First off, here is the route we took (recorded via the Endomondo app on my phone). It says just over 12 miles on the stats for the walk, but according to the guide we were using, it should have been 8.5 miles – so I’m not sure which one is correct, all I do know is that, towards the end, it became a lot of hard work.

For the most part, it was what you would have expected, lots and follow-this-path-through-the-woods…

…but after about an hour we came across our first cool find, an abandoned house:

We have no idea when it was built, or why, or equally why it was no longer being used, but it was very cool nonetheless:

Just around the corner from this was our second cool discovery:

So needless to say, we both found ourselves a little souvenir:

…and I got to laugh at Mari trying to get back down:

After a couple more hours we found ourselves, after a near vertical climb, at the top of the Wrekin, which I’m happy to report had an amazing view:

Upon our descent down the other side, I discovered that the Wrekin was an ancient hillfort, which I remembered learning about in school, but had never been to one:

The trip had a couple more surprises for us, such as The Halfway House, a house/cafe which was literally half-way up the hill, and provided some much needed sustenance (coffee and ice cream), and couple of private fishing reservoirs:

…and a disused quarry:

…but for me, I think the best bit was finding the abandoned house

Although I had a lot of fun on the hike, and would be very keen on doing another one like it again soon, I think that I’ll have a bit more forward thinking, and be sure to wear some better shoes!

Hacking groups (such as LulzSec) have been targeting high profile companies (including Dropbox, Sony, Valve, et al) and (among other sinister things) have been releasing millions of rows of customer’s data have been released into the public domain.

Thankfully, this has highlighted the importance of good security for technology companies all over the world, some of which are taking the threat seriously and beefing up their own security as a result.

But a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link, and more often than not, the weakest link is a user’s password.

In my job as a Web developer I’m often given the login details for many of our customer’s accounts, anything from hosting, email and social media accounts right up to e-commerce payment gateways, and more often than not, (if I’m allowed to be frank for a moment) the passwords on these accounts are abysmal.

Some of them are so bad, they’re the equivalent of Manchester Unitedusing ‘football’ as a password, or The Coca-Cola Company using ‘c0ke’ (substituting a letter for a number – such as replacing an I with a 1 – is not making a password secure.)

what constitutes a good password?

There is a lot of advice on choosing a good password, and even arange of tools that can help generate them, but it mostly boils down to choosing a password that will be difficult to guess, and with enough characters (and special characters) that a brute force attack would be endless.

All of this advice is worthless, however, if even after choosing a good and secure password, you use the same password on everything you sign-up for, or if you write it down on a piece of paper next to your desk.

how am i supposed to remember all these passwords?

As I mentioned before, I have to keep track of the login details for many of our customers, and as such it is my responsibility to keep these passwords secure. To help with this I use a piece of software calledKeePass:

KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key file. So you only have to remember one single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole database. The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).

KeePass isn’t the only solution, others such as LastPass andPasswordGenie (seen below) exist, but keepass has worked well for me for a number of years.

Anyway, I hope this post has been useful to you (and I hope I start to see some more secure passwords from our customers), but in the meantime, let me leave you with this interesting PasswordGenie infographic:

(Article originally published on Ghost Design.)

I’m having a bit of a dilemma.

I’m a web developer, and as a web developer, I’m part of an industry that is forever evolving. New tools and techniques are being created all the time, and if you don’t keep up with the latest industry developments, you face being left behind.

In addition to this: I’m a PC – and very proud of that fact. Microsoft’s Windows platform might not have been at the top of its game at all times (I’m looking at you Windows Vista and Windows 8), but I think Windows 7 is a fantastic operating system – I’ll be the first to admit that Windows 7 isn’t perfect, but I like it.

It’s a lot like your favourite hoodie: the design might be faded, the stitching around the hem might be starting to come loose, and there might be other hoodies with cool, slick and stylish designs on them, but your like your favorite one because it has molded to your body shape and fits you perfectly – which is exactly the case with me and Windows 7.

So?

My dilemma is that, in my effort to try and keep up to date with the latest tools and techniques being developed for the web industry, I’m going to have to jump ship and start using a Mac.

I’m no fan of the Mac.

Unlike my favourite Windows-7-hoodie, a Mac-hoodie would be too short on the waist, too long in the sleeves, and things would keep falling out of the pockets.

Anything I’m able to do on a PC I’m equally able to do on a Mac (and vice versa – but more on this in a moment), but I prefer doing it on the PC as it fits my way of working better. More and more, however, I’m seeing people within the web industry ignore the PC and focus on the Mac. Tools such as CodeKit and Hammer are Mac exclusives, and even tools which support both platforms such as GitHub, tend to focus on the Mac features first.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m able to achieve the same goals as all of these Mac-only tools via the combination of my PC and Debian development server – but it never just works - there is always something that I need to configure or fix. One could make the argument that I’m better off doing things the hard way, and that I’m learning more by manually configuring everything, but I’m not a software engineer - I’m a web developer, and as such, so I don’t care how the tools I use work, I just care that they do work.

This isn’t to say that Macs are fundamentally better than PCs (they’re not) or that PCs are better than Macs (equally not). It also doesn’t mean that the tools in question can’t exist on the PC (they can, if only someone would build them). It simply means that the developers of said tools, for whatever reason, are choosing to build them exclusively for the Mac, and as such, if I want to take advantage of them, I also have to use a Mac.

Once bitten, twice shy

Anyone that knows me knows that I embraced Apple once before when purchasing an iPad, which I later regretted. I still have the iPad in question, but it currently exists as nothing more than a music player, pumping funky tunes out of its speaker dock, as all its other functionality has been superseded by my Android phones and tablet.

I also have access to a Mac at work, but don’t use it for anything more than checking email or reading documentation, as everything else I need to do is completed using an old Windows 7 laptop which I brought into work on my second day of employment. I keep giving Apple the opportunity to impress me, but keep coming away disappointed.

So the point (and dilemma I’m facing) is that, if I should somehow find the £1,500 needed for a semi-decent Macbook, and decide to embrace the Apple once again, am I just going to end up regretting it?

As always, I welcome your comments below.

Introduction

I’ve been meaning to make this post for a few months now, but one thing lead to another, and before I knew it an unhealthy amount of procrastination had set in. I really don’t have any real excuse for this either, as all I really wanted to do was share the following resource with you…

iOS App Icon Template

The iOS App Icon Template is a Photoshop template (and action) which makes it easy to create, and then export, an iOS icon in all the different sizes you might require, for whatever purpose you might require them (in this instance, we’re looking to provide a custom icon for sites that get added to the iOS home screen).

I’ll not go into detail on how to use the template itself (its site does a good enough job of that), but I will tell you that once you’ve created the files, you need to rename the files with the relevant dimensions like so:

• apple-touch-icon-114×114-precomposed.png
• apple-touch-icon-144×144-precomposed.png
• apple-touch-icon-57×57-precomposed.png
• apple-touch-icon-72×72-precomposed.png
• apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png (57×57)
• apple-touch-icon.png (57×57)

Once you’ve done this, and compressed them using TinyPNG, simply upload to the root of your site, and iOS (upon someone choosing to add your site to their home screen) will do the rest.

The video starts with a fairly non-descrip introduction by Hugh Grant, who talks about the titular newspapers’ integrity and journalistic practices, and the fact that if they say they have an important announcement to make, it isn’t going to be some obnoxious marketing gimmick…

… then it happens! (watch the video, I don’t want to spoil it)

I don’t know about you, but any institution that has a good sense of humour about itself is good in my books.

Will this make me buy the aforementioned newspapers? Probably not. But I might consider subscribing to their RSS feeds.