Password Security
We know we harp on this every single month, so we’ll just say it quickly: it is time to get serious about password security. It is just no longer safe to try to memorize the passwords of all your web sites, or to use a single password for all of them. You need a password manager, which remembers secure passwords for you.
We’ve written about this before, and, unfortunately, there’s more bad news on the security front: hackers have stolen over one billion passwords.
We don’t want you to lose your email address, or become a victim of bank fraud, or have your phone remotely locked. Please start using a password manager such as 1Password, and be happy and safe. If you’re not going to do that, just call us, so we can help you do it! Ok. Sermon over.
Fun iPhone Apps
Here are a few fun iPhone apps our office has been working and playing with this summer:
Drew clued us in to a nifty app for waking up feeling refreshed called Sleep Cycle. You put your iPhone on your mattress, and it records your sleep motion. After a few nights of observing your patterns, it wakes you up very gently within a half-hour range, selecting when it thinks you’re at the point of lightest sleep, and therefore able to be woken up feeling most refreshed. It even claims to be smart enough to filter out the sleep motion of your partner. We haven’t tried it yet, but Drew says it’s great. At any rate, we figured it was worth $0.99 to find out if he’s right.
Leslie showed us Star Walk, a pretty slick app for anyone astronomy-inclined, especially if you live in NY where you can’t see the stars. You point your phone at the sky and it shows you the stars. Even if it’s daytime. And it shows you what constellations are what. $2.99.
Elizabeth (a former IvanExperter) likes 2048, the insanely-addicting-game-du-jour. We played it, and found it insanely addictive. It has all the ingredients of hours of involuntary play: simple to learn, but difficult to master. But you always think you’re getting better at it. Since 2048 is open-source, and free, there are lots of variants, including one in which you can’t even really tell what you’re doing because rather than numbers on the tiles, there are dog faces.
Caroline is a fan of JotNot Pro, an app that replaces your flatbed scanner. You can scan multipage documents to PDF files straight from your phone. It actually works. $2.99. She also likes Stand Up!, which politely dings your phone at intervals to remind you to stand up, instead of sitting at your desk for hours at a time. We all now jump to our feet reflexively when we hear it.
We’ve mentioned it before, but Ivan still doesn’t know what he’d do without Exit Strategy, $3.99, which is the definitive reference on which subway car to ride for the quickest transfers or best exit to the street.
Which apps do you love? Let us know and we’ll give you a shout out. Enjoy your apps!
(August 2014)