Fix your totally insecure password in 1 minute

There is this interesting article on Slate called Fix Your Terrible, Insecure Passwords in Five Minutes The method mentioned is quite good but there is another way through which you can create strong password and it will probably not take more than one minute. And you can even continue using your current password.We are just going to make it very strong. Let us  start with a word that you will not forget that easily, any word will do ,even your current password, but I will start off with the word password. Using 'password' as a password is not only pointless but is also quite stupid. Let us insert two symbols in the word to get p@$$word. Replace the o with a zero to get p@$$w0rd. Now capitalize one of the letters, usually it is recommended to capatalize one of the latter letters but making p capital works too. So the final password comes to p@$$w0rd. This password is too short for using in a system environment but it is superb password for any user.

Weather Updates on Linux Desktops

There are a lot of options for displaying weather information on Linux Desktops. There are some KDE plasmoids which usually ship with most distributions. There's the Weather plasmoid and there's yet another weather plasmoid (yaWP). Unfortunately, they are examples of what I would like to call as inadequates. The Weather plasmoid is not that much customizable and yaWP just got rid of an ominous bug. I hate it when plasmoids eat 100% cpu. I want my computer to be responsive and having a plasmoid eating 100% cpu is, basically, a bummer.

So I searched around until I stumbled into a gem, called Customizable Weather Plasmoid, this plasmoid shows the power of customization, shows why great softwares (including desktop plasmoids) allow high level of control by users, and shows how to make a great plasmoid. It is themable, it is versatile and it can include much more information than other plasmoids- the key is to know how to customize it.(Don't forget we are talking about Linux users :-)) The website has some screenshots.

For those who don't like KDE, there's something in a great desktop environment called Xfce. It is THE choice for desktop managers. It has a plugin for Xfce panel called the weather plugin. The plugin automatically determines your location based on the computer's IP address and updates weather information from the weather channel. The weather information scrolls in the panel and it is pretty accurate.