My mother lives on a different continent. I sometimes need to provide remote assistance for her Linux PC, on issues such as printing failures. I wanted to set up a secure remote access solution that didn’t require any action on my mother’s part aside from turning on her PC. To make this work, I’ve set up a port-forwarding outbound SSH connection from her PC to my server.

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.

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.

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.

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.