A few things that make my life easier.
A fantastic open source program with a single purpose: to keep track of all of your passwords. I started using KeePass when I kept having to reset passwords on my various domain accounts or write them down so I wouldn’t forget them. Obviously, writing down a password reduces any amount of security a password provides, so KeePass allows me to store them without having to make a physical copy of them in an insecure format. KeePass also allows you to synchronize your password database with another file (it’s important to have a backup since all of your passwords are stored in it), which I use in conjunction with a copy of KeePass I run off of my USB drive when at work. So now, when my bank informs me that I can use a password of up to 32 alphanumeric characters, I go for it.
Fingerprint Readers
Everyone knows these things aren’t all that secure, especially the non-swipe variety, but it’s so nice not having to type my password in when I turn on my laptop in the morning. The software I use with mine, DigitalPersona, lets me use the fingerprint scanner built into my laptop to log in to sites I use often, such as the administration panel for this blog.
If you’re like me, you have accounts on Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! and AIM. Rather than having to install the clients for each, I use Pidgin and use a single client for all of my accounts. Best of all, it’s available for Windows and Linux/UNIX as well as Mac OS X via Fink.
I currently operate five internet domains, and I manage the email accounts for all of them through Google Apps. Which means that I can use multiple addresses rather than having a single inbox bombarded by emails from my financial accounts, school, spam, etc.
This one is kind nerdy, but regular expressions have saved me so much time while I’m doing web development. Just the ability to replace trailing whitespace followed by a line break in a plaintext document with “<br />” or converting a numbered list to a set of “<ol><li>…</li></ol>” tags is worth learning the remarkably simple syntax behind them. I use Notepad++, which has built-in RegEx support. If you’re interested in learning how to use regular expressions, I highly recommend http://www.regular-expressions.info — not for it’s design, which is horrid, but its extremely comprehensive tutorial.
