Lately I’ve been making an effort at being a bit more organised, and to that end have been maintaining a structured notebook.

The notebook was inspired by a talk on Bullet Journalling by Rachel at Code Craft Dunedin late last year. I’m borrowing a few ideas from Bullet Journalling, but am keeping it considerably simpler. Really, the selling point for me was the “dot grid” paper she mentioned; it’s neat - easier to draw on than lined paper, and easier to write on than blank paper. So, now I’m always carrying around a spiral bound, dot-grid, A5 notebook and its allocated Mars Micro pencil. I’ve always been a sucker for nice office supplies…

This notebook seems like a great place to keep passwords, except the obvious problem of the notebook going missing (or, being photographed, if you’re paranoid). Previously, when I’ve written down passwords I’ve just kept them near my computer - figuring that physical access is full access anyways. But, this notebook is much more on-the-go, and I suppose more likely to get lost. A lost notebook wouldn’t be so much of an issue though, if the passwords were written down in an encrypted or obfuscated way.

So, I came to want a grid of random characters, and ended up writing a little Python program(view on github) to generate exactly that: