rambling and recommendations about synching passwords, music, and bookmarks
I want to talk about something boring and geeky: passwords, bookmarks, and clouds. And music, which might not be geeky, but it will be.
I know that most of my normal friends have one computer, maybe a phone, and this isn't interesting to them. Sorry. But I'm not alone in having a dizzying array of devices: a personal laptop, a low-end PC attached to my TV for streaming shows, and a smart phone (Android), not abnormal. Throw in a work computer I'm in front of all day, though, and an iPad issued to me by work...
It is not unreasonable to need passwords for various banking, email, social, work, shopping, etc., sites, and have most of them be different; there's enough hacking in the world that you are kind of crazy not to have different password everywhere. You can't possibly remember them all, and some security gurus will tell you you shouldn't even use passwords simple enough that a human CAN remember them for most things. So you need a password manager: I use KeePass. But I want it on more than one PC, so now I'm synching the encrypted password database via Google Cloud (probably the weak point in my armor?) which requires a plug-in. And installing a port of KeePass on my phone (next up my iPad). And another plugin to make it integrate with my web browser. Normal people aren't going to take this effort. It is very difficult for normal people to be safe, I think.
It is also not unreasonable to want to listen to my music on various devices. Several large companies (Apple, Amazon, Google) want to make a lot of money with the promise of making this easier for you, if only you completely buy into their ecosystem and (if possible) only buy music from their stores. My solution thus far has been to manage music and playlists in iTunes on my personal laptop, mainly because the iPad has locked me into using iTunes (haven't found an alternative that works). But that doesn't play well with my Android phone, which is my main music source in the car; for that I use Easy Phone Tunes which is cheap (free with limited functionality) and miraculously actually seems to work to copy music based on iTunes playlists to an Android device. Still, normal people... are just going to listen to Pandora or Spotify because normal people are not going to put this much work into listening to some goddamn music.
I'm old enough to remember that years ago, dealing with keeping my bookmarks in synch on my home vs work PC was a pain in the butt. Chrome worked that out with cloud synch of bookmarks; ports of Chrome for Android and iPad mean I have them everywhere. Unless a browser can promise me synch of bookmarks and passwords across all popular platforms (Windows, iOS, Android, at minimum) it's a non-starter as far as I'm concerned.
Right now Apple and Microsoft seem to want to strongarm me into using their platforms only, and sorry, that can't happen for reasons I won't bore you with in this post. Google is doing a better job meeting my needs, but they are still imagining a world where people have good connectivity all the time; I can barely get a phone signal in an urban area sometimes, much less wifi, so their desire to keep my music and documents entirely in the cloud instead of synched isn't working for me.
The point of my rambling, I guess, is to recommend KeePass and Easy Phone Tunes; and to solicit thoughts from people who might have done better.
I know that most of my normal friends have one computer, maybe a phone, and this isn't interesting to them. Sorry. But I'm not alone in having a dizzying array of devices: a personal laptop, a low-end PC attached to my TV for streaming shows, and a smart phone (Android), not abnormal. Throw in a work computer I'm in front of all day, though, and an iPad issued to me by work...
It is not unreasonable to need passwords for various banking, email, social, work, shopping, etc., sites, and have most of them be different; there's enough hacking in the world that you are kind of crazy not to have different password everywhere. You can't possibly remember them all, and some security gurus will tell you you shouldn't even use passwords simple enough that a human CAN remember them for most things. So you need a password manager: I use KeePass. But I want it on more than one PC, so now I'm synching the encrypted password database via Google Cloud (probably the weak point in my armor?) which requires a plug-in. And installing a port of KeePass on my phone (next up my iPad). And another plugin to make it integrate with my web browser. Normal people aren't going to take this effort. It is very difficult for normal people to be safe, I think.
It is also not unreasonable to want to listen to my music on various devices. Several large companies (Apple, Amazon, Google) want to make a lot of money with the promise of making this easier for you, if only you completely buy into their ecosystem and (if possible) only buy music from their stores. My solution thus far has been to manage music and playlists in iTunes on my personal laptop, mainly because the iPad has locked me into using iTunes (haven't found an alternative that works). But that doesn't play well with my Android phone, which is my main music source in the car; for that I use Easy Phone Tunes which is cheap (free with limited functionality) and miraculously actually seems to work to copy music based on iTunes playlists to an Android device. Still, normal people... are just going to listen to Pandora or Spotify because normal people are not going to put this much work into listening to some goddamn music.
I'm old enough to remember that years ago, dealing with keeping my bookmarks in synch on my home vs work PC was a pain in the butt. Chrome worked that out with cloud synch of bookmarks; ports of Chrome for Android and iPad mean I have them everywhere. Unless a browser can promise me synch of bookmarks and passwords across all popular platforms (Windows, iOS, Android, at minimum) it's a non-starter as far as I'm concerned.
Right now Apple and Microsoft seem to want to strongarm me into using their platforms only, and sorry, that can't happen for reasons I won't bore you with in this post. Google is doing a better job meeting my needs, but they are still imagining a world where people have good connectivity all the time; I can barely get a phone signal in an urban area sometimes, much less wifi, so their desire to keep my music and documents entirely in the cloud instead of synched isn't working for me.
The point of my rambling, I guess, is to recommend KeePass and Easy Phone Tunes; and to solicit thoughts from people who might have done better.