This is just a post that lists and explains what they do and what they’re for.
First up is this wonderful little thing called LastPass. It's a password manager that saves any password you want. You log into a website and LastPass offers to save your password and login information. Some people might be worried about storing all of their passwords for everything in the cloud. Lifehacker gives a solid explanation as to why LastPass is just about as close to secure as you can get. When they thought that they had been hacked in 2011, they imposed a mandatory Master Password change when anyone was logging from an untrusted IP address. It’s free on all app stores so you can sync across everything. When you use the app on your phone or mobile device, there is a perpetual notification in your drop down bar that you can tap that opens a little box on screen. You can tap which login information you want to use then it gives you the option to copy the username and/or the password so you can paste it into the username/password bar on the app/website. You really should make our Master Password as secure as you can because, with that, someone would have access to everything you can. Mine is 23 characters long. LastPass also has a feature that auto-changes your passwords and saves them at the same time. It will generate a random string of characters (up to 100) for your passwords. This is why it’s necessary to have the app on all of your devices; there’s no way you can remember 50+ different passwords of 100 characters each.
Next, an app called Twilight. Studies by various universities, including Harvard, have discovered that blue light has profound effects. Blue light waves are the among the shortest, highest energy wavelengths in the visible light spectrum. Because they are shorter, these "Blue" or High Energy Visible (HEV) wavelengths flicker more easily than longer, weaker wavelengths. This kind of flickering creates a glare that can reduce visual contrast and affect sharpness and clarity. This flickering and glaring may be one of the reasons for eyestrain, headaches, physical and mental fatigue caused by many hours sitting in front of a computer screen or other electronic device. Our eyes' natural filters do not provide sufficient protection against blue light rays from the sun, let alone the blue light emanating from these devices or from blue light emitted from fluorescent-light tubes. Prolonged exposure to blue light may cause retinal damage and contribute to age-related macular degeneration, which can lead to loss of vision.
The most common effect of exposure to blue light is the disruption of circadian sleep patterns. The sun’s rays are white light and white light is every wavelength including blue light’s wavelengths. That is how you wake up with the sun. Blue light, produced by the sun, biochemically disrupts your circadian rhythms and waking you up. Twilight is a blue light filter app for Android devices. All it does is filter blue light so you don’t see it and it doesn’t disrupt your sleep patterns. You can set it to your location so the intensity of the filter increases as the sun goes down and decreases as the sun rises. You can also set it to use different colors for the filter. The Kindle Fire is customisable with different blends of colors from red to yellow. Twilight offers colors from red to yellow to blue. The blue filter actually filters other colors out so blue is the color you see. With this filter, you are more energised rather than less energised. It can also be set the filter to dim your display incrementally as the sun goes down and increase in brightness as the sun goes up.
Another amazing app is Evernote. It is an online note taking and note sharing system. You can take handwritten notes on the app (free on GPlay and Apple) as well as typed notes on the web application. This app lets you scan documents, set reminders, take notes, handwrite/type shopping lists, and whatever else you need. It also lets you sync across devices. You can use the web app to take notes in college classes and use the mobile app to study. You could use the mobile app to draw a diagram and the web app to copy and paste it into a document. It’s amazing and useful for all of your everyday needs.
The final app up for review is called dotVPN (.VPN). VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. A VPN protects your internet privacy and prevents proxy networks from blocking websites. Think about it like this: Your request is inside a sealed envelope. The address on the outside is to a Google server. The proxy, as it reads the address, will open the envelope and read where you want to go. If the proxy has it blacklisted, it blocks the request. The VPN opens an encrypted, secure, VPN tunnel that essentially puts your envelope in another envelope. The proxy can’t look at the contents of the VPN’s envelope because it’s encrypted. All it can read it the address. After it reads the address, the proxy send the request to the VPN server, the VPN server reads the address (without opening the envelope) and sends it to the destination. Google, as the destination, would open the envelope, process the request, then give you the relevant information. Using a VPN does make your internet slower. This is only because of the encryption that’s happening on both sides. Your device encrypts the request, sends it to the server who decrypts the request, then encrypts it again, then sends it to the destination, the destinations processes, then sends the results back to the server, the server encrypts the information, sends it to your device, then your device will decrypt the information again. It’s not as slow as you might expect after reading all of that but it is still slower than Spectrum’s high speed internet.
I hope you found this post interesting and that you’ll consider downloading and using these apps!
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