I’ve been struggling with passwords for a while. I sign up for all kinds of things and keeping track of all the different password/username/email combinations has frankly become a bit of a nightmare, especially across different computers, tablets and phones. Then there’s the worry about anything other than randomly generated passwords when it comes to hacking attacks (and even those might not be good enough in the long run).

Although a lot of people recommend it, to be honest I found 1Password pretty baffling to start with. There are a bunch of sites that it doesn’t really work with very well and out of the box it doesn’t sync across machines.

In the end though I settled on using 1Password with Dropbox and gradually using it to replace all my passwords with new ones randomly generated by 1Password. By the way the Dropbox synching only works if you have your Dropbox folder in the default location on a Mac — took me a while to work that out.

(Just spotted that Nic Brisbourne posted about the same subject today!)

Enjoyed watching this video of Tony Fadell talking about his experience of leading the teams behind all kinds of interesting projects including the iPod, iPhone and Nest learning thermometer. The last answer about self-doubt particularly caught my eye:

“If you’re not having doubt you’re not pushing the boundaries far enough. It’s too easy… you need to be feeling that doubt every single day.”

I’m just about old enough to remember the miners’ strike of 1984. Listening to ‘Just Deserts’ by Michael Blastland on Radio 4 a few days ago I realised quite how impossible anything like it would be today. The argument in the programme is that the financial gains from the growth we’ve seen over the past 30 years have gone to senior executives rather than workers or shareholders. The last point surprised me — I’d assumed that at least some of the relative gains had gone to investors but the figures (at least for public companies) show the opposite.

The result has been a gradual growth in inequality and the more I read of the economics, the less I think anybody really understands what’s going on. Perhaps that’s because there are a whole host of reasons for the changes. Unions blame the laws curbing their power, others say that increasing regulation has made it more expensive to employ people at all and others blame the underlying structure of the modern company which effectively gives executives free reign.

I’m not sure. But I think technology has probably also played a big part. Automation (as this Washington Post series explains) is changing the structure of the economy in ways we didn’t notice because of the shock of the financial crash of 2008 and all the talk about public sector deficits. And unless we look at the way we apply tech in the future, things could get worse.

Photo some rights reserved by MuseumWales.