Elcomsoft is best known for its software that allows forensic cracking of passwords for wireless networks, Adobe PDF files, and Word documents. The company knows how to break weak passwords, and thus it knows how to make strong ones. The company's Password Store delivers virtual scratchcards with unique codes. For a small fee, Elcomsoft can provide forgotten passwords, too.

What medium survives an electromagnetic pulse, stores compactly, and works far into the future? Paper, of course. Online storage firm Livedrive has released a QR Code based permanent backup solution that densely writes up to 2 MB per A2 sheet (16.5 x 23.4 inches). It's a brilliant idea, marrying digital and analog.

Come on, you know the answer to this one. But it’s still always fun to see the Will It Blend? folks shove whatever Apple comes up with into their blender.

Kudos to BBC News for developing some tools that help us visualize interesting data points about the Internet. The Top 100 page shows a treemap of the 100 most-trafficked sites on the Web, broken into categories. The Net Growth page presents an animated world map showing how the number of Internet users has grown from 1998 through 2008. And the How It Works page displays a constantly updating count of the total number of Internet users, along with the number of today’s email messages, blog posts, and Google searches.

We glance at icons all day long, but if you look really closely, you may see more than initially meets the eye. Electricpig has zoomed in on a number of standard Apple icons to discover hidden text and other Easter eggs.

Lex Friedman writes at Macworld about how Apple has now modified the U.S. iTunes Store to play 90-second previews of songs longer than two-and-a-half minutes; that’s up from 30 seconds. According to Lex, not all songs have the new previews yet, and the longer previews are limited to the U.S. iTunes Store, presumably due to licensing restrictions in other countries. Still, 90 seconds is much better for getting a sense of a song. Oh, and look carefully at the screenshot; 90 seconds should be more than enough to get a sense of that piece!

No, really, it is a music video by Jayme Gutierrez about how hard it is to take his laptop apart to clean the fan. It’s remarkably well done, with tons of music video tropes, a catchy song, and a nod to Apple at the end (not that Mac laptops are necessarily all that easy to take apart either!). And you have to love the disclaimer: “This is not a definitive maintenance video.”

As Halloween approaches, this 2007 post on the Bad Banana Blog offers a do-it-yourself way to turn a classic Mac (perhaps even a Mac Classic) into a retro-technology pumpkin. Bonus points for spooky screen displays and sounds, if you can get software into the old Mac!