Brain Assassin

Avatar Teaser Poster

Yay! Who would’ve thought it? Apple just put a teaser trailer of James Cameron’s lat­est project – Avatar – online. Avatar is a 3D sci­ence fic­tion epic, slated for a Decem­ber 18 release this year. The movie is about Jake Sully, a for­mer Marine who was wounded in com­bat on Earth. In order to get rid of the wheel­chair he agrees to par­tic­i­pate in the Avatar pro­gram and con­se­quently to travel to Pan­dora. Pandora’s a planet with a lush rain­for­est veg­e­ta­tion filled with incred­i­ble life­forms. It’s also home to the Na’vi, a humanoid race – just take a look at the poster.

Humans now encroach on Pan­dora in search of valu­able min­er­als and Sully has become part of this encroach­ment. Humans can’t breathe the air on Pan­dora, so they have to make use of a genetically-​​bred human-Na’vi hybrid – an Avatar. These Avatars are liv­ing bod­ies con­trolled by a human dri­ver through  a tech­nol­ogy that links the driver’s mind to the Avatar’s body.  This way, Sully can be whole again and he soon falls in love with a Na’vi woman. Of course, Sully sud­denly finds him­self caught between the mil­i­tary forces of Earth and the Na’vi. Did I men­tion that there will be epic battles?

Any­way, you can find the teaser trailer – includ­ing glo­ri­ous HD vari­ants – over at Apple’s site. The offi­cial site isn’t really infor­ma­tive just yet but if you want to give it a try, visit www.avatarmovie.com. I don’t know about you but I’m going to watch this movie in the the­ater. The trailer doesn’t look that awe­some but you never know.

So, dur­ing the last few weeks I’ve been look­ing for a pass­word man­ager. I recently stum­bled over Robo­Form which is a quite inter­est­ing prod­uct if you’re look­ing for a pass­word man­ager that runs in your browser and acts as a form filler. I tested it for a few days but I didn’t really like it all that much. Robo­Form is con­ve­nient but it only works within your browser. I’d like to have my pass­word man­ager avail­able to me all the time, though. Plus, you absolutely have to pay for Robo­Form after a trial period  of 30 days or it will become seri­ously crip­pled in its functionality.

That’s why I once again turned to KeeP­ass which I’ve used for a short while a few years ago. So, I installed KeeP­ass on my sys­tems and dropped the heav­ily encrypted data­base in my Drop­box account. After con­fig­u­ra­tion I imme­di­ately dis­cov­ered the awe­some poten­tial of a fea­ture called Auto­Type: Just set the focus on the con­trol accept­ing your user­name, press your defined short­cut and the magic hap­pens. KeeP­ass logs you in with the cre­den­tials you pro­vided. Nice, you might think. Well, it didn’t work all too well in the browser. I dis­cov­ered a few scripts on Userscripts.org but not one of them worked as I wanted them too.

No prob­lem, I thought. Just cre­ate one your­self … and here it is: KeeP­ass Auto­Type Enhancer. This script sets the focus on any user­name field it detects on a web page. You can con­fig­ure the script to even focus con­trols that are out­side the view­port so that the browser scroll as nec­es­sary. If you don’t, it will ignore con­trols out­side the view­port. I’ve imple­mented the short­cut CTRL+ALT+S to man­u­ally focus on the user­name field. The short­cut will always set the focus on the appro­pri­ate field even if it isn’t inside the view­port, thus ignor­ing the switch pro­vided in the script. Enjoy!

Dur­ing the last months I got ever more irri­tated by the pass­word man­ager imple­mented in Fire­fox. If you want secu­rity, you have to assign a mas­ter pass­word. Of course, you have to enter it at least once, if you want to make use of the man­ager directly or via inter­est­ing add-​​ons like Secure Login. This add-​​on adds a but­ton that acts sim­i­lar to Opera’s wand. Well, I didn’t much like Fire­fox’ pass­word man­ager because you would have to syn­chro­nize your data­bases if you need your pass­words in more than one loca­tion – at home and at work, for instance.

A few weeks ago, I stum­bled over a pass­word man­ager called Robo­Form. I didn’t have time to check it out back then, but I did today. And let me tell you: I like what I’m see­ing! After a lit­tle con­fig­u­ra­tion it works like a charm. All you have to do is to get an online stor­age ser­vice you’re going to use to sync files. That’s it, you’re done. Of course, you still have to enter your mas­ter pass­word once but that’s the price you pay for secu­rity. By the way, you don’t have to set a mas­ter password.

Any­way, Robo­Form stores and man­ages your pass­words, enters the infor­ma­tion auto­mat­i­cally or man­u­ally, and stores dif­fer­ent iden­ti­ties with lots of addi­tional infor­ma­tion. You can trust it with your credit card or bank­ing account infor­ma­tion. It’s quite flex­i­ble and easy to use. I already love it. Best of all, it’s free. Well, sort of. I won’t save much infor­ma­tion at all after the 30 day trial. Let’s see if I can get my hands on some­thing sim­i­lar or if I have to acquire some licenses. I know, I know, I could use KeeP­ass for free but this tool isn’t designed to act like a filler …