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Comment by jzl | Hacker News Reader

Lastpass has an awesome option when generating passwords for cases like this: "Make pronounceable". It will generate a password like "lickyusideno" (just generated that now) which is easy enough to remember between looking at the lastpass app on your phone and then typing it in through a console/netflix/etc interface.

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I wrote a little HTML/JS app to generate pronounceable passwords which alternate left-and-right hands. Mainly I use it for my AD logins at work, which I A) have to enter numerous times per day and B) have to change every 60 days. The "pronounceable" part makes them easy to remember for the first couple of days, and then the "easy to type" part means muscle-memory takes over so that it's barely and inconvenience.

Data source is a python script which trolls through /usr/dict/words and then counts the occurrence of each three-letter alternating-hand combination, outputting the counts. To start I pick a letter with 1/26 odds, then filter the triplets based on first letter, then continuously pick triplets based on the last two selected letters.

(I think this amounts to a Markov chain but I've not studied them well enough to know for certain...)

1Password actually has the same feature. You can separate the words with a hyphen, space, period, comma or underscore on generation to make it more human readable.

All of the bad password traits are rewarded in this scenario. You want a password as short as possible, with as many repeating characters as possible, etc.

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