Views of a Modern World

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How to import firefox passwords into 1Password v4

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I recently purchased 1Password v4. I thought, reading the reviews and the FAQ, that it would import the 548 password combinations I evidently had stored in Firefox.

NOT TRUE.

The product was shipped with only the ability to import its own format (thanks for nothing) and CSV files.

Checking, opening, and retyping 548 sets of URL, username, and password sounded like exactly Zero Fun.

Here’s the workaround that 1Password should have kindly shared with new users, modified slightly from my post on their forum.

  1. Here’s an extension for Firefox that (in Firefox 24) exported my 548 saved passwords to a .csv file: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/password-exporter/ The extension tells you how may exported items there are. This is a quick check to see if there’s a major problem in your process (but keep in mind it won’t confirm that they’re properly converted at each step).

  2. Export was very quick.

  3. USE 1Pv3 to import. Use the legacy download page. I used v3.8.2.1 for Lion with no ill effects on Mountain Lion.

  4. File/Import. Select the csv file. (In 1Pv4, this must have the .csv extension, so mine now did from an earlier failed attempt.) You will have to adjust the fields manually to ensure they match and select “Login” as type. 548 logins imported in my case, which matches 

  5. Export all to 1PIF (just in case) to desktop. Not encrypted – remember to delete later.

  6. Close 1Pv3.

  7. Reinstalled 1Pv4 (from App Store, in my case). It remembered my earlier master password.

  8. Import the 1PIF folder.

  9. 548 items imported. 

  10. I tested a few items to see if they worked, which is also about learning the application. It all looks good to my newbie eye.

Drying out a phone after acute water exposure

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I was recently in a Starbucks, fand my phone was perched [a little] too precariously. It fell. Into water. I was right there, of course, and snatched it out in less than a second. (Of course, this is purely hypothetical.)

My luck was not all bad. There was an enormous high-speed dryer there (Dylan calls it a “trapezoid dryer” – I think there’s a trapezoid design underneath.

Graphite front

I cranked it up — high-temperature air at high speed, across every corner, curve, angle, and surface of the phone. I went for about two minutes, maybe three, until the phone felt warm to the touch and looked bone-dry from every angle. Luck was with me – no problems then or since.

So, add “restroom” visit to your list of viable solutions to water+phone problems. I’m thinking that home blow dryers would be just as effective. Good luck.

Some things don’t belong in the task list

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Randomly happened upon this old 43Folders post on appending text via QuickSilver. Thinking about how fast that is for certain types of lists (books for library/amazon — and right, I know I haven’t put the library first in practice, but that’s exactly why I wrote it that way!; wines – but that seems like a worthless endeavor after a while, right?; restaurants in other cities – is that really a “travel” task?; random ideas for gifts, websites, and similar things – text files all cross-link; I should put them in DVT (Pro Office FTW!) if it became useful to track them — indeed, the whole lot of text files can probably be added to DVT as part of an indexed folder.

This little tidbit will get added to my workflow post (forthcoming!) for sure!

It’s not quite zero-effort, but it’s more lightweight than my current system of adding these bits as individual items in OmniFocus and then consolidating them randomly. Not only do I create more work than is probably warranted by a reference link, the list of references isn’t a task. David Allen is already preparing to roll over in his grave. There is a burden to seeing that I still have nearly 2500 entries in OF (no lie!), even after pulling out well over 100 partly written blog posts. 

Much of that material is reference stuff that got added to my Outlook task list when that was my tool of choice (platform-dependent: I bought OmniFocus very soon after getting my Macbook Air). The workflow simplicity of email something and then drag it to the task list to keep track of it (hosted Exchange is one version of a backup plan!) was commendable. But I definitely stored lots of things in the task list that didn’t belong there.

To preview things a bit, the workflow post covers the shifts in my tools, process, and thinking (deliberately ordered that way) after switching to the Mac created an opportunity for deliberate planning — path dependency no more!

Unclutterer discovers the dummy cord

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In this brief post, Unclutterer describes a little elastic band, cord, and sticky piece that helps keep the lens cap of an SLR camera from disappearing.

In the Army, this rope or lanyard used for the technique of “physically securing loss-prone objects” is called a dummy cord.

In some units or places, notably Ranger School, it’s common to attach a motherlode of dummy cords to your gear. Basically, everything that is expensive, small, easy to lose, or important gets attached, meaning tied with a rope, to you or your gear. Skilled soldiers often use a D-ring or carabiner to collect dummy cords that are pre-tied with a useful knot, like an end-of-the-rope bowline (IIRC), that leaves a standard bight (that’s technical lingo for a loop) that stays in the rope.

Another way to think of a dummy cord or related system is like a key ring for your gear. I recall tying canteens to my LBE and the caps to the canteens. I bought my boys steel sports bottles with a carabiner so they could just attach to a backpack. (Nathan likes that they say “Nathan” on them.)

I find the comments on the original post amusing, saying that the author should just remember to put the lens cap in a pocket. Of course, if we all always remembered those things, or weren’t so tired we would talk to a yucca plant about our favorite foods, then simple habits would always suffice. And we would probably never need to-do lists or grocery lists or yellow lights on our gas gauges. But we’re all human and remembering lots of modestly important items is often not worth the effort. Am I off base? How big of a business is Getting Things Done? How big is that ecosystem?

Are there items that you dummy cord when you travel or on a regular basis?

QuickSilver fix-it tip

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I recently started with my new MacBook Air, aka the Airbook. I have long been hearing about mythical programs like QuickSilver and OmniFocus (both of which I use now) and even DevonThink (which I’m starting to use and just bought).

But today QS decided to break and stop opening up my mail application and a few random others. Since the application launcher feature of QS is pretty much DOA if it doesn’t launch things, this was bad and no fun.

But, a little googling, some unfruitful techniques, and I found the answer. Thanks Alex!

Email tips? Really?

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One of my favorite authors, Seth Godin, recently posted another little list of email tips.

Of course, they’re pretty much all useful and accurate. I mean, it’s hard to write a “tip” that is flat-out wrong. But I was thinking about it more in the sense of why, in 2010, do high-profile people with things to say get caught up in “email tips” or other minutiae of their fields?

For Seth, email is no more specially relevant (in the sense it’s discussed here) than it is for pretty much anyone. (He does have special things to say about marketing emails to customers and how to dance the tango with that one; but that’s really about marketing, not email.) For Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures, the basic, undergrad level stuff about finance that he’s been posting as “MBA Mondays” is far below the level at which he’s presumably operating (assumption based on: Wharton MBA, co-founder Flatiron Partners, investor in Twitter, Foursquare, Etsy, Meetup, Return Path, Del.icio.us, Feedburner).

So two questions: first, why don’t we know how to use email yet? Is it really just that everyone my parents’ age is emailing all the time now? Really? For work? They’re in their early 60s. I don’t think there are many folks that age just starting to use email in the workplace, but I could be wrong. Show me, and I’ll believe it.

What should experts write about?

Second, if you’re a hotshot guru, if you’re an actual expert at something, even if that’s being an expert in communicating about something that seems mundane or even unimportant or at least non-mystical to many people (Blogs about wine? Gardening? Cooking? With a waffle iron?), what would drive you to spend time on these types of seemingly low-value questions? Is it just about sharing what’s free?

I thought recently about why I answer basic questions in my field — it’s because my clients are not experts in the field and these seemingly basic questions are not basic for them. So it’s my belief that these readers get value disproportionate (hopefully in their favor!) to my cost to provide it. It gives them a chance to learn about my way of approaching problems, a sense of my depth of of knowledge on the real issues, and maybe even an introduction to me when we wouldn’t have met otherwise. So sure, the Five-Minute General Counsel series is marketing. But it provides value because it’s me talking about topics on which I am an expert.

I am worried about the viability of my potential client base, however, if the pool of startup candidates for Fred’s attention are so far down the learning curve in terms of business planning that they don’t understand discount rates, CAGR, or the law of large numbers. Conveniently for many of them, I’m well-versed in finance too. Financial models and ranger-level attention to detail? Match made in heaven (twice).

Front-line management (which is the starting point for most leadership development) has had its share of tips from me, which I think of as different, but maybe that’s not true. And I’ve written about email and productivity too. Part of the productivity dance is sharing what works for me, a version of the mobile professional: I’m a lawyer and strategic advisor who works with relatively small teams on any particular engagement or matter. My advice is  (not the same as having 75+ people working on a software beta launch).

Email tips? Really?

So back to the main point: really, do we still need email tips? Even people of my generation (early 40s, or what I like to call “mid-30s”) who didn’t see email commonly until after college (for me, it was law school in 1994 at Cornell that introduced email as a common tool), have still had 15+ years of experience with email.

If we keep working at this level, if we don’t expect some kind of improvement, we’re going to be telling people every year for the next 50 years about how to write emails, how to read email, and how to save money for retirement.

We can’t have our smartest guides, our best communicators, teaching remedial classes. Not if we want to make any progress.

When don’t you need an app?

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Confession: I bought an iPad, the smallest wifi-only version. I wanted something that was more functional than my Blackberry Pearl but with a more convenient form factor than my laptop for use during parts of my commute.

Here’s the question: I’ve been using Basecamp for internal (and now external) projects, and I had been of the impression that I would/should get an app to work with that site. I’d seen lists of iphone apps, including basecamp’s own list.

But I was trying to get a handle on which one to get; review seem scarce, and the app store model makes it impossible to try unless the maker has created a “lite” version (see Headquarters and their lite version: the app framework might be one where what used to be called “crippleware” doesn’t seem to be so bad.)

But last night, on a whim that seemed silly at the time, I just fired up the Basecamp website to see how broken it would be. Pleasant surprise: it worked pretty darn fine, just like on my laptop. Now, in fairness, I did identify one missing feature: the ability to rearrange tasks in a to-do list was missing (the little 4-way arrow was not there at all). Maybe that’s the dreaded no-flash problem. I can deal.

What this makes me think about, though, is a couple things: first, I just saved $10 or $12; second, those app companies are definitely confined to a niche; third, apps that access web services have their days numbered as mobile browsers improve (or, in the case of the iPad, screen sizes and keyboard functions).

Where these apps would create an immediate urge to buy would be if they mimicked “desktop” add-ons to Basecamp, such that they could operate offline and upload/sync my changes later. True, part of that feature needs to be implemented in the underlying web service, but wifi and 3G haven’t eliminated the need for the mobile professional to be functional when there’s no connection.

[Ed.: followup–  Outpost claims “full offline capabilities.” That’s the secret sauce; I think this app will make the cut for a full-fledged review/shootout.]

At ThoughtStorm [http://thoughtstorm.com/], we were fans of Groove (it still lives on my several machines, in fact) because of the online/offline capability. Until a client accepts my excuse of “I couldn’t work on it because I couldn’t get a connection in the subway or on the plane,” people like me will always have a need to maintain local/offline access to our materials, even if they are backed up to, or even exist primarily, in the cloud. (See more on this concern in my review of PlanPlus Online.

When do you decide that you want/need an app vs. just using the website? There are tools to “make an app” from your blog. Does this make sense? Do you use these apps yourself to read favorite blogs?

Fauxtivation

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What is Fauxtivation?

It’s hiding the ball from your customers to try to create a motivation to engage with your company that they wouldn’t naturally have, i.e., don’t need and don’t want.

Example: “emailing” travel reservation info that consists of a link to a website rather than, you know, the actual itinerary info. (Tip: that means you, Expedia.)

History: probably a holdover from the days of hits, page views, and monetizing eyeballs.

Also seen when “giving away” an eBook that actually requires you to confirm your email, ostensibly for the purpose of getting a link to the file but really for the purpose of adding you to the author’s email marketing list. (Tech tip: you need my email if you’re going to email me; if the PDF is hosted on your website, you could, you know, provide a link.)

BUT SEE Copyblogger/Chris Garrett’s Authority Rules ebook and Seth Godin’s recent What Matters Now.

If your business model or marketing plan hinges on getting people to give you an email address so you can send them things they haven’t actually asked for (and “opt-in” isn’t the same as asking for your marketing pitch), you might want to rethink that strategy or at least figure out how you’re going to move away from it. Remember, your customers are your friends. If you treat them that way, they might just become fans.

How-to: Forward a Facebook event to your friends

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My son’s school, REED Academy has a Facebook fan page as well. I created that page since I’ve been using social media, including blogs, twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to expand awareness of causes important to me as well as teach people about my legal expertise in corporate governance and my practice in special education / IDEA law for families of autistic children like mine.

One way to continue the flow of the conversation and activity on a Facebook page is to schedule events through the page and invite your fans. You shouldn’t just make up events; they should be meaningful to your audience from their perspective.

Since REED is having its Seventh Annual Fall Fundraiser next month, I added the event details to the Facebook page. The tools allow you to easily signal all the fans, but even though the school has 200+ fans (not bad for a school of about 20 students), each of those fans has hundreds of facebook friends who they want to invite.

Using our event as an example, here’s how to share an event with your friends on Facebook:

Step 1 – go to the right fan page, like this REED page: http://www.facebook.com/reedacademy

Step 2 – find the event you want to invite people to

Step 3 – look at the menu at the bottom and select the “invite guests” option. (Follow the arrow in this picture.)

Arrow showing "invite guests" option

Arrow showing "invite guests" option

Step 4 – this brings up a neat dialog box that will let you select from everyone in your friends list. It then sends off the event as an invite.

Bonus step – if you also send a link to these instructions to your friends, they could send an invite to their friends as well.

(As an aside, if you just share the event, it’s much harder to add everyone to the list, and there’s a “send as message” option in the lower let of that dialog box.)

If you find this useful and would like more information about how my social media consulting can help you shape and share your message, contact me here.

Memories on TV?

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Quick note: watching an episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay. He’s at Phil’s Fish Market in Monterey, CA (technically Moss Landing). Pam looked at it and said, “hey, isn’t that the place we used to go?”

Turns out it definitely is. We would go to the Aquarium in Monterey with visitors and stop there for a great lunch/early dinner on the way home, or after a day of kayaking on Elkhorn Slough. (Yes, that was pre-children!)

No spoilers here. You can see excerpts on the Phil’s website.