But have you ever really thought about what makes a password strong? well this article is a great explanation of how hackers can attack a website and looks into great detail on what makes for the most secure passwords.

It’s changed how I think about password security and has made my passwords easier for me to remember while still being secure… Well, all the ones I’ve updated so far anyways

If, like me, you purchased your Microsoft MCE Remote System as an OEM, it’s likely that you didn’t receive the instruction leaflet with it or you have lost it in the meantime.

So for those who want to program it (very limited functionality but useful) – I tracked down a guide that I used some time ago – hope it helps

Windows XP Media Centre Edition remote

The TV, Vol+ and Vol- buttons on the remote control can “learn” IR commands from other remote controls. This feature lets you use the TV button to turn on your TV and the Vol+ and Vol- buttons to adjust the volume on your TV or another device such as an audio receiver.

By default the Vol+ and Vol- buttons on the remote your pc system volume and the TV button has no command assigned until it “learns” one.

For best results don’t attempt this in bright or natural light.

1. Place the remote head-to-head (2-3″ apart) with the remote control from which it is learning

2. On the MCE remote press and hold the DVD MENU and OK buttons at the same time until the LED turns off. (~2 sec)

The remote is now in learning mode.

3. On the MCE remote, press and release the TV, Vol+ and Vol-, depending on which command you want it to learn.

The MCE remote blinks once to confirm the choice.

4. On the remote control that is teaching the command, press and hold the button that you want the corresponding button on the MCE remote to learn.

The MCE remote LED flashes twice to confirm the selection

If the remote did not learn the command, the LED blinks quickly four times.

To try again, repeat steps 1 through 4.

To restore the default remote control settings

1. Press and hold the DVD MENU button and the LEFT navigation button at the same time until the MCE remote LED turns off.

2. Press the OK button.

The MCE remote LED blinks twice to confirm that the buttons have been reset.

The TV button will have no command assigned to it and the Vol+ and Vol- will adjust the MCE system volume.

If the default settings were not restored, the LED will blink quickly four times. To try again, repeat steps 1 and 2.

Of course our mobile phones would be required so chargers and socket adapters would be required as well, Elly’s Kindle cause it’s so much easier than carrying the amount of books she will read in a week and of course my netbook so we can connect to the free wi-fi in our hotels and not have to pay for an internet café, plus it would mean we can watch some of our TV shows while relaxing before or after a hard days touristing.

This of course lead to the usual discussion over how pathetic the speakers are on the netbook. It’s not so much that their bad speakers, more that they are pathetically quiet. So, I said I’d have a look for some sort of portable speakers to help.

Oh look it's only a bit bigger than a hen egg!

Included with the speaker is the USB charging cable and a small pouch to carry both the speaker and cable in, which is a nice touch. The speaker itself has a short cable, about 3 inches, attached which plugs into any headphone socket and wraps away into the bottom of the speaker for storage.

The next thing that I noticed is that the unit shipped fully charged, another nice touch. Immediately it was connected to my mobile phone and tested, the sound was pretty good and the volume level was more than respectable if a little tinny sounding.

Just as I was starting to feel a teeny bit disappointed with it I remembered that the speaker had a neat trick, a quick twist of the base and the bellows style middle of the speaker was expanded. this really surprised me with how much it improved both the over all sound quality and increased the volume.

Expanded Mini Speaker

The battery life is surprisingly good, I get about 2 days out of it between charges. I used it constantly while studying for my recent exams just to give it a decent test you understand And charging couldn’t be easier, just connect it to a USB port and it will charge in about 3-4 hours, I’ve even charged it from the USB ports on my X-Box 360 while it was off.

There’s also a neat little trick it can do, if you have more than one you can daisy chain them together to give more volume although if volume is what you are after this is not the best solution.

Now think about the cost, we paid £20.00 sterling for ours. Since then Amazon have reduced the price again, it is superb value. My biggest concern about it is that those annoying teenagers that play music from their phones on the bus will get hold of these and become even more annoying. As a small device to make using your laptop in a hotel or even a small presentation a little less painful I couldn’t recommend this mini speaker more.

I was young, and with all the things that come from being a teenager who has just finished school and having a dream in my mind that I just knew was mine for the taking I set about a career as a musician, composer, arranger, songwriter and really just all round rock god The next few years were to hold stories of success and failure, of immense joy and deep heartfelt anguish. All the usual stuff a teenager goes through and genuinely believes is unique to them.

My Tenor Sax and EWI

I loved to play, write and arrange music, I enjoyed it immensely and I believed I was really great at it, just the world hadn’t coped on to my genius, eventually I would cop on.

When I did, I ended up in a job I didn’t really want for a while and slowly I drifted away from all my music interests. First I stopped writing and arranging and eventually I stopped playing. I’m really not sure why, I guess I just got caught up in life and decided I had less and less time for it which I’m now discovering was really stupid.

I’m saying this now as I’ve recently started playing again, bizarrely as a result of studying for exams. At some point about two weeks before my exams were due to start, when I was studying, I started to get distracted by thoughts of playing as I got tired from studying. After a day or two of this I gave in dug out my horn and had a blow for about half an hour and then returned to study refreshed like I’d just started.

Even after that first day I suspected that there was something more up with my playing than just a lack of practice and I’ve discovered that my beautiful twenty year old horn is in need of a major overhaul. In the mean time It’s still playable, just not with any other instruments as the tuning is a little wild in places.

It still allows me to practice my scales, arpeggios, long tones and all the other boring stuff that all instrumentalist must practice to play the tunes that everyone loves. Unfortunately this is only a small part of playing and the most fun part, playing tunes as part of an ensemble, be it a real or virtual, is not possible with my baby, until I can afford the overhaul.

My EWI

Hopefully it won’t take too long for me to save the funds to get the work done. Thankfully, I have a solution that will keep the itch scratched in the meantime. A few years back, while considerably flusher than I am now, I invested in an EWI, that’s an Electronic Wind Instrument.

At the time I bought it I practised and played it a fair amount but thanks to a less than simple manual and some difficulty setting it up and familiarising myself with it that didn’t really last long. However in the meantime a number of people have come along and published a number of simple how-to’s on you tube, so I now have it set up to my liking and am getting my playing back in shape reasonably rapidly. Who knows what may come of this.

In the meantime, if you’re an EWI player why not leave a comment below about what style and music you like to play and if you are struggling with an EWI take a look at Saxman999′s channel over on youtube or leave a comment below and maybe I’ll be able to help.

Fast forward twenty years and I now live in a home where I’m connected to the ‘information super-highway‘ in every room, my home entertainment system allows me to watch the TV I want to watch, whenever I want to watch it and even allows me to pause it (when the doorbell/phone ring) or rewind when I miss a bit and we have our own house-bot.

All these thing’s were simply thoughts and idea’s to that 80′s kid (vinyl and cassette were the norm) but now they’re a reality and nowhere near as expensive or difficult to put together as you might think. You may even be surprised to find that a lot of this technology is already in your home and just needs to be enabled.

I’m going to put together a few posts about the technology that Elly and myself use on a daily basis and how it impacts our lives, both the positive and negative aspects, as well as some futurism of my own.

So stay tuned for updates and in the meantime why not leave a comment letting me know what crazy idea’s from your own childhood/teenage years have made it (or not) into mainstream technology and the kind of things that you would like to see make it in the next few years.

Hindsight

If you are a fan of the loudness that is “System of a Down” you should be familiar with this song, but possibly not the musicians, a fantastic cover version and a lot *ahem* easier on the eye

Hands up if your surprised by how much Violins can rock, I was.

Getting married? Looking for idea’s for a wedding cake? take a look at this…

I’ve been getting myself back up to speed with wordpress a lot in the last few month’s and while I’m not using all these plugins, I’m definitely going to be testing them, thanks for the post Conor

And finally as the F1 testing season kicked off last week and the anticipation is building for the new season, I stumbled across this video of Bruno Senna training and being the king of all multi-taskers

Aerobic training, Core muscle & balance training, concentration, Focus, as as well as eye hand coordination training, inspired!

Wise words

Work continues apace behind the scenes here getting the house in order. It’s slower progress than I expected though.

I’ve now spent 2 days sorting and tidying up the ‘Categories’ for my posts. I’m down from almost 400 to exactly 200 as I type and I’d like to get that number a lot lower, as I still have more categories than posts on here.

Why? I hear you ask, well it goes back to when I first started blogging and my lack of understanding of categories and tags, I thought they were the same thing and as I wanted to make sure that my ramblings could be found on search engines I was very liberal with the application of categories and as tags were less accessible to me, in wordpress at that time, I ignored them.

This was a monumental mistake of epic proportions. Essentially, categories help organise the posts on your blog where as tags are what search engines look for to help them organise the massive amount of data that they contain.

So once, I have sorted out the categories to my satisfaction, I have to apply tags to all my old posts. Thankfully, one of the many new features that WordPress now includes is a “category to tag converter” so once all the categories are sorted out, I’ll be looking into that a bit further to see if it will help me out in my quest to sort this mess out.

There are a number of reasons/excuses for this

Not enough time
Nothing that I wanted to write about
General disillusionment with the world
Tired of all the work required to keep WordPress up-to date
Tired of dealing with the random curve-balls that WordPress used to throw my way

I could go on. Long story, short I now have more time on my hands, there are thing’s I want to write about, the world ain’t so bad and WordPress has moved on so it’s now a lot easier to update.

I know this because I’ve spent the last while building a new site around WordPress which launched recently and now that I’ve smacked all the curve-balls out of the park why don’t you pop over to Not Junk Food and see what it’s all about. I’ll be keeping that site focused on my favourite topic, food and the rest of my posting will happen here.

So will I get back to regular posting here, who knows, but I’m going to give this place a bit of a makeover and a tidy up, so expect to see changes shortly.

Also, it came to my attention a while back that Paris Hilton has borrowed my blog title for a perfume so I’ll be changing that as part of the makeover.

Now I’m off to look at new theme’s and plugins.

There are a lot of plus sides to it, not least of which is a 32″ widescreen monitor to surf the web with. But that’s only a small plus, first off what does a HTPC do for you?

Well a home theatre personal computer is exactly that it’s a computer for your home theatre, or in my case, living room. How does this add to your home theatre? for a start it’s 1 box for your DVD player, all your music, digital photo’s, TV recording’s and Home Movies. That’s what Windows Media Centre 2005 will do out of the box. Is it difficult to setup? not really, you can do it all from the remote once the operating system is installed.

For me there are 3 killer features…

1. My Photos – allows basic photo editing and slideshowing your photo albums
2. My Music – The Music collection
3. My TV – schedule and watch TV recording’s

The last of these gets the most use in our house, although having a photo slide show as wallpaper means both myself and Elly get to see those precious moments plenty.

I love the Music portion of Media centre, it was a bit time consuming to get all the info and album art sorted out but once thats done, it makes it so easy to find your favourite artists’ or albums. I’ll post another time about my personal experiences tagging over 20 Gb or about 10,000 individual audio files, it’s actually not as time consuming as you might think.

Where Media centre comes into it’s own is working hand in hand with our set top box for TV. it means outside of Grand Prix, neither myself or Ellybabes watch TV “live” anymore. Instead we record all our favourite TV shows and we can watch whatever takes our fancy at that particular time. So much better than spending 20 minutes flicking through channels till you find something worth watching.

This is really easy to do, just search by keyword till you find the program you like and select “record series” you can even tell it to record all showings on all channels or just new episodes, but once you take those 2 minutes to decide that, media centre just does it. The NTL set top box is far less reliable, needing to be rebooted at least once a week.

What if 2 shows are on at the same time? first media centre tries to find an alternative showing of either show, if it can’t then, it decides what to record based on the recording priorities the user sets. So for instance, we’re huge “Bones” and “Boston legal” fans, to make sure we don’t miss an episode these are top of our priority list.

Whereas “The Simpsons” which is on so many channels and almost daily, it’s near the bottom of the priority list as there always being re-shown.

What all this means is that when we sit down to relax and watch some telly what we want to watch is always on.

So is that it? well not entirely, there is a lot more to it than that and in a future post, I’ll touch on the why I chose Microsoft Media Centre and the benefits that it will bring when we move into our new home.

So, I’ve upgraded WordPress and some of the plugins, I’ve even installed Donncha‘s Wp Super Cache Plugin. but there’s more to come. so long as what I’ve done doesn’t explode first, Fingers crossed then.