Life Through the Eyes of an Ambulance Driver

I spend a lot of my time on the computer. I also spend a lot of time exploring to find out what I can use to make my computing time more enjoyable and more efficient. I think others can benefit from the things I have found, so this is my first of posts that I will make to highlight hardware and software technology that I have and I like.

My first post will be about a piece of software I’ve been using for about a year now called KeepassX. This is a program you can use to keep your passwords organized. It’s free, its open source, and best of all, its cross platform. More and more sites these days make you sign up to use their service. Whether its a forum you participate in, you bank, credit card, email, Facebook, Twitter, servers, websites, the list goes no. Some folks have a separate user name and password for each place they log into. This can be hard to keep track of. I personally have some passwords that are tough for me to remember. KeepassX will help you keep track of that. Have you ever forgotten what user name or password you use on a website? KeepassX is your solution.

Is it safe to keep all your passwords in one place on your computer? I believe it can be. The file that KeepassX uses to store your information in is encrypted with Twofish or AES. You must remember one password to get into this file. It is a lot easier only having to remember one password instead of a whole list of them. If you don’t want to use a password, it will allow you to use a keyfile as well.

This method is also safer than keeping a word or excel document on your computer with all of your passwords. This is also better than the piece of paper some people keep by their computer (like my wife used to do before we got married).

There’s lots of features that you can explore about it if you like. For example, it can remind you to set a new password after a certain length of time. It can generate a password and tell you how strong the one is that you are using. One of my favorite features is when you open the program, you can right click on the list of logins and have it copy the user name or password to your clipboard. Then you can paste it into the form field without having to type it in. For security, it clears your clipboard after about a minute.

I use two computers in two different environments on a daily basis. Overall, I use Mac OSX, Ubuntu Linux, MS Windows, and Android on my phone. All of those environments have a version of KeepassX that will allow you to access your logins and passwords. You can keep one file that has all of your information in it. I have a file server that I had been using to keep my keepass file on that I could use to share the file between computers. I recently started using a program called Dropbox to keep the file synched between computers. I’ll write more about that in a later post.

You can download KeepassX from the website for free for what ever of the popular operating systems that you use. The android app is called KeePassDroid and is developed by someone else, but uses the same file format.

Last month Wendy and I took a backpacking trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. We had planned to go there around this time last year, but instead we had our wedding. The plan was to take two days to drive up and two days to drive back while spending 6 days and 5 nights in the back country. Beforehand we did two shakedown hikes to help get us ready for the trip. Both trips were 3 days 2 nights. One was in Uinta Wilderness and the other was in American Fork Canyon. This was also our first time to take Madie with us, and she really enjoyed the trips.

When we left town, we left Madie, our German Shepherd, at doggy day care at Dogmode. She seems to really like it there, and we have been impressed with how well they treat the dogs. We drove all the way to Missoula, MT the first day by interstate. That took most of the day and left us with about another three hours to get to the park. More importantly about the day, according to Wendy, it was Wendy’s birthday! She opened gifts and had cake a couple of days earlier to celebrate.

The next day, we toured around Missoula a little. Missoula is one of the bases where the National Forest service keeps some of its smokejumper wildland firefighters. I was particularly interested in this and was excited to get to see the base. There was a college intern there that was taking care of the visitor’s center and gave us a tour.

This is the base for the National Forest service Missoula Smokejumpers

After driving around town a little more, we headed on to Glacier. We bought a National Parks annual pass earlier this year and used this to get into the park. Once inside we headed to the West Glacier visitors center. I have to say, I was not impressed at all with the visitor’s center. It wasn’t very big and it didn’t display much information. Even the gift shop was just a small room. We later discovered that the newer larger visitor center was on the East side of the park. From there we headed over to the backcountry office where we got our permit for staying in the backcountry. A number of national parks have gone to a backcountry permit or reservation system to help regulate the number of visitors to areas of the park. This helps with overcrowding issues that have been happening in national parks.

The sign to the entrance of Glacier National Park on the West Entrance

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