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
Update 2023-06-30: Persona Plus is no longer on Mozilla’s website and links have been removed from this article.
Earlier we mentioned how to customize Firefox. Personas are like wallpaper for Firefox and give some basic customization, but what if you wanted to make your own instead of using the ones provided by others?
Fortunately you can with some photo editing and a Firefox addon named Personas Plus. This little addon will give you the ability to create your own personas.
Update 2023-06-30: Removed link to Adblock Plus as Ublock Origin is what I use and has less controversies. Removed Link to Classic Theme Resotorer and Add to Search Bar as the links are dead. Firebug was integrated into Firefox and is no longer available. I also replaced Stylish with Stylus as Stylish was purchased by an adware company. VimFX link is also dead and has been replaced with Vimium-FF I will keep the text of the article as is however.
Update 2023-06-30: I do not recommend using Google Services for anything other than maybe YouTube when no alternative is available. The company makes money off your data, harms society via its control on information, and is all around bad if not outright evil. Use alternatives like DuckDuckGo for search and ProtonMail for email.
The majority of what you will be doing online will involve Google and Email to some extent or another.
Now that we have an understanding of how to get around, we will go over installing software and the internet. We will only cover the minimum here, in the future we will go over email, Facebook, and other things.
There are a couple of programs we will be installing to get you up and running properly on the internet. These would be a web browser and a firewall.
An Overview The internet is, in its most basic form, a connection between computers.
We have gone over how to install Windows 10, now we will go over how to navigate the interface.
Getting Around In Windows 10 you navigate using the mouse and keyboard. The mouse has to functions; the left button is used to activate whatever the cursor is on and the right button brings up additional options. The keyboard has many keys and many more functions, so we will introduce them slowly.
Last time we went over computer hardware. Today we will be installing Windows 10. Windows 10 is the most recent version of the Windows Operating system (OS). We will first go over installing the OS from a disk, if you bought a computer with Windows 10 on it you can skip ahead to part two.
Part 1: Installing from Disk To interact with menus in windows you will use the left mouse button to select items and the keyboard to type information.
Note: This post uses affiliate links for Amazon.com, this is perfectly harmless. When you click one of them it just means that I receive a commission for referring you if you buy anything. It helps this site stay online.
Today, we are going to go over the basic computer hardware you will need to get up and running.
The Hardware: The Computer: Most computers are housed in tower-like cases and are thus called towers.
Before we learn how to use a computer we must understand what a computer is and the underlining concepts that allow computers to work.
At the most basic level a computer takes data (input) and processes it into information (output). Lets say you us a calculator to solve a 2 + 4. The numbers 2 and 4 are your input along with the plus (+) sign. The plus sign is an operator that tells the calculator how to process the input.
In our hyper connected world it is important to know how to use a computer. Unfortunately, many people do not have the knowledge of computers to get far in a work environment. Thus Random Thoughts will start an Introduction to Computers series of posts. This is to help people who have little knowledge of how to use computers become more than competent with them. By the end of this series you should be your own computer guy.
This year Random Thoughts will start an Introduction to Computers series of posts to give readers a better understanding of how to use computers and their important in society.
School and work have prevented me from keeping this blog up to date, but with the upcoming year I will dedicate some time each month to writing.
The Plan The series will be geared towards people who have little experience with computers.
