Time to Change my Password Again

This morning I got an automated e-mail telling me it is time to change my password again. I have been getting them for the past several days and if I wait until tomorrow it will be too late. I have written in the past about ideas for passwords and I got another good suggestion today.

The password for my laptop has remained relatively the same for the past 10 iterations. I use something like "ThisIsVersion1ofMyPassword." It is a long sentence and all I need to do is change the version number to the next one in the sequence. It works well except I didn't want to start adding 2-digit numbers. One of my colleagues suggested using letters. At first I thought that would be a horrible idea because "ThisIsVersionaofMyPassword" just doesn't make as much sense. Sure it is easy to remember and I definitely think it makes it more difficult for people to guess my password. After all, what does "a" represent?

I thought about it a bit more and remembered the line from the movie "The Martian" where Matt Damon has an epiphany with hexadecimals. For those that don't know, hexadecimal is a base-16 numbering system. Instead of creating new symbols for the numbers between 10 and 15, you just use the letters a, b, c, d, e, and f. The letter a is equivalent to 10, b = 11, c = 12, etc. If you ever take a peek at your computer or phone's MAC address, it is stored in a hexadecimal number. So to me, "ThisIsVersionaofMyPassword" is really equivalent to "ThisIsVersion10ofMyPassword" but with one less character.

While saving one character in a really long password is not that big of a deal, I have discovered that typing a single letter is significantly easier than typing a number. Don't get me wrong, I still include other numbers in my passwords to make them more difficult to guess. Reducing the amount of them makes my password easier to type. Hopefully you will find this trick useful with your passwords as well.