Stephen Warren's Blog
I was having recurring trouble logging into my laptop. Eventually I realized that I was accidentally touching my mousepad while typing my password, which caused subsequent typing to go to the middle of my password instead of the end. Naturally the system didn’t accept this variant of my password! Here’s how I avoided this issue. Automatic Touchpad Disabling When Logged In When I’m logged in, I…
When I was forced to change from Classic Outlook to New Outlook, I lost the ability to control the location of the notification window, which in turn made it hard to notice, and caused me to be late for some meetings. Here’s the story of how I fixed this. The Problem Classic Outlook would create a notification window by default. With new Outlook, I had to change the notification settings to get…
My old work cloud-based VM used VMWare Horizon, which had built-in support for accessing the client machine’s files from the VM. Recently, I had to switch to an AWS VM instead, and the Linux client/viewer app doesn’t support file- sharing, so I had to roll my own solution. Here’s how. The Feature I Lost If you use VMWare’s Horizon client application to connect to and view a VMWare VM/VDI, it…
I recently had to switch provider for cloud-based Windows VMs. After firing up the new VM and its viewer application (AWS Nice dcvviewer ), I found that basic features such as Alt-Tab and mouse forward & backward buttons didn’t work. This was an annoying productivity drain, so I set out to solve the problem. Here’s the story of how I fixed it using the keyd key remapping tool. What Do These keys…
Have you ever wanted to combine GPG, GPG agent, and SSH socket forwarding? It’s something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. The last time I tried it, many years ago, it just wasn’t ready. But a few days ago I tried it out again and it all works! Read on for an explanation of what these things are, and why they’re useful. What Are All These Things? GPG GPG ( GNU Privacy Guard ) is an…
Recently, I’ve been working on creating Docker containers. Minimizing the image size is a topic of interest. A common pattern seems to be to ADD or COPY some data into the container, use it, and then delete it. This bloats the image. However, there’s a way to solve this! The Problem In my case, I needed to install various Debian packages into the image. However, these packages were not acquired…
I’m trying out vscode for editing, since it has a nice “file explorer” capability that I don’t get (at least by default) with GVim. However, the scrolling behaviour annoyed me. But I found a solution! The Issue I typically use the cursor keys to scroll in my editor. Often, I want the cursor to stay on the same line of code while the window scrolls. This allows me to see more context above or below…
I’m very much a fan of black or at least plain backgrounds on my system; there’s much less clutter and distraction. When I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 20.04, I naturally configure my user session’s background to plain black. However, the login screen insisted on displaying some image rather than the plain black I wanted. Here’s how I fixed this. The User Image Each user account has a wallpaper…
I have an Ubuntu 16.04 server that runs the bip IRC proxy. Until recently, I was happily accessing bip from an Ubuntu 18.04 laptop. However, when I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 20.04, xchat refused to connect. This post describes how I fixed that. The Error xchat would display the following: Connection failed. Error: (337260938) error:141A318A:SSL routines:tls_process_ske_dhe:dh key too small…
The question of “why doesn’t sudo cd work?” has come up a couple times in the last few weeks. I figured that the explanation would make for an interesting blog post. What Shells Do (Interactive) shells repeatedly prompt the user to type in a command-line, and then attempt to execute that command-line. Once that command exits, the cycle is repeated. The big question is: what does execute mean? The…
The ESP8266 micro-controller makes a great Internet-of-Things device. It’s cheap, easy to use (especially via the Arduino IDE), and has been quite reliable for me. Here’s a description of how I used one to allow remote control of my garage door via the Internet. Description My primary motivation for create a WiFi/IOT garage door opener was that I store my bicycle in the garage, but don’t keep a…
I recently connected my garage door to the Internet using an ESP8266. More on that topic in another post. This post covers some research I did after discovering that one of my garage doors opened every time the power was removed from the ESP8266 and re-applied. Background My WiFi garage door opener is simply a pair of relays connected to ESP8266 GPIOs. I essentially chose which specific GPIO pins…
I recently purchased my own sword, for use at the SCA , and built a scabbard for it. A scabbard serves two purposes; first as protection for the blade while the sword is stored or in transit, and second it can be used as a defensive weapon while fencing. The Completed Project The completed scabbard holding my sword. The colors were chosen to match the local Barony’s, along with a small (debatably…
Like many people, I often read in bed. However, my wife doesn’t really appreciate me having the overhead lights on when she’s trying to sleep. I decided to solve the issue by building a more targeted reading light. Here’s a brief description of the project. Project Description I had plenty of WS2812 (programmable RGB) LED strips left over from other projects, so these were the obvious light…
For a while I’ve been meaning to create a place to write up various projects I’ve worked on, or the occasional other topic. Well, here it is! Google+ and similar site work great for sharing posts, but I wanted something with better formatting and image embedding opportunities to allow more detailed write-ups. I initially considered using Github Pages, since it’s based around git and Markdown, thus…