Wow!

I don’t know why it took me so long, but I tried http://www.mint.com. I had been using http://www.pageonce.com, but not really actively using it anymore. However, thanks to Pageonce, I found out that Capital One has a credit card which does not charge transaction fees for overseas purchases… Could easily save me over $100 per year.

Anyway, with Mint.com, it allows you to organize all your transactions, whether by credit card or check. That’s the big difference with Pageonce. The UI for Mint.com is very smooth so that you can actually get a good overview of your transactions across many accounts, rather than just one account at a time. In addition, you can categorize your transactions.

Now I know how much how much I am spending eating out… or more importantly how much more I should be spending on my beloved tech gadgets…

From what I can tell so far, Mint.com is exactly what I’m looking for.

See more progress on: become more organized

Today is Change Your Password Day...

How are you celebrating?

I need to research some password manager tools to see if they are better than my current approach. My current approach allows a way to manage different passwords for different sites, but theoretically could be hacked. The password manager should work across the web (mainly using Chrome) and Android apps. Symantec has a password manager Norton Identity Safe which is in beta.

Some tips about keeping secure:

• Do not use the same password for same ID or associated e-mail address across multiple sites.
• Do not use obvious passwords. Adding numbers like the year to the end of password does not make it that much more complicated to crack.
• In theory, the longer the password, the more secure it is, regardless how obvious it is.
• Do not use real answers for the answer to your secret question. This was how Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account was hacked. There aren’t too many places for guessing where she met her husband.
• Do not click on links in e-mails which supposedly take you to one of your accounts. At a minimum, double check the address where the link is taking you. It’s much safer to simply open a new tab and manually type the address where you want to go.
• Be especially careful of public computers. At a minimum, remember to log off all the websites to which you connected during the session. Public computers could have key logging software which is keeping track of your keypresses.
• Google had introduced a way to log into your Google accounts by using your smart phone, so you don’t need to type in your password on public computers, by scanning a QR code. It seems like a good idea, but it is no longer supported. It did increase your exposure to risk though in case your smart phone is lost or stolen.

See more progress on: research