sonofsanta

After warning my Reception about it yesterday from reading that linked thread, we had that exact email this morning, even the same signature. Which makes it seem like they've just gotten round to Lincolnshire today, and it is a targeted scam (whatever it is they're doing) rather than an automated system.

Slightly off-topic question--can you access the Unifi cameras via their IP to watch directly on a webpage? Reason I ask: our school hall isn't big enough to fit everyone in. When we do whole school stuff (handover, pantomimes etc.) a couple of year groups have to sit in the gym, and we set up a projector to stream from an old IP camera on the ceiling of the hall. But this camera is oooold, and terrible, and we have to keep an XP laptop on hand specifically to handle it... but any newer cameras have always been near a grand when I've looked (granted, not for a few years) and it's not a common enough requirement to warrant spending that money. If a Unifi camera can give us a decent upgrade for £100, though, it might be worth looking at for this summer. Especially if they do PTZ cameras (ETA: I've got no issue with Hikvision either, if they do this, just that we have Unifi APs already so I'm inclined to trust & like Unifi kit)

I've been a 15.6" man for as long as I can remember, but these days, honestly, 14" is plenty big enough. Fits in the hand and on the lap better, and you're hard pushed to notice the difference when you're looking at it. (Stop sniggering at the back)

Innit. The last minute nature of all this is irritating, because surprisingly I don't have £10k just lying around to upgrade the system... not quite how school budgets work, that

I've gotten a few concessions out of them--hopefully getting the £195 SYNC2 thing refunded, given that we were told about it last August, finally got sent an invoice in March and paid it then, and only actually got an appointment for the work to be done yesterday after I forwarded on a message from WisePay about TLS1.0 being disabled in a fortnight--and hopefully going to get an update on our server software which has been static for 6 years despite us asking for certain functionality and being promised it in an update. Fundamentally, though, our tills (SP-800) do support the update to Win10, so we can take a cheaper option now (i.e. <£1k, not £10k). If I can keep them going for another four years, they'll have done a decade and we can upgrade fully at that point. I might still push back on the price, though. £159 for each SSD is steep, and when I pushed on it given that I can buy them for £15 from Amazon, I was countered that these are preconfigured SSDs so have had work done on them. Only after the meeting did I realise that "work done on them" ought to just be "imaged the thing for twenty minutes"... but not exactly got much leverage to complain, I suppose.

Nothing like that--just the GPO Force a specific default lock screen and logon image set to Enabled with a local path, and a group policy preference to push the file over (which, now I think about it, might be the source of needing the Date Modified stamp to be later... d'oh*). Only takes effect after someone has logged on & off, or restarted; it won't refresh a screen already at logon. *ETA: maybe not. Already set to Replace, so idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It amuses me that they're pushing this upgrade away from POS2009 etc. on the basis of "Microsoft won't be releasing updates anymore, you'll be insecure!" when they have always configured the tills to have Automatic Updates turned off and don't guarantee support if you re-enable them...

You can keep the same filename, but everytime you replace it, it has to be with a file that has a newer Date Modified timestamp--to the point I have to open up Photoshop and resave it if I want to change the image. PITA, and took me ages to realise that was what was happening, but there it is. Windows: it never did make much sense.

200MBps on a 1Gbps bearer, £8400pa, two years into a three year contract (i.e. this wouldn't necessarily be a good price now, though it was okay at the time)

If they try to fob me off with that excuse following the meeting this Thursday (I know full well the sales bod won't have an answer) then I'll chase them too, and let you know if I get an answer! Cheers

Eh, we have 2nd Gen i3's with 8GB RAM and SSDs in and they're fine. I mean, we are replacing them this summer, but only on the basis of "they're 7 years old and living on borrowed time", and these are the main IT suites, but honestly I wouldn't have an issue with sticking them in an office somewhere. New PCs are in no way 10x faster than these ones; for most tasks, tbh, there's no difference at all. CPUs haven't progressed that much considering the time difference, and most people never push a CPU anyway. Plus you'll upgrade way more PCs with SSDs for your money than you'll replace outright. We did this back in 2013--skipped replacing old machines to upgrade loads more to SSDs. We've been fully SSD since about 2014 and it makes so much difference. Plus, if you ask nicely, Stone, Novatech and VeryPC will all quote you replacement PCs on the basis of you sending in your own SSDs harvested from the machines you're replacing--so buy them now, and when you come to replace you can re-use the SSD anyway, so no money wasted at all

They always felt a bit... amateur and disorganised. We only found out our account manager had changed when I tried to phone his mobile and got someone completely different, as they'd cancelled the contract on that number and it had been reassigned. Support have been okay (though as an amusing aside, one of their engineers who came to visit once went on a rant about the government restricting computer development as Moore's Law limited how fast they could improve processors; I had to explain it was not that kind of law) but generally a bit disjointed and half-arsed, e.g. we make use of a loan system separate to FSM and while we can add kids to it, we have to phone up support to have them removed, and have been promised an update to resolve this for years. The change since the Civica take over seems to be an enormous hiking of prices.

@mdrabble--did you get Win10 x64 working on the SP800? We've got those tills and they're still doing okay, so I'm not inclined to pay Civica for an upgrade, especially when I challenged them on the use of a WinXP derivative during installation back in 2013. I seem to recall being promised they'd be compatible with an upgrade down the line, though of course I can't find that in writing now. Got a meeting with our account manager on Thursday as I'm so sick of their support being such terrible value for money--was just trying to argue the £295 Sync2 nonsense today after I chased them off the back of a WisePay email giving us a three week deadline, and it transpires the Bursar already paid them back in February and they just haven't done a damn thing about it. We've never had an update to our server software in 6 years (incidentally--we're running V6 and always have been, on whatever POSReady2009 OS the SP800 is running) and in some instances we're paying something daft like £100 maintenance a year for biometric readers that only cost £200 in the first place, which is a p155take on the levels of a PC World warranty. It's frustrating that the system itself does, in general, work pretty well, because as a company they're bloody awful. EDIT: lololol the Bursar just forwarded on our annual bill. £750 for "software support" which apparently doesn't include any actual support, judging by the lack of updates and the £295 charge for any actual work that requires doing! I suspect I am not going to be in the finest of moods for this meeting on Thursday...

John Wick 3 is really, really fun. I love how weird they're making the worldbuilding without any consideration towards such petty concerns as "logic" or "explanation". They just do a thing cos it'll be cool. Works for me ;D Very mild spoiler for those concerned about the dogs, after JW1's puppy: no animals get hurt at all, and the dogs are very very good dogs

I love Lindisfarne. I could spend a fortnight there with my camera. Then my wife could come up and join me and we could have an actual week's holiday I continue to absolutely adore my Sigma 105mm macro lens: More on my Twitter, if you're so inclined

Sorry to Bother You It's... weird. Really weird. Has a lot to say about racism and capitalism, though, so might be your bag! It's got some great performances in. But oh man it goes to some strange places.

I think the Queen he's referring to there is Cersei

Reddit is having fun, anyway. I love this alternate ending, especially Arya's moment. (Better with sound, though not essential.)

Apparently HBO offered full ten-episode seasons but Dan & Dave declined and opted for 13 episodes over 2 seasons. In hindsight that was the biggest mistake they made; I'd have taken some scaling back on the battles to free up some money for more episodes at this point. I can well believe that GRRM is headed to broadly the same place with Dany & Bran etc., and don't have a problem with the destination per se, just that it felt so unearned. If GRRM ends up at the same place but with a stronger journey, with proper foreshadowing, I can see it working. As to how Jon survived Grey Worm... yeah, I got nothing. GW was obviously well off the deep end at that point, murdering unarmed prisoners, he's not going to just arrest Jon nicely once he works out what happened. (How he finds out is never discussed, given that Drogon did Jon a solid and hid the body, but it would be entirely on brand for Jon to just go down and admit to it to GW's face, because he is an idiot.) Going north: he did say a couple of episodes back that he wished he was going back with Tormund, right? And that was where he was happiest, up with the Free Folk. But Kit Harington gave absolutely no indication that Jon was happy about this or that he understood Bran was giving him what he really wanted, so... idk.

The Sharp screens are a lot cheaper than your CleverTouches/Smartboards etc. and the hardware is still excellent. The PN65SC1 is the 65in model, we've been getting them installed by Sharp directly for about £1600 all in (including 3 year warranty). Comes with some basic free software for writing on the screen that's surprisingly competent, but not specifically an art application, and no games. I warrant you can find something like that around on t'internet for nowt, though.

I think that's what it comes down to--on paper, stuff was happening that should be meaningful but just... wasn't. Like the moment between Jon & Dany: it fell flat because their relationship was never convincing, having been rushed through the last two seasons. You need to do more than show me a dragonflight date, you need to show me why these two people in particular are in love, what it is that uniquely binds them together. In what ways do they think the same, in what ways do they test and push each other, what in-jokes and secrets and worries do they share ... not just "hey you're hot and I'm hot and call me maybe?" There's lots of articles floating round about various turns and decisions going "but AHA this was foreshadowed back in Season 3 Episode 8 and if you were paying attention..." and I feel like if you need that kind of intellectual justification afterwards, that's a big failure of your storytelling, y'know? Everything that happened this season felt arbitrary. Characters were doing things because the plot needed them to do it, and the plot needed them to do it because there was a cool scene it wanted to show you with King's Landing. It wasn't quite Lost levels of godawful, but Breaking Bad remains the pinnacle of TV and of TV finales in particular IMHO.

It mostly just made me sad watching this episode. Because I just... didn't really care anymore. I used to love this show so much, feel so invested in it, and there were moments last night where I could hear an echo of what I ought to be feeling if the last two seasons had been better, but... I didn't really feel it, and so I'm sad that they threw away so much good will. I mean, it wasn't a terrible episode as it goes, if a little slow given that for the first twenty minutes the only meaningful action was a man took a badge off. Jon finally did something useful, and I liked Brienne's scene, and I loved Sansa telling Edmure to sit down. Seeing our true queen tell a mediocre upper-class toff to sit down will warm me through cold winter nights. But... so much was out of character. (Switching to invisible white text for spoilers!) Two episodes ago they asked Bran if he wanted to be Lord of Winterfell and he said nah, I'm good, I've left the concerns of mortal men behind me. And now he wants to be King? (Also why tf does he not get a say in what his name will be, I'd be pretty pee-one-fifty-fived off if someone declared me "the Broken".) Arya has shown no capacity for being a boat captain before now, and I think the extent of her urge to explore was one off-hand comment in Season 6? If Sansa declared the North independent (fine) why did none of the other kingdoms follow suit? Yara Greyjoy you'd think would take the first opportunity, and Dorne owes nothing to Bran Stark. Who, incidentally, is now a foreign lord on the throne with no claim. And why in seven hells is Jon going to the Night's Watch? (a) that was a compromise for Grey Worm, who immediately buggered off on a boat, so maybe go catch Jon up on the road and say "hey you can come home now"? (b) WHAT ARE THE NIGHT'S WATCH WATCHING FOR NOW. THE NIGHT KING IS DEAD. THEIR WATCH IS ENDED. And what about Azor Ahai? Nothing came of that in the end, did it? Nor the Valonqar. Is Bran now the prophesied "one younger and more beautiful than you"? Wasn't much point in Jon being Aegon, in the end, nor Howland Reed popping up at the Kingsmoot council. The whole Old Gods/New Gods/Lord of Light thing got dropped. Religion got dropped entirely, in fact, as soon as Cersei blew up the High Sept and faced absolutely zero consequences for it; I'm pretty sure that if the King of France blew up the Pope and the Vatican in the 14th Century because they'd become politically inconvenient the people wouldn't have suddenly shrugged their shoulders and forgotten Catholicism entirely, you know? Anything about the Sand Snakes and Ellaria Sand. Winter! "The Night that will Never End" ended up lasting, uh, one night, and then was promptly forgotten about. Jaime's whole arc was wasted entirely and made no sense. The last two seasons of the show just felt... rushed. They went with the first idea they had and wrote it down and filmed it and never stopped to see if they could come up with any other ideas, or think through any plot holes, or consider if they'd left anything out. They knew what cool scenes they wanted and by the old gods and the new they were going to shoehorn those scenes in, character development and logical consequences be damned. The dragon melting the throne is the perfect example: either the dragon accurately recognised that it wasn't truly Jon that murdered Dany, but the whole system of absolute monarchy that must be competed for with violence and guarded jealously... or he thought the spiky chair had stabbed the spiky thing into her, not Jon. Because of course the correct answer is that they just wanted a dragon to melt the chair and didn't think it through more than that. The more I write this out the angrier I get. I used to love this show so much. I miss how good it was. About two pages back in this thread, no less

Course, it could be that no-one will sit the Iron Throne, and Dany will melt it down and f%!k off over the horizon on her dragon and there'll be some form of Parliament takes over instead. She said she wanted to break the wheel... GoT spoilers online are doing my head in. Everyone online was really good about Endgame! Really cautious and understanding that some people won't see it for a week! But I'm at the point where I just have to stay off social media entirely on Monday after GoT. I've got every character name and every possible hashtag and every phrase I can think of muted on Twitter, and yet still I'm seeing something every single week. It's hard not to feel like it's a very US-centric sort of entitlement--they've all seen the episode, what's that you say about people living in different time zones? Bloody annoyed by it tbh!

Already confirmed: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/a12438310/game-of-thrones-prequel-spin-off-series-news/

Jaime: I know, right? So many actions are in contradiction with earlier established character beats. And dragon fire: how much of it does one dragon have? My only hope at this point is this Twitter thread. In short: GRRM writes by coming up with characters and seeing what they do. Benioff and Weiss write by coming up with what they want to happen then arranging events to get to the destination they want. Both are valid approaches, both have their strengths, but the reason this all suddenly feels unsatisfying compared to the first few series is that we've switched from one style to the other, and so where stuff like Ned losing his head or the Red Wedding felt surprising-yet-inevitable before, now we're feelikg like characters are acting in idiot ways just to create a spectacle. Because that's exactly what they're doing. But if they are writing this way, there's probably a grand and amazing finale they have in store, and everything has had to be this artificial and forced in order to set up this mind-blowingly good last episode. ...maybe. Or maybe it will still be terrible. I dunno. A man can hope though, right? Bonus Twitter idea that would have been way cooler: