 My name is Allison Sherrod and I do the Nozillicast podcast. It's a technology geek podcast with an ever so slight Macintosh bias. And it's a tech podcast. I do mostly Mac stuff, and like I said, with a fair amount of bias on that. But we also talk about photography. We talk about Linux. We'll occasionally let some Android people have conversations in there. Talk about gadgets and all that sort of thing. But today you guys have been brave enough to come to a presentation as there were death in it, and I mean actual death, believe it or not. I'm going to tell you a story of something that happened in our lives and it sort of was an awakening to us of things that maybe we should do in our lives to make sure this doesn't happen to our friends and family. So this is Tim and Alice Fortnum. Did anyone here ever listen to the Mac review cast? Yeah. Yeah, so Tim unfortunately passed away last year. And Tim, as many of you in this room probably are, he is the geek in the family. Anybody here not the geek in the family? You guys are all the geek in the family. So this is actually exactly tailored for you because you guys are the geeks. Alice is not a geek. She's a norm. She's a muggle. I don't care what word you use for it, but she's a regular person and she doesn't know anything about technology whatsoever. So actually let me back up a little bit. So Tim passed away and she called me up on the phone and she said, Alison, Tim didn't trust any of us with his computer gear and his electronics and everything, so he actually had a lock on his door so that nobody could get into his stuff. So nobody knew anything about anything that was in his studio. He had microphones and speakers and computers and storage and all these kinds of things that all of us have and yet nobody knew how to get into his stuff. So she was trying to figure out what to do. She was in Wisconsin and she asked whether somebody from the Mac Brown Table which is a group of us that all podcast together said, can somebody come to my house and figure out what to do with the computer? And I remember the first call she said, I need you to help me with Tim's Mac. And I said, okay, well let's, you know, we could go into Skype and we'll do a screen share. And she says, oh no, I turned off the internet as soon as he died. Okay, it's in a garage, you know, plugged it all and put it all on the garage. That's when I came into the plot. And she had to figure out what to do with this ginormous room full of equipment. So she mailed it to my husband and I. These are the, she mailed 22 moving boxes. She paid $2,800 to ship it to me, hoping we could sell it. So we started in a whole $2,800. Now this came at a very lucky time for us anyway. Steve and I had just retired and so we had time to take a look at this. So here's a picture of Steve and our good friend Dorothy Vendones in the front row there, starting to organize all of this junk that came in our house. It was absolutely astonishing how much stuff she shipped to us. I've got a real short video, let's see if this will play. Okay, so we're just about done with day one. And I don't know, what do you think, Dorothy? You think we're pretty good, right? You wanna shake that? Yeah, I don't want to buy that. Okay, so let's keep going here. That is actually a box that has been collated and tagged and that one's ready to go. We have mags over here, we got speakers, galore. This is the table of misfit toys. We had a way of doing that stuff. And then we've got manuals. Obsessed with keyboards. So I'm sure all of you wouldn't want your dirty laundry out on a video like this showing the things that you had laying around. But this kind of brought up the idea of, well, what can you do to make sure this doesn't happen to the non-geeks in your life? So we had a background table where a bunch of us got together and talked about this and I had the immediate experience of what had happened. But we got together a lot of great ideas. So I sort of have to give credit to the rest of the background table but let's see, none of them are in the room. So no, they didn't do any of the work. This is all me. So we're gonna go through, I think it's four key areas to consider. And the number one thing is, who could access your passwords if something happened to you? So we're not just gonna talk about if you died, but what if you just were disabled in some fashion? You were in a, just a, like say a one month coma. Let's do some just kind of short term like that. What would happen? Who has access to those passwords? What services would you want to have continue if you were incapacitated or worse? You know, I mean if I'm dead maybe certain things wouldn't matter that much but if I was just incapacitated for a while maybe I'd really care that certain things continue to exist. And I'm the only one who knows what those things are. How organized are your electronics? Mine pretty much looked like Tim's until we started thinking about this. So, you know, you might think about some things you can do to organize them that are maybe low, low impact. I'm not into real high impact. Let's make this all really difficult stuff. So the solution is gonna be pretty good, I think. And what could you document that would protect your interest that would allow your friends or family to not go through what Alice went through? Oh, if I see anybody taking notes, by the way, all my slides are available on slideshare.net. And so at the end there will be a link so you can write it down. So you don't have to take any notes. I mean, you can if you want. If you like playing with your iPad, that's okay. So the number one thing, who knows your passwords? This was probably one of the most tragic things in the plot. Tim had a really sweet little MacBook Pro. It had a 256 gig SSD right from Apple. It was a few years old but it was still worth a lot of money except they had a combination lock on it. So we had to pay a locksmith, 50 bucks, to saw it out which of course damaged the case a little bit. It wasn't bad considering what the thing had gone through. So we lost, I don't know, about $250 on the sale of this item. It was probably the most expensive thing we were able to find. Oh, I forgot to say, yeah, the motherboard was dead too so that took some of the price out. But it got us to thinking, who knows your passwords? You know, because if she had known the password to this combination lock that would have saved us $75. Well, we lost all her money. So if you are not already using a password manager please get one. I have no religious affiliation with LastPass or OnePassword. I happen to use LastPass. My friend Dorothy did an exhaustive research study of both of them and when she was done they were equally good so just pick one but pick one. Get yourself a password manager and make sure that somebody knows what your LastPass is, what your OnePassword is because if you have all that great information and then you're snuffed out all that stuff just ceases to exist. Nobody has any way of getting into your information. So consider sharing that password with somebody you trust. Maybe you want to put it in a safe deposit box with a, you know, to be open upon my death. That's okay too. I talked to a guy last night who said, he said, well, my problem is I change my OnePassword every two months. He's like, okay, you're crazy. No helping you. Some people talk about, Kurnit cut it in half and give it to two different people. I still don't understand quite what that one actually does though because if those two people know they have it can't they just go in and go into it right now? I don't understand that one and that's entertaining. So, but if you use one of these, does anybody here not using one of these? Everybody's a couple of people on? Basically what these tools do is allow you to have one freakishly hard password that you can't remember and then you don't have to ever remember any of your other passwords ever again. It's absolutely, they're fantastic. They generate these crazy passwords you can't remember but you don't care because you only have to remember that one. Now you make that one freakishly hard but all the others that you don't care how hard they are because you don't have to remember them. They secure notes for credit cards, for websites. I know, I see that little plunge of credit cards that makes you kind of cringe but right now those pieces of information are sitting in little notebooks right next to our computer so the guy robs your house grabs a computer grabs that notebook, you're dead anyway. So these are really, really, really well-vented safe ways to protect your passwords. So think about what would happen if your credit card got canceled while you were incapacitated it's probably the more important one in this case. So if your credit card got canceled because no one paid the bill because no one knew the account password to go in and pay the bill, you're going to start to see a ripple effect of what's going to go wrong. So as we go through these slides keep thinking about how many things are connected to your passwords and what would happen if those things that actually cease to be there. Do not let your email account disappear. You need your non-geek family to know not to let your email account go away. The one saving grace was that Alice did not cancel Tim's email account so she was able to communicate with me we were able to talk back and forth and guess what comes into your email. Those notifications and things are going to expire. So if that account gets closed those people don't know that your Dropbox account is going to disappear or your credit card is going to get canceled or something like that. So they need to know to keep your email account alive while you're still alive and gracefully otherwise. One thing you could do to make sure a lot of these accounts stay alive if something happens to you is turn on two-factor authentication. Now I've done this but on a couple of things and I'm still taking my own little baby steps towards it because it's kind of scary but two-factor authentication basically means that in order to log into something you not only need the password you need a code that's sent to some other thing like a text message to your phone. The nice thing about a lot of these sites that I did this with my husband Steve is you can have an alternate phone number also get the code. So that's kind of nice so if something were to happen to me Steve would still be able to get into the account because his phone number still is on that account for the authentication. So I did it on I think the main thing I did it on was my website because that's kind of my whole online presence and that's in one place where Steve could get into it even if something were to happen to me. So if you do two-factor authentication make sure it's not just to you because then that defeats the purpose of other people getting in later. Another thing we talked about in the background table session that I'm not giving them any credit for was where your files are. A lot of people now are starting to store files in Dropbox. I don't know if you saw was it Google Drive. Google Drive is the one that just went down to ten bucks a month for a terabyte of storage. So you can pretty much take your whole hard drive shove it into your Google Drive and you've got off-site backup basically at that point for ten bucks a month. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't do that but if you are storing your stuff on Google Drive or OneDrive or Dropbox or Box.net, if you're storing stuff there does it matter? Does it matter if something were to happen to you because if you're using a paid account and then that stopped getting paid what would happen to that data? Maybe that's just fine. Maybe it would just still be only one copy on your computer and that's all okay but just think about how you're using it and what would be important to you if you were to be in capacity and to be able to get back to all of this data. And what could be lost? I mean if that's your precious family photos or all of your bills or your tax records, I mean I don't personally keep my tax records in the cloud but maybe you do. So think about what you could do people might care about that if something were to happen to you. Photos, a lot of us are nerds tend to be photographers I don't know why those two things go together but it seems to go together quite a bit. Do you care about your family photos? Who has managed the family photos for all these years? Maybe you really care what happens to your Flickr account that your family is going to go well that's where all the grandchildren photos are or that's where all my dog photos are and we love Skippy, we're going to have those photos. So you want to think about how those photos are managed if, you know, Smugbong isn't paid for service you got it up there, what would happen to those photos if that account got turned off while you were incapacitated or worse? So that's another angle it's sort of like the Dropbox kind of stuff it's got a different emotional piece to it than maybe your tax records would be This one was really a surprise Tim was a web developer and he died when no one had their passwords all of these people who had their websites did not have access to their own websites and the domain hosting companies just said, yep that's too bad and they lost their sites and one of them was a real estate office it was a rematch real estate office and they lost their website they lost their domain I ended up being contacted by a guy who was a friend of Tim's who was also a developer he's the one who told me and so we're looking through, you know, old weird notebooks from 1972 going well could this be it you know, little scribbled notes if all of this had been in last pass or one pass we wouldn't have had a problem and he had shared that password with someone Backup services this one may or may not be crucial I'm getting all my stuff backed up to crash plan right now if I were to be incapacitated for a month I'm probably not generating any new data that's probably not a big deal and if it got shut off because I didn't pay the bill that wouldn't be catastrophic, right it's not a big mess it would just be a real pain if I had to regenerate this all from scratch so think about whether that matters to you I know a lot of people are looking into these transporter things where people have the same they share transporters I know my friend Pat is back there he's been booking me up to her transporter I just want you to think about if you have a transporter and you have somebody else's data in your house and their data's in your house what would happen if your family went oh, I don't know what this is, let's just throw that away we don't need that so that's another one to think about how those off-site, on-site backup strategies can affect what it is you want to keep you would think that it's not all that important what happens to your Instagram account Facebook, Pinterest, whatever but something terrible happened with Tim Tim was one of the gentlest, kindness sweetest men to ever walk the face of this earth and his account got hacked after he passed away and it was a spam porn hacker so here's Tim's reportance thing coming out with all this wretched, horrible stuff and I just started getting notes from people going hey, can't you shut this off can't you fix this, Allison well, you know what, if he had given his last password one past password to his wife we would have been able to fix that so if I had to have her send me a death certificate I filled out all this paperwork had to be paper mailed with a stamp and mailed it off to Twitter who then like two months later shut off his account you know, it's not the giantest, biggest crisis in the whole world but I know that would have just destroyed him I mean that was just like the worst possible thing so it turns out there's some things you can do about some of these kinds of accounts it must come later, because it's not my next slide so now let's talk about your stuff here's Aaron Dorothy and Steve in this giant pile of rubble that we by the way, we did end up making a profit I should tell you that, that's the nice thing I think we made about $2,000 $2,500 above the $2,800 but that was we tracked the time it took us at first but then after about 120 hours we got tired of writing it down and trying to track it packing and shipping and learning how to sell I didn't know how to sell things on Amazon and that sort of thing so we have a couple of suggestions you could use service like one pass or last pass use secure notes in order to inventory the stuff you have a couple of people on the background table were suggesting what if starting today Katie Floyd has a great comment when she talks about going paperless, she always says stop digging the hole don't go okay, I have to skin and all of this stuff before I can start going forward no, just stop digging the hole you'll go pick that stuff up eventually what if today you go out and buy a new iPhone you scan in your receipt and you shoved it into a secure note you put down the date and time you bought it and how much you paid for it that would tell someone whether something was worth something if they had that little inventory and you had a category in there for what kind of device that was you would have an inventory I started doing this I'm not super good at it yet but it's one of my goals is to get better at doing this they pointed out this would also be would help you out with warranties too I don't know my father in law tapes the receipt to the box or the back of the device this would give your friends and family a clue whether it was valuable if I knew that Tim had spent a thousand dollars on something just a year ago I would know that that was something I really should pursue a whole lot of the time that Dorothy and Steven I spent was just looking things up I don't know, what do you think this is I don't know trying to figure out what it was trying to find out whether it was worth anything because it was a lot of older stuff there's an app called Home Inventory if you like apps and you like playing with little databases this is really cool it's called Home Inventory and I think the price is on there but I can't read it I think it's 20 bucks so it's a little bit steep but it allows you to take a picture of your stuff and you can put in the date and the time and when you bought it and allow you to create that Home Inventory certainly useful with insurance companies as well if you have a fire or something like that that would help you out in that too I do have a little PSA on that I found out when I had all my jewelry stolen they didn't care as much about the receipts as pictures of me with it to be able to prove that I actually did have it so if you're doing your Home Inventory have you with a smile holding up this shiny new iPhone with this certain date just a little PSA there so again if you look at everything in your house that's just going to overwhelm you that's going to be way too hard you're never going to start but you could start today going forward and leave here to go to the show floor you know you're just going to buy something so you could get this and do it one cool thing about Home Inventory is it lets you inventory 10 things before you have to pay so you can kind of see whether it fits your style and the way you want to use it is the file format proprietary for that? is the file format proprietary yes you know what I don't know that would be interesting whether it could spit out a CSV or something like that I'm thinking of putting it out in Dropbox so you lose your Mac like it was PDF and drop it out yeah I doubt it would be PDF like I said it is a database sort of thing but you know the nice thing is you can try it put in 10 items and see if it what it can export yeah that's actually a cool idea alright do you love oh yeah question okay yeah Leon is suggesting that's something to ask the developer about let me find out first whether it actually does have an export format I didn't even think to check that but yeah one thing I really do like is calling the writing to developers it's so often that they write right back to you and tell you you know they might say nope not going to do it but at least you know the answer after that it's funny how I started liking the little developers big and big developers like you got to write to Microsoft and hope for help or Apple not too likely but the person who wrote this might be so passionate about that tool that's a great idea we should do that so do you love being the guy that has that thing that the other guy needs you know what the guy says hey you know what my Lyxis WRT54G just died and I need a new antenna and I'm like yeah I've got one of those it burned up but the antenna is still good anybody that guy I'm that guy apparently Tim was that guy so I had this great idea what if we labeled our boxes I'm not right this one's not hard right had he done that she would not have shipped us a box this big of floppies she probably spent 40 dollars these were 400 meg floppies they were 400 K anyway yeah so I mean I opened it up with nope that must have caused a fortune to send us to us one of them was printer paper I now give it away as party gifts people come to my house for dinner here have a rima paper because I would never use all this paper I mean this is a real simple solution I went to my closet where that WRT54G that's been burned out and has those good antennas and it now says crap on the side of it so if something happens to me Steve is not going to have to fish through and figure out what it is simple solution I told you I'd give you some easy one one of the biggest nightmares actually it was fun it was kind of fun to be honest we played match game at the house Dorothy would come in and she'd say okay maybe I've seen something that plug into that and then we'd all go wait wait no I saw that one and you know you did go climb over a bunch of stuff and go fight something oh shoot no it's rough but it's not the right size you know that's the wrong volts I wasn't wrong and I am so whatever although it was electrical terms and it was a nightmare this by the way is a picture of the ones I have left from Tim's estate I don't know what they go to we apparently threw those away I don't know we did do the ruthless at the beginning Stephen Dorothy we're really good at organizing never throwing anything away and I was just like don't be this of course three weeks three months later we'd go oh that's what that was so I'm sure I threw away all the things so the power supplies go too but if anybody needs a power spike give me a call yeah so you mean like that so much joy in our home that we did this you know you're climbing around under the desk and you don't know which one to unplug we do so we got ourselves a nice little label maker and we make our little labels and we stick them on everything now if this is a certain level of anal retentive disc maybe you don't have but we were on the background table discussion I was talking about how you can get a label maker I love this one because it makes you happy while you're alive and it makes your relatives happy when you're gone I thought well this is great this is the way to do it and then Chuck Joyner from Mac Voices says well no I just use a sharpie we use a sharpie what do you mean sharpies are black and these are black and he goes oh no they sell silver sharpies even his little fancy pants silver sharpie you know I would not like to have it all scribbled nasty but if you'll do that and you won't do the label maker like the anal retentive people Steve and I are you'd be happy with that so if you're gonna do it do it that's a great way to go somebody else point out sometimes those labels will actually start peeling up from the heat so the silver sharpie might be a good plan so we actually Dorothy bought me my own silver sharpie after that anyway again this is probably the happiest thing we did for ourselves now this one is actually nothing to do with the plot but this made me so happy one day I don't know how I got this idea I got a couple of these boxes I get their three dollars or whatever got a bunch of gallon ziplocks and I pulled all of the cables out of my drawers I threw them out on the floor and I organized them it probably only took me an hour or two to do it and now when I need a USB cable I go USB cables I don't have to dig through the firework cables and the weird miscellaneous cables and the you know audio cables and the ethernet cables and everything this made me so happy and the time to do it was it was almost zero really really quick and you end up doing it every time you're looking for a cable anyway so why not just do it all with one fell swoop remember when we were talking about that Bart Bouchantz was on the call and he said you know this is a good idea because all my cables are out on my bed right now because I was just looking for them so next time you have to look for some just start sorting and get your houses in lock you right out with a little sharpie this makes me so happy it's so much easier to find what I need when I was running out the door and I realized I was doing this speech in my little dongle for this projector oh and I opened the door I was ready to go so this one makes you happy I don't think it's going to help your relatives because we have little baggies full of HDMI cables and ethernet cables we have more cable don't ever buy an ethernet cable or anything call me up we could not figure out how to sell them right how do you sell you know 40 ethernet cables maybe a school or something I don't know they're still in my house so we got a checklist now to go through I always go too fast so if you guys have questions let's bring them on the kind of things we were talking about here is number one tell them what credit card is tied to what service if you're not going to use a password manager make sure you do this in some way but that's a real easy way to tell in last pass or one pass you can say what credit card goes with this service what's paying for that if you don't tell them that they're not going to know to renew it next tell them to keep your email account open for a year they're not going to think that that's important but it's going to be really important because of all those things that are tied to it tell them to keep your cell phone active because of that two factor authentication you set up that they're not going to be able to get into your accounts if you set up two factor authentication they're not going to be able to get into those if they shut off your cell phone again Alice kept Tim's cell phone for a long time and she's now averted to her own but she did keep that open for a long time and that made all the difference then tell them if you care about your photos in the cloud tell them about Flickr and Smugmug and any of those other services that you use make sure you get those up there and make sure you tell them what other stuff you have in the cloud if you've got Dropbox, if you've got box.net or SkyDrive, what is it called? OneDrive now all those kinds of things make sure they pay those bills tell them if someone else depends on that cloud storage you know I've heard about people now where they'll get a Dropbox account and they're sharing it with somebody else and also the Dropbox account gets shut down all of a sudden they've lost stuff that lives on their hard drive I don't know if you guys know exactly how that works but if I have something on my hard drive and it's on Dorothy's hard drive and it's in Dropbox but my account disappeared it would disappear from her hard drive it would actually be erased it would stop existing on her computer because it exists in all three places synced exactly so if it disappeared in one it disappears in the other David's looking at me with a deltful look on his face no, not deltful they give you the option now when you delete an account or a share okay he's saying they give you an option when you delete an account or a share but if you aren't there to do that option if the account just got closed I don't know it might not yeah I'm not sure if they know tell them about the websites you know if you're a web developer especially if it's a Tumblr account if it's something you care about where you want them to write a final hurrah leave it open for a month or a year or something like that there's a gentleman I think he came in the back who was telling me last night that his solicitor in Scotland actually would not allow him to give him his one password which I thought was really really strange it's like the guy they're out in a stick somewhere the guy doesn't know about this stuff I told him to get a new solicitor let's see tell them to keep your backups running and pay those bills that's definitely important there's a thing called google inactive account manager and you can actually make decisions right now about what happens to your account so if you google google it inactive account manager you could go in and say I want this to if you don't hear from me for six months I want you to make sure that you fill in this or you take care of this information just keep it there and after this length of time this is what can happen to it this is what I definitely did go in and do it was really really easy I think Facebook has a way of doing it after somebody's death I believe so it would be interesting I couldn't swear that it also takes into account youtube but nowadays I think they're congealing more and more into it I think they're congealing I think they're congealing more and more into one company than they used to be I don't remember it being a separate thing or saying it wasn't included so the next one I said give someone access to your password manager tell them about it I asked my friend Robert Lachman and his wife Lorelai were talking about this and I said well Lorelai you're not the geek he's the geek do you know how to get into his accounts and she turns and says do I tell her write her a letter that's what it is it doesn't count if you did it and you didn't tell them you did it or how important it was put your cables in zippered bags trust me if anyone in here does it please send me an email and tell me how happy it makes you after you do it you're going to do it oh you've already done how happy does it make you it's wonderful what's that alright alright good you're going to have to listen to me they're telling you how great that is such a funny one get yourself a label maker or that little cute silver sharpie for your power supplies again make you really really happy could you get that sharpie from silver sharpie if you would go ask Chuck go up and ask Chuck if you would like to see his silver sharpie you would like that and of course label your boxes crap and not crap yes actually my wife is a non-techie so my investment broker has volunteered to keep track of all the information like I've sent it again and he's going to share it with my wife oh okay so how does he know like today if you created a new account yeah if they have access to the password manager that you're using actively it shortens that time it sounds like you've got a pretty good process I would do that maybe once a year but if it's in one password or last pass then it would be immediate they see some people who are in the business of helping people having time to gather whatever like that we'll actually go the next step and they'll be willing to share your password okay yeah that's good but that solicitor wasn't before they've been buying them I would think that'd be more likely did everybody hear what he said yeah that is good to know by the way the way I shared my one password or my last pass was Steve put it in his last pass and we put his last pass in my last pass so now I'm not sure if we both go down in the plane together I don't know if you guys have done a will or a trust but our lawyer was hilarious he says okay you and Steve are in car crash kids put the money right okay now you and Steve and Lindsey and Kyle you guys are all on a plane and the plane crashes and it's a success was a successively worse disaster pretty soon there was a giant earthquake and the entire grandma grandpa gone the dog's gone okay now who does it go to but he made it fun in a twisted kind of way so anyway the last page of the presentation is what is a trademark link farm of doom this is some passwords to some of the things I talked about the facebook memorial request that was the thing I talked about you can have your facebook page a memorial after you pass away so people can put their wishes down and that sort of thing and the google account manager real good actually I think those are hot links to something much longer so if you go to and there's the home inventory link too that was definitely one longer if you go to slideshare.net slash no cellicast you will be able to find all of the charts there that I've talked about here and I love to get e-mailed I do a segment on my show called dumb question corner so if you've got a dumb question you think everybody else knows the answer to I think that's probably how I met Leon in the first place there it's a nice way to ask questions that you think are maybe too stupid to ask in public but if you do it through this form we try to get the answers to people I actually have some silly things to give away anybody wants one of these this is getting ready to crap my house but I was going to say I was going to sell these to people but I realized these are called a bud sock it's a weird little conical piece of cloth that you shove your headphones in and it keeps them from tangling it makes them into a loop and once your headphones are in a loop they can't get tangled so if anybody wants one of these just come on up and get one and I got some business cards if anybody wants those okay Leon's coming up alright thank you everyone