Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Apple Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, August 22, 2021, and this is show number 850.
CCATP #696 – Bart Busschots on PBS 123 of X — Backing up and Syncing Dot Files with Chezmoi
SVMUG Meeting August 16, 2021 – Allison Sheridan discusses passwords and the xkpasswd tool
This week I was asked to present at the Silicon Valley Mac Users Group about Bart’s awesome tool for creating long, strong, memorable passwords, xkpasswd.net. They invite anyone to come who wants to, and they record the remote presentation to Youtube. That means you too can watch my presentation. After I posted the video to our Slack (at podfeet.com/slack) Ian Lessing wrote, “This is like a free ScreenCastsOnline! I took a look at Bart’s password generator before and the UI was too complex so I gave up. But this video will really help demystify it.”
The quality and crispness of my explanations is definitely not up to my ScreenCastsOnline standards which take a week to record, but I think you’ll be able to follow along and hopefully understand why you might want to use xkpasswd.net to create at least some of your passwords, and how to use Bart’s tool.
Blog Posts
The Day the Internet Lost Its Mind about 1Password Becoming an Electron App
After I posted my perspective online, I expected to get a lot of blowback, but I was surprised at how many said they felt the same way. I’m not saying whether I’m right or wrong, but the lesson learned is that the loud people are not necessarily the majority opinion.
Remember I mentioned Folge is one of the Electron apps I use? That’s the one for documentation with screenshotting, annotations and instructional steps. I said that really like the developer. Here’s another reason why I like him so much.
After I posted my article, Oleksii Sribnyi from Folge wrote me a note that included some new information I found helpful in thinking about the future of Electron. He wrote:
The main takeaway for me personally is that with 1password stepping into electron world, this would boost electron development and bring even more improvements and features. From my perspective, electron got a second life after Slack became popular and its developers had to contribute a lot into electron development to keep Slack app running smoothly. They have dedicated half-people-half-programming-gods like Samuel who goes by MarshallOfSound on GitHub who are working on electron literally day and night.
Second factor is more popular electron apps are there, Apple and MS have to accept the fact that electron exists and has rights to be distributed. At some point Apple was very much against electron and even marked electron apps as untrusted, but they had to cope with this and allow electron apps to be notarized and distributed through the app store.
I thought that was a really interesting perspective. It’s entirely possible that we’re watching the evolution of computing unfolding and maybe it will be even better than what we have now.
I do want to mention one more thing. As I said I got a lot of positive feedback on the blog post, but the comments took a surprisingly ugly turn and it was interesting because it was off topic. Way back with 1Password 6 and older, you created local vaults with the standalone app, and then if you chose, you could sync those vaults through Dropbox to your other devices.
In 2015, the 1Password developers created the 1Password.com service that allowed for two-factor authentication, teams and families, a way to securely share items and a more secure encryption format. On top of all that, it was way more stable than syncing through Dropbox.
Three years ago when they released 1Password 7 as a subscription version they eliminated local vauts, but they also allowed you to buy a standalone version that continued to support local vaults. 97% of their users chose the subscription service.
With 1Password 8, there will no longer be an option for local vaults, but 1Password 7 standalone will continue to work. (Link to Dave Teare’s description of the history and future of local vaults: 1password.community/…)
Standalone local vaults was not the subject of my article, it was entirely on the subject of 1Password becoming an Electron app. In spite of this, a few people became rabid that I didn’t talk about the move away from local vaults. One of them actually accused me of being an “outsider, rather than someone within the community of 1Password users.”
People are funny, aren’t they?
TikTok is My Happy Place
Support the Show
Do you wish I interrupted the show by telling you about a new mattress, or an app to help you meditate, or men’s underwear you should buy? No? It takes a fair bit of money to produce the content at the Podfeet Podcasts, and it takes even more effort, but I don’t want to do advertising. Instead, I rely on people like you who find value in the show making financial donations either through a pledge at podfeet.com/patreon or by one-time donations through podfeet.com/paypal. It sure would be swell if you could stop by one of those two links and show the value you get out of the content we create.
Security Bits by Bart Busschots — 22 August 2021
That’s going to wind this up for this week. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, Everything is Fiddly recordings, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter @podfeet. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com/. podfeet.com/patreon, podfeet.com/paypal, podfeet.com/facebook, podfeet.com/slack! And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.