Happy Wednesday! I hope you are having a lovely day. For today’s post, I want to share a few links that should be useful for checking on the security of your passwords, searching, and data. Then let’s finish up with some helpful tips for summer cooking.

Lifehacker, Gizmodo, and other techie websites have shared a bunch of great resources for increasing the security of your browsing, passwords, and checking for security compromises to your various online accounts in the past week or so. A few that you might want to share with your patrons are: Should I Change My Password? (super-easy to use, just type in your email account to see if it may have been hacked); Panopticlick (checks how “unique and trackable your browser is,” plus EFF provides information on how to make your browser less trackable); and web worker security: how to keep your data safe at a distance (great for anyone who travels a lot and/or telecommutes). Hopefully these tools will help you and your patrons, plus they are a great way to start raising awareness about privacy and security issues online. (Then you can go into the wonders of Google 2-step authentication and maybe even file encryption.)

After you’ve helped secure your patrons online accounts, find some great books, articles, and/or movies, they might also be thinking about lunch/snack/dinner. Luckily, we’ve got you covered for that stuff, too. Point them to Lifehacker’s guide on how to select fresh ripe produce so they are armed with knowledge the next time they go to the grocery store or farmer’s market. You might also want to suggest this delicious sounding recipe for grilled corn salad. Enjoy.

That’s it for today. I’m off now to the reference desk. Have a wonderful rest of your day. I’ll be back on Friday with some more news and tech tips to share. Allons-y!