I feel that I have fairly good password habits, covering all the commonly suggested bases of making them long, containing a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation. A tip I haven’t seen so often is to make them typeable but I think that is worthy to join the canon.

I have recently changed one of my passwords and my previous “magic key” followed all the regular advice. However, it was a bit of a finger buster and I probably mistyped it about once every three times. In devising a new one I spent some time practising and refining it (in plain text but away from prying eyes). In particular, it has helped to have some clusters of characters, which serve as “typing macros”. Rather than thinking about each individual letter, I just have to think of the group and the whole thing whistles out from under my fingers. Also, because I have chosen to have each group of a regular length, it means I have mangled the words from the phrase I am using to make them fit thus, without making it harder to remember, I have also sidestepped the debate about using “dictionary” words (not, I think, a bad thing as long as you run several of them together and have at least some non-dictionary elements in there as well).

BTW, if your password is any of the ones on this list, change it now!