sonofsanta

Relevant quote from Stan Lee: It seems to me that a story without a message, however subliminal, is like a man without a soul. I haven't seen the episode in question yet--I'm only up to Rosa Parks, which was in equal parts powerful for how it presented the contemporary injustice plainly and through modern eyes, and equal parts nonsense for how the story was all just busywork--but in general I think a story has to stand for something if it's to linger in the mind at all, but that a story does itself a disservice if it doesn't present all aspects honestly, insofar as possible. No story is apolitical, and every author has a political stance that they can't help but bleed into the story (though sometimes supporting the status quo means that political stance seems absent), but presenting the other side with strawman arguments or caricatures just undermines you on every front. And that's something that happens on both sides of the aisle--to be honest, right-wing stories by the likes of the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies tend to be far worse for it, but you don't hear about them because, well, they're terrible (and, frankly, unheard of outside of SFF writing circles, contrary to the magnitude of their self-importance). But there are plenty of left-wing stories that fall foul of the same fallacy. One of the better examples I've read recently was “Dulce et Decorum” by S. L. Huang in the anthology Sword and Sonnet--sadly not available free online anywhere at the moment, as the antho only came out 3 months ago, so all the stories are still in exclusivity. But it presents a pacificist, anti-gun character in mourning for her grandfather, struggling to reconcile the fact that his war service was a fundamental part of his character and a part of his life he was proud of (longer summary here). It presents both sides as complex, acknowledges that it's difficult to reconcile both angles, and doesn't deign to offer an answer, but just lets the thoughts roll around your head. One of the best short stories I've read in ages. (I promise I am not just shilling for that anthology because I happen to be in it. I've been reading it recently because I got a contributor's copy, which is why it came to mind, but there's no royalties in short story anthologies, so it really makes no odds to me if you buy it or not. All that said, though, it is excellent and you should buy it anyway )

Use S tags Use [ s ]S tags[ /s ] (delete the spaces inside the square brackets there, obvs)

I was going to say that's a lovely looking lens, @BillyAB, then remembered Flickr would tell me if I clicked through--and good grief, that is a lovely lens! Some lovely bokeh on that top shot. Bit rich for my blood, though!

Dave. Dave. You're not a PE student. You know better than to film in portrait. Have a word with yourself.

Please sir Mr Dave sir, can you at least tell us wot the prize is this week sir?

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Shhhhhh it's a Friday, it could save the school £600 on a new workstation, it's all justifiable. And that, your honour, is why I've brought this unfair dismissal case...

That better damn well count for the 2pm deadline as well. An hour of work to get it in ON THE DOT

I've been busy this lunchtime. (if you click through in the last panel it is EVEN BIGGER for printing and display purposes) (If you want a logo slapping on it, Dave, send me a decent PNG)

Creep

I can do it in 1803, both from searching as you've shown or under More > on the Start Menu item. But for most items it just takes me to the shortcut folder on the redirected Start Menu, where NTFS permissions stop the kids from doing anything, and for something like cmd or mstsc it tells me "This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions..." etc. I'm guessing that's the "Hide System Drives [C:]" GPO. Not ideal--I'd rather it wasn't there at all--but can be mitigated with permissions.

Nokia 8 is currently half price on Amazon, from £500 to only £260 (cheaper than the Nokia 7, which is daft). Pure Android, guaranteed & fast updates, 64GB storage + microSD slot. Dual cameras on the back; probably not the greatest, but nothing under £300 will be, tbh. Camera quality seems to be the big differentiator these days.

*thinks and plots and photoshops* Er, unrelated, any hi-res photos of you lying around, Dave? No reason... Brilliant. The whole thing was brilliant, but this was especially so.

Perfect! I had blocked the folder, blocked MicrosoftEdge.exe and MicrosoftEdgeCP.exe, and blocked MicrosoftEdge.exe via hash, and none of it worked. But using the wildcard path blocks it correctly (and on 1803, at least, gives me the correct error, not a crash). What a perfect summary of how nonsensical administering Win10 is. It is an OS of dark secrets and whispered tips, hard won knowledge and cargo-cult solutions. (Also remembered, just in time, that removing shortcuts is no longer enough, because Win10 is oh so helpful and still offers a program if you type the process name. chrome.exe and iexplore.exe now explicitly blocked, too...) RE: AppLocker: it remains forever on my list of "stuff I really need to look at". I want to go the whitelist route, but that makes it a big job, and I've not yet got round to it. Given how many fires I'm constantly putting out with Win10, I don't know if I ever will...

Reinventing exam accounts for Win10. Should be simple, right? Stripped down Start Menu, couple of overly broad SRP paths for Office etc., RTFs defaulting to WordPad and no internet. 1) Default file associations are a computer GPO now, not user GPP. Had to use third-party software to fix this. 2) Calculator is a modern app, so can't hide it from the Start Menu. Had to block all of C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\ to stop it and other carp. Actually surprised this worked. 3) Took a day to get the Start Menu XML working properly for a layout of 4 (four) tiles, because I'm buggered if I can find anything in Event Viewer that ever tells me why it fails. The taskbar layout was working so it was applying the file, it just ignored the Start Menu part. Finally got it working by copying and pasting the relevant code in from a working layout file and altering the shortcut paths. Best guess is that some white space broke it. White space. In a markup file. Fffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu 4) Browsers removed and blocked. Except Edge. Edge can't be blocked through SRP. Edge can't be taken off the Start Menu. Edge opens from Cortana searches on the Start Menu anyway. User added to Blocked Users on filter, except some sites (Kerboodle etc.) are proxy exceptions so don't get filtered, and Edge is still letting them get to said sites. AppLocker may work but is a Computer setting, not user. Should just be able to block on a per user basis, as before. Should just be able to control what appears on the Start Menu. Should just be able to control this OS outright, without it deciding what's best for me, without it reeeeally begging pleeeeease use this new software we worked ever so haaaaard on, without it arbitrarily ignoring settings when it suits it. Should have been an hour's job. Currently on day 3. As a consumer, I actually quite like Win10. As a sysadmin I loathe this OS like it's a Tory cabinet member.

Currently on v1.7.1--updating the thread because the links above don't work anymore, guessing only the latest version does. Just trying to reinvent my exam users (with WordPad as the default for RTF files) and hit the logic knot of assocations being per-computer. Just when I think Win10 has run out of ways to make my life arbitrarily more difficult... Thanks for the original post @Arthur--strange how, whenever I google a problem, EduGeek turns up on the first page of results and has the right answer waiting for me in less than sixty seconds

What We Do in the Shadows is clearly the greatest vampire movie ever made, and possibly the greatest mockumentary ever made (only Spinal Tap competes tbh), and they've just started posting teaser videos for the new TV show. Which, I hadn't realised, stars EduGeek favourite Matt Berry! Annoyingly all the YouTube videos are location locked to the US, but they're all on the @theshadowsfx Twitter feed, so that's how pointless that restriction was. I can't embed here, though so you'll have to click through there.

Just the general combination of Christmas and bum jokes, to be honest. It looks unbearable from my perspective: crude and over the top and way too American. Now Arthur Christmas, on the other hand...

My kids are gonna lose their poop over that.

Redirection still works, yes, redirects all the stuff under All Programs. You'll still get all the silly UWP apps (like Mixed Reality Viewer) appearing in there though, so don't send yourself in circles trying to get rid of them: you won't. As to missing tiles: you need the shortcuts to also exist in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\ before the XML file will deign to include them. I generally had more success using DesktopApplicationID="" than DesktopApplicationLinkPath="" too, even though the XML gets generated with the latter; e.g. it works better to use than Note that, even if you're using DesktopApplicationID, you still need a shortcut file appearing in the local folder. Even though you never reference that shortcut directly, Windows will automatically check that location and use that shortcut, matching it via target. Yes, this is all very confusing and unnecessarily complicated.

I've got the HP Comware switches at my core and they've been flawless for... 6½ years now, I think? We put two A5800s in as a stacked pair, with redundant links to servers etc., then added a 5820 into the stack a couple of years back when we upgraded to 10GbE over the backbone. They were better value for money than the other HP stuff, and the edge switches (mostly 5130s) are brilliant too. If it's a big upgrade project I'd definitely talk to a network specialist reseller--plenty on here, but SwitchShop have always been superb for me. And they send you a chocolate advent calendar if you're on the mailing list If you're paying to have new cable run then definitely get double the capacity--the actual fibre cable doesn't cost that much, it's the work in hauling it through the ceiling, so while they're at it anyway you may as well get the job done right

And lo, across all the land, from all the voices of all the people, no disagreement was heard.

systeminfo at a command prompt will tell you when a PC booted up and when it was first installed, along with a whole host of other useful stuff. The one that always amazes staff: hold down Ctrl and scroll with your wheel to zoom in and out of webpages & pretty much any Office application (including PDFs). I think we all get so used to doing that without even thinking about it that we can forget to pass it on

Beautiful morning in Lincolnshire this morning, and I just got a new ultra-wide angle lens for my DSLR (Nikon 10-20mm AF-P on my D7200) that I'm learning how to use. You have got to get cloooooose to your subject to get a decent composition; I actually managed to break the spiderweb below when I moved my camera away from my face, because I was probably only 3-4 inches away from it. I have contorted myself into all sorts of awkward positions to use this lens, and all my clothes are filthy from laying on my front I'm also still amazed by the dynamic range of this camera. That last photo isn't HDR, it's one exposure: I just boosted the shadows up in the RAW file with Fill Light to even it out. This is as it looked out of camera, and you wouldn't think there was anything in the bottom half of the photo!

You could probably get LanSchool updated for cheaper than you could get something new in--we'd let support lapse for a couple of years (because it just worked) but were having problems with Windows 10. Taking out a year's support gave us access to the latest update again, and was only £442 (secondary school, up to 700 devices). You could let it drop again after a year if you wanted to keep it cheap after that.