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.

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.

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.

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.