Essentially the trick is to use a stab-blender for 20 seconds to aerate the wine very quickly. It's definitely something I'll run a double-blind test on over Christmas!

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1. Start with a base word. This can be anything, but the weirder the better. This will stay consistent across your passwords. For the purposes of explaining this technique, the base word will be "Redux".

2. Next take the name of the website or service. Let's say we are creating a password for Reddit. Take a number of specific letters from the name. Let's say that we always take the first 2 letters from the site name. This gives us the letters 'R' and 'e'. If you want, instead of taking the first 2 letters you could take the first and last letter, or the first 3 letters. It doesn't matter. What matters is to always take the same number of characters from the same position of each website.

3. Next, use an algorithm. This algorithm will be unique to you, but is a way of mixing the letters you have extracted from the website into your base word. A simple algorithm might be to prepend the letters to your base word. Your password then becomes "ReRedux". A slightly better algorithm would be to increment the letters by one character. This means that "Re" -> "Sf". Then merge the resultant characters into the first and third positions of your base word. Your password for Reddit then becomes "SRfedux".

This combination of using a unique base word, that is consistent across all your passwords, but modifying it using an algorithm based on the website name will allow you to construct passwords that you can remember, but are different for each site you need to log in to.

EDIT: OK, based on the Reddit comment thread it turns out that I didn't properly explain the rationale for using a combination of the website name and some constant stream of characters is to try and create a unique password for each individual site. You want to have a unique password per site because a lot of sites store your password in plain-text. If one site gets cracked, you don't want the attackers to be able to compromise your identity on other sites you have an account on. Also, using a passphrase or the first letters of words in a passphrase as your base word is obviously more secure than using a dictionary word.

EDIT 2: It seems people are worried about the entropy of the generated passwords. Obviously, they are not completely random, but to give you an idea on how secure they can appear, here are some passwords generated from the same base word and algorithm for different sites:

The algorithm that generated these passwords was fairly simple. A slightly more complex algorithm would generate different length passwords. The key takeaway is that if an attacker gets hold of the password for the reddit site, it is extremely unlikely that they will be able to reverse-engineer the passwords for the other sites.

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1. Written by Robot

Before the negotiation

Firstly, try and build information profile about your counter-party. You are interested in working out what their utility function (or value profile) is. You want to try and determine their "walk-away" number - the price at which they will walk away from the negotiation. You want to try and work out what alternatives they have to an agreement. What pressures do they have to getting an agreement?

Also, determine what your walk-away price is. What is the point at which you will walk away from the agreement? Try and come up with alternatives, this will help take the pressure off you during the negotiation. Work out what your utility profile is - what are your priorities? What points won't you compromise on?

During the negotiation

Firstly, you should set the initial price. This will help determine the expectation range that your counter-party has. The only time when you should allow the counter-party to determine the initial price is if they have a lot more information about what the item/service is worth than you do.

With your initial price, you take your estimation of the negotiating counter-party's walk-away price and offer slightly lower. Don't go too low. You want the counter-party to take your initial offer seriously.

Also, try and establish rapport before you begin the negotiation. You can reveal unimportant information about yourself to help the flow of information. Ask questions - try and determine what is important to them. Are there any pressures on them to get the deal done? Are there any time pressures involved? Do other people have any expectations on the results of the negotiations?

Sometimes some small things may give you an edge. Having the appearance of authority may help you during the negotiation. Helping to boost the attractiveness to the counter-party by making the object of the negotiation appear scarce. "Only one left, so you should get it now". Social proof - all these other people have also bought this item and been completely satisfied.

It's important during the negotiation to try and seek mutual benefit.

If someone is over-aggressive or too emotional during the negotiation, take a time-out. Don't mirror negativity. If the counter-party starts with with an insultingly low offer try a technique called "Re-Anchoring". The Re-anchoring technique involves making a counter-proposal, and then repeating it numerous times. You are trying to "anchor" your counter-proposal in their mind.

If you get stuck in a negotiation, try adding in embedded options. For example; if [some situation] happens, then you must do [this other thing].

Closing the negotiation

Create a solution "package". This is a complete solution - listing all the negotiating points and your proposal. Don't try and negotiate each point separately, seek agreement for a "package" of solutions.

Potentially try embedding options into the solution.

Also, once you have an agreement, think about shelving the agreement temporarily to try and "re-factor" it, i.e. to try get a better agreement. You can always come back to your original agreement if no better solution can be found.

Take your time during the negotiation.

Practice!

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The solution is to select all the files in iTunes that belong to the same Album. Right-click and choose "Get Info" from the menu (you may get a warning here that you are changing multiple items). You should see them as all having the same Album name. If they don't then edit the "Album" field with the name of the Album. Secondly, set the "Album Artist" field to be "Various Artists". If you click OK, you should now see the music in iTunes shown as being part of the same Album.

I quite often then go to the "Options" tab, and set the option "Part of a Compilation" to be "Yes", and because a lot of my music tends to be electronica and dance music, I also set "Gapless Album" to be "Yes".

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1. Great Quote

Although the origins sound quite dodgy, apparently the exercises have been verified as a form of Tibetan Yoga. The key point for me is that the exercises can be done in 10 minutes a day.

There are 5 exercises:

1. The first is extremely lame and is essentially spinning around with your arms outstretched, turning from left to right. Lame. Ignore.

2. The second exercise is leg raises, while raising the head to the chest at the same time. Good core strength workout.

3. The third exercise seems to be stretching forward from a kneeling position to child's pose, and then back to a seated back bend.

4. The fourth exercise goes from seated staff pose, and then pushing up to bridge pose.

5. The fifth exercise goes from downward dog to cobra pose.

Apart from the first exercise, which seems quite silly and pointless, these sound like a great set of exercises for a quick workout routine.

Here are some links to THT demos on youtube:

• Sarah Kline demoing
• Maryse Moerel demoing

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After a bit of googling I found kjk's script evernote-to-file.py over at Github. A little bit of Pythonic bastardisation later, and I modified the script to extract the notes to a directory, creating directory names that match the notebook names in Evernote. I also updated the script a bit, as it didn't work with my version of Evernote.

I have uploaded the source code to my repository at Github, so it is available for general use.

It works OK at the moment, but future plans would be to track the notes by ID in an index file, and so if I move the notes around in Evernote, I can make the corresponding changes on my local filesystem.

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Close-up of a new razor blade

Please try to use the microscope with Photo Booth first before downloading the driver, and let me know in the comments if that works.

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        <key>NSKeyEquivalent</key>
             <dict>
                 <key>default</key>
                 <string>/</string>
             </dict>
             <key>NSMenuItem</key>
             <dict>
                 <key>default</key>
                 <string>DEVONthink Pro/Lookup...</string>
             </dict>

Delete the "/" character from the "<string>/</string>" line. Once you log out and log back in, this should be fixed. Save a copy of this file before you change it, just in case you screw up.

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for i in *.wma ; do
  MN=`basename "$i" .wma`.mp3
  mplayer -vo null -vc null -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader "$i"
  sox audiodump.wav "${MN}"
  rm audiodump.wav
done
 

I probably can just output straight to MP3 from mplayer, but I couldn't be bothered reading through the mplayer man page to work out how to do it!

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