Good day on balance: sunny all day, surprisingly cool when I went for a run in the morning, but very pleasant by five when I went back out for a stroll. No photos to speak of on said stroll.
I instead continued my restoration project on 2018 winter-away photos. I took a whole bunch of the parakeets at a little museum in Las Palmas. These two were not quite good enough technically to make the cut the first time through, but they're kind of interesting. Makes me think, isn't nature bloody wonderful. Look at the colour!
This one was, again, one of many I took of essentially the same subject: wall murals on hoardings along the beachside promenade in Las Palmas. There are better ones than this, but I kind of like it too.
And then we moved on to Madrid. The first was taken in Malasaña, a neighbourhood in the centre that is pretty much an open air street art gallery. The other is a shot of an iconic building and intersection in the beating heart of the city.
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For something in excess of ten years, I've been using a password vault - an online service that stores all my website passwords and other security information and makes it easily available when I need it. The one I used is called LastPass, but there are several out there. LastPass was free for the basic functions, which was all I needed. Until recently.
I understand it must be difficult for online service providers to see hundreds of thousands or millions of users benefiting from their services but generating no revenue or only a trickle from online advertising. But, hey, we didn't invent the business model so many of these companies use. They give away a basic service in hopes that enough users will see the value of their more fully-featured "premium" service and be willing to pay a monthly or yearly subscription for it.
When that doesn't work, when they're not generating enough revenue, what do they do? Well, apparently it wasn't working so well anymore for LastPass, so they simply changed the rules. Previously, even free users could use a LastPass account on all their devices. I had it on my computer, iPhone and Android tablet. Under the new rules that took effect this week, you could only use a free account on one device.
You could always set up multiple accounts, using different email addresses, one for each device, and copy all your passwords over to each of the new accounts. But then the accounts wouldn't be synchronized going forward. If you set up a new website login with userid and password while using your phone and stored it in LastPass, it wouldn't be available when you moved over to your computer. If you use your devices as interchangeably (and intensively) as I do, that would be...an irritation.
So I went looking for an alternative, and found it pretty quickly. PC Mag, always a gold-standard in tech product evaluations, recommended one called MYKI (my key). It does pretty much everything LastPass does, but does it a little differently. For one thing, it doesn't send your data to the cloud - your passwords are stored on your devices. That sounds like an improvement in the security department to me. But you can use a free account on multiple devices and the passwords will be automatically synchronized to all.
It took an hour and a half or so to set it all up and copy the data over from LastPass, but now I'm good to go. Next, I'll have to do the same for Karen, although that is less urgent because she really only uses LastPass on her computer.
I don't know why more people don't use password vaults. If you can remember all the passwords you use, then you either a) have a phenomenal memory, b) use the same few passwords for everything (very risky) or c) don't use the Internet much. If it's b), as I suspect it is for most non-users, you should give MYKI or one of the other free password vaults a try.
Most provide "extensions" - little chunks of programming code - that you install in your browser. When you're browsing and come to a page where you already have an account and need to log in, the extension will pop up your userid and password, or can be set up to automatically populate the fields on the page.
Or you can go to the MYKI drop-down menu in the browser, search on the name of the website you want to log into and click 'Launch.' The browser will go to that site and automatically log you in.
I don't think MYKI is quite as slick as LastPass, which was one of the first, and once one of the most highly recommended of password vaults. But it's good enough for my purposes. And it's free.
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