Passwords.

I've been thinking about passwords a lot. Strong passwords are important. They should be a long, random string of letters, numbers and special characters *?%. But forgetting said passwords is very annoying. Having a list is good, but what if you don't have the list with you when you forgot—that is a delay.

So what you need is a system. A good system.

One obvious system is to have one password you use for everything. Like Green123. Or supercalifrag. However, that means that once a password hacking machine has hacked that, everything falls open. So the one password system is only a good system for things that don't matter being hacked. A lot of things don't matter being hacked, so I would use the Green123 sort of password on chat forums and online clubs that don't even really need passwords at all.

The system I use for higher security sites is to tap my fingers around the keyboard in a certain pattern like a zig zag or Fur Elise (plplpnkjb) for example, and what comes out LOOKS random, and my brain could never remember it, but my fingers remember it because it is a spatial pattern. If you aren't a spatial person, you could take a line from your favourite book or song. Eg "I was in the middle before I knew I had begun" becomes the nicely enigmatic 1witmb1k1hb (with I swapped for 1 obviously). That was the trick in Doctor Who last week, "Run you clever boy, and remember". But I still wouldn't use that one 'random' password for everything, because again, it's safer to have different passwords for facebook and paypal and online banking. So then I put an extension on it (including special characters), so facebook might go plplpnkjb*f*b and paypal might go plplpnkjb*p*p. That's a bit lazy, I should probably have a completely different random pattern, not just an extension, but this system I can keep in my head—and in fact because the system doesn't take up much memory it's even possibly to have different patterns for different things, so social media gets one sort of system and banking stuff gets another.