How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords (onemansblog.com)

The author starts off with a list of the top ten passwords, and how he would go about finding the personal information needed. For example, number 1 is “Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)” and number 2 is “The last 4 digits of your social security number.”

The really interesting bits are when the author explains exactly how he would approach hacking your accounts, and how likely he would be to succeed. Unfortunately, the tools needed to engage in this kind of mischief are readily available and do not require great skill to employ.

Some key protection points include…

• Don’t use the same password for all of your online activities. Use different passwords for each site. That way, if your Facebook password is compromised, your Wachovia password is safe.
• Never use dictionary words, names, or other common passwords.
• Look for a trusted password management utility to help ease the pain of having a hundred different passwords.
• Your email is one of the most important and critical passwords—a criminal can use the “reset my password” feature on many shopping sites once they have access to your email account.

Take a look at the article and see if you can make some changes in the way you handle password security so that you don’t get hacked!

If you live in a slightly older home, such as mine, you occasionally might want to know which circuit breaker or fuse controls a particular outlet. Besides making it more convenient to disable the power for repairs, some of us have to deal with easily overloaded circuits that weren’t meant for all of the modern gadgetry we depend on.

Every homeowner can benefit from having a good map to their home outlets and circuit breakers, and a PDF scan of this map can make it extremely convenient to find two years later when you forgot you ever made it.

My Map

Last week my wife was asking if she could run her Jiffy Steamer in the bathroom, or if it would trip the breaker. I remembered making my cheat sheet, so I simply brought up Spotlight on my Mac and typed in “home circuit” and was rewarded with this document:

It’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. I quickly scrolled to the bathroom and identified the circuit that she was using. A quick scroll through the other rooms showed that she would be safe as long as she turned off the air conditioner in the bedroom.

Making a Circuit Map

There’s a little bit of process involved here, and it helps if you have someone else to help you.

Get a notepad and scrawl a rough sketch of each room in your house that has electrical outlets, switches, and lights. Don’t forget the basement, garage, and attic. Draw a rough sketch of each electrical outlet/switch on the maps. You can see in the image above that I simply drew a little box for each outlet and a box with bumps on it for a set of switches.

Then, shut off a single breaker and go around the house to see everything that lost power. Take a small desk lamp with you or, better yet, a proper line voltage test light, and test every single outlet until you identify the ones that are off.

Every time you find an outlet or switch that is off, write the breaker number on its spot on your map. You can see that breaker 19a and breaker 7 both control the living room in my house.

Now turn that breaker on and then turn off the next breaker and repeat the whole process.

It may take ten or fifteen minutes to make the first round-trip, but with each new breaker you have fewer things to test. You really only need to test outlets or switches that have not been identified yet.

When you are done, scan in everything and give the file a nice long descriptive name. Throw in some keywords if you are indexing your files in some application.

Using the Circuit Map

If you are concerned about the load on a given circuit, you can go through the whole document and look for every matching number (such as the “19a” from my living room) to see how many devices are on that circuit.

If you need to shut down power to a switch or outlet for any reason, find its breaker on your map, shut off the breaker, and then test the outlet with your line voltage tester before you do anything else. Even though you know the right breaker, you must always double-check that the circuit is dead before performing work.

By the way, my wife has had that Jiffy Steamer for years, and she absolutely loves it—it probably ranks right next to her iPad as all-time coolest and most useful products.

There are plenty of different ways to catalog loosely associated knowledge of varying complexity—a few months back I discussed using a wiki for this—but some problems just don’t need that level of complexity and depth.

Some problems are more suited to random scribblings on a whiteboard, and that is where mind mapping software comes in.

What’s a Mind Map?

Imagine you and your family are going to fly to Rio de Janeiro this summer to visit distant relatives and you realize that there are about a thousand things to do  in preparation but you just can’t sort it all out.

You know that you need passports and you need to verify that everyone’s visa is still valid. There is the monumental task of deciding what to pack. You might want to make a checklist of places you want to visit. And you want to go hang gliding down to the beach, but there’s something nagging at you about whether or not your health insurance would cover a broken leg in a foreign land.

The problem is that it is difficult to keep the whole thing in your mind—if you concentrate on the luggage, you forget about the international driver’s license.

Mind maps allow you to visualize the whole thing at once, and you can slide stuff around and get it looking nice and pretty.

This is a relatively simple start at a mind map that represents the vacation. These maps are typically read from the top right going clockwise, though many have no specific sequence. In fact, you can do pretty much what you like with a mind map as long as it works for you.

Just Another Outliner?

At first glance these tools look like glorified outlining applications such as OmniOutliner, and they do serve admirably in this respect, but they are so much more. An outline gives you a very easy way to organize topics and thoughts, adding annotations and such along the way, but it isn’t nearly as easy to visualize and nonlinear concepts do not map well to an outline.

Consider the Rio Trip example above—you could put all of that information into an outline, but it would not be nearly as easy to process mentally.

And these mind maps look especially cool in presentations.

Slick Document Generation

Some of the commercial mind mapping products provide pretty good integration with Microsoft Office products.

Some time back, I needed to write up a set of style standards for Oracle’s PL/SQL programming language for our offshore team. Rather than just dive into Word and hope for the best, I used Mind Manager Pro from Mindjet to make the following map:

This tool supported attaching rich text to nodes in the map, so I used these notes to handle the actual code examples.

I was then able to put together a nice Word template that matched our corporate documents and I clicked the Export to MS Word button and had an instant document:

I have also used mind maps to auto-generate PowerPoint slide decks as well. These days I use Mind Manager on a daily basis at the office; it makes a great difference when I am trying to grasp complex topics with lots of strange dangly bits hanging off of the edges.

Nothing New

Mind maps have been around for a long time. A quick search of the ‘Net will show you that mind mapping software is quite plentiful and mature. There are good free products for PC and Mac available and there are many commercial products that take mind mapping a step further, often integrating with Microsoft Office.

Take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about mind mapping. Here’s a post from 43 Folders on the same topic. Peter Russell has useful information as well about them.

I learned about mind mapping from a friend at work who had been using them for years. After seeing him make some quick notes during a meeting, I was sold.

Closing Thoughts

I made the Rio de Janeiro example using XMind, the free “lite” version of XMindPro. This application is pretty full featured for a free basic version—the Pro version adds enterprise features such as import/export and collaboration.

There are XMind versions for Mac, PC, and Linux.

If you are looking for more, all of the commercial products offer a trial period. I use MindJet’s Mind Manager. Be warned, these tools are expensive, just like buying MS Office, but you might just find that they more than make up for their cost with your newly found productivity.

I’m serious. You don’t need to know anything at all about Linux to use one of these. Just download the image, install, and you suddenly have a full featured NAS file server, or you might have a database or a source code repository.

Last year I wrote an article on how to set up a NAS device using Ubuntu Linux. I have been a fan of Ubuntu since the start because it is a very easy distribution to install and configure. The down-side of using Linux has always been the fairly steep learning curve. Before you can get around to using the server, you need to get down in the weeds with configuration files and other stuff.

TurnKey Linux changes all of that.

Painless Installation

A few weeks back, I was setting up an aging PC as a standalone wiki server for a small office—this machine was going to provide a place for the office staff to document their procedures, how-tos, and other things.

I was about to set up an Ubuntu server, as I have done before many times, and install MoinMoin, like I did some months back. I remembered that it was a bit of a pain to get everything tweaked just right, so I did a quick check to see what kind of standalone wiki options were available online.

This is how I found TurnKey Linux. This project is all about single-purpose preconfigured Ubuntu server images.

One of those preconfigured images happens to be a MediaWiki appliance—the wiki engine behind Wikipedia—and I was in business.

The installation took about fifteen minutes, with very little user interaction. I answered a few basic questions and the installer took over from there. As soon as the install was done, the machine rebooted and displayed a message on the monitor with the IP addresses where you can browse to from any other machine.

Full Featured

The work that has gone in to these appliances is amazing. In fifteen minutes I had installed a complex configuration that has the Apache, PHP, MySQL, MediaWiki core, as well as maintenance utilities such as a neat tool that provides a Flash-based pure-AJAX-based SSH command line in a remote browser (i.e. your browser becomes a terminal). Even someone with Linux experience would have to spend quite a bit of time fiddling around with different packages and configuration options in other to provide the same functionality that TurnKey gives you out of the box.

As with most open source projects, the documentation is about 80% complete, with deep detail in some areas, but leaving others fairly sparsely documented. But don’t let this deter you: in most cases users know how to use the product they are installing (e.g. MediaWiki) but don’t want the hassle of configuring it on Linux. That’s where TurnKey shines.

Some Examples

In minutes, you can set up a NAS device. If you want to try advanced content management in your office, try Joomla or Drupal.

If you are working on a small project team and want to protect your source code, try Redmine or Trac and do your bug tracking using Bugzilla.

And while you are at it, you can document your organization’s working practices using a wiki such as MoinMoin or MediaWiki.

Don’t forget to back it up!

As with any computer, you should include your new TurnKey appliance in your backup strategy. The nice thing is that you don’t really need to care at all about backing up Linux or the other software; just back up the data. I don’t need to back up my entire MediaWiki machine; I just need to back up the database and image files. If anything goes wrong, you can rebuild the TurnKey appliance from scratch in minutes and then restore your data.

To save yourself some pain, keep notes on any small tweaks you made to the configuration.

One Machine, One Purpose

These disk images share common Ubuntu underpinnings, but they are referred to as Appliances because they turn your PC into a purpose-built appliance.

This means that if you want a content management system and you also want a ticket management system, you will need two old computers—not a rare commodity these days.

Take a look at what they have to offer and give TurnKey a shot—specialized software used in corporate environments is now within reach of small offices at the right price.

I have a nice iMac that I use daily; my wife has a MacBook Pro which she has taken quite a liking to. And I carry around my iPhone (she really couldn’t care less about smart phones). It looks like these devices all converge on and overlap the territory of the iPad. Again, what’s the point?

I walked into the Apple store last Monday expecting to enjoy a few minutes of playing around with an over-sized iPod Touch, and then walk out. Then it hit me: they did it again—they created a device, akin to the iPhone, that is so slick and easy to use that you must handle one and play with its features before you can truly understand.

Alex Payne put it quite nicely in his blog:

“Human-computer interaction has found a sweet spot on the iPad. It’s all the power of desktop computing, plus the valuable constraints of mobile devices, minus the limitations of both. It just makes sense. Use one for a couple hours and your desktop or laptop will seem clumsy, arbitrary, and bewildering. It is, simply, how (most) computing should be.

You can be as cooly aloof as you like about the device, but it won’t change the fact that it’s a fundamental step forward in computing. … [I]f you work in tech, you should spend some time with an iPad. If it doesn’t change the way you think about what you do, you’re either a genius or an idiot.”

— The Moderate’s Position on iPad Openness

He’s right, you know.

As soon as I held the device in my hands it was clear why this device has earned its own new niche that it was wedged into, between smart phones and laptops. The touch interaction that was so revolutionary with the iPhone has become more palpable, and more natural. I find myself gently sweeping my hand across the screen as I read the newspaper, watching the words gently glide by.

It really sank in when I looked at how my wife uses her MacBook Pro. She lays in bed with the machine in her lap, listening with headphones, as she goes through her email, listens to iTunes, searches out videos of old friends in Brazil posted on YouTube, and does some Google searches for whatever is on her mind. Meanwhile, the machine’s legendary thigh-roasting fans are running and she fidgets and fumbles with its bulk.

Everything she does with her MacBook is better with the iPad. It is more like a TV than a computer in the sense that you simply turn it on and choose what you want to do, with no knowledge of its internals. There are no fans blasting searing heat. The device is not cumbersome; she can curl up with it like a good book.

And it does Netflix.

What more could you want?

Well, there are few things I see right away that I would like, but for the most part I want more proper iPad apps. Old iPhone apps offer two equally unpleasant views: either you use the app in a horribly cropped iPhone-sized letterbox view, or the app is displayed in grotty pixelated full screen mode. Fortunately, folks are coming out with new iPad apps every day, some are even free upgrades if you own an app on the iPhone.

The first problem my wife will encounter (when I finally give her my iPad, as promised) is that she will want to print something from it. Printing doesn’t seem to be in the iPad’s repertoire. I have to admit that printing is a bit of a heavyweight for such a handy dandy device. She will still look at me and say “But it should be able to print.” And she’ll be right.

The second real issue I have with it is file management. There just is no simple way to move files onto an iPad: all file management is kludgy at best, usually involving iTunes. This was not so bad with the iPhone because our expectations are lower; after all, it is a cellphone first and foremost.

But the iPad is different. Its name screams “Documents” and begs us to flip pages with our bare hands. Why do all document transfers have to involve web browsers, email, and iTunes?

There are many different ways file management could be handled, but the way iPhones and iPads deal with documents and files is so un-Apple. This little bit of tarnish distracts from the beautiful polish of the device.

But I love it anyway

I can’t really criticize much more about my iPad. It does exactly what someone like my wife needs with little hassle, like a handheld flat-screen TV with cool features.

In other words, the iPad excels at being a computer for entertainment.

Check out some of the (currently) free newspaper apps. If you like Popular Science, drop a five-spot on their interactive magazine. You’ll like it.

And did I mention that it does Netflix?

My situation is worse—both my wife and I are musicians, to one degree or another. Throw in the fact that she is a music teacher and you can imagine just how many pages of sheet music there are filling bins and flexing cheap shelving in my house.

What do I have and Where is it?

The biggest problem we face is knowing what we have and where it is. I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of classical and jazz guitar sheet music, but if I need to find Villalobos’ Choros no. 1, where do I look?

Shortly after I bought my ScanSnap, I began scanning in all of my sheet music (I have left much of my wife’s collection untouched—I’m sure you’ll understand). In most cases, I simply hacked the spine off of the original book and fed the sheets through the scanner. Now, I have less paper in the house and my music is searchable.

In most cases I didn’t bother to run OCR on the documents since there is little in the way of printed words on most sheet music that is worth indexing. I did take care to name the files well.

If you ever hope to find your music on your computer, make sure you include at least the composer/artist and song title in the file name.

Is this really cutting down on paper?

Whenever I find what I’m looking for I might play it directly off of the computer screen, but it is more likely that I’ll print it out. Doesn’t this kind of negate the idea of removing paper from my home? Not really. Think about it—most sheet music is never played. We have books with hundreds of songs in them and we play only  a handful. That’s just the way it is.

The fact that I print out five or ten pages in a month does not negate the many hundreds of pages that were scanned and then recycled.

Great for Music Lessons

I started taking jazz lessons again a month or two back, and my teacher gave me some lead sheets, with all kinds of useful annotations on them. As soon as I was home, I scanned those babies in, so I would not risk losing the valuable information. I also went through all of my notes from prior lessons and scanned them in as well. These kinds of things are precisely the sorts of paper that tend to get lost in some mismash of unsorted music.

Now, I can type in “Four” in my favorite PDF library application and find the lead sheet for Miles Davis’ Four.

Maybe you don’t have that many notebooks full of music lesson notes, but when you have been trying (poorly) to learn for as many years as I have, those notebooks begin to proliferate. Just scan them all in, give them some good filenames, add some keywords to help, and you’re in business.

What about copyright?

It seems that the jury is still out on digitizing works you own. There’s one fellow who made a right awesome device for scanning in textbooks in minutes, by photographing the pages. That guy’s machine has spurred much debate about whether or not you have the right to digitize your own stuff.

On the one hand, you bought the book and paid for it, so it would seem that fair use covers this; on the other hand, publishers are eager to monetize digital media, reselling the same works to you if they can.

So, is Daniel Reetz’s butt-kickin’ book scanner legal?

That would depend on who you talk to, says Pamela Samuelson, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital-copyright law. Trade publishers are almost certain to cry copyright infringement, she says, though it may not necessarily be the case.

Google was recently forced to pay $125 million to settle with angry book publishers and authors who claimed copyright infringement as a result of the search giant’s book-scanning project.

But not so individual users who already own the book, says Samuelson. If you scan a book that you have already purchased, it is “fine, and fair use,” she says. “Personal-use copying should be deemed to be fair, unless there is a demonstrable showing of harm to the market for the copyright at work,” says Samuelson.

(Source: wired.com)

Here’s another take on this:

Question

I bought a book for school, can I make a copy of the book for my own use to write on so I don’t write in the book and can get my money back when I return the book to the campus store.

Accepted Answer

You have the right to make a copy of the book you purchased as long as you are using the copy for your personal use. The copyright laws merely prevent you from making copies to sell or distribute.

(Source: justanswer.com)

Of course, if you go passing your PDF documents around to all of your friends, all bets are off.

Final thoughts
Music is a hobby that seems to accumulate great stacks of paper, but these music sheets are peculiar in that you only need one or two out of every hundred. Why not digitize the whole lot and keep those book shelves from sagging?

The problem is this: with Outlook we will be limited to 1000 messages in our in-box; sadly, many of us have tens of thousands of emails in our old GroupWise mail. Even after a fairly rigorous slash and burn mission, hacking out all of the low hanging fruit, there will be many thousands remaining and I don’t want to lose that information. It might be useful to search and find how I set up a Zebra bar code printer in 2003, no?

A bundle of different freeware glue tools came to my rescue. Read on to hear about the toolset that has made it so I can keep those messages for years to come.

Possible Solutions

Right out of the gate, I began looking for ways to migrate messages from one mail client to the other. Some apps have this built right in, and if not, there are scripts and utilities out there to do this; but I was hampered by a few key facts:

• I have no control over the email clients and their configuration. Even if there is a menu option for exporting GroupWise messages from version 7.2, I’m stuck at 6.4 and cannot use that option.
• GroupWise is a minor player in the email world. I’m not sure if Outlook would import from GroupWise, but I doubt it.
• They are replacing the client in one shot. There will be no interim period where both GroupWise and Outlook will be available.
• There is no getting around the hard limit of 1000 messages.
• I don’t want to spend money on this.

With these constraints in mind, I immediately thought about PDF documents. I then considered the following questions:

• How do I convert my email to PDF?
• How can I do this automatically with thousands of emails?
• Once I’m done, how do I search these documents?

Here’s what I did:

Conversion to PDF

The first part was easy. I downloaded one of the many free print-to-PDF products available.

I chose PDFCreator, because I am familiar with its use and I know that it does not munge the fonts.

Like many other PDF generation utilities, PDFCreator functions by providing a virtual printer to which any application can print. For example, to make a PDF of a web page, you use the Firefox Print menu and select PDFCreator from the drop-down list of available printers.

You are provided with a list of metadata fields that you can fill in, and these fields are used in the PDF generation.

Here’s what the PDFCreator screen looks like:

A word of caution: PDF Creator is free, but you must be careful to deselect their spammy toolbar options in two different places during the installation process. I don’t like software that comes with preselected toolbars to install (even nice ones like Google’s) because I’m certain that 95% of the folks who actually install the toolbar would never have chosen to do so if it were unchecked by default.

Running Everything Automatically

This was the interesting bit. I work with Windows machines at work, so there was no AppleScript option available. So I did the next best thing: I used AutoIT.

I will warn you that AutoIT is pretty much the Windows analog of AppleScript, without the cutesy pseudo English syntax. In other words, you will need to roll up your sleeves and get your hands a little dirty in order to put together a decent AutoIT script.

The payoff comes when you finish your work and compile it into a tight executable that you can share with your friends, allowing them to automate some complex series of button clicks and copy/paste operations.

I walked through the manual process of exporting an email to PDF and listed each action:

• Get the date, sender, and subject
• Create a filename based on date + sender + subject
• Launch the Print dialog
• Select PDFCreator
• Fill in the Document Title, Creation Date, and Subject in the PDFCreator dialog
• Fill in the full file path in the Save dialog

In addition, I wanted to make the script a little better by adding the following:

• Check that user has PDFCreator installed
• Verify that GroupWise is running and that the user has selected one or more messages
• Prompt the user for a target directory before processing the messages
• Sanitize the filenames by replacing illegal characters with underscores and truncating to meet maximum filename and path length in Windows
• Skip over files that have already been generated, quickly, so that one doesn’t need to worry about accidentally selecting messages that were already printed

There were other adjustments needed, but the process was the same: run the script, hit a problem, tweak the script a little to address the problem, and repeat.

Here’s a little bit of the AutoIT script:

You can see that it is a bit more intense than AppleScript, but remember that the full script wasn’t written in one go. I had a little short ten-line script that I kept tweaking as small problems cropped up until I had adjusted things to my liking.

Note that this is a GUI macro language. The machine starts clicking and typing away right in front of you and you probably shouldn’t interfere until your script finishes.

As of this afternoon, I have generated around 4,000 PDF documents for my email messages.

Searching All of Those Documents

This was the easiest part. These days there is an excellent tool available for searching documents on your desktop: Google Desktop. This product indexes every useful file on your desktop and provides a full Google search with a quick double-tap of the <control> key.

So you can enter a search like “Zebra bar code”

And the results look exactly like a Google web search, but it’s showing your desktop files. And you can see inline previews too.

Macintosh users can install Google Desktop as well, but all of these files should already be indexed and searchable by Spotlight.

Closing Thoughts

Whenever I reach for tools like this I feel a twinge of guilt—it’s outright hackery, isn’t it?

But there is a place for quick and dirty jobs in every workplace. I needed to get my files from one place to another, one time only. It just didn’t make sense to spend money or time on a more elegant solution.

Play around with each of these tools a little. Especially AutoIT—it’s a handy Swiss Army Knife to have at your disposal.

Among other things he discusses options for prioritizing and cutting down on the total volume of stuff you plan on keeping, digital or otherwise.

“Backup, backup, backup” made number four on his list.

And finally, he provides a few notes on some helpful free organizing software. I think I’m going to check out that Know Your Stuff application he mentioned.

Five Tips to Paperless Finances (moneytalksnews.com)

What do you do with 1,500 photographs?

In hope of sparing some folks hours of boredom I’d like to share my ideas on this topic here.

The Endless Stack of Photos

We have all been there. A friend or family member brandishes a stack of photos, saying “Let me show you photos of our trip to Ecuador…” (oh no… here it comes…). At this point, you reach for the photographs, but they hold the stack out of reach. They then turn each one over slowly, telling a long tale about every single image. “Oh, look at this monkey, it was so cute when he stole the candy out of little Billy’s hand and spit it into Aunt Sally’s hair.” and so on and so on.

You begin to look at the size of the stack and estimate how long this process will take.

Everyone has been on the receiving end of this treatment, but have you ever been the perpetrator?

It’s an easy trap to fall in to. To be honest, when you are showing photos to a friend, each image brings back a wave of pleasant memories and it is tempting to bask in the enjoyment of the memory, talking about how you felt at the time, as your friend’s eyes begin to aquire a glossy sheen.

Don’t Be That Person

Remember how it felt the last time you endured a four hour photo flipping marathon and have pity on those around you.

Here’s my strategy for pleasant photo sharing:

• Pare down the photo collection. Substantially.
• Create an attractive photo album with the finest photos of the lot.
• Hand the album to your friend and let them turn the pages.

Back to those 1,500 photos from India…

Here is one of the pages from the album I made from that trip.

As you can see, the end result is fairly simplistic, with a few very nice photos.

Paring Down the Stack

Even the most avid photographer understands that nobody wants to see a thousand photos. And don’t think that just because you made a slideshow with music instead of printing the photos that you are exempt. You can afford to cut the number down quite a bit.

Consider that a typical Hollywood motion picture contains less than 10 percent of the total footage filmed. Stanley Kubrick, ever the perfectionist, took this to the extreme with shooting ratios around 100 to 1. Following the analogy, in photography, it is quite reasonable to take dozens of photos for every single picture that you might share to others.

The real trick is deciding exactly how far to go with the selection process.

In my experience, you can weed out the bad photos for hours, and when you think the job is done, you can still go back and toss out a few dozen more.

I filter my photos in three major phases, using the five-star rating tool of my photo library software to help keep things in order. I personally use iPhoto, but any other good photo library suite should offer ratings and smart folders.

Phase 1: Removing obviously bad photos

This is a very quick pass through the whole collection. I start by selecting everything and marking all photos with a neutral rating of three stars.

I then find any photos that are underexposed or are blurry and give them one single star. Along the way, any photos that obviously have no useful content get the same treatment.

Phase 2: Identifying decent photos

I use a smart folder to show all photos with three stars or greater. This hides all of the junk from the first pass.

Now, I go through each photo and give it a deeper look. I sort them into three different stacks, giving two stars to anything that has useless or boring content and giving four stars to photos that I think are worth showing to people. Photos that don’t fit either description retain the neutral three-star rating. These are often repeats of the one good photo I tossed in the four-star stack.

Phase 3: Identifying the best of the best

I use a new smart folder to show only photos with four stars or better.

This is the hardest part. I go through the photos and try to find the absolutely best photo that expresses each experience or thought.

• If the photos are of places, then it makes sense to check that you have at least one photo of each important place you visited.
• If these are shapshots of friends and family, then you probably should verify that each person shows up in at least one of the pictures.

I often have a difficult time working through photo collections from visits to my wife’s family in Brazil: there are hundreds of people in the pictures and I often have doubts over who is family and who isn’t. Fortunately, my wife sits patiently with me and helps at this stage.

Look again at the photos of the elephant ride and the snake charmer. I probably have two dozen different shots of the snake charmers, while the elephant shot was a single dodgy photo taken by the tour guide. I was able to pick the very best snake charmer photo, but I had little choice with the other—there was no way I was going to omit a picture of me on an elephant so I used it. These are the kinds of tradeoffs we are dealing with.

You can see in this screenshot how I flagged most of the photos as three stars (I have already hidden all of the one-star dreck). There is one photo that has four stars, while the one next to it had an unappealing composition in my opinion, so it got two.

How far should you go?

I suppose this comes down to personal preference, but I like to keep things down to thirty or forty photos—from a starting point in the thousands. In a photo album, you can represent your whole trip in fifteen or twenty pages. This is far less intimidating than a big thick stack of photographs.

Of course, context is important. I will go out on a limb here and say that a new baby can be shown to co-workers in five photos.

In the end, I create a smart folder that shows only photos with five stars. And boy do they look good!

Tweak the best photos

My favorite tool of all for tweaking photos is the crop tool. A good crop can dramatically change the composition of a shot while still retaining the purity of the photo.

I will also straighten any slanting horizons and possibly fix funky light balance at this point. The tool set provided in iPhoto is quite adequate for these simple tasks.

Now create a slick photo album using any of the great tools available online.

Make the Photo Album

Again, I like using iPhoto. It allows you to easily create fancy albums using templates and so forth. Once you are done, you can buy a finished album with a few clicks.

Once you have your short list of photos, use a five-star smart folder as the source for the photo album. You can then spend a pleasant evening or two playing around with the layouts and composition and adding captions to your photos.

• Create a smart folder that shows only five-star photos
• Create a new photo album based on that smart folder
• Choose a pleasing layout
• Add your photos in varying page styles to the book
• Write some informative and/or witty captions for the photos

This is a screenshot of the iPhoto application, with the A-list photos along the top and the snake charmer page in the editing window.

You can even make albums like this online, without any editing software whatsoever…

This is a similar photo album creation tool that is run completely from the Winkflash website.

Now, finish picking out the features you want on your album (e.g. cover style) and place your order.
In my opinion, these albums come with the optimal number of pages (usually 20). Any more pages could make it tedious and boring. Fit your vacation into those 20 pages.

These books usually cost around forty bucks, but they are worth every penny.

The Finished Product

When everything is done, you will have a beautiful printed photo album that looks like you bought it at a book store.

I have seen photo albums from three different outfits up close.

MyPublisher

I have a couple of albums from these guys and they are near perfect. The pages look like thick magazine pages, with magazine-quality photos. I found that my white-on-black text bled a little.
Note that the leather used on the leather-bound books is paper thin.

These folks are always sending me coupons for 40% off, so it seems that you really don’t ever have to pay full price for their wares.

Apple iPhoto

These are identical to the MyPublisher books. Indeed, at one time iPhoto could send its output to either MyPublisher or Apple. I heard a rumor that MyPublisher did the books for Apple at one point.

The only down side to the Apple books is that you pay high shipping costs. Otherwise, the books are perfect.

Winkflash

A friend shared one of these with me. I happened to have my India album nearby, so we compared them. On the one hand, Winkflash is much cheaper; however, the image quality is not nearly as nice as the other books. Perhaps I was looking at a lower-end book from them, but the ink dots were a little coarse for my taste.

Summary

By putting a little effort in aggressive photo selection, basic image tweaks, and then taking advantage of the many photo book tools out there you can create a beautiful album that is a pleasure to leaf through.

These books have been available for several years; even so, whenever I hand one to a friend, they page through it, transfixed. People really love these albums and they actually enjoy looking through them.

Oh, and they make great gift ideas too!

What does this topic have to do with reducing paper in our lives? Believe me, printing one of these books is so much neater and cleaner than printing hundreds of loose photos. And you will enjoy them more.

Recently I have been mulling over the possibility of commuting to New York—owing to a hazy future at my current employer. Whether or not I am ready to trudge there and back every day of the week is still an open question, but the siren song of the city has its draw.

With such a fine commute comes an interesting problem: one needs to cart lots of stuff to and from, especially a laptop and possibly a Kindle for the train ride, but no one wants to lug huge bags throughout the subways of Manhattan.

Anyway, here’s the article from Wired Magazine’s How-To Wiki on how to Travel Light Without Leaving Your Laptop Behind.

Got any ideas? It’s a Wiki, so go ahead and contribute yours.

One point that I don’t think they mention: I want a bag or backpack that looks nothing like a laptop bag. I really don’t care to walk around with a neon sign on my back saying “I’m carrying $3000 in electronics!”

I’m still looking for that perfect gruffy looking bag.