sonofsanta

As just heard on Radcliffe & Maconie on Radio 6: The manual for the Philips HD2520 toaster includes the explicit instruction "We advise you not to use the toaster in the presence of birds" What the actual...? o_O;; Anyone have any clues as to why Philips felt the need to include this very specific advice? Apparently the gentleman who noticed this and emailed in to the RadMac show phoned their customer service and confirmed that they are referring to all species and breeds of bird, but they couldn't explain why. The mind boggles.

Absolutely superb tears in my eyes.

The November Man: Pierce Brosnan is an ex-CIA agent pulled out of retirement for one last job... yeah, it's another entry in the Old Man Does An Action Movie That's A Bit Like Bourne sub-genre so prevalent right now, but it's competently done, entertaining for the 1h40 it's on, and c'mon, it has Pierce Brosnan in it. He's great! Kept me and the wife happy, and worth a look next time you're scrolling through Netflix. Unfortunately, since listening to Adam & Joe's podcast, all I can think of every time Pierce Brosnan shouts in a movie is this clip from Taffin.

DDR4 isn't such a boon by the looks of things - maybe 20% more bandwidth - but getting an i7-6700K gets you 20 PCI-E 3.0 lanes instead of 16 PCI-E 2.0, and native support for nVME PCI-E SSDs, which are absolutely the future of SSDs. With that budget, you should absolutely be getting a future proof Skylake system. i7-7600K, 980 Ti GPU, a PCI-E boot SSD if you can. Not going to worry about making a full specs list because others have already done a fine job in that regard

eBuyer have some very good offers on at the moment on Asus & Lenovo laptops - in particular, a Lenovo with a Core i3-5010U @ 2.1GHz w/ 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD for only £270, and even better (and the one I've just bought for my daughter for her GCSEs & video editing) a Lenovo with a Core i5-5200U @ 2.2GHz w/ 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, AMD R5 GPU and 1080p screen for only £400. Can't think I've ever seen a 1080p laptop that cheap before.

Seriously: stop stressing. Everyone has crap paint jobs in their collection, but you know what? It doesn't matter a jot even if all you've got is blocks of colour, once you're looking at a complete squad from 6 feet away it all looks the same. You're gaming with them, not displaying them in a cabinet. It's surprisingly easy to do a good job after a few models worth of practice, and once you've gotten really good at painting you decide you haven't got the patience and go for speed painting instead I once painted an entire 1500 point Eldar army in a week using white spray paint and yellow, blue and black washes. Absolutely passable, worked a treat for getting squads of twenty done in 3 hours, looked a damn sight better on the table than one exquisitely painted squad and 8 unpainted squads because you ran out of time. The only models I put any real effort and detail into were the character models and larger vehicles. As for size, they're 28mm scale, so probably the size of the first knuckle on your thumb (depending on the specific model, of course). They're much bigger than Risk models, so long as you haven't got the whiskey shakes you'll be fine with the detail painting.

Still my favourite Gove image: (edited to use a non-cropped version, just realised the original had lost bits from the sides)

Munich is one of the best places in the world (though, disclaimer, I haven't been to the other options). The Black Forest is gorgeous, and really does look like the postcards. The beer halls are incredible. The old quarter is staggeringly beautiful--it makes you mourn for all the history we've lost in our own cities simply through negligence. Stuttgart is nearby with the Mercedes Benz museum, and is also a lovely city. And yes, it's hot--gloriously so. The only solution is more hellbier

If it was the Death Star I could handle it. Planet destroying, evil empire, etc. etc., but none of that is as bad as it could be...

Like heck - I pay KPMS to come do mine for me, I'm a danger to myself with power tools!

I just worry that it's going to be altogether too serious and humourless:(

Check your distances and screen sizes, but if it fits, the Casio Core (i.e. XJ-V1) is unbeatable for the price. Lampless, bright, sharp, £430. There are only two faults with it: 1) It still uses a silly power cable. Buy some adapters. 2) The zoom range is quite limited at 1:1.1, which isn't too problematic in and of itself, except that its throw ratio is different to all the other standard projectors, and so it seems to prefer being closer to the screen than you'd expect. For a 120cm high image (i.e. a normal whiteboard) it needs to be mounted 2.5-2.7m away, where projectors are more normally around 3m away for that size image. If the Core doesn't suit, the XJ-M141 is much more flexible in its mounting, with a 1:1.5 zoom range.

From what I saw of Cunninghams (and one other I can't remember the name of now) NRS was the better system by far - had less of a whiff of "it's only schools, it's good enough" about it, and felt more complete. I can't deny there's been aspects we've had to work out ourselves to an extent, though - the above is one example, and I've just discovered myself (to the delight of our shop lady) that a simple USB numeric pad can be used for girls to enter their PINs if their thumbprint isn't on the system.

When they installed NRS here, they told us we had to start and close the reval program every day... but all you really need to do is set a scheduled task for [DRIVE]:\NRS\Truste\RevalController\TrusteRevalController.exe XXX at 7am (where XXX is the site code, provided as an argument) and TASKKILL /F /IM TrusteRevalController.exe for the end of the day when you want to cash up. That way I can't forget to do it There's 7 scheduled tasks set up to help administer NRS, and it pretty much looks after itself now.

27 ain't nothing Happy birthday!

That looks very interesting - opening directly from HAP and clicking Save to resync (as with a OneDrive document) would save us no end of grief with students coming in and discovering that yes, you need to re-upload your document when done. So long as the installation is nice and straightforward for them to manage at home...

Great minds...

These are the sturdiest design we've found: Robust Headphone + Mic

Whatever's cheapest at the moment out of the AMD 5450 or nVidia 210, comes with a low profile bracket (if you need) and has a full DVI-I port, not just a DVI-D (so you an use a DVI-VGA converter).

I love how gloriously overwritten it is. Stuff objectivity, let's write the article like it's a Redwall story! "The ferocious beast appeared... Panic reigned, with a woman being bitten, a man falling off his bicycle as he was chased... A man who tried to outpace the fearsome creature on his bicycle was chased into a field... Club members ended up barricaded inside the building." THE SIEGE OF ALCONBURY 2015 NEVER FORGET

Today I realised one thing that's been annoying me and learnt another that will stop a lot of annoyances. 1) I've been experimenting with setting power plans by GPP. I set the Power Saver plan in the computer GPO, so that machines with no-one logged in would save energy, then set the Balanced plan in the user GPO to override when someone logged in. Computers kept reverting to the Power Saver, limiting the CPU, turning the display, lots of little annoyances. Today I realised that it was the group policy refresh after 90 minutes causing me grief - because although computer GPOs are processed at start up then user at logon, giving user policies precedence, policy refreshes do user first then computer, so the computer policy was suddenly taking precedence and reverting machines to the Power Saver. D'oh! 2) Using uBlock, all I need to do to block those stupid "You may also be interested in... 15 Sights You'll See on the Beach This Summer! Rich people don't want you to know this trick! UK Man finds pill that DESTROYS fat!" blocks is click the uBlock icon, click the eyedropper icon, click on the offending block of rubbish and click Create [filter]. No faffing around working out the filter or using Fiddler to find web addresses - just 4 clicks. Oh frabjous day! (I should point out that edugeek is the only site allowed on my white list, and I see all its ads. Well, I say see - they're on my screen, but my brain has a remarkably effective built in ad blocker...)

The hours to meet FTE are very low - 200 hours a year, so only 5 hours a week through the academic year. They have to be a computer user to count as well, so none of the kitchen staff count (just the kitchen manager here) and none of the cleaners count. If your TAs use the computers at all, for emails or resources or anything - and I'd imagine they do - then they count. More generally, regarding cost effectiveness of EES, I figured it as breaking even over 6 years for us, because during that time we'd have upgraded Windows and Office (new version every ~3 years, we plump for every other version). Except in those 6 years we'd have saved ~£12k by shifting to the included Microsoft AV away from the Symantec EP we had, we'd have been able to upgrade as and when we pleased, not when we could afford it, and we'd have had the peace of mind of knowing we're licensed. The addition of Student Advantage only made it better. It depends on your staff numbers (we're selective, so don't have many TAs at all) but it really can be as good as it looks.

I felt a great disturbance in the Lego, as if millions of bricks were stood on, and were suddenly silenced.

That is ludicrous, far beyond what anyone could ever possibly need (because if you want to take photos of the moon, you probably have a proper scope & camera mount), and compromises the sharpness of the lens throughout the range. Doesn't mean I'm not impressed. The mad bar stewards! I love 'em.

Snowspeeder cheers y'all!