sonofsanta

In the loft. Pfft. You've gone soft, Dave. Witness my mancave: That dust cover is the one it came with from Gordon Harwood in 1990. And check me out with a second floppy drive. How the other half lived, eh?

Another Amiga documentary has been released People still use the Amiga today, and new Viva Amiga documentary shows why | Ars Technica (tagging @Dos_Box ) Just seeing the logo in the article photo has made me all nostalgic and fuzzy. I will never love another machine like I loved my Amiga.

Played Gunpoint (excellent puzzle thing and very funny, but ends just as it gets going, sadly), Never Alone (a game about Inuit mythology actually written by Inuits, but the game is a bit meh) and That Dragon, Cancer (obviously heartbreaking given that its about the developer's son suffering cancer from 1yo, with a couple of utterly brilliant moments that could only work in a game amongst a lot of other sections that don't work anywhere near as well) over the holidays. Then picked up Endless Legend at 75% off from Humble and oh my glob it's marvellous. Proper Civ style 4X game with a fantasy setting, but whereas different factions in Civ give you a couple of slightly different units and buildings and a boost here and there, Endless Legend's factions all play the game completely differently--maybe they don't use food but can only grow by consuming Dust (the gold equivalent), or maybe they can't found any other cities but have to build up a megacapital, or maybe there's no peace and cities grow by consuming corpses... then there's a storyline for each faction with quests, changing seasons, resources and boosters, heroes, equipment for units... I'm about 12 hours in to my first play through and just about getting a handle on everything, but if you enjoy Civ games, you have to get this too. It's brilliant.

Update to my support query upthread: it has taken PSF 26 days (8th Dec to today) to reply to my ticket with "we fixed that in build 22, do you want it?"

Looking like it's all but definite for Bottas now: Sauber agrees Wehrlein deal for F1 2017 & Bottas Mercedes factory visit suggests deal is done

We've got an HP M651 laser in our art room, after complaints that the ink-based PageWide x585 wasn't good enough quality, and they've been perfectly content since. Remarkably colour accurate when measured against a calibrated monitor, I have to say. Apart from an annoying tendency to run out of toner at 1% and stop printing the empty colour whilst insisting it's still fine, it's been a reliable bit of kit this last year. ETA: that's A4, btw; can't work out from the Xerox spec sheet if yours is an A3 printer. A3 equivalent of the HP is the M800 series; we've got the M880z outside our office, same print engine but A3 and with all the scanning gubbins on top. Absolutely marvellous bit of kit, but not especially cheap to purchase. Could probably save a chunk by getting the model without the scanning stuff.

Massa might be coming back... Valtteri Bottas: Williams open to Finn joining Mercedes - BBC Sport Interesting that he only retired because Williams were going to promote Stroll; the narrative earlier in the year had been the other way round, that they only promoted him after he announced his retirement.

Is it just me, or...? I also got annoyed that they didn't do the 8-bit movement right for the cars, because I am a grumpy old sod, but I did love all the little nods (Street Fighter 2 stage selection!) so I should cheer up and shut up, I suppose

We've unblocked the art teacher's profile - https://uk.pinterest.com/fredfinbar/ - for all students through the selective unblocking of certain subdomains. Art can then pin stuff onto that board and kids can access it in a moderated, curated area. Staff have got all of Pinterest unblocked so that they can pin new stuff to it. Subdomains in question are... pinimg.com (passets-[a-z]{2}.pinterest.com) [as a URL pattern] pinterest.com/resource pinterest.com/fredfinbar where the last entry there is the profile in question. The biggest PITA is that Pinterest doesn't let you do blooming anything without being logged in, but all of that does allow students to sign up/log in; once they do it will redirect them to the homepage, which is blocked, but if they go back in the browser to the allowed profile page it will have logged them in.

It's the latter--the Shared Reports window disappears (replaced by some other reports window that tells users they don't have permission and causes much panic) and needs to be re-added from the web catalog thingummy. I imagine something is happening with the Application Pool because the update process (as told to me by PSF in a document full of lies, and refined by me into something more accurate) involves uninstalling MyPortal and then installing the new one and copying a few config files back in.

I raised a ticket on the 8th because out of nowhere (which is a typical pattern for PSF problems--they appear suddenly for no reason) adding new lines to a draft now deletes all the lines you'd previously added before you hit save. Which essentially makes drafts useless, and means you have to fill an order out in one go and hope you don't get interrupted so that the session times out. Guess when I'm likely to hear back from that logged case? No, really, please guess, because I have no idea. Still got nothing from them. All the comments from 2014 are still valid. There's no development and the company still behaves the same. Every now and then I'll get a new build in the post, usually in response to someone raising a ticket and PSF going "oh yeah, we fixed that a couple of builds ago, we'll send you the new one", and said new build usually takes away as much as it adds. And then arbitrarily shuffles a couple of other things about, so muscle memory for menus gets disrupted. And resets everyone's preferences so we have to go round one by one adding the budget reports back in for people, cos there's no way of controlling it centrally (at least, not so far as we've ever been told). Much as it'd be nice to be told when there's an update and get a download link, I don't know if I'd want to update regularly. It's more grief than it's worth most of the time. It's horribly unfriendly on the interface, horribly insecure (both in design and in their working practice--I bet I know everyone's admin password, and I certainly know where it'll keep your network user password in plain text; I hope your install doesn't use domain admin credentials to run its services!), it's disorganised and convoluted to do anything in... it is, by far and away, my most hated piece of software. No staff here like it, apart from Finance and I think that's a case of "anything's better than the old version of SAP through an ancient Citrix connection to county" and the devolved workload implemented alongside PSF i.e. we fill our own orders out now, rather than filling out a spreadsheet and Finance entering it onto the system. FWIW, we use the HCSS five year planning software, and that works like a dream, and HCSS themselves are a pleasure to work with. If they have an equivalent system then you should probably look at that. For various reasons beyond my ken, PSF was the only option for us at the time we had to move (County booting us off the SAP farm), and now we're stuck with it. I wish we weren't. I loathe that we have to give them money for this crock. ETA: and +1 to all the reports of support wanting to make every last damn little tweak a chargeable project. If you're lucky, you'll eventually find a support person who knows what they're on about and will be able to do these five minute jobs for you, but if you get the head of support picking up your ticket? Anything you could ever dream of asking for turns out to be a development request requiring a charge.

And about bloody time too! It's been approaching Greek tragedy levels, this quest for a job. Gratz!

I think that Cities episode was the greatest thing I have ever seen on my television. Absolutely incredible stuff. Hard to pick a best bit--the happy Jaipur monkeys free running everywhere? Falcons divebombing at 200mph in NYC? Leopards stalking through Mumbai at night under the cover of the city noise? The turtles were heartbreaking though. Glad they were helping as well as filming them, because hot damn if that wasn't some thick guilt being laid on for how we as humans are causing that suffering to no end.

But... if Panasonic's latest screens already support that, then hasn't that ship sailed I can well see PE2 being the exemplar material for HDR in the way that PE1 was for FullHD. HDR should be very, very cool. On topic: only one more episode left! Why can't it just be a permanent fixture of the schedules, a new episode every Sunday without fail. I'd pay for that.

Did it with Windows and mapped drives for PHP/MySQL. Takes an afternoon. Easy as pie. Wrote it up in full on here Installing a PHP/MySQL Development Server for students on Windows Server 2012 - Part1 - Blogs - EduGeek.net Installing a PHP/MySQL Development Server for students on Windows Server 2012 - Part2 - Blogs - EduGeek.net

My OnePlus One will be two years old next month and I have absolutely zero intention of replacing it. Still runs like a champ. Best phone I've ever owned, and I do love me that CyanogenOS. (No idea what Oxygen is like, them fancy OP2 and OP3 owners can tell you.)

Plus: Mercedes F1 team puts Pascal Wehrlein Sauber talks on hold

Can't see it being Jenson, alas, much as I'd love it otherwise--he's out not because he got replaced but cos he wanted the break. Don't think Merc could pay him enough at this point. It'd be brilliant though, wouldn't it? Wonder what the odds are on Perez--he's shown pretty fine form this year, and is at a Merc engine customer...

To be honest, I think it'll be Bottas, with Wehrlein to Williams, or even Paul di Resta (who is on Williams' books at the moment as Reserve Driver) filling that race seat. But I'd like to see Ricciardo there, with Sainz to RBR. That'd be awesome to see. I also do not want to see Vettel there because he has been a whiny little b1tch this year and I don't like him. Never had a problem with him before this year, but all the radio messages saying people he's racing should get out of his way... how about, and this is a strange idea for Formula 1 I know but bear with me, how about you overtake them.

Damn it, left write-protect on on the floppy again. Ooh, can I borrow that game to Xcopy it? What's the third word of the fifth line of page 17... hang on... oh bugger, where'd I leave the manual? Wish I just had a cracked copy... [/Amiga nerd] Two hours. Enough for me to download 24.8mb on my 44k Freeserve connection, in the days before download managers could resume an interrupted download. Any file 25mb or more was forever out of my reach.

I thought the cinematography in the Deserts episode was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on TV. Absolutely stunning, in an almost literal sense of the word. Thus far the eagle fight is still my favourite moment though

Tesco have still got the Chromecast for only £18, which is as cheap as it's ever been. Picked up another for home and another for work Was thinking about getting one of those Compute Sticks to stick in the telly, because its built in iPlayer is getting ever more broken and it can't support a lot of, er, alternatively sourced videos anymore, but a bit of experimentation with apps has shown that BubbleUPnP can transcode on the fly and get DTS and x265 content working on the Chromecast without issue (limited to 20 minutes in the free version, but worth the £3 for me). So now, rather than copy files to a memory stick and then get annoyed when it can't play the audio, I copy them to my phone instead and stream it to the Chromecast. I've not yet experimented, but there's a server component as well which should allow me to stream straight from my PC via my phone to my Chromecast, transcoding as it goes. Lovely job

I thought it was probably the least tense between them as it's been the last three years, personally--the embrace in parc ferme, the congratulations on the podium etc. All a lot more sportsmanlike than Rosberg was last year when Hamilton won it! All this nonsense about dirty tactics from Hamilton is ridiculous. He didn't put the cars at risk at any point, he clearly had enough pace in pocket that the race victory was never at risk, and it was his right as race leader to control the pace, just as it is when being released from the safety car. Was he meant to just gainfully take the championship loss on the chin and race as if nothing else mattered? If he cared that little about winning, he wouldn't be the triple world champion he is, and Mercedes wouldn't be paying him such a huge amount of money to secure his services. Methinks the papers are just stirring it up today with all this talk of suspensions and sackings--if they didn't take either of those actions against Rosberg when he deliberately drove into Hamilton at Spa '14 and took a car out of the race, they're not going to do anything for Lewis driving a little bit slower than he otherwise could have done at the end of a double-championship year, ffs. That said, I'm kinda happy for Rosberg--his consistency through the year has been pretty astonishing (front row every race!) and if not now, then probably never. He'd have felt awful if this slipped through his fingers, and I'd have felt for him. But he's got his championship now, and he can go back to being second best to Lewis from here on out

They're probably about equivalent tbh. Probably get the 1866 kit cheaper, and its tighter timings will offset the speed deficit--though the difference on performance if you have a graphics card is almost non-existent.

Normally higher speed means higher latency--just the physics of the thing, I think. It's about balancing the two, as shown in that rough performance index from the conclusion of that article (the page I linked to).