Ask HN: How to you create and manage passwords?

The way I create passwords is to make an algorithm that no one else would know - which creates unique passwords for every site I use, but I can never forget the password since the algorithm stays the same. Example:

initials + last 3 characters in domain of site + year of birth + random sequence you know.

my + tor + 91 + e72BQo -- HN my + igg + 78 + abwBs$ -- Digg

Again, just examples. It works for me and I never forget my passwords as long as I remember the algorithm.

I use a different pass for basically everything. The strength depends on how much I care about my account at the service. I've been known to do stuff like "sucks" when I really don't care about it. Everything somewhat important is longish, with some capitals/numbers/special chars.

I have FF remember all of my passes basically (on my own computer with a good password on it.) I make fairly heavy use of "forgot pass" functions to make up for forgetting some passes.

Random username and password for each site, generated by http://duckduckgo.com/?q=pw

I keep them in an encrypted file on an encrypted disk. I let my browser remember them though, and I have the frequently used ones (ssh, gmail, etc.) memorized.

For web sites I don't want to access from my phone, I use the PasswordMaker plugin for Firefox, which generates site specific passwords from a single master password that never gets saved anywhere (except maybe swap space, I haven't looked into that). The only problem I've run into were overzealous input sanitizers on some sites that refused some of the characters in the generated passwords.

For really important passwords I use strong random passwords with a security copy on paper stored in a safe place. Depending on the password and how often I need it that may be the safe at work, a binder with all the important related personal documents, or that place all people use to keep valuable small pieces of paper, the wallet in my pocket (there usually without a full domain name).

Then I use old safe passwords which I no longer use for their original purpose but still remember as passwords for situations where PasswordMaker is no option.

I'm actually quite surprised at the lack of mention of KeePass in this comments thread: http://keepass.info/

I've been using it for years at this point, and I love it - it's very well supported, and is fast and straightforward to use - both for creating new accounts and recalling old accounts. In fact, I don't know my password to the majority of sites that I am signed up for, and instead use a randomly generated string.

That helps my peace of mind in cases where sites like monster.com get hacked - I don't need to change every password on every site, only that one.

[Edit] - By the way, Version 2 is written in Mono-compatible .NET, which means that it is accessible as a cross platform application. (It's not quite Python or Perl, but it works for me)