6.5 Million Linkedin Passwords Stolen, including mine !

If like me you have a LinkedIn account it's time to change the password as today (7th June 2012) it's been confirmed that 6.5 million password have been stolen and compromised.

This following article from The Verge contains some details including the text from LinkedIn blog post confirming the breach http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/6/3068652/linkedin-member-passwords-stolen

If you're feeling a little inquisitive use the following site (only after you've changed your password) to see if your password is amongst the 6.5 million (mine certainly was) http://leakedin.org/

If you've used the same password for anything else, I'd strongly recommend you that also.

Is facebook offline ?

From time to time get calls from customers saying that their internet is down, when this happens we usually visit the service status page for that particular Internet Service Provider  which normally lets us know if that ISP is having any service disruptions at the present time.

This saves us countless hours having to wait on hold only to be told "yes we know we currently have an outage"

However when this happens to a web based resource or cloud service it's usually a little more difficult to find what the story is.

Well now there is a website dedicated to showing the service status of the major cloud based services.

www.downrightnow.com is a site which simply lists major cloud resources such as Facebook, Gmail , Twitter, Youtube etc and will display along side the list any current service disruptions.

Take a look yourself and bookmark this page, perhaps next time someone says "if facebook offline?" you can reply with, well actually it is currently offline.

Microsoft Wired 600 Keyboard

I mentioned in a previous post that my favorite keyboard is the Microsoft Wired 600 Keyboard, I thought I'd better explain why.

This particular keyboard has two key (pun intended) driving features behind my decision. 

Price and lack of functions.

Price, at $19.95 it's priced amazing well for such a well built and great feeling keyboard. (You can also buy it bundled with a Microsoft Wired Mouse for $34.95)

Lack of functions, (yes that's right lack of functions) I often find that keyboards go over the top with extra keys, functions, zooms, sliders and gadgets. The Wired 600 simply adds a Play/Pause key, Volume up/down & mute keys plus a calculator key.

I personally find this lack of functions to be a major feature of this keyboard keeping it simple and straight forward, the wired USB connection is also a major plus as you'll never have to worry about the battery running out while your in the middle of writing that important email.

If your running a business I'd strongly recommended having a couple of boxes of the Wired Desktop 600 (that's the keyboard and mouse bundle) always on hand in your stationery cupboard and then when a new staff member starts simply replace the old dirty crumb filled keyboard with a new one for the new staff member. 

 

iTunes doesn't play with Microsoft Keyboard

It's Saturday afternoon and I'm sitting at my keyboard reading away while iTunes plays into my headphones when my Son walks up to me and asks me something.  

So I hit the Play/Pause key across the top of my Microsoft Wired 600 Keyboard (my favorite keyboard). 

Nothing happens !! That's odd. Isn't this the sole purpose of this key, it's one and only task is to simply Play or Pause and for some reason it cannot even get this right.

Well after a little playing around I find that the Play/Pause key will correctly interact with iTunes only if iTunes is not minimized.

Surely we can get something as simple as a Play/Pause key to do what it's supposed to do.

After a little research I find that I'm not the only person to have pondered this particular oddity and I end up finding this little gem as a solution.

Download this small iTunes plugin file from this location
http://www.everythingitunes.com/os/windows/2008-01-04/mmkeysdll

Now simply copy this file to your iTunes plugin folder, for me this was located in
C:\Users\Nigel\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunes Plug-ins

Once you've copied the file, close and then reopen iTunes and that's it you're done the Play/Pause key should now do exactly what's it's designed to do Play and Pause.

Now what was it that my Son asked me ?