Windows only There are a lot of apps out there that will calculate hashes for popular formats such as MD5, SHA1, and CR32. Some of them try to conveniently integrate into Windows Explorer so that you can just right-click on a file and view the hash, but very few apps have an option where they can recursively crawl through an entire folder and record the hash for each file it comes across.

Last week we wrote about how you can use hashes to scan files for viruses using VirusTotal, and referenced a few ways to grab the hashes on both Windows and Mac. One of the recent additions to my portable catalog is a hash calculator called HashMyFiles put out by Nirsoft, who makes a lot of great freeware utilities.

One of my favorite online services is undoubtedly VirusTotal. The fact that I can get an on-demand scan of any file from over 35 different antivirus apps (for free) is incredible.

As we've learnt from following the news, simple passwords like 123456 aren't the safest. On the other hand, if you pick a safe password with both letters and numbers, you'll end up forgetting it. You can't have your cake and eat it.