I've just reset my Apple ID password. It's now 21 characters log, includes upper and lower case, contains digits, wasn't used in the past year and it's strength is still only 'moderate'.

So as far as Apple are concerned, I'm guessing the only really secure password is one you can't actually remember.

I've been getting more and more annoyed recently with Google returning search results that didn't contain the terms I'd searched for. So I looked into it, and they've removed the implicit + operator. Worse than that, they've removed it altogether so now you have to specify every search term in quotes!

The reasons why are fairly obvious (google plus) but I still think it's pretty annoying.

So I thought it might be worth trying another search engine. I started using duckduckgo thinking I'd be back to google pretty quickly but after about four weeks, I'm still using it. I've reverted to Google a couple of times, but it's easy to do so by prefixing your search with !g.

No adverts, and exactly what I searched for. Looks like a keeper...

I'm not keen on Chrome's wider pinned tabs. I thought the whole idea of pinned tabs was to shrink them down so they take up less room...

Google fired squarely at their own foot with their latest change to the Chrome App Store - comments left on extensions are now displayed in non-chronological order - apparently based on 'review helpfulness'.

This means it's now impossible to see where bugs are reported and fixed and allows non-helpful comments to appear at the top of the list!

I can't help thinking some beta-testing of this particular 'feature' might have been useful...

I'm not sure why, but on my mac (both at home and at work), Chromium's start up time seems to get worse over time.

If you allow Chromium to sync everything then there's a fairly simple way to speed it up again - quit Chromium, and simply delete (or rename if you want to be careful) your ˜/Library/Application Support/Chromium folder. Restart and enable syncing by entering your password. After a short while everything should be back to normal, but next time it will start a lot quicker.

The only thing that seems to be lost is your recent tabs on the new tab page...

Isn't it annoying when you finally realise that a feed has stopped being updated? There ought to be a standard way of posting a 'we have moved' type message...

I would have thought that Permanent Readability would be a more popular extension than Oogle, but it's only just hit 100 users compared to Oogle's 350...

I've just written my second Chrome extension. This one adds a context menu to allow Readability to be triggered automatically for the current website. It works best with the Readability Redux extension, but will work (although slower) without it.

Version one is a bit hamfisted - it works for any URL within the top level domain, but the next version will add support for controlling the list of URLs and use of wildcards to make it more flexible.

Get it here: Permanent Readability.

Apparently not in javascript! You learn something everyday...