As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a Google Reader fanatic. Nothing else handles RSS as smoothly as it does.

The one gigantic failing of Google Reader is that you cannot receive password-protected feeds that request user authentication. I think that sucks. A lot.

So I created a Yahoo Pipe to work around this failing.

Cocoia Blog hosts a great two-parter on how to make your Mac virtually impregnable to the common thief or hacker. While a lot of these measures will seriously impair your ability to easily use your Mac (such as turning of Bonjour networking entirely), they will also make you quite a bit safer.

If you have sensitive documents on your computer, these are things you should, at the very least, consider implementing.

Cocoia Blog Howto: A more secure OS X before Leopard

I’m a long time fan of Little Snitch, which is a nifty application from Objective Development that lets you monitor and restrict which applications and processes can access the internet. This gives maximum protection from spyware and other malicious software which “phones home” for any reason.

On the Mac, Little Snitch has been without competition for quite a while. But it looks like things are heating up.

GlowWorm FW Lite is a new freeware utility which does much the same thing. Like Little Snitch, you can create fairly complex rules (such as allow an application access to only certain destination hosts, or allow a program access over a single port to any host or various other combinations). I haven’t tested it in detail, but it appears to work quite well, and the price is hard to beat.

Hash a Pass was recently featured on Digg.com and is an interesting idea. Using a master password and a Javascript implementation of the SHA-1 hash algorithm, you can generate a secure and un-guessable password, and then simply re-generate it when you need it again.

A nifty trick, to be sure, but does this really make you safer?