I figured that with my special memory even improving this technique very slightly would leave me in the dark so I decided I’d need a tool to help me. Given that I’ll be using a tool, I decided I may as well go the whole hog and have a different, auto-generated and complex password for everything. Then I found Revelation, a password manager for the GNOME desktop. It seems to be a really neat little app that can store, generate and quality check passwords. It even has a handy little tray applet for quickly copying a particular password into your clipboard and other useful bits and pieces.

Of course the major drawback to this approach is that if I lose the file containing my passwords I’m screwed. So now I have something else to backup. This might seem like a bad thing but actually it meant that I improved my current backup process too. That’s even less interesting that this post so I won’t go into any details

Having said and done all this, I’m sure that even if all my passwords are the same, no-one would ever find out one and then try it in a million different systems. But man would I look like a prize idiot if they did – so just in case I’ll stick with it.