How To Remember Passwords With Ease
| Computing : Internet When I first started using the internet around 12 years ago, I quickly discovered that my desk was getting very cluttered with all these little bits of paper with scribbled url's, usernames, and passwords, and so I started keeping a notebook for all my internet stuff. Worked OK for a year or two, until it got so full that it was taking me longer & longer to find anything since it wasn't in any kind of alphabetical order. Next step was to put it all into an Excel spreadsheet, which was great - as long as I remembered to constantly update it, which was a pain. Part of the problem is having a common name like mine - every time I signed up for a new program, newsletter, or forum, etc, I kept getting "That name is already taken. How about John_551370#aj22?" Sound familiar at all? Another couple of years down the line, and it was getting ridiculous - hundreds of different usernames, and hundreds of different passwords to the point where my notebook was falling apart, and I STILL had loads of those little bits of paper....... Then one day {can't remember what I was drinking at the time, but it must have been really good stuff!} it dawned on me - why not use my Favourites list to save all the hassle of looking things up? When you add a website to Favourites, you can call it anything you like - so why not type something like: new program login jh22 blue764 Every time you click on Favourites, you have an instant reminder on the screen of the name of the site, your username, and your password. {And yes, of course that's my real PayPal info - go check it out!} The next step is to create new folders to keep your url's organised, so that all your online banking details for instance, are kept together; however for sensitive information like this {and especially if other people can access your computer}, then you should use abbreviated password "reminders" instead. Another tip for simplifying things is to use a "formula" for making up your usernames and passwords; for example, on a site which we'll call Tell Me How, you could select the first three letters of the site name followed by your initials and a single digit for your username {e.g. teljh7}, and the same again for your password, only with two or more digits - teljh747. If you always stick to this same formula, it becomes very, very easy indeed to remember your login details without ever having to look anything up, and you're extremely unlikely to find that "teljh7 is already taken". Of course, a username like teljh7 isn't exactly a very cool username where it's going to be seen in places like forums and chatrooms, so for these it's probably better to stick to names like FireGod or DreamGirl.........
 Questions about passwords:
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