Tech Stuff 4 You

O’Reilly Media has opened the O’Reilly School of Technology at http://www.oreillyschool.com/. You can take a bunch of information technology and related courses and even get credits from The University of Illinois at $400 a pop.

Top 5 Most Popular Courses
Introduction to HTML and CSS
Linux/Unix 1: The Unix File System
Learn Object-Oriented Programming using Java
Learn XML Programming
Learn Perl for CGI Programming

I don’t know about you, but I am not comfortable saving all my passwords on some online site. According to Clipperz, you don’t even need to trust them with your information, because they encrypt everything before storing it on their databases. I don’t know about this.

From Clipperz.com:

Clipperz benefits

• Free and completely anonymous.


• Access any time from any computer.


• No software to download and nothing to install.


• Avoid keeping secrets on your PC or on paper.

Why you don’t need to trust Clipperz

• Clipperz let you submit confidential information into your browser, but your secrets are locally encrypted by the browser itself before being uploaded to Clipperz.


• The key for the encryption process is a passphrase known only to you! Clipperz will not be able to recover a lost passphrase because we don’t know it. Actually we don’t even know the username you have chosen!


• Clipperz simply hosts your sensitive data in encrypted form and could never actually access the data in its plain form.


• Your browser is a powerful “number crunching” tool, capable of executing cryptographic algorithms thanks to our Clipperz Crypto Library, a JavaScript collection of cryptographic primitives.


• Clipperz does not use homemade cryptographic algorithms but implements standard strong encryption schemes. You can review the source code anytime you like, but you need to know nothing about cryptography to be an happy user!
  

What do you think? Is it safer to save it online rather than saving it on your laptop with a password manager like Roboform?

Extremetech has a nice article on how to speed up Windows Vista by getting rid of stuff you don’t need and some other nifty tips. Check it out.

Performance is probably the most coveted intangible when it comes to PCs, and tweaking, to the performance hungry, is considered more of a necessity than an option. Gearheads go to great lengths to get quicker system response times, faster-running games, and shorter PC bootup and shutdown times.

One way is to overclock the heck out of the poor components (and then, for bragging rights, to log on to a message board and claim a stable CPU frequency of about 300MHz faster than what's actually possible). Another way is to tweak out the operating system itself.