It’s New Year’s Day, and I’m not going to waste much of my precious naptime (or your’s!) on a maudlin post reflecting back on 2006, nor am I going to enumerate all the ambitious resolutions that realistically I’ll break sometime in the first quarter of 2007.
You’re welcome 
One thing I’ll do more of in 2007 ….
Having noticed that I constantly get traffic on my “Techie Stuff” posts, even when they’ve fallen into the archives, it occurs to me that perhaps there are a LOT of people like me – just want to know, in simple language, how to fix something or do something easier.
I don’t want to know why something doesn’t work, I want to fix it. I want things that DO work, and I want them to be easy. I prefer quick and simple little programs that do what I need done over huge bloated apps with features I’ll never understand, let alone use.
So, I’m going to post more of those things, and start 2007 with one of my very favorite new finds. It’s free, it’s small, and I found it via Sourceforge - it doesn’t get any better than that 
We all know, of course, that we should use different passwords for all of our accounts, they should be random, and we should never have them written down anywhere, and certainly not on those Post-It notes cleverly concealed under the keyboard.
Right.
That was fine, ages ago when most of us only had a handful of passwords to keep track of. That was before we did all of our banking, all of our shopping, all of our bill-paying online. That was before we had multiple email addresses for multiple purposes, and blogs and forums and message boards to log into. And that was certainly before all of the secure sites started requiring us to CHANGE our passwords from time to time.
GAH!!
We all need KeePass. Small, easy to use, free, and recommended by a trusted site, KeePass fulfills every one of my requirements for Stuff Worth Downloading.
Just download the app, install it, come up with ONE master password that will “unlock” the database, then you can store every other password you use on every site in one place that is NOT under your keyboard
KeePass will generate random passwords for you, auto-type them into forms, and even allows you to keep notes such as what day this bill is due, or what email address you used when you created that account. It’s very small, which makes it portable, so I can carry all of my log-in and password information on a thumbdrive.
KeePass stores the data in highly encrypted form, so even if you lose that thumbdive, no one will be able to read your data without that one master password you created at the start. AND it locks itself back up, so if you walk away from your desk with KeePass sitting on your taskbar, it’s going to ask for your master password again when the window is restored, thwarting that suspicious person in the next cubicle
I have no idea what my banking passwords are. Now I don’t care.
Easy, free, small, does what I need it to do. That’s good enough for me
