AboutVTCGamesSkoda’s Moodle SiteGamemeistersskoda.netJack's BlogNeverwinter MMOPosted on May 7th, 2019My long delay in posting is somewhat attributable to my discovery of the Neverwinter MMO on PS4 and then on PC.  I really enjoy playing MMOs on the console.WoW was great and fun and I spent way too much time playing that game, but the console MMOs are great because they have less options for spells and actions.  I don’t need macros and a qwerty keyboard to play.  All the important things are mapped to a set of buttons and everything else is left out.Posted in News and Opinion                |Leave a commentGame conventions: Origins Game FairPosted on June 18th, 2018This Father’s day I had the rare treat of going to the Origins Game Fair.  I really enjoy Origins and should probably consider attending more of the con rather than making a Sunday exhibit hall run for deals.  Don’t get me wrong, the Sunday deal hunt is a time honored tradition passed down by my friend Rocky and this year I scored a most excellent deal.  I am wondering I shouldn’t have sat in on a Pathfinder 2 demo session just to see what changed.   I really would like to avoid the need to buy version 2 materials since I’ve got a nice original Pathfinder collection going already and I like the system as is.Maybe next summer I’ll go for a few days…Posted in News and Opinion                |Leave a commentTeaching LinuxPosted on October 29th, 2017I have been using a *NIX system for a few decades now and it seems to become more challenging as time goes by to teach people about linux command line.  I cannot tell if I’m turning into a crumudgeon or if there has been a fundamental shift in the mentality of computer users, especially new system administrators.  Is learning a list of useful commands just not done today?  Are people happy to use an interface to accomplish most things and then just go without advanced features?  I don’t know, but I do know it seems harder now to teach command line usage than it was 5 years ago.Posted in News and Opinion                |Leave a commentTurning off a trackpad in LinuxPosted on June 28th, 2017My new HP Spectre laptop is good, but the touch pad is huge and the linux palm detection or turn off the trackpad when typing setting doesn’t work well.  For a few months I had to type slowly and carefully in order to not send the mouse across the screen or worse, move the cursor in vim while trying to code.Here’s the magic, xinputIn a shell use xinput –list to list out the devices providing input to the GUI.  Find the overly sensitive trackpad’s number and then disable it with the command xinput disable 14To make life even easier I’ve added the following aliases to my .login for easy toggling between a live or dead trackpad:alias padon xinput enable `xinput --list | grep "Synaptics TouchPad" | sed -e 's/.*id=\([0-9]*\).*/\1/'`alias padoff xinput disable `xinput --li