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.

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!

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!

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.

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.