Two useful gadgets

I have to say I am impressed with BNZ’s netguard card. I had put off getting one for my Internet banking because I thought it would be one of the clunky electronic gizmos which flashes a new code every minute.

But it is just a credit card sized card with a 7×7 matrix on the back with a letter or digit in each square. They prompt you for three squares each time you login, which is very quick to do.  Hardly a hassle at all, and definitely more secure.

The chance of someone guessing the right responses on any given login is 1 in 46,656 (36^3). And the chance of guessing your entire card is 1 in 36^49 which is 1 in 1.81×10^76.

The other cool thing lately is that Google Calendar now has a plugin to sychronise with MS Outlook.  This means I can let people view my busy/free times in Google, have appts synchronise with Outlook (where I make most of my appts) and have them also transfer to my Blackberry to remind me of the appt when on the road.

The only bad thing is discovering this may have cost me a Blackberry. I have been looking for a way to synchronise Google Calendar and Outlook for months and tried every setting there was. So I casually remarked to one of my staff that if she could discover a way to do it, she’d get the Blackberry she had been pestering me for. By pure coincidence, Google had earlier that day released their Outlook plugin, and it was a front page link from Google Calendar.  So she is insisting I owe her a Blackberry for her two minutes of work.