Compose keys are a Linux feature that allows you to type special characters. They’re very useful for typing accents, umlauts, diacritics, and other special characters. All operating systems have a way of typing such characters, but they are, to put it mildly, a convoluted mess.

Domains get blocked for a variety of reasons including security, family controls, content filtering, politics, and legal requirements. But when browsers encounter these blocks, they will usually display a somewhat generic and unhelpful error message. As end users it often isn’t clear to us why the domain was blocked, and…

I’ve been seeing some buzz around Sigstore recently, it’s a project that aims to improve software supply chain security by making signing and checking easier. It has seen ongoing work in the Python and Maven ecosystems, as well as npm and Github Actions, which is pretty significant.

On Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, the background image that you set for your desktop doesn’t appear on the login screen. I will go over two ways of synchronizing the login screen wallpaper to match the one chosen for the desktop.

While setting up PiHole on an Ubuntu 24.04 server, I realized that the usual instructions I’d been following for years on Debian systems for setting a static IP address (often involving /etc/network/interfaces or /etc/resolv.conf) weren’t going to work here. It’s worth sharing now that I’ve learned how for myself. Netplan…

A reverse shell is a type of shell where the target machine (under attack) communicates back to an attacker’s machine, and importantly, gives the attacker control over the target machine.

I’m not a networking professional, but I’ve often had to impersonate one. Here are some of the tools and commands I’ve found useful over the years.