This is your brain. This is your brain on NPR

There were two interesting stories on NPR this morning, one about the brain of the teenager and young adult, and the other about the brain of those of more advanced years. In other words, something for everyone.

I thought there were several interesting things to remember from the broadcasts.

1. The nerve cells in a teenager's frontal lobe are not fully developed, leading to difficulty in creating the association between actions and consequences. 
2. Young adults can learn easily and quickly, since their chemistry is tuned to be responsive to their environment because the cells are so easily excitable. This also makes them more easily susceptible to addictive drugs, which have a longer impact on them than they do on older adults. Young people perform poorly on tasks long after the actual drug experience is past.
3. You can learn while you sleep. Rather than cramming all night for a test or staying up to prepare a presentation, it is better to read the material, then get a good sleep. The brain will process the material and you will wake up knowing it better than when you went to sleep.
4. Aging causes that frontal lobe to slow down, making it harder to retrieve information and slower to respond to it.
5. However, aging also improves the analytical ability of the mind, allowing it to engage in much more complex reasoning, as well as the ability to emphasize with others.
6. Brain cells can continue to grow all through one's life. Growth is encouraged by physical exercise and by engaging the mind in challenging work, such as working on puzzles or working with a computer.

I recommend listening or reading both broadcasts from NPR. You will have to excuse me now. I'm going to go exercise my brain and play some computer games.

Egging you on

Who would have known I needed help in cracking eggs? I came across this in Cooks Illustrated. I don't know if it works yet, since I haven't had a chance to try it. Let me know if you are able to test it out. It may save me from always fishing for egg shells after I crack.

Don't crack the egg on the edge of the bowl or counter. Instead use a flat surface (such as the kitchen counter or a breadboard) and tap the egg, then pull the halves apart over the bowl. Presumably, this results in a cleaner break.

Please tell me that I'm not the only one who didn't know this.

Browse till you drop

I've been a regular reader of PC Magazine since its inception -- back before there were color displays and hard drives. When the Web finally arrived, PC Magazine started compiling what it considered the 100 best Web sites every year. It is something I often consult when I'm trying to find a good place to begin exploring a category. Warning: once you start browsing around these sites, you can spend a lot of time, especially in the "undiscovered" territory. Anyone for bad tattoo art?

After you spend a few hours browsing the best Web sites, you can go waste the rest of your day trying out what PC Magazine considers the best free software of 2009. From music to finance to graphics, most of what you need can be found on the Web for free. If you are spending money, you aren't doing it right.

Books, Books, Books!

To any librarians who read this blog, this news might be as old as the dewey decimal system. Try not to drool, while yawning over your keyboards. But for the rest of you reading folk, here's how to get free books in the mail.

Head over to Goodreads and sign up for their free service. Besides being a great place to keep a record of what you and your buddies are up to, literarily speaking, you can click on the Bookswap section to have someone send you their used books just for the price of shipping. What's more, every time you send 10 books, you get 1 book for F-R-E-E!

Book it Dano.

The cloud gets bigger

If you have a Google account, you can now store all sorts of files in its cloud, and not just word processing documents and spreadsheets, up to 250 MB in size. This is a good option if you need to use a file from different computers, or you want to keep certain files backed up for safe keeping. One of the best uses might be for file sharing. You can share a file or folder with other people, making it easy to collaborate on projects and to avoid file transfer problems with e-mail attachments. There are limits on the amount of storage you can use unless you pay for a premium account, but for day-to-day use it should be more than sufficient for most of us.

Book it

RoomAtlas is a nice little application. You put in a city or place you want to go, and a mash-up with a mapping service visually locates where the hotels are and how much they cost. Color coding makes it easy to find out where you can get the best bargains.You can set filters, such as those that accept pets or have a restaurant, to refine your search. You can even use it for foreign travel.

A new feature looks very useful if you are organizing an event. You can create a hotel map of the area, add some information for visitors (such as a link to restaurant sites), and add the dates. You are then given a unique URL you can share with your visitors to make it easier for them to find lodging.

This one is going in my Delicious folder for Travel.

I've got a secret

It is time to get serious. There are more news stories circulating about hackers getting control of e-mail accounts. Once a hacker gains access to one of your accounts, it is a wedge to start gaining control of more of your passwords and personal information. You may not even know it is happening for years.

I've been using a password manager that generates strong passwords. Strong passwords are one of the keys to being safe. Another key is not to use the same password for more than one site, and to keep them in a way hackers can't find. I can't recommend strongly enough that you exercise control over your computing environment.

Here is what Imperva says are the twenty most popular passwords. If you use one of these, you should probably just shoot yourself now. There is a good chance you have already been hacked.

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123
11. Nicole
12. Daniel
13. babygirl
14. monkey
15. Jessica
16. Lovely
17. michael
18. Ashley
19. 654321
20. Qwerty

People deal with all their passwords in differnt ways, and hackers know them all. Which one of these things do you do to keep all of your passwords straight? How about store them in a browser so they get automatically entered when you visit a Website, write them on scraps pieces of paper, put them in an e-mail to yourself, write then up in a Microsoft Word document, store them online in a Google Docs account, or just use one or two passwords for everything? I have 231 passwords right now, so I know this is not easy.

But before despairing, I recommend you use use LastPass to manage your passwords. It will help you use strong, unique passwords, and automatically fill them in for you when you visit a page. The passwords are encrypted to keep them safe. The system syncs everything up so you can use your passwords on different computers. It even has a way for you to use your passwords safely on a public computer, such as in a library. You can share a password with another user (such as joint banking accounts), so if one person changes the password both users get updated. You can define the length of a password, and if it should include numbers or special characters. You can also use LastPass to store secure information, such as credit card numbers, so you never have to enter in this information when purchasing online.

Oh, and it is free. What's not to like?

There are a couple of important things to remember about using LastPass. One is to use a strong master password that you will remember. (If you forget the password, you are sunk.) One ways I like to do this is with a phrase of some sort that you will remember -- song lyrics, a poem, a saying, a combination of addresses. It is good if you can mix things into it other than letters. Take for example, the line from the nursery rhyme:

Three blind mice, three blind mice. See how the run

This can be transformed into a strong password by converting the numbers to digits and using the first letter of each word:

3bm, 3bm. Shtr

This is a 14 character password that does not contain any dictionary words, and includes both upper and lower characters, digits, special characters, and spaces. (Hint: don't use this one; come up with your own.) To help you get started LastPass will scan your computer for all your passwords you have already saved in your browser and encrypt them into your LastPass database. You can then start using your old passwords. I suggest you visit your most important, sensitive sites and use LastPass to generate a new password. This would most likely be any site that has financial or personal data about yourself. Then get rid of that Word file you have that lists your passwords.

One enlightening exercise is to use the LastPass security analysis to tell you how secure you actually are. You can run it after you import you passwords into LastPass. It will find all the duplicates and analyze your passwords for strength. I've been working on hardening mine for a while now, and will be happy to challenge anyone to best my score.

Be safe, be happy. Oh, and did I mention that it is free?

Here is some more things to help scare you into action:

• Gmail flaw shows value of strong passwords
• Keep your passwords private--and handy--with LastPass
• If your password is 123456, just make it HackMe