PIN stealers and crossover cables

For a long time, my mum had no idea how to use cash machines. I was first alerted to this situation when on the way to The Eating Place, she said that she had to stop at Tesco to buy something so that she could get money. This logic has been known to work - in the one in Inverurie, there's an oversight in the system that means if you buy something that's reduced at the end of the day and is also part of a 2 for 1 offer, you get the original price taken off and end up being paid to take them out of the store (the disadvantage being that you're also encumbered with two semi-rotten aubergines or similar). But she meant going in so that she could get cash back from a purchase, not knowing how to use cash machines at all. I showed her the one outside the Union and the situation was rectified.

It seems that I might have a paranoia of using cash machines now, though, because yesterday a PIN-stealing device was discovered in the machine outside my work (Schoolhill in Aberdeen). I had only used it once and that was a couple of weeks before the device was removed, but the police were advising people who had used it in the last few days to check their accounts.

Dutch Cash-Machine Disease had struck Inverurie, though, and the only one I saw without a large "Out of order" sign on it was the one outside the Clydesdale bank. After feeling the tension growing as I stood in the queue, I checked my balance to find that nothing had happened to my account. It was only then that I remembered about the online banking service - when I sat down to look at it, though, I was foiled when I found that I had forgotten not only my password and access number, but also my username as well. Digging through old emails solved the problem and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

While in the town, I was also attempting to find a crossover cable - the most likely place seemed Panasonic, which advertises itself as "sound technology", but you're greeted with a range of decidedly unmusical kettles and toasters when you walk in so I thought I had a chance there. I was told that they'd run out of them and to try next week - they did have a USB computer-to-computer connection, but I decided against that because it had a £35.99 price tag, and paying that would have been comparable to having my money stolen anyway.

I've been looking round on the Internet for methods of networking two computers together, in fact, and via a crossover cable seems the most likely solution. I'm aware that it's possible to manufacture one from my ethernet cable, and every site that has the instructions for it claims it to be "easy" with two screwdrivers being the only requirement before lapsing in to impenetrable jargon. Apparently the end result is to swap two internal coloured wires over, which is logical enough - each computer's reading channel is at the other end of the other computer's writing channel - but I don't feel confident that I would be able to do it, colourblindness being a fairly major obstacle when attempting anything to do with electronics. If anyone has any advice I'd welcome it.

I bought a Big Issue on the way back to keep up my positive karma, feeling that I'd used quite a lot of it during the morning. I further increased it by throwing it straight in the recycling where it belongs when I got back home.