By Steve, on August 20th, 2024 Gone are the days when you could use a simple ‘easy to remember’ password on every site you needed to use a password on to access it. These days we might find that the average person requires log in details for over 100 sites.
The number is gradually increasing as our lives become more and more dependent on websites for services from mundane things to the important things like healtcare and banking.
Therefore password security is just as important as having your annual health check.
Here are some tips on how to make sure you aren’t breaking any fundemental password rules.
- Make your passwords long
- Avoid common phrases (in any language)
- Do not use personal information
- Use a mix of characters and UPPER and lower case letters, numbers and symbols
- NEVER reuse passwords, even on ‘low priority sites’
- Store passwords in a secure password manager
- Only change a password when you need to or if there has been a data leak
- Use 2-factor authentication
- Only share passwords securely
- Be careful clicking on links in emails/text messages
1. Make your passwords long: Increasing password length is among the most important password security tips. The logic behind longer passwords is simple each time you add an extra character, you increase the number of possible combinations, along with the time it would take an attacker to decipher the password. Just going from 8 to 12 characters makes it nearly impossible to guess a password based on computer-generated combinations.
2. Avoid common phrases: Dictionary words like password, dragon, monkey and princess are among those commonly used as a password (or part of one). Not surprisingly, these simple words, along with basic patterns like abcd1234, are also easy for others to guess. Numerical passwords like 123456789 are even less secure since there are only ten available characters.
3. Do not use personal information: Most of us are guilty of this occasionally. After all, it’s much easier to remember your parakeet’s name than some random combination of numbers and letters. Addresses and birthdays are other examples of personal information that people convert into passwords to make them easier to remember. Since this identifying information can often be found on the web, leave it out of your passwords.
4. Use a mix of characters: Using a variety of symbols in your password, including uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters, is another good way to strengthen password security. Since there are no set rules for arranging the symbols, try inserting special characters and uppercase letters into the middleof the password, not just the beginning or end. But while you may think it’s clever to replace common letters with symbols, l!k3 th!$, be warned: cybercriminals are wise to this tactic, so it won’t actually slow them down any more than regular words will. On some devices (iPhones etc) when logging in to a site for the first time it will offer a secure password… use it, it will then be saved.
5. Never reuse passwords:The volume of accounts and passwords we maintain can lead us to reuse passwords to make them easier to remember. Duplicate passwords weaken cybersecurity by exposing multiple accounts if even one password is compromised. Using a secure password manager will often alert you to duplicate and compromised passwords.
6. Never store passwords in an unsafe place: Passwords stored in desk drawers or written on sticky notes can easily be lost or fall into the wrong hands. Passwords stored electronically in spreadsheets, notes applications, or web browsers are also vulnerable since none of these methods typically use encryption to protect stored passwords. Use a secure password manager application such as 1Password, Dashlane, Password App built in to MacOS/iOS, NordPass, Keeper etc. Password managers will ensure that you no longer need to remember any passwords only the one to get in to the manager, and that can often be done with Face ID or Touch ID or similar.
7. Only change your password when you need to: Changing passwords too frequently can make them less secure. Changes might result in only minor changes to an existing password and if the previous password was compromised, then the hacker has a head start on what the new password might be.
8. Use 2-factor authentication (2FA): This uses a second credential, such as a randomly generated code sent through an app or by email/SMS to provide further verification that the user trying to log-in is the correct person. This is best set up with an application on your smart phone so only you will have access to it. Apps that offer this feature include Authy, Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, Duo Mobile as well as a lot of the password managers available now.
Banks will insist on using 2FA to access your account these days. It doesn’t replace your password, therefore your banking password and any other password you use on a site with 2FA should follow all the normal rules. It’s also best to use 2FA on any social media sites you access.
9. Only share passwords securely: Try to avoid sharing any passwords with anyone if you can help it. If their security is impacted in some way then it compromises your security as well. It’s best that they set up their own account rather than sharing yours when possible. Most of the password managers however offer a method of sharing data using encrypted and therefore secure methods. If you must use a messenger service to share important information choose one that has end to end encryption, and is not open such as email or an ordinary text message.
10. Avoid clicking on links in emails: It is very easy to get caught out by an email or text message that looks like it has come from a reliable source. Don’t click on the links until you have checked if they are real or not. If have clicked on a link that compromised your security, make sure you change your password straight away do not wait. Keeping your email box empty of junk emails is a whole other topic for another day!
Passkeys: Passkeys are a new way to log in to apps and websites without using traditional passwords. Instead of remembering and typing in a password, you use a digital key that is unique to each account.
Here’s how it works:
- Two Keys: Your device creates two keys – a public key and a private key.
- Public Key: The public key is stored by the app or website.
- Private Key: The private key stays on your device and is used to unlock your account.
When you log in, your device uses the private key to prove your identity without ever sharing it. This makes it much harder for hackers to steal your login information
Passkeys are often used with biometric authentication like FaceID or fingerprint scans, making them both secure and convenient
Read more about Passkeys here. https://developers.google.com/identity/passkeys
Stay safe on line.
This post is available as a PDF document here. Please share it to your family and friends or a link.
Steve Morton
August 2024
By Steve, on June 12th, 2024 Reading that title might make you think of bench pressing full camera bags!! Yes they can get heavy, but I was thinking of another way!
I try to keep as active as possible, as a 65 year old retiree, it has to not be too strenuous, but enough for me to close my activity rings on my Apple Watch each day.
Exercise for me is mainly walking, sometimes at a slow pace, sometimes at a fast pace if I’m going somewhere listening to music.
Today I took my camera with me on a photo walk, it didn’t matter that I had been around these streets in the town many times before. Looking around you often see things that have changed, or something you hadn’t noticed before.
I didn’t take many photographs, but I enjoyed the walk and looking for scenes to shoot and the walk did me good. The quality of the photos wasn’t important either.
In most cases I can go back again next time and try again, may be with a different camera out of my small collection!
Today I used my Canon EOS600D. My EOS100D with a fixed wide angle lens is perfect for these photo walks, compact and light weight.
Until next time, take care, keep fit and enjoy photography too.
By Steve, on May 6th, 2024 I was pleased to receive an email this morning complementing me on the coverage of Photography on my site and would I consider adding their website to the list.
When I looked at Photo Tips Galore I was pleased to see it wasn’t full of tips for just smart phone users or Fujifilm X100 users! This site had everything including DSLR’s and film cameras as well as digital compact cameras. Take a look I hope you find something that interests you too.
Here are some other sites/channels that I enjoy looking at:
Take a look and see if there are any that interest you.
By Steve, on March 24th, 2024 1. Go to System Settings
Go to General, then Software Update, check that the Mac OS is up to date.
2. Go to System Settings
Go to General, then Time Machine, check that the most recent backup on all drives is within the last 24 hours.
3. Checking for Updates on other apps.
Word, Excel etc. In Word, click on Help, Check for Updates
Thunderbird. In Thunderbird, click on Thunderbird, then About Thunderbird, it will then check for updates.
Skype. In Skype, click on Skype, then Check for Updates.
4. Go to System Settings
Go to Passwords, Log in with your machine password, check security recommendations for compromised, reused, weak, leaked passwords.
By Steve, on February 7th, 2024 Firstly, I would like to give you my apologies for the recent lack of activity. The end of 2023 and beginning of this year took a turn in an unplanned direction and photography (and other things) had to take a back seat for a while. I’ve not even taken many photographs with my shiny new iPhone 15 Pro since getting it.
Hopefully though now that the weather is improving, I will start to feel inspired to take off the lens cap a bit more often and get outside with one of my many cameras.
I did film photography for several decades before changing over to digital photography about 20 years ago. At one point in the mid 1970’s I did a lot of black and white film photography and I had access to a dark room and all the equipment to process my own films and print my own negatives. I enjoyed the process. But I’ve not done any of that in the last 40 or more years.
In the last 20 years, my use of my film camera has sadly decreased to may be one or two rolls a year. However, I still enjoy using my Canon EOS30 film SLR camera, but it is quite a challenge compared to digital these days. There are times when I wish I still had some of my other film cameras such as the Olympus OM30 I used in the 1990’s.
The other major difference to digital photography is cost, the cost of film and of getting it processed etc. That has put me off doing it too often. It’s a sort of treat to do it once or twice a year.
After a bit of research I’ve found a company here in France that does film processing, scanning, printing etc. They are Nation Photo, they are based in Paris, but they do a mail order service. I did enquire locally about the cost of film processing, but it was a crazy expensive price. The Nation Photo site is available in English as well as French 😉🇫🇷
Nation Photo do quite a quick turn around. I posted a film to them last Tuesday, and I received an email back from them a week later with a link to download my images in TIFF format. They will post the negatives back to me sometime this week I guess.
For a change this time I decided to give Black and White film another go, it is many years since I shot in black and white apart from on my digital camera. I loaded up a roll of Ilford HP5, a film stock I’ve not used in ages. The grain is very evident in the resulting images but it adds to the creativeness of them I guess.
Once a month the local automotive club meet up in the town market square, naturally there are quite a lot of old French cars (2CV’s and the like), but there is also a good selection of other makes from around the world. I don’t go every month, but I was determined to ‘finish off my film’ last month.
Here are a small selection of my photographs from this recent film.
I’m reasonably pleased with the results. I have done some small adjustments to the images you see here, mainly to increase the contrast levels and some cropping.
By Steve, on January 6th, 2024 I’ve been taking photographs for over 50 years, quite scary when you work it out!
I vaguely recall my first camera is one my parents gave me that they had got as a free gift or similar. It was very similar to the ‘Diana’ 120 cameras we still see today in different guises. I don’t remember using that camera a lot or what ever happened to it.
 On a trip to London I was gifted a Kodak Instamatic 25 camera, this used 126 cartridge film. I remember using this camera a lot. I still have it, but sadly it isn’t easy to obtain 126 cartridge film these days.
When I was about 14 or 15 I got friendly with another pupil at school who was also keen on photography, he made me aware of a shop in Liverpool that sold second hand cameras.
 With my saved up pocket money we took a trip over there and I bought a Praktica Nova 1B a single lens reflex camera. I also had to buy an exposure meter because the Nova 1B didn’t have a built in meter. I bought a bag and flash gun as well.
I used this camera for a number of years, I left school in 1975 and started work the Praktica came with me and I continued to use it.
I joined a photography group in Milton Keynes and I learnt how to develop my own black and white film, as well as printing my own photographs.
 I sold the Nova 1B to a friend of mine when I was offered a Praktica LTL3 and some additional lenses. The LTL3 had a built in light meter and was a more modern design compared to the Nova1B. I used this camera a lot through the 1980’s.
 In the late 1980’s now married and with a young family I decided to look for a new camera and found an Olympus OM30 for sale in the local newspaper. The OM30 had a focusing assist mode, it basically had a contrast detection system and it indicated which way to rotate the focus ring and when the lens was in focus. It worked with any brand or type of manual focus lens.
The OM30 was used throughout the 1990’s and I continued to enjoy taking photographs and exploring new places with my camera fitted with a zoom lens.
By the late 1990’s I was on the look out for a newer camera. Digital cameras had started to appear but they were still expensive and low resolution. After a lot of research and trying different cameras in a local shop I bought a Canon EOS30 SLR film camera.
A few years later I was made redundant from my job and I decided to buy a digital camera, the Canon EOS20D APS-C DSLR had then become recently announced so I bought one of those with a 17-85mm zoom lens (27-136mm 35mm equivalent. I used this extensively for the next ten years or more.
Travelling with the EOS20D and zoom lens could prove a bit of a problem on budget airlines because of the weight. For a grand seven week adventure to Canada and USA, I bought a Canon EOS100D (SL1) this was considerably smaller and lighter than the EOS20D.
The 100D has continued to be my main camera alongside using my iPhone in daily use.
In the summer of 2021 I inherited a Nikon D300, it proved to be quite a learning curve to learn a different system. But it sparked my interest in older cameras again.
 I also started using again my wife’s long put aside Canon Powershot SX120is compact digital camera.
I started using this compact camera after seeing the new keen interest in older digi-cams on various You Tube channels: One Month Two CamerasOne Month Two Cameras, Lucy-Lumens Analogue Adventures, Snappiness.
I also laid claim to my son’s Canon EOS600D, this was a similar age to my own EOS100D but a better fit in the hand.
I am enjoying using these various cameras on a regular basis.
In 2024 I’m hoping to try my hand again at film photography and also do some black and white photography for the first time again in few years. Although I no longer my processing gear so I will be using a film processing company in Paris.
By Steve, on October 28th, 2023 Far too often, I hear about people who have ‘lost’ their computer files. Happily, there are many ways to easily avoid such a disaster these days.
Firstly, how do you organise your files? Having tens or hundreds of them on the desktop is not best practice. Try to follow a ‘clear desk policy’, only keeping files on the desktop that you are currently working on or frequently (i.e. daily) need to access. All other files should be saved and stored in appropriately named folders on your computer hard drive.
Backing up your computer is essential! Hard drives are a commonly used method, but¬ – it’s a big ‘but’– they do fail after a finite time. However, you shouldn’t need to worry about that horror if you have a proper back up strategy in place.
I’ve always followed the ‘3-2-1’ back up rule. This means I have:
- Three copies of each file, including the original,
- On at least Two different drives,
- And One copy stored ‘off-site’.
For example, I might have a document stored on my internal computer hard drive, a copy stored on a separate external hard drive, and the third copy synced to Dropbox.
However, whenever I change the copy on my internal hard drive, the copy in Dropbox (cloud storage) will be updated, and the second copy on an external hard drive will also be updated within an hour automatically via Apple Time Machine or if you are a Windows user there is a similar application such as Backup and Restore.
Therefore, at worst case I will have potentially only lost a few minutes’ work on a document should there be a drive failure or computer failure.
Going back to external hard drives, please do not use them for storing your original files and photographs on them as they tend to fail more frequently than the internal drive on your computer. You should use them only for backing up. The place to store your original files is your computer!
One back-up solution is to use two external drives to back up, with the system alternating between the two drives automatically. The likelihood of both failing at the same time is remote.
Check your back-ups are working from time to time. Make sure that the back-up drive is fully up to date, in the same way you have made sure that your applications and operating system are up to date.
By Steve, on August 30th, 2023 I have a monthly routine of checking over my cameras to make sure they are all ok.
Here are some simple tips you can follow to make sure your camera is always ready to be used.
Battery and Memory Cards
Every few weeks take out the battery and memory card. The simple action of removing them and putting them back in will clean the contacts without any additional work. Contacts can become oxidised over time and the simple action of removing the battery or card will clean the two mating surfaces and remove any oxidisation.
Charging Batteries
If you have more than one set of batteries, there’s no harm in cycling those as well at the same time. Charge up your spare set before putting them in the camera. Don’t worry about charging up the set that have just come out of the camera, it is best to store batteries partially charged and then charge them to full before use.
Cleaning and Maintaining the Exterior
For the exterior surfaces, some plastics can become ‘sticky’ as they get old. I use a car product that is recommended for use for maintaining dashboards and other black plastics. I don’t spray it on to the camera direct as it might find its way inside the camera, instead I spray it on to a microfibre soft cloth and then wipe the plastics with the cloth. Only use a small amount of the spray, you can always go over the surfaces a second time if required.
To get in to the small spaces I spray some of the liquid in to an aerosol cap and use a cotton bud to get in to the nooks and crannies. It really does bring up the shine again on hand grips and feels less ‘sticky’ after treatment.
I did the same thing on the rubber focus and zoom rings on a lens too.
You only need to do this sort of renovation treatment about once a year if that.
Visual Checks
Take some time to look at all sides of your camera and check for any damage, cracks in any plastics etc. Catching these faults early can be a blessing in the long term.
Clock setting
Check the clock setting in the menu to make sure the time is correct, the built in clocks on cameras are not renowned for their accuracy! I always set mine to local time when ever I’m travelling. It will then tie in with any photos I take on my iPhone and the iPhone will also record the location so the two sets of photos are easier to synchronise when you get home.
Your camera should be ready when you need it at short notice.
Take care and keep taking photos.
By Steve, on August 15th, 2023 Anyone who is a fountain pen user (and I am one too) will know the issue. You have far more than you can sensibly use at once!! The only difference with cameras is that it doesn’t matter if you swap from one to another every day or week!
Except may be for film cameras, imagine having several cameras loaded up with different types of films and then trying to remember which one had what film in it. You could dedicate a Filofax to keeping track of all of your cameras!
In the last few weeks I’ve been cycling through my cameras as the mood has grabbed me.
I’ve loaded up my Canon EOS30 with a roll of HP5 black and white film, I really need to get a move on and finish off the roll, I have another unused roll in my bag to use as well. I’m a rather infrequent user of my film camera these days. The cost and the challenge I suppose.
On the digital front my EOS100D has seen quite a bit of use with the 28mm pancake lens. That with a simple wrist strap makes a great ‘guided tour camera’. We went on a local history tour last week, exploring the history of the railway in our town here in France. It was a big employer in the town once upon a time, not so much so these days sadly, although we do still have a passenger service.
Following the publication of this video about the Nikon D700, I used my Nikon D300 for a few days. Although I’m less familiar with that camera, I still do enjoy using it. It pushes the grey matter a bit to do so, but I love the results I get with the camera.
Please do watch that video even if you aren’t a Nikon shooter I’m sure you will appreciate the cameras a lot more.
I didn’t realise that Lucy and her partner were such big fans of Nikon cameras as well.
Do follow Lucy on Instagram and of course here on Substack, she is a great inspiration to me when I’m looking for new ideas of photos to take, to try and get myself away from photographing the same scenes all the time!
Then a few days ago this video was released
That made me dig out my old Canon EOS20D of similar vintage to the EOS5D. The 20D is quite a weighty beast a bit like the Nikon D300
Steven Heise did a great video review of the EOS 20D about a year ago:
His channel is excellent if you are looking at older DSLR cameras or even older mirrorless cameras.
Keep that lens cap off and keep taking photos.
Take care
By Steve, on July 22nd, 2023 ‘Slide shows’ are a little outdated in the modern era of sharing images on the internet. But in the days of analogue photography, a correctly exposed slide image is just about as good as it came.
I was recently looking for some old slides of my own taken in the 1970’s from the early days of my photography hobby. I didn’t find them. However I did discover a box of slides I had completely forgotten about from 1978 and some more from 1984/85.
I set up my flat bed scanner to be able to scan slides which it can do 4 slides at a time. After a bit of experimenting I managed to get it to do them unattended. Pop in the slides, hit scan and it would do a two pass scan and then save the individual images.
Seeing the images again for the first time in over 40 years has brought back a lot of happy memories. I’ve shared a few on line as well and been contacted by several old friends from back then as well. It has been a wonderful memory filled week.
Get out your old slides and live on the memories again.
A house I lived in Cyprus back in 1983. Some old cottages in Bebington. A new housing complex in Milton Keynes I lived in back in 1978. And me…..yes with significantly more hair than I have now, taken with my first car in about 1978.
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