Category: ifttt

By (author unknown), Dilbert Daily Strip – September 24, 2012 at 01:00AM

By Erica Sadun, TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog – September 14, 2012 at 08:00PM

Last year, Steve Sande and I put together a “What can you say to Siri” post that proved to be hugely popular. We’d been working on “Talking to Siri: Learning the Language of Apple’s Intelligent Assistant“, which we initially self-pubbed as an e-book, and then later moved to QUE publishing.

We’re now working on the second edition of “Talking to Siri” and thought we’d update our original post for iOS 6. A lot of people are now using Siri and Siri-related features.

Siri is available on the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 5, the new third generation iPad, and the fifth generation iPod touch. Dictation-only support also appears in OS X Mountain Lion. There’s a lot of Siri going around.

As we work on our update, we thought we’d share the following Apple-supplied examples for using Siri. It’s only a partial list, but it gives a great flavor of what Siri can do.

Standout new features include the sports, movies and restaurant categories recently announced by Apple. But there’s a lot more too.

Siri now supports arbitrary relationships. You can say “Megan Lavey-Heaton is my favorite comics author” and Siri will add that relationship. You can launch applications by saying “Launch Angry Birds” and post to Twitter and Facebook by voice. Siri also now lets you dismiss her (or him) by voice. Say “Goodbye Siri” and Siri will close the interaction window.

The examples that follow below only scratch the surface of what you can do with Siri. We’re having a ton of fun discovering all Siri’s new improved capabilities. Keep your eyes peeled over the next few months as Steve and I share new favorite tricks and tips as we work on our update.

Have you found some great new Siri features? Share them in the comments!

ASKING ABOUT CONTACTS

• What’s Emily’s address?
• What is Susan Park’s phone number?
• When is my wife’s birthday?
• Show Lindsey’s home email address
• What’s my brother’s work address?

FINDING CONTACTS

• Show Brian Conway
• Find people named Park
• Who is Jimmy Patrick?

ESTABLISHING RELATIONSHIPS

• My mom is Susan Park
• Jimmy Patrick is my brother
• Call my brother at work

APP LAUNCHING

• Open Photos
• Play Infinity Blade II

ADDING EVENTS

• Set up a meeting at 9
• Set up a meeting with Jimmy at 9
• Meet with Emily at noon
• Set up a meeting about hiring tomorrow at 9am
• New appointment with Susan Park Friday at 3
• Schedule a planning meeting at 8:30 today in the boardroom

CHANGING EVENTS

• Move my 3pm meeting to 4:30
• Reschedule my appointment with Dr. Patrick to next Monday at 9am
• Add Emily to my meeting with Brian
• Cancel the budget review meeting

ASKING ABOUT EVENTS

• What does the rest of my day look like?
• What’s on my calendar for Friday?
• When is my next appointment?
• When am I meeting with Jimmy?
• Where is my next meeting?

USING ALARMS

• Wake me up tomorrow at 7am
• Set an alarm for 6:30am
• Wake me up in 8 hours
• Change my 6:30 alarm to 6:45
• Turn off my 6:30 alarm
• Delete my 7:30 alarm

CLOCK

• What time is it in Berlin?
• What is today’s date?
• What’s the date this Saturday?

TIMER

• Set the timer for ten minutes
• Show the timer
• Pause the timer
• Resume
• Reset the timer
• Stop it

SENDING EMAIL

• Email Emily about the trip
• Email Lindsey about the change in plans
• New email to Susan Park
• Mail Dad about the rent check
• Email Dr. Patrick and say I got the forms, thanks
• Mail Emily and Brian about the party and say I had a great time

CHECKING EMAIL

• Check email
• Any new email from Jimmy today?
• Show new mail about the lease
• Show the email from Emily yesterday

RESPONDING TO EMAIL

• Reply Dear Susan sorry about the late payment
• Call him at work

FACETIME

• FaceTime Brian
• Make a FaceTime call to Susan Park

FACEBOOK

• Post to Facebook headed to the new Pixar movie
• Write on my wall just landed in San Jose!

FIND MY FRIENDS

• Where’s Brian?
• Where is my sister?
• Is my wife at home?
• Where are all my friends?
• Who is here?
• Who is near me?
• Let me know when Jimmy leaves home
• Let Susan know when I leave work

LOCKSCREEN READING

• Read my notifications
• Do I have any new messages?

MAPS

• Show me the Golden Gate Bridge
• Show me a map of 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino California

LOCAL BUSINESSES

• Find coffee near me
• Where’s the nearest coffee shop?
• Find a gas station near work

NAVIGATION

• How do I get home?
• Directions to my dad’s work
• Get me directions from San Francisco to Santa Barbara
• What’s my next turn?
• Are we there yet?
• What’s my ETA?
• Find a florist along my current route

MAPS

• Show me the Golden Gate Bridge
• Show me a map of 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino California

LOCAL BUSINESSES

• Find coffee near me
• Where’s the nearest coffee shop?
• Find a gas station near work

NAVIGATION

• How do I get home?
• Directions to my dad’s work
• Get me directions from San Francisco to Santa Barbara

SENDING MESSAGES

• Tell Susan I’ll be right there
• Send a message to Brian Conway
• Send a message to Emily saying how about tomorrow
• Tell Lindsey the show was great
• Send a message to Susan on her mobile saying I’ll be late
• Send a message to 408 555 1212
• Text Brian and Emily where are you?

READING MESSAGE ALERTS

• Read my new messages
• Read it again

RESPONDING TO MESSAGES

• Reply that’s great news
• Tell him I’ll be there in 10 minutes
• Call her

SEARCHING FOR MOVIE INFORMATION

• Find Disney movies
• What comedies are playing?
• Who starred in Tron Legacy?
• Who directed Finding Nemo?
• What is Toy Story 3 rated?

FINDING MOVIE SHOWTIMES

• I want to see the new Pixar movie
• What’s playing at the movies tomorrow?
• What’s playing at Main Street Cinema

FINDING MOVIE THEATERS

• Find some movie theaters near my office

READING MOVIE REVIEWS

• Show me the reviews for Toy Story 3

MAJOR MOVIE AWARDS

• Which movie won Best Picture in 1983?

MUSIC

• Play Walk by Foo Fighters
• Play Little Broken Hearts shuffled
• Play Norah Jones
• Play some blues
• Play my party mix
• Shuffle my roadtrip playlist
• Play
• Pause
• Skip

NOTES

• Note that I spent $12 on lunch
• Note to self: check out that new Norah Jones album
• Find my meeting notes
• Show me my notes from June 25

PHONE

• Call Brian
• Call Emily’s mobile
• Call Susan on her work phone
• Call 408 555 1212
• Call home
• FaceTime Emily

REMINDERS

• Add artichokes to my grocery list
• Add skydiving to my bucket list
• Remind me to call mom
• Remind me to call my mom when I get home
• Remember to take an umbrella
• Remind me take my medicine at 6am tomorrow
• Remind me to pick up flowers when I leave here
• Remind me when I leave to call Brian
• Remind me to finish the report by 6
• Victor Agreda is my hairdresser
• Kelly Guimont is my colleague

SEARCHING FOR RESTAURANTS

• Find some burger joints in Baltimore
• Good Mexican restaurants around here

RESERVATIONS

• Table for four in Palo Alto tonight
• Make a reservation at a romantic Italian restaurant tonight at 7pm

RESTAURANT REVIEWS

• Show me the reviews for Seven Hills in San Francisco

SCORES

• Did the Giants win?
• How did Kansas City do?
• What was the score the last time the Tigers played the Red Sox?
• Show me the football scores from last night

GAME SCHEDULES

• When do the Giants play next?
• When is the Boston Red Sox’s first game of the season?
• Show me the schedule for baseball

PLAYER INFORMATION

• Who has the highest slugging percentage?
• Who has the most home runs on the Giants?
• Who has the most goals in soccer?
• Which quarterback has the most passing yards

TEAM INFORMATION

• Show me the roster for the Dodgers
• Who is pitching for the Miami Marlins this season?
• Is anyone on the Red Sox injured?

STOCKS

• What’s Apple’s stock price?
• What is Apple’s PE ratio?
• What did Yahoo close at today?
• How is the Nikkei doing?
• How are the markets doing?
• What is the Dow at?

TWITTER

• Post to Twitter another beautiful day in Cupertino
• Tweet with my location great concert
• Tweet meeting up with Brian Conway for lunch today
• Tweet the new iPad looks insanely great! hashtag Apple Keynote

WEATHER

• What’s the weather for today?
• What’s the weather for tomorrow?
• Will it rain in Cupertino this week?
• Check next week’s forecast for Burlington
• What’s the forecast for this evening?
• How’s the weather in Tampa right now?
• How hot will it be in Palm Springs this weekend?
• What’s the high for Anchorage on Thursday?
• What’s the temperature outside?
• How windy is it out there?
• When is sunrise in Paris?

WEB SEARCH

• Search the web for polar bears
• Search for vegetarian pasta recipes
• Search the web for best cable plans
• Search Wikipedia for Abraham Lincoln
• Bing Foo Fighters (We know, we know. Sorry.)

WOLFRAM ALPHA

• What does repartee mean?
• How many calories in a bagel?
• What is an 18% tip on $86.74 for four people?
• Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?
• How long do dogs live?
• What is the Gossamer Condor?
• What’s the square root of 128?
• How many dollars is €45?
• How many days until Christmas?
• How far away is the Sun?
• When is the next solar eclipse?
• Show me the Orion constellation
• What’s the population of Jamaica?
• How high is Mt. Everest?
• How deep is the Atlantic ocean?
• What’s the price of gasoline in Chicago?

What can you say to Siri in iOS 6? originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 14 Sep 2012 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker – September 22, 2012 at 11:00AM

Apple released iOS 6 this week, bringing a handful of new features to iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. While they defined many of the flagship features, several were left unsaid. These are our 10 favorite secret features in iOS 6.

10. Pull to Refresh

Pull to refresh is one of the greatest gestures that Apple took next to forever to adopt. iOS 6 finally allows you to pull down to refresh your mail accounts and various other data sources. Ignore the reload button and start swiping down.

9. Tons of New Emoji

Some people love their emoji—the cute icons you can add to messages, emails, or really anywhere that accepts text in iOS. Apple just added a ton of new options. If you have your emoji keyboard enabled already, you don’t have to do anything. If not, you can enable it in the Settings app by going to General -> Keyboard -> Keyboards -> Add New Keyboard. That will bring up a list. Choose Emoji and you’re all set.

8. Limit Ad Tracking

Everyone’s trying to track you on the web, and your phone is no different. If you’d rather advertisers not track your activity and serve up targeted ads, iOS 6 lets you turn off tracking with a simple switch. Just head to Settings > General > About > Advertising and flip the switch to On. It may take a little while for you to stop seeing targeted ads, but soon enough your activity should be much more private.

7. Wake Up to a Song

Apple update the Clock app—which I still hold to be my favorite native app—to give the alarm functionality a boost. No longer do you have to wake up to one of your ringtones. Instead, you can pick any song in your library. You could even make a recording of yourself telling you to wake the hell up, sync it to your iDevice, and open your eyes to a sunny day and your own, obnoxious voice. Or you could just pick a song that you like. Regardless, you now have a choice. That’s very much appreciated.

6. Late Night Listening

Although not available on all devices, newer iPhones and iPads have a new EQ setting: Late Night. This option lowers bass levels and attempts to make your music less-intrusive in the evening so you can listen and fall asleep easily without being distracted by anything too jarring. Why Apple didn’t include this option on earlier devices is beyond us, but iOS 6 has shown how much they like to unnecessarily limit their software to keep you from getting off the upgrade treadmill.

5. Only Receive Message Alerts from Your Contacts

Don’t care if you get an iMessage from an unknown source? You don’t have to. If you head into the Settings app, then Notifications, then Messages, you can set your alerts to only show up for your contacts. If you don’t want to be bothered by people who aren’t worth sticking in your contacts—like spam message bots, for example—iOS 6 lets you ignore them.

4. Sync Your Text Expansion Shortcuts Across Devices

Apple added text expansion to iOS 5, and it was awesome, letting you type in long usernames, addresses, and other text with just a few strokes on your keyboard. We showed you some essential shortcuts to set up, and now iOS 6 has made the feature even better, letting you sync it between your other iOS devices (like an iPod touch and an iPad)—along with your custom keyboard dictionary. To do so, you’ll need an iCloud account. Then, just head to Settings > iCloud, and scroll down to Documents & Data. Tap it, flip the switch to On, and do the same on your other iOS 6 devices. Your custom dictionary and shortcuts should stay in sync between all your devices.

3. Launch Apps with Siri

Apple told us Siri got smarter in iOS 6, but they neglected to mention that she’d launch apps for you. All you have to do is activate Siri and then say the word “launch” plus the name of the app you want to open. While this may seem a little lazy, it’s really useful if you have a bunch of apps and don’t necessarily remember where they all are. You no longer need to search—Siri can do the work for you.

2. Archive or Delete Messages in Mail

A common Mail complaint among Gmail users has long been the need to choose between archiving and deleting a message. iOS just never provided a way to choose on the fly. Now you can. To do this, open a message, tap and hold the Archive button, and make your choice. The unfortunate reality is that you have to actually open the message to do this. You can’t tap and hold the Archive button in list view to get these options. That said, it’s a welcome improvement. We still prefer Sparrow, though.

1. Walking Directions in Maps

People are not happy with the new Maps app in iOS 6. It’s full of problems. One of the major complaints is that it only provides driving directions, leaving walkers, bikers, and public transit users behind. The good news is that Apple didn’t leave out these features entirely. In fact, walking directions are still available. To find them, just tap the bent arrow “directions” button in Maps and you’ll see your recent destinations. From there, you can toggle between driving, walking, and public transit. Walking directions will work without issue. Public transit, on the other hand, will try to route you to another app (and fail, for now). Hopefully we’ll see Apple improve Maps quickly and bring back these important, lost features. In the meantime, if this secret feature isn’t enough to satisfy you then check out Lumatic. It might do the trick.

By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – September 21, 2012 at 09:30PM

… isn’t it about time that we recognize the patent system is really, really broken? Courtesy of the always awesome Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (and my friend Tom who sent this over), I present to you, yet another example of “the patent system” being a punchline:

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By Adam Dachis, Lifehacker – September 21, 2012 at 03:00PM

Blocked sinuses are no fun, especially when the problem frequently requires taking a pill. Redditor gymfork points to a clever acupressure method that can solve the problem in just 20 seconds:

Push your tongue against the top of your mouth and place a finger between your eyebrows and apply pressure. Hold it for about 20 seconds and your sinuses will begin to drain.

When you push your tongue against the roof of your mouth, don’t aim for a specific point but rather push it flat against the top. When you let go, you should start to feel a little movement in the back of your throat. It’s a very simple trick that gets the job done.

LPT: How to clear a blocked nose | Reddit

By (author unknown), Dilbert Daily Strip – September 20, 2012 at 01:00AM

By Tim Brookes, MakeUseOf – September 19, 2012 at 08:31PM

Apple’s walled-garden approach to computing has some pretty far-reaching implications for an everyday user of OS X. Apple provides, on the whole, a smooth and pleasant experience while using your computer, partly because the options that will break something aren’t there. Conversely, this approach can be quite limiting – especially to those who are used to endless preferences on Windows or Linux.

The fact is that it’s not particularly easy to tweak Apple’s OS without some extra help (or expert knowledge). Assuming you’re not a Terminal wizard, then you’re probably going to need something like Mountain Tweaks (also known as Lion Tweaks), a handy and free little tool for changing certain aspects of your OS X experience without having to work out how to do it yourself.

For a quick look at what’s included and what Mountain Tweaks won’t fix then read on!

Tweaks Galore

The app comes courtesy of Fredrik Wiker, a teenage developer from Norway who has been collecting a long list of things to mess around with since OS X Lion was the Apple zealot’s OS of choice. He’s not asking for any money for the app, which is both nice of him and somewhat expected – after all, these tweaks are easy enough to perform after a quick search. If you’d like to chuck Fredrik a bone for saving you time and effort then you can do so using the donate button on his website, or the heart icon in-app.

There are two versions of the project at present, one titled Lion Tweaks and the other Mountain Tweaks – I’m sure I don’t have to explain why they’re named that way. As far as I can tell (as a Mountain Lion user) they’re both largely identical in terms of tweaks, except the Mountain Lion version comes with a few tweaks that are specific to 10.8. That means if you’re still using Lion (10.7) you should have no trouble using Mountain Tweaks. Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6) users should get some limited mileage out of this app too.

The app is painfully simple to use, with four tabs to provide you quick access to the different features. They are:

• General Tweaks – for tweaks that are cross-compatible with both 10.7 and 10.8. According to Fredrik, these tweaks should also work on 10.5 and 10.6 (that’s Leopard and Snow Leopard if you’ve been following the feline release formula).
• Lion Tweaks – unsurprisingly, tweaks for those using Lion. These are cross-compatible with 10.8 on the whole.
• Mountain Lion Tweaks – restricted to use with 10.8, mainly because many of the target features do not exist in earlier versions of the OS.
• Restore – for reverting to the system default settings for all of the tweaks you have performed.

In order to activate a tweak, simply click Yes next to its name. In most instances you will need to provide your administrator password in order to action the change. To revert a tweak you’ve just applied, hit the big bold No in the same column – it’s really that simple. 

One thing that Mountain/Lion Tweaks does not do is keep a tally of the tweaks you have enabled, so you might be able to tell if you’ve enabled Hide Spotlight Search but for other tweaks like Disable Autosave for all apps it might not be so obvious. In this instance it might be frugal to keep a count of what you have enabled. If you do lose track then you can always visit the Restore tab and click Restore to system default in order to undo your tweaking.

What’s useful depends on exactly what you wish OS X would let you change, or rather what you would change if you knew it could be done this easily. There’s a good chance that looking through these screenshots will decide whether or not you might find any of these useful, though I will add one point.

The reason I downloaded this app in the first place was due to an increase in UI lag after updating to Mountain Lion. I found out from an Apple Support Communities post that the 3D dock can be disabled easily using Mountain Tweaks’ Enable 2D-Dock option. The amount of lag when switching spaces and minimizing/maximizing windows is unhealthy with dock auto-hiding disabled, and I hoped that this would help. It didn’t. In fact, none of the tweaks here should impact performance all that much – only the user experience. Bare that in mind if you’re looking for a quick fix for Mountain Lion’s performance shortcomings – you won’t find any quick fixes here!

That said, I didn’t delete it when I found out what else it could help me do, which has to be a good thing. If you’re disillusioned with some of the new additions in Lion or Mountain Lion, but love the new Messages app and Notification Centre, then you might find that this tool is exactly what you need to disable some annoyances. Keep your eyes peeled for an update, in which Fredrik might add something to the mysteriously blank Maintenance panel!

Conclusion

Mountain Tweaks is one of those small and handy little all-in-one apps that simply make life that little bit easier when it comes to changing certain aspects of your Mac desktop. Windows users have tools for tweaking their OS, and now Mountain Tweaks gives you a limited selection of things to toggle on Mac OS X too. If you need to change more, then don’t forget you can spice up your desktop, tweak the appearance and dig a little deeper with Tinkertool.

By (author unknown), Waxy.org Links – September 19, 2012 at 05:16PM

ridiculously massive comic, roughly 46 feet wide at 300 dpi [via] 

By James Bruce, MakeUseOf – September 19, 2012 at 04:01PM

Have you heard? Blogs are old news. I hope you didn’t jump on that particular bandwagon. Yep, static sites are the all the rage now; who wants dynamic and fresh content when you can keep the same set of pages up forever?

I’m joking, of course. There has always been the need for various kinds of sites, but the blog format doesn’t fit every requirement. However, WordPress is more than happy to be moulded into whatever you want – blog or otherwise – and today we’ll be talking about making a basically static WordPress website.

You might also want to read these past articles where Joel talked about WordPress theme frameworks, and I showed you some of the more unique kinds of sites you can make with WordPress.

Use Pages

When creating a static website, your usage will focus on Pages, rather than Posts. Unlike a traditional blog post, pages have no associated date and aren’t placed into a date archive. They are designed for static content – things which rarely change, such as “About Me”, or “Contact”.

Pages can also be made hierarchical, meaning each page can have one or more child pages. Whereas blog posts are unstructured but can be sorted according to date, tags, and category, pages are structured arbitrarily by you – the developer. If you want to represent the products you sell for instance, pages may be more suitable in that you can create a parent page for a particular product subtype which gives the customer an overview of all those products, then give each individual product a child page of that.

Trying to achieve the same with posts alone would require the use of a custom category template; and even then you’d be hacking around with product templates to remove the date or re-order them how you want; or you might even have chosen to go down the route of a custom post type – an even more uneccessary complication. Think carefully about how you want to structure information on your website, and you may find Pages are the better solution.

There are SEO concerns too – posts in WordPress have a lot of baggage associated with them. Even a few dated, categorised, and tagged posts create additional URLs on your site in the form of various archives. These are indexed too and may appear in search results. If you have just a few posts, these incur a negative SEO penalty for duplicate content – basically your category archive will look a lot like your index page, for instance.

On the flipside, Google gives points for fresh content. When doing SEO for various companies in the past, I always suggested they try to maintain some semblance of a blog on their corporate site, because producing fresh content on an appropriate topic will always help you rank better. So even if the core content of your site is done with static Pages, I’d still encourage you to keep blog posts somewhere.

Not all content on the web needs a date; some remains relevant. Avoid putting people off old content by simply removing the date. Pages have no date associated; they simply exist.

Adding Comments to Pages

Unlike posts, pages don’t have comments. Not because they can’t, but just because most themes don’t have the code to display the comment template. To solve that, open up page.php (or your custom page-slugname.php template if you only want comments on a particular page), and add the following:

<?php comments_template(); ?>

That’s all it takes really. You may find comments are disabled on the actual page though; edit the page and look for the meta section Discussion.

Change your “homepage”

By default, WordPress is going to list your latest blog posts as the homepage on your site, but this is quite easy to change. Make sure you have another page already created that you’d like to use instead. Then open up Settings – Reading. Change the homepage to be the static page you’d like; and if you want to keep a blog style listing somewhere, set that in the Posts option (this isn’t required though).

Contact Form

It’s quite likely you’re going to want a contact form on a static WordPress website. Often people will try to contact you through the comments, but if you haven’t enabled those on Pages then I’d strongly suggest putting up a contact form somewhere. Start by creating a new Contact page.

Pro-tip: A page named “Contact” is built into WordPress. If you’ve previously deleted it, and now find you’re being given a permalink slug like “/contact–2/” then be sure to empty the trash first – deleted pages remain there with their previous slugs.

Fast Secure Contact Form is a fantastic free plugin – featured on our Best WordPress Plugins page no less – and includes Captcha abilities out of the box. It has a huge range of features and enables you to maintain a number of different contact forms.

The options can be found under Plugins – FS Contact Form Options. Configuring the plugin can be a little daunting as the admin interface isn’t exactly intuitive, but read through the options slowly and all will be well; then embed the form on your contact page using the shortcode: [si-contact-form form=’1’]. You can also set up auto-responders, additional fields, AJAX posting, and even video confering requests via the premium vCita meeting scheduler plugin.

So as you can see, WordPress can literally power any kind of website you want to create. Do you have any more ideas on how to use Pages only to power a static WordPress website? Let us know in the comments!

By Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker – September 19, 2012 at 12:00PM

Tech consultancy company DataGenetics has analyzed the popularity of numeric passwords. What they found confirms previous research that most of our four-digit PINs (e.g., for credit and debit cards) are way too predictable. Check if yours is one of those mentioned in their report.

The data analysed came from exposed password databases. Data Consultancy filtered the results to just those that were exactly four digits long [0-9] and found nearly 3.4 million four-digit passwords. These are used as a proxy for users’ four-digit PIN codes. There are 10,000 possible combinations of digits from 0000 through 9999, and each of those were represented in the dataset.

So out of the 10,000 possible combinations for four-digit codes, which is the most popular? You guessed it: 1234. An alarming ~11% of the 3.4 million passwords are 1234.

The top 20 passwords account for nearly 27% of the total.

Looking at the list at right, you’ll see that the numbers are all familiar, easily predictable patterns, such as 0000, 4321, and 1010.

If you’re using the keypad to make a PIN pattern (e.g., 2580 going straight down), chances are hackers can guess that quickly too.

Other high frequency PINs are years and dates (e.g., MMDD).

Expanding the analysis to all-numeric passwords (not just four-digit ones), guess which are the most popular? Yup, 12345 for 5 digits, 123456 for 6 digits, and so on. (Ranked at #17 for the ten-digit password is 3141592654—the first digits of Pi, so that’s at least a little more imaginative).

What about the least popular PINs? At the bottom at #10,000 is 8068—but that’s not a great idea for your new PIN now that it’s been exposed. The twenty least popular PINs don’t appear to have any predictability.

The moral of the story, as with every password topic, is that we’re pretty bad at choosing truly random passwords and PINs. In the case of your credit or debit card PIN, having one that’s too common would obviously be an issue if a thief steals or finds your wallet, but ATM card skimming also means thieves don’t need your physical card to get into your bank account.

If your PIN number is too predictable or popular, see our article on PIN security and how to come up with new numbers that are more secure.

PIN Analysis | DataGenetics

Photo by Cory Doctorow