Vigneshwar's blog

I readily admit that I have a yearning to just write, to write something all the time. But I also have a filter in my head. It prevents me from turning my thoughts into words on the screen. It does this because of the self-doubt that we all have within us.

• What if the words we put out there are not adequate?
• Who would even want to read it?
• What is the point?

This is the first part of the two part series on access control and account security. After this, be sure to read Part 2: Multi-factor authentication is for everyone.

Introduction

Let’s face it. In modern life, as an integral part of the digital economy, we have to remember a bemusing number of user account IDs and passwords. With each passing year, more and more services that we avail go online and thus compound this problem.

It’s not easy and it’s certainly not efficient to tackle this manually. And so, to reduce this heavy load, we all come up with our own hacks for storing passwords. This invariably results in us picking up some terrible habits for both choosing passwords and storing them. Some of these include:

1. Reusing the same formula or password-ingredients across accounts over and over to the point where it becomes committed to our muscle memory and we could type them out even in our sleep;

2. Storing passwords in really worrying ways such as

   • writing them in our diary that we might leave at the coffee shop
   • scribbling it on post-it notes which may fly away out the window; or
   • using plain text files on your local drive which would leave us locked out of all our accounts if the disk fails

How to cope with all this?

I am an extensive note-taker.

Today, I began writing a new note in my note-taking app of choice, Bear. This note is of a new kind. It Is metadata or context for existing information in my repository in order to adopt a new approach to organise the knowledge I have accumulated over the years. While my notes are already quite organised, filed under tags and nested sub-tags for convenient access, there is a need for improvement. As the number of notes increase over time, I realise that using tags as the sole form of organisation is neither efficient nor sufficient.

While I have come across the the concept of Personal Knowledge Management earlier, the real trigger for me today to revisit the existing structure was coming across a new note-taking app known as Obsidian. It is a thing of beauty.

Why is it so good?

One idea is to create experiences centred around the end use of lending. Say that there is a loan taken by a user for vehicle financing — they are buying their first car.

Here the following 4 steps to gamification come to mind, revolving around the various parts of the formal lending process.

Tom Scott is a popular YouTuber, producing educational content about History, Science, technology and linguistics.

In one particular episode, he speaks about why Dasani bottled water is not sold in Britain anymore. While walking down the road by the side of the bottling plant in Kent, he explains about the history of the brand’s introduction in UK and the events that followed.

Suddenly, about 3 mins into the video, my attention is drawn to a small text box to the bottom right of the frame.

Background — Why am I answering this question?

Yesterday, I attended a webinar by Peter Akkies, a productivity consultant who I have been following for a few months now on various platforms. It was super nice and he even answered some of my questions. He published a blog post today — Flipping the script: you teach me! — asking a question to readers:

What’s the no. 1 thing you learned about outsourcing or delegating effectively?

And here are my two cents.

How to reflect on your work and career path

Introduction

Finding or shaping a role to be well suited to your career aspirations is a fairly complex process. But like all processes, it is merely a series of simple steps.

Book Authored by Stephen Batchelor

Today is the day of Buddha Purnima or Vesak. This day is for the commemoration of Shakyamuni Gautama Buddha. Coincidentally, today I finished reading the book: Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, by Stephen Batchelor. This post is a review of the book along with some of my thoughts on its contents.

Views on digital editing

Photography is a science. Photography is an art from. It is the recording of light or other electromagnetic radiation. It is putting a thousand words into one frame. It is really complicated. It is fairly simple.

Art is, but, human expression. I hope you agree with me on this definition as this is the basis for all comments that follow.