How to make a good password?

One time you will need to create a strong password, or a strong random number to be used as a key. The geek inside your brains will think furiously trying to avoid considering the random keystrokes on a keyboard as random. Well, here is a way to create a random password. A very random password that you will not be able to memorize, that you will need to store it somewhere, and therefore easily lose all the security gained by creating this password.

You need a working Linux shell, with the commands dd and uuencode:
dd: reads device files. A device file can be a hard drive, a webcam, any thinkable hardware, or even /dev/random, that gathers some random bits from the physical components of your computer.
uuencode: translates the binary streams into ASCII (or into base64 encoding, whatever it is).
The secret weapon here is |. This vertical bar is typed by Shift+\ on a US keyboard. It simply redirects the standard output from one program to be the standard input in another program.

In a shell, type this command:

dd if=/dev/random bs=1 skip=128 count=64 2> /dev/null | uuencode -

You will simply end up by some random characters:

mohamed@hp:~/Desktop$ dd if=/dev/random bs=1 skip=128 count=64 2> /dev/null | uuencode -
begin 644 -
MYX:E]D%;N68RRW4#KFPJ1U7"`3RIA&J^&/AB6T&#Q;_S5P'W_Q&2Q!Q#R*^"
3:GP0)@U1\4;>I@<4IW)#CC]430``
`
end
mohamed@hp:~/Desktop$

That is a good place to get your password from. /dev/random collects random bits from your hardware. dd skips 128 character of them and passes 64 character to uuencode that puts them into ASCII. Of course you can change skip or count, but take care, reading too much from /dev/random will drain the queue it has been collecting and therefore will result into stopping the program until enough randomness is collected. bs means block size, which means a block is 1 byte in this specific example. Finally, what is 2>/dev/null? dd will output a message on stderr that will probably interfere with uuencode. This redirects the stderr of dd to disappear.

You can enjoy seeing randomness from your machine by this command:

dd if=/dev/random bs=1 skip=0 count=2048 2> /dev/null | uuencode -

Executing this command too many times will drain /dev/random. Then you will see the random lines coming one after another, taking a lot of time to be generated.