This is basically the same method I use for laptop hard disk encryption. I don't remember the password, but I typed it so many times my fingers remember exactly the pattern to type. Kind of like playing a piano.
Several times i've been drinking and am unable to remember how to log into my machine, because I can't replicate the pattern and don't remember the password. After 15 minutes of concentration it comes back.
I found I couldn't enter my password in unusual situations, e.g. holding the keyboard in one hand, typing with the other. I finally cottoned on that my fingers' muscle memory was typing the password consistently but it wasn't what I thought it was; it had been corrupted by similar N-grams in Unix commands from the moment I'd first entered it twice to passwd(1).
I don't even need to be drinking, but sometimes I'll fat finger it a few times and get frustrated. The only way I can get logged in is to type really really fast.
Yeah, I find speed is important too. The quicker you can type it, the easier it is to recall. Another thing, if I slow down I notice i'm sort of humming parts of the pattern in my head, as if each character held a sort of audible weight that indicates where my fingers should go next... again, kind of like playing an instrument. Yet I can't play anything. Weird.
I've been wondering for a while where the boundary for being diagnosed with synaesthesia is - nearly everyone I know has some sort of synaesthesia, even if it's only associating numbers with colors. Yet, it's no where near the viewing-numbers-as-landscapes of Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day or Nabokov's gift with words.
I suspect almost everyone has a little synaesthesia, just like almost everyone has a little depression, a little anxiety, a little Borderline Personality, a little schizophrenia...
I guess it's only worth giving your mental quirks a name if, say, they're 2σ above norm. I dunno, ask your doctor (or statistician :P).
No, it's not. Your laptop doesn't know your password and hence you can actually use it to generate and encryption key. This system needs the laptop to know your password.
When entering a password on my phone, I have to type it on my PC and then read it out. Even if I can say the password, things like case-sensitivity become an issue.
It is of course a much more refined approach; critically, there never is a stage at which you retain explicit knowledge of the password. With pseudo-implicit passwords (knowing how to type but not quite remembering what), recall is still possible -- either via explicit recall after sufficient deliberation, or via presentation of the input device.
(Neat trick, but reversible password encryption still seems like a massive flaw here...)
Same here with my ATM PIN - I could probably make a guess and tell you what the numbers are but not the order without actually using an ATM pad.
A few weeks ago it was late, I'd just come from the gym and not eaten anything and I couldn't figure out why my PIN wasn't working. Turned out I was trying to use a code that I stopped using a couple years ago.
I find that in this case, conscious concentration can actually make performance of the password sequence more difficult for me.
Also, I get into a stateful kind of memory where if I have to produce a password I normally produce at home while I'm at work, I produce the wrong password.
Several times i've been drinking and am unable to remember how to log into my machine, because I can't replicate the pattern and don't remember the password. After 15 minutes of concentration it comes back.