LastPass Saloon

Posted on by

Over two years ago a wrote a post about how I’d had a little mishap with my laptop and my passwords (A Fool and Her Password are Easily Parted).

I was surprised by the number of comments and suggestions made, everyone seems to have their own way of remembering passwords. It’s a problem that many of us were struggling with. At one point in the comments I admitted that despite my scare…

“I have to come clean that I haven’t actually done anything about my passwords yet. I’ve looked at a number of online tools (I personally feel that I need something that is available ‘from anywhere’ so KeepPass doesn’t really suit) but all seem to cost, especially if you want something also accessible from a phone. I’m reluctant to pay so I’m now considering other options. I’m thinking that your method might be a possibility. Maybe even a Google doc is a possibility as long as the security is set up properly?“

Not much has changed in the two years since I wrote the post. I still have the “written out list of about 250 user names and their corresponding passwords” – though now the list is a lot longer and starting to fall apart. The main action I’ve taken is to photocopy it and store it in a safe place, and I don’t take it out with me on trips anymore!

All a bit pathetic really.

Now I’m working for the Open Knowledge Foundation and leaving UKOLN I have a whole other set of issues – sorting out my digital identity. My colleague Brian Kelly has written this great presentation on the type of issues involved: When Staff and Researchers Leave Their Host Institution. The University of Bath allow us to have at least 4 different aliases and I’ve used them sporadically to register for accounts (though I’ve tended to use my standard email address for the majority). So lots of email addresses (which will soon be defunct) and user accounts along with lots of passwords. It’s a merry mess!

LastPass

Luckily the Open Knowledge Foundation have just gone with LastPass, an online password manager. I’m hoping it’s going to be my salvation. LastPass claim that:

“Collectively we lose more than 10,300 hours per year retrieving lost passwords, making new ones or talking to call center representatives about them. And it gets much worse if a password is stolen and misused.“

LastPass works using a browser plugin that will learn (and encrypt) your password for all the online sites you use. It will also help you create secure strong new passwords (if you so wish – personally I prefer to make my own). You can import your data from existing services and browsers and you can securely share logins with colleagues. It is an online service, so you need to be online to access it, but then everything is online (hence my recent rewiring.)

LastPass

I’ve only just started using LastPass but I’m hoping the day may come when I can throw away my scruffy bit of paper and move on! Now I just need to visit about 300 sites and change the email address I have registered with…

An Epic List of Productivity Tools for Remote Workers

Posted on by

Arvin BuisingWe haven’t had a guest blog post for a while – so time for an epic one! Arvin Buising has been working remotely for more than 6 years now. He works as a freelance writer and uses lots of different productivity tools to help him plan his day.

Follow him on Twitter at @kudlit.

********
Thanks to technology, we no longer have to be trapped in an office to do our work. In this post I’ve tried to come up with a comprehensive list of productivity tools to make your life easier.

Free Storage

Cloud storage makes our data safer and easier to share. Sure, you can store terabytes of data on your hard drive, but when a hard drives fail, as hard drives often do, your data may be lost forever. Below are some free cloud storage services that remote workers can take advantage of.

Dropbox – Marieke has mentioned Dropbox on this blog before but they are definitely the biggest player at the moment. They offer 2 gigs of free storage. But you could actually earn a bigger storage (up to 16 gigabytes) by referring friends.

Mega – If 16 gigabytes of free storage still look small to you, how about 50 gigabytes of free storage? That’s what mega.co.nz offers. Their connection speed is really fast too. I recommend using this free service if you’re transferring a lot of huge files such as images, videos or audio files.

If those are still not enough for you, check out these other free storage services:

That’s more than 100 gigs of free cloud storage space if you register with all these providers!

If that’s still not enough for your needs, you might want to upgrade to a premium account on any of those providers or perhaps get a VPN service. A Virtual Private Network makes it convenient for team members working in different geographical locations to access the same resources via the Internet.

Online Meetings

Good communication is key to a smooth workflow. Sometimes, emails and chats are simply not enough especially if there are several people involved in the projects. Good thing there are a number of free online conferencing tools that you can choose from.

  • Adobe Connect – is a shareware that lets you create an unlimited number of “meeting rooms”. Personally, I don’t think anyone would need that many “meeting rooms”, but I like the fact that it lets you record meetings, share screens with each other, chat and even leave notes.
  • Mikogo – is everything you’ll ever need in an online conferencing tool. You can use your iPad, iPhone or any other device that uses a browser to join a conference. And yes, it’s free!
  • TeamViewer – if someone needs to take full control of another person’s computer then this is the tool to do it. It can do everything Mikogo can do and for personal use it’s free.
  • Google Hangouts – Marieke has recently written about hangouts but it’s still worth mentioning in this list.
productivity

Productivity by koalazymonkey

Time/Task Management

One of the challenges of working remotely is keeping up with the tasks and sticking to schedule. Fortunately there are task management tools that help us be on top of our game.

  • Rescue Time – Are you always distracted by Facebook and YouTube? Rescue Time can help you analyze how much time you spent socializing on Facebook and how much time you spend on actually working. It helps a lot if you get distracted easily. The individual license is free.
  • Google Tasks – This free tool from Google is integrated with Gmail and Google Calendar. You can use it with any device that has a browser.

Project Management

While the above tools are excellent for managing your own time, working together with an entire team remotely is an entirely different story.

  • GanttProject – is a free and user-friendly tool for managing projects. It has an active community around it and you can ask questions on the forums if you get stuck with anything.
  • PHPProjekt – is a suite of applications for communication and management of teams. It features a group calendar, a time card system, a file management system and a mail client. Like GanttProject, it also has an active community.

There are many other open source project management tools available but these two are the well-maintained ones. Commercial project management tools are often better considering the importance of these tools in completing projects.

There are free tools out there that remote workers should take advantage of but in some cases, it makes more sense to use the paid tools.

What’s your best-kept secret tool you use as a remote worker? Please share it in the comment section.

Data from a distance

Posted on by

Koln DomI recently attended the IASSIST (International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology) 2013 conference. The conference (the 39th to date) entitled Data Innovation: Increasing Accessibility, Visibility and Sustainability was hosted by GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and held in Cologne, Germany.

It was an incredibly friendly conference and many of the participants knew each other really well. Most of the sessions of interest focussed on research data management and issues around data publication. I presented a talk on data journals as part of a session on Expanding Scholarship: Research Journals and Data Linkages. My slides are available from Slideshare.

One sessions I attended was a panel Data at a distance: using technology to increase reference reach. The session explored the idea that users (and here, by users, they were referring to students and researchers at Higher Education Institutions) want to work in an increasingly virtual space. The result is that the data user is less likely to be tied to a physical data center, and can work from anywhere. This presents not only the challenge of making data available remotely, but also of helping data users at a distance navigate the variety of data sources and successfully use the data.

The panel session looked at different ways a range of institutions tackle the thorny issue of data reference at a distance. There were 4 case studies from a small academic institution, a medium sized academic institution, a large academic institution and a government institution.

Most of the institutions were using services like ‘Ask a librarian’ and also had a course management system which could be accessed by librarians and used by students. Some of the more interesting discussions were around how you “explain things” when face-to-face is not an option.

Wendy Mann from George Mason University described how she had spent countless telephone conversations trying to get people to do things with SPSS files when they did’t know how to unzip a file, and actually don’t know how to use their computers! Dealing with more technologically challenged people often required hand holding and phone conversations but recently they had progressed to using Google hangouts (detailed in my recent post) and Join.me. They preferred these approaches to ‘Ask a librarian’ chat services in which there was an expectation of fast answers, that they could not necessarily fulfil. George Mason University also use Jing, for screen captures and online tutorials, and GoTomeeting webinar software for meetings. Wendy explained that one of the hardest issues was knowing when it was appropriate to use particular tools i.e. getting the timing right. For example when should you say “this phone call isn’t working, I suggest you watch a screen capture, or we use Skype so I can share my screen”.

Nicole Scholtz talked about a remote consultation and reference service pilot they are running at the University of Michigan using Google Hangouts, Skype, ichat (messages) and M+ Google – Google campus. The pilot was in response to dealing with the mountain of email the librarians currently experience. Nicole shared the grid she uses for dealing with people, it allows her to consider a person’s home set up and skills before choosing a tools to use. It considers a person’s audio/visual content and their computing environment. The majority of interest so far has been from researchers needing help using GIS software and excel. Nicole commented that the service isn’t a perfect solution but that it’s on the right track.

Nicole and her references mode grid

Nicole and her references mode grid

The final speaker in the session was Lynn Goodsell from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Lynn couldn’t travel so was planning to give her talk on archival federal data at a distance using Skype, but unfortunately the unreliable wifi at the conference put pay to this. How ironic! No talk from a distance!

Chair, Shawn Nicholson from Michigan State University, trying to speak to Lynn Goodsell on Skype

Chair, Shawn Nicholson from Michigan State University, trying to speak to Lynn Goodsell on Skype

Google Hangout party

Posted on by

So this month I have been mostly been using Google Hangouts! I admit, I’m a bit late to the party, everyone else seems to have already had a go, but here are my thoughts so far…

What exactly is it?

Google Hangouts is basically Skype à la Google. It’s a video chat service that allows you to have one-on-one chats and group chats with up to ten people at a time. With the name ‘hangouts’ the group interaction seems to be pushed a little more than the one-to-one, but it works well for both. As well as chat and the message window you can share your screen, documents, scratchpads, images, links, videos etc. with other users. You can access Google Hangouts from computers and Android and Apple devices.

Google Hangout by kidsconnect

Google Hangout by kidsconnect

One of the exciting things you can also do is broadcast the hangout live on Google+, on other Web sites and on a YouTube channel. Saving to your YouTube account could be really handy – though I’d be reluctant to do this without getting people’s agreement first. Some of the ideas behind this are explained in Hangouts on Air. In fact Hangout parties seem to be all the rage – I think the Open Knowledge foundation had one last year!

However the most exciting thing by far is the ability to add virtual hats to people! This is one of the offerings of Google effects, others being drum roll sounds and facial hair!

Google effects

Google effects

My experience

So last week I sat in a Google Hangout with over people and the quality seemed pretty good, a lot better than Skype has been of late. It’s also incredibly intuitive, the buttons for things are big and obvious. I have heard from some long-term users that the set up/layout etc. changes quite a lot, but that it has improved over time.

I haven’t created my own proper hangout yet, but it looks as easy as typing a couple of names in the hangout box. My only issue so far is that at one point someone invited me to a hangout and I missed the invitation because it only came up in my notifications. Maybe they chose not to send me an email?

A few cons

The biggest issue I guess for some is that you need a Google account and it’s all very connected to other Google offerings like Gmail and Google drive. Some people have pointed out that unlike Google Talk, which it is apparently set to replace, it’s not built on open standards – a bit of a concern. The Electronic Frontier Foundation have commented that “These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users”. This may mean less interaction with other messaging systems and that as a user you have to sell your soul to Google. Why did they have to spoil the party!

What’s with the Wiring?

Posted on by

So this morning we have some people coming round to look at our wiring and cables! Hopefully they are going to sort it all out for us!

Example of a telephone socket in my houseAfter months of flaky broadband my husband finally decided to do an audit of telephone sockets and cable. It turns out that the telephone wire comes in to one room in the house then does a merry dance around each room, splitting itself several times and ending up at the place the router is plugged in to. Basically the wiring is a mess! This combined with our rural location (we are quite a long way from the nearest radio mast) results in our slow, temperamental broadband. (At least that is our current theory!)

We’re hoping that shortening and improving the cables will give us a better chance of being permanently connected. With all the online tools my new job requires I really want to avoid long periods of being offline.

Interestingly my colleague Brian Kelly has been asking about cabling for his own house. He’s even created a Storify (What cabling is needed for a network in a large house?) with the responses. See below for the tweets.

The consensus among the more technical on Twitter is that you shouldn’t scrimp on cable and it’s worth shelling out for Cat5e and possibly Cat6e if you have it installed professionally. We’ve decided to leave this to the experts, fingers crossed they are as clued up as the Twitteratti!

For further information see the useful link to Automated House: Wiring guide with some guidance on installation of the various wiring systems around the ‘automated home’.

Brian Kelly's storify: What cabling is needed for a network in a large house?

Tooling Up

Posted on by

This week marked my first working for the Open Knowledge Foundation #okfn (a previous post explains my current job situation). I’m only doing 2 days a week for now but will build it up as time moves on.

OKF (or OKFN, where the N stands for Network) is a global network with staff all around the world and much of their work is also done through volunteers. There isn’t any official central office, though there are clusters of staff in London and Berlin. Anyway all of this makes for an impressive virtual organisation that uses a huge number of remote working technologies.

In my first few days I’ve been introduced to:

They also use a number of tools that I am already familiar with:

I’m sure there is lots more too…

So my plan is to work through the list and write a couple of blog posts on the most useful tools. Watch this space!