For credentials I'm going to type a lot, I still prefer a short password full of strange characters to a long passphrase made of words. It's more effort to memorise, but once that's done, it's faster to enter than a long passphrase – a benefit that lasts the rest of the year.

My current memorisation technique involves a recurring timer. Every N minutes, an alert goes off, and I stop whatever I'm doing, run 'su $USERNAME -c "echo ok"', type my password, and make sure it did echo "ok". I do the password change first thing in the morning, and over the course of the day, increase the period between memory checks, from 5 minutes down to 15 or 30, so that it moves from short-term to long-term memory. If I find I've forgotten it in one of these tests, I'm allowed to look it up, but in every test I must first try it from memory and _then_ find out what I got wrong. And then retype it right.

I like this technique because it's simultaneously practice at remembering the password, and practice at typing it quickly and accurately. Even the "do it right now, interrupting whatever else you were doing" aspect is deliberate: it trains the skill of remembering the password _even while distracted_, which is actually necessary, if e.g. you need to 'sudo' something in a sudden emergency that's taking up most of your brain.

Reinforcing the new password periodically over the course of the first day is generally enough that when I come to log in the next morning I can remember it even after a night's sleep. And then I'm over the hump.

But one problem I still haven't solved is remembering, the next day, *that* I changed my password. It's still common for me to type the old one three times running before I realise what the problem is!