Monday, September 23, 2013

High Tech Product Low Tech Mind

I just upgraded my computer - another way of saying I just demonstrated how far technology has left me behind. This new one (a MacBook despite the suicidal Chinese workers and the kids being force to mine minerals in Congo) has the app store built right in.

One of the first apps I got is called 1Password. I has a simple premise that appealed to me - go to every site that you have a password for, use the app to generate an incredibly long and basically random new password and then the app will fill in the form for you ever time you visit the site. All I have to do is remember the enormous password with which I protected the password generator. That's the theory anyway.

Instead, I have changed every one of my passwords to random strings of 20 characters and can't figure out how to get the app to fill the forms in for me (or even tell me what the new passwords are). The only reason I'm able to write this is because Google sent me an email saying "You got hacked, no one would be stupid enough to change their password to 2kH%N6kdin(sm$nald2(dnas)#an1kO" and let me change it back.

On the down side, since I have a terrible memory for things like passwords I use the same one for absolutely everything. It used to be "BobaFett" but I thought people would be able to guess that, so I changed it.

Every other change Apple has made in the years since I switched systems seems designed to annoy me. The scroll function on the pad works in the opposite way - why did they do that? And 1 finger is something different than 2 fingers or 3 fingers. That makes a kind of intuitive sense - if you are desperate to avoid the right-click (as Apple are for some reason) you want as much from your pad as possible but I end up spending 20 minutes a day licking my fingers so the track pad will understand they are actually human appendages and not something else. As to what they might be if they weren't fingers, I have no idea. Still, on the plus side I am keeping this computer as clean as an operating theater - since I am licking it all day.

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