guj from Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra

The weekly winners will receive a Sony digital music player each while the grand winner will get a Core i5 powered Laptop computer from Intel India.

Congratulations! Please send me your complete postal addresses (with phone number) so that the prizes can be delivered to your place.

I do plan to publish some of the entries on this blog so stay tuned!

Announcing Winners of the Intel Tips Contest

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

We think of Google as a search engine but they are an advertising company. This short documentary on Google will give you a good idea of what Google is trying to do and how the different pieces fit together.

They want to own the cables that deliver the Internet and also the electricity to power them.

Not every number or statistic that you see in the movie may be true but it is still a good recap of Google’s constantly growing list of products and features. The movie originally aired on Australian TV show – Hungary Beast.

Thanks Andrew Vande Moere for the tip.

Also see: Google’s Master Plan

A Short Documentary on Google

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

It might have take them several days to plan and draw the whole thing but luckily, you get to enjoy the process in under 60 seconds.

How to Paint in an Excel Spreadsheet?

If you want to create your own spreadsheet art but don’t have the time (or patience) to carefully paint every single square cell manually, here’s a nice shortcut.

Go to boydevlin.com and download their free Excel Art program. It’s a standalone utility that will convert any bitmap image into a spreadsheet that you then open in Microsoft Excel or even Google Docs. You don’t need Excel to use Excel art.

Excel as a Pixel Drawing Tool

For instance, here’re pixel portraits of painter Vincent van Gogh (Google Docs) and Mona Lisa all created with Excel Art. The conversion might appear a little pixelated from close but its beautiful nonetheless.

Thanks Richard Devlin for the tip.

Turn your Images into Spreadsheet Art

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

The plug-in, called Harmony for Google Docs, adds a sidebar to your Outlook so you can access your online documents from virtually any Outlook screen.

When you send an email message that contains attachments, Harmony will ask if you want to upload the attachments to Google Docs and instead send links of the uploaded files to the recipient.

Upload & Download Google Documents using Outlook

There’s more. You can drag-n-drop files from the desktop into Outlook sidebar and they’ll immediately get uploaded to your Google Docs account. If you are reading an email inside Outlook, you can drag the file attachments from that email into the sidebar and they’ll be uploaded as well.

Alternatively, if you want to download one or more Google Documents from the cloud to your local computer, just drag the files from the Outlook sidebar to your desktop. It can’t get easier than this.

Harmony will add a Google Docs search function to your Outlook so you easily can find documents that are already in your Google Account and attach them directly to your email messages. Harmony can find documents based on the title or it can even for text inside the documents.

Double-click any document name in the sidebar and you’ll be able to edit it right inside Outlook – when you are done, the changes are saved online.

Harmony currently supports Outlook 2007 though they plan to add support for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2010 as well.

Go to mainsoft.com to download Harmony for Google Docs for free. Do check the homepage video to understand how the plug-in can be a great time-saver for employees who have to work on Office documents collaboratively. Thanks Leena Rao.

Related story: Edit Google Docs in Microsoft Office

Manage Google Docs from Microsoft Outlook

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

There’s an app called “Export Friends” that will save you friends names, city, birthday and their current location in a CSV (text) file that you then import into Excel, Gmail or any other web email program.

Then there are social plug-ins that can sync photos and status updates of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Outlook.

The problem is that none of these apps can download what  you are looking – the phone numbers and email addresses of your Facebook friends. There are Greasemonkey scripts and other hacks that can pull this information from Facebook through “web scraping” but don’t ever take that route as Zuckerberg’s army might ban your account forever.

Export Email Addresses of your Facebook Contacts

Facebook APIs don’t expose email addresses of users and hence none of the Facebook apps can provide you with the actual contact data of your friends. There’s however a simple (and perfectly legal) workaround that can help you easily download all your friends email addresses from Facebook’s walled garden.

The trick, as you can see in the video, is actually quite simple.

Go to address.yahoo.com and click the Facebook icon. A login dialog should pop-up, just sign-in with your Facebook credentials and within seconds, you entire Facebook address book will be available inside your Yahoo Mail Account. Once the import is done, click this link to download a CSV file with the email addresses of all your Facebook contacts to your desktop.

You can then import the CSV file into Gmail Contacts, LinkedIn, your phone address book or any of the social sites where you want to connect with your existing Facebook circle.

Update: If Yahoo! is unable to import your Facebook Address book, open your Facebook page and choose “Application Settings” under Account. Next remove the “Yahoo! Contact Importer” application from your Facebook profile and try the steps mentioned in the video again.

Related: How to Download Facebook Photo Albums

How to Export Email Addresses of all your Facebook Friends

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Microsoft is slowly rolling out a new design for their MSN.com homepage. The design is clean and doesn’t appear busy anymore.

Like Yahoo, you can check your friend’s tweets and their Facebook status updates right on the MSN page. You can even update your status without leaving the homepage.

Visit msn.com to see if the new design is live for you and if it’s not, just head over to msn.com/preview. They have created a new butterfly logo for the MSN logo as well.

Thanks Michael Palermiti for the tip.

The New MSN.com Homepage

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

If you a business customers or an  MSDN / TechNet subscriber, you’ll get access to all the new Office products including Visio, Project and SharePoint in May itself.

Buy Office 2007, Upgrade to Office 2010 for free

If you are planning to buy yourself a copy of Office, you don’t have to postpone your purchase decision – just buy a copy of Office 2007 today and you can later upgrade to Office 2010 for free.

To qualify for the free upgrad, you must purchase and active your Office 2007 suite between March 5, 2010 and September 30, 2010.

The other good part is you won’t have to uninstall your copy of Office 2007 for running Office 2010 – the two versions can co-exist except for maybe Outlook.

For details, visit www.office.com/techg.

Office 2010 Coming in June; Free Upgrade for New Office 2007 Customers

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

All the Delhi Metro Rail stations and train routes are now available on Google Maps.

You just have to key-in your current location (where you are starting from) and the end address (where you are going to) and Google Maps will instantly give you the required information such as which Metro should you take and the train’s schedule.

If there’re no Metro stations at your starting address, Google Maps will automatically suggest you a path and the best mode of transportation for you to quickly reach the nearest Metro station.

In addition to Delhi DMRC, Google Maps also includes transit details for Kolkata Metro, Chennai MRTS and Hyderabad MMTS. Here’s a video demo on how you can use Google Maps to plan trips with the metro service in Delhi and other cities.

If you don’t plan to travel by Metro but are only curious to know the areas in Delhi that are connected by Metro Rail, just check the “Transit” option under the “More” menu.

Thanks Arpit Kumar for the tip.

Plan your Delhi Metro Trip with Google Maps

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.