Welcome to TechTea, my humble slice of the internet. This is the personal website of
Matthew Lamont. Here you will find my blog, projects, and anything else that interests me.
My blog consists of articles, these are longer form content focused on
FOSS Software, Digital Freedom and Personal Digital Sovereignty, and Privacy. There is also a notes section, these are smaller titbits that I find interesting. Notes are still a new section to the site so there is not much there yet, but soon it will have a little bit of everything that doesn’t fit nicely into an article.
I have been inspired by the indie web to transition to this new format for TechTea. If you have any suggestions feel free to
contact me. This site is ever changing and always expanding so feel free to subscribe to our RSS feeds:
Everything,
Articles, and
Notes
This year was a bit slow, but we published four detailed articles and started a new series of posts on game design. We also redesigned the website and started a news letter.
Posts at a Glance We began making a simple video game in RPG Maker MV this year. First we established the cost and scope of the project. Then we covered the RPG Maker Interface and Map editor.
We covered two valuable networking tools along our RPG Maker project: ipconfig and ping.
Now that we have our story and game engine, we are ready to start making our game in RPG Maker MV.
Creating a new Project We need to make a new project before we can start making our game. To do so we have to go to the file menu at the top of the screen and press New Project… or CTRL+N.
A dialogue box will ask you for the Project name, Game Title, and the Directory you wish to save it under.
A lot of us hear the word ping used a lot in gaming and when we are having network issues, but what exactly is ping?
ping ping is a command line tool that is used to measure the round-trip time for messages sent from one computer to another. This is often used to test if there is a connection between your computer and a website.
You can use it by opening a command line and running the command with the following arguments based off of your operating systemf;
Sometimes we need to know our IP Address or troubleshoot internet connection issues. How do we do that? Well we have a handy tool built into Windows, ipconfig.
ipconfig is a Windows command line utility and network troubleshooting tool. To access it you just need to open the windows command line by pressing start and typing in cmd.
ipconfig has many arguments and follows the syntax:
ipconfig /argument Arguments Many command line programs can be given additional options called arguments.
Many people dream of making a video game. Gaming is one the the ages most popular hobbies and stories of people getting rich off side projects are everywhere. The truth is very few people actually want to make a game nor are the success stories nearly as common as we would like to believe. Building a video game on your own is a massive undertaking and rarely yields success financially. That said, there are options.
With the introduction of Firefox Quantum, Mozilla removed support for legacy XUL extensions in favor of Web Extensions. This naturally made a lot of people angry. XUL extensions had full control over the browser and could change everything from how downloads where handled to the user interface. This powerful framework gave Firefox what many seen as a competitive edge. Extensions this powerful came with some shortcomings, however, and this lead to the adoption of Web Extensions in Firefox.
Windows 10’s new Creator update that improves upon the system’s settings, privacy, included creative software, and gaming. Microsoft will be slowly phasing in the update over the next few months. What if you want to get it now though?
Windows 10 Update Assistant Microsoft provides a way to skip the line when it comes to updates. This tool is the Update Assistant. You can download it from Microsoft’s website here.
Update 2023-06-30: I do not recommend Launchy anymore as Windows Powertools has this feature and it is open source. Also Windows Search features are rather good now. Most major Linux tools desktops already have great application launchers as well so there is no point in using it.
The less time you use the mouse the faster you can navigate a computer. That said, sometimes keyboard shortcuts are not enough. When you need to launch programs or search for a file quickly for example.
Many of us have old games laying around and realize that they just don’t work right. This can be due to many issues, but today we will cover DirectX issues using WineD3D for Windows.
WineD3D for Windows is a “DirectX 1-11 to OpenGL wrapper based on WineD3D”. Normally WineD3D is used to run DirectX games on Linux, but some old Windows games do not run on Windows anymore. Lets take Star Wars Battlefront 2 for example.
2016 has been an interesting year. Random Thoughts has produced a series of articles Introducing Computers another Simpsons joke came true, and many other things came to pass.
Technology We plan to continue our computer series with some more specialized tasks throughout 2017. An overview of VLC Media Player and some HTML for example.
I (Matthew Lamont) will be taking more classes at college this spring semester and will not have as much time to write.
