A fun game based on Google Maps. It plops you somewhere in the world, restricts what you can do with the typical map controls, and encourages you to explore, find clues, and determine exactly where in the world you are.

The closer you guess, the more points you get. The better your Google-fu (in a separate browser tab, admittedly), the better your score too.

The first time I played, I scored 22,905 points. Can you beat it?

Oh yeah, I started using Vine App. It’s kinda neat to toy around with and make 6 second videos, though I’m not really sure how much I’ll end up using it.

There is an interesting website where you can check out instant, real-time uploads from Vine users all over the place. They are public, after all. It is disturbingly voyeuristic, but at the same time it provides a fascinating glimpse into society, from goofing off during class to playing with kittens. Check it out.

I guess I know what I’ll be doing this weekend…making sure none of the Hostgator servers under my control were rooted. At least it sounds like the situation was mitigated.

You all might want to check your servers, if you have any with Hostgator.

Lazarus
A web browser add-on that auto-saves any web form you are filling out. Never again will you lose that perfect Facebook political argument reply you’d been working on for an hour until your browser crashed. It be free. It be cool.

Feedly
This is what has replaced my Google Reader account now that Google has announced it will be shutting down Reader this summer. It’s simple, though it takes a little getting used to, and it will import all your feeds from Google Reader automatically.

Mailplane
My favorite way to use GMail and Google Calendar on my Mac(s). It lets me keep multiple accounts open at once in a tabbed interface, seamlessly switching back and forth to get things done. It also works with Google tasks.

The investigation has shown… that the individual(s) responsible were able to gain access to Evernote user information, which includes usernames, email addresses associated with Evernote accounts, and encrypted passwords. Even though this information was accessed, the passwords stored by Evernote are protected by one-way encryption. (In technical terms, they are hashed and salted.)

After following the very geeky discussion about it in /r/netsec I was left wondering if I was placing too much faith in Evernote to protect all the brain dumps, notes, files, and private information I like to store in it.

Cloudy with a chance of security breach

After stumbling across this blog post entitled “Evernote doesn’t really care about security” I became convinced that it was time to leave Evernote. The security breach was actually the last straw in a number of things that have been bugging me more often than not — frequent crashes being the chief one.

Sometime around when Evernote added Skitch, the whole shebang started crashing on me frequently. I’m a premium Evernote user, and dealing with the app crashing multiple times a day quickly became aggravating. It has been almost unusable at times. That does not bode well for something you need to access frequently throughout a given day.

Then there were the issues where my notes were not synching between my laptop and my desktop, which I don’t really need to go into. You’ve probably had them too, if you are an Evernote user on more than one computer.

Lastly, I mentioned I was a paid Evernote user, but I never found myself using the paid features. The other big issue for me was with tagging – I would add tags to notes but then forget about them and never use them to find things. The inability to organize notes hierarchically is very necessary to me as someone who thinks that way due to my years as a sysad and developer, and I couldn’t get used to everything having to be arranged with tags.

Faith In The Cloud?

So my question yesterday became: “Where do I put all this info I have in Evernote that is more secure and can be synched and access between my phone, laptop, and desktop?”

Security experts mostly agree that putting secure information in the cloud is not a very good idea. But I want to have faith that it can be, and there are companies making an effort in that regard. I turned to a solution that was right under my nose: Google Drive.

Why Google Drive over Dropbox or some other service? Because it integrates easily with everything I already use, and more and more features and interactions with it are becoming available. I, for one, welcome our new Google overlords.

I’m still working on moving everything over from Evernote to Google Drive, and it’s not a simple process, but I think I will be able to live with it. I’ll also be able to rest a little better knowing that, while my data is still in the cloud, Google seems to value it more than Evernote.

Other fed up users are coming up with their own solutions for replacing their faith in Evernote.

What will be yours?

You may remember this

Be sure to check out the one and only Gray Chatham. And then there is his Twitter feed. Oh, and his Youtube channel.

It has been really interesting to watch him ‘grow’ into the always-on, networked, online world. Much of it he learns through Minecraft, and thanks to Minecraft he recently bought his first piece of Internet meme clothing: the trollface t-shirt.

Their website is deepchathammusic.com. I have a website called chathammusic.com. Even weirder.

In other news, my solo album, Geekamongus, made it onto the Mountain Xpress’s list of 16 Albums We Loved in 2012. Spiffy!