Work – Pleasure Mix – Tired Eyes, Head & Neck – working on your PC

Anyone today working in an office can spend the entire day on the computer working – Sitting and staring at your screen or screens.  Many in today’s world work through lunch, coming in earlier and working late.  All this time in front of your computer can be very bad for your health, your eyes and your body.

I am sure you have heard and most likely have tried the 20 or 30 minute break, look around, stand up and move around, but how many of us really do that – not many.

Well I came across a great little program that you can get from Portable APPs – these are those applications that you can launch from a USB key so you can run these programs on your work machine, home machine – set them up and have the program follow you.  I have gone one step further and have loaded up the loader and programs on my DROPBOX account so I can get to them anywhere, anytime.  I don’t have to worry about a USB key.

You set up the times for a quick break, a coffee break and it pops up with warnings and exercises to do when your taking your short break.  I think it is GREAT!  I loaded up today and have really tried hard to follow it, I have made a few changes to the timing to make it work with my work flow and I will continue to use it at work.

Workrave is a program that assists in the recovery and prevention of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). The program frequently alerts you to take micro-pauses, rest breaks and restricts you to your daily limit. Please refer to the feature comparison for a complete list of features, and how the program performs with respect to other programs on the market. The program runs on GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows.

Welcome to Workrave

USB Keys – Drive imaging for USB made easy!

More and more tech people are using USB keys to load up images on systems, it’s convenient and easy to carry with you.  Have you ever had to make multiple USB keys with images?

Well a simple to use FREE software tool available to create multiple USBimages for Windows.  Plug in your devices to your USB ports – as many as you want or can – select the image – press GO and walk away.  When you come back your done!

IMAGEUSB

Overview

ImageUSB is a free utility which lets you write an image concurrently to multiple USB Flash Drives. Capable of creating exact bit-level copies of USB Flash Drive (UFDs), ImageUSB is an extremely effective tool for the mass duplication of UFDs. ImageUSB can also be used to install OSFClone to a USB Drive for use with PassMark OSForensics™.

Unlike other USB duplication tools, ImageUSB can preserve all unused and slack space during the cloning process, including the Master Boot Record (MBR). ImageUSB can perform flawless mass duplications of all UFD images, including bootable UFDs.



Security – Passwords TOO MANY or TOO Little!

Passwords – you have two camps – for those that are involved in the industry I would say most try to be as secure as possble when creating passwords.  Well I would hope! 

The other side is those that use the same password for everything just because they have forgotten passwords in the past and it’s easy – no thinking involved.

Today no matter what – we have to be more secure in our methods of creating and maintaining passwords.  We have too much of our personal information and there are too many people ready to take advantage of your situation not to do the right thing.

NEVER

–       use the same password more than once

–       Don’t use anything associated with you personally – phone number, Address, family names, birthdays etc – these are the first things people try to use

–       Short passwords are also not good

–       Shouldn’t write your passwords down.

I have over the last few days reviewed and tested a number of Password managers.  I wanted to have a package that would allow me access to the data from three different computers, one being my work systems that doesn’t allow the installation of any software.  I found two packages that matched what I wanted in different ways, both are good and currently I am using both to determine which one I will finally go to.

The two packages are KeePass and LastPass – these both come in a FREE version and do what I need them to.   I find KeePass to be the easier version at this point, everything is just there and I had didn’t have to go looking.  LastPass advantage would be that it does a lot more and is available for Smartphones as well.  I had a 90 plus passwords that I had to import into both packages and in both cases it was not the easiest, but I got it done.

If you don’t have a huge list and you are willing to wait and add your passwords as you load up the web pages, LastPass makes that really easy – Login and it asks you if you would like to add the location and password to your database.  Really nice!  Your database is available to you from anywhere through the WEB as well.

With KeePass I had to save my database on a CLOUD storage sync program in order to have the access from any of my computers.  The program can be loaded up on a USB Key which will allow you to open the program from any computer.  As I said I had to work around things to get KeePass working. 

For people who just want access on a single computer the KeePass product I believe would be the better choice, it’s a little easier to use and very familiar in look to many other programs.  If you’re like me and have several computers that you would like to have access, plus a smartphone then LastPass is the product you should be using.

THE LINKS:

Keypass

LastPass

Utility – CREATING MULTIBOOT USB/ISO – MADE Easy!

Anyone in the service / support field who needs to move from building to building supporting your customers – this tool can make it so much easier getting the job done.

Simple program that creates multiboot USB/ISO from various ISO Files.

Lifehacker – Xboot Creates your own custom, Multi-image bootable USB Drive