sonofsanta

I like the Google Now Launcher, and have already switched to it I did try Aviate once but it annoyed me, I like things to be where I know they are, not move around depending on the time of day. I reckon I might root so I can tweak the DPI though. Having a phone this size and still only having a screen 4 icons wide is daft.

There is a Green candidate in my constituency, and whilst I don't agree with some of the policies* and find them perhaps a little naive and optimistic about what they'd actually be able to do if they were in power, I'm thinking that a vote for Green would demonstrate that I want the country to be more left-leaning, not more right-leaning - as all the current politicians assume thanks to the rise of Farage. *e.g. the absolute stance against nuclear power; all the arguing over that has meant we've kept on building coal & oil plants and done more harm to the environment than nuclear would, which is the cleanest form of energy we have in the UK alongside wind

Wouldn't get another chance like this, that's for sure, so I'm well up for it. I did a year's work in Switzerland before and it was fantastic - getting to really live somewhere for that length of time is an absolute privilege. The only problem is I'm not a qualified teacher but I can but try, dependent upon the opinion of our teenager daughter. The bigger problem would be living away from easy Amazon deliveries for two years...

Just had a serious conversation with the wife about this over breakfast - for two years, it is very tempting. Schools offer GCSE and daughter is only about to start hers, two boys aren't yet school age so minimal disruption for them. Hmmm...

Going back to Android 4.4 feels so old fashioned...! It is taking a long time to get this set up the way I'm used to - apps, homescreen etc. - but I'm liking just how tweakable everything is. And there's so many common sense tweaks! Showing the battery percentage, showing me how many messages I have in the icon, showing me all the volume sliders so I can turn music down before I start playing it... I just hope they hurry up with CM12S!

There's no easy answer, is there? But my view is that just because they're incapable of thinking ahead and supporting a child, doesn't mean they're incapable of loving a child. Stereotypes can be made and assumptions can be jumped to about the quality of care seen in a lot of these homes*, but at the end of the day could you really drag a healthy child away from a healthy family and a loving environment simply becuse their income doesn't reach some arbitrary level set by some landed toff in Westminster who has absolutely no concept of what actual poverty is? I know that continuing to fund these families is what breeds the sentiment of "the world owes me", but I guess I'm too soft a touch to punish a child for the mistakes of the parents. And good use of the proper meaning of blood thicker than water - I believe it was a phrase used by soldiers originally, no? *favourite example: large family on holiday in Skeg, wandering past the ice cream shack I was working in. The mother turns round to one whining child and declares "if you don't stop &*%$ing crying and start $&£%ing enjoying yourself right now, I'm going to %*£&ing smack you!" Right, yup, I'm sure that child will cheer right up now.

First up: I agree that the attitude of "but the world owes me!" is infinitely frustrating and makes you wonder why you bother trying to do the right thing (saddled with a mortgage, we'll only have three kids even though we want more etc.), and it's a deep seated attitude problem that's two or three generations deep now, and I don't know how it can ever be fixed. However, I don't think taking the child away can ever be the answer, because that is absolutely punishing the child, which should be allowed to grow up with its own parents and not in social care. Even saying "nope, no benefits for this one!" is problematic, because you're effectively denying the child the resources it needs to grow up. We may well strongly suspect that the money only goes on fags/fruit machines/iPhone contracts but letting even one child go hungry is too high a moral price, IMHO. Perhaps a line is drawn in the sand saying from now on, fourth children and on aren't eligible for any benefits, so don't have them if you can't afford them, and any existing claimants continue under the old system. But would that really stop people? Do they people who need to know that information pay any attention to politics and news? I'm stereotyping, I know, but from what I've seen of the families round my (poverty-stricken) home town and all the children that go to the comprehensive there (where I used to work), the only way I think you'd get the message across would be ads during the X Factor. I'm pretty solidly left wing these days, and we need a benefits system to help those less well off (I'm all for a 20x wage cap in public & private sector), but there is something fundamentally unbalanced in our benefits system at the moment. When I first moved in with my now-wife, bringing an extra £18k into the household where she was only on £11k (pro-rata TA salary), we were worse off by a significant margin every month thanks to the loss of benefits. The best answer for us in terms of money in our pockets would have been for me to quit my job. How can almost tripling the household income result in a couple being worse off? How is that sane?

I was hoping to be rid of the last hard drive in a desktop machine, and the last Core2 machine with them, but the changes to TAP may leave me just short of that target. Hopefully I can manage the full SSD target still - I might buy a handful fewer new machines and spend the money on completing the SSD roll out, actually. Draft N wireless points, to be replaced with a proper quantity of AC Unifi points. And later in the year, the Oki laser printers whose contract is up; with any luck we'll swap for the Officejet Pro X printers as well @localzuk, if I can convince higher ups. They're cheapest option to run, have a very tidy consumables system (4 inks that are solid metal rectangles you click into place like an SD card, couldn't be easier unless they recharged themselves from dust or something), are incredibly fast in Draft mode - and quite frankly, draft quality is more than good enough for the majority of printing. Side-by-side with a laser print you can tell it's come from an inkjet, but on its own merits the print quality is more than good enough. Colour images have more resolution & detail as well - our lasers compress the blacks, although the colour balance seems a bit off, so it's six of one and half-a-dozen of t'other. I'll write some fuller impressions up in due course, but I'm very impressed so far given all the benefits.

Our cashless system is from Nationwide Retail Systems, our online payments are from WisePay. Using the latter, parents can top up via credit card, and girls can then buy uniform using their cashless account in the school shop. We also have one of the school shop tills set up as a cash till, which is a bit of a kludge in the back end (it's a cashless system, after all, it wasn't designed with cash in mind) but it works well in the day to day, and it's only us that ever have to deal with the odd quirk as a result of the setup. Not had a parent turn up and ask to pay on card, to the best of my knowledge, but I suppose if they did we could get them logged into their WisePay to top up, then make the purchase against the student's account - you can look them up without them being present. There's an online uniform shop as well, I think that's a local company, and they can order for delivery to the shop and pick up on site. And bearing in mind the post above - NRS support have always been very good (as have WisePay).

After waiting forever and a day for AzureAD to set itself up - never been in there before - gone through the above and customised our login screen to look all pretty and special. Thanks!

Just had a concerned email from one of our office staff as to the content of a ClipArt search... It would seem that Bing Image Search is not a flawless replacement for the original curated selection of images

Novatech. Stone. I always ask VeryPC as well, maybe this year will be their year (5p discount per machine per rep point on EduGeek? Maybe?). Custom build all the way, because then SSD upgrades aren't silly money.

So this is a move being pushed by the Civil Service to keep the MPs distracted and out of trouble while the CS gets on with the real business of running the country, you say? You know what, you might have something there.

There is something specifically more useful about dual monitor than single widescreen that I can't put my finger on. My resolution is effectively 2560 x 1024 - so a single 27" 2560 x 1440 would give me more real estate. But the separation of the screens makes it feel like I can have more open - I can have two full screen programs, not two half-size, which is a ludicrous distinction to make but it's there. More practically it does make it easier (in Windows 7) to have 4 snapped windows side by side, whereas a single big monitor would only support 2.

Trying to negotiate deals with the networks is a fool's errand these days, they just don't care. When my wife's contract was up I got in touch with o2 and said look, I can get the phone I want for free through Carphone Warehouse for £23 a month on your network, but it'd be a world of faff for me to arrange and you'll end up losing money when Carphone Warehouse take their slice; can't you just match it as an upgrade deal and make everyone's lives easier? No, no they could not. £28pm was the price and that was that. So I went through CW and dealt with the faff and o2 are now making less money than they otherwise would have. Ridiculous.

Hahaha! They think that giving people shiny devices will stop them printing out anything and everything? Are they mad? This won't save £3m on printing, it'll just cost £1m on devices while everyone carries on as before.

OnePlus One order status has changed from Pending Shipment to Processing - I'm sure that's a backwards step...

If Top Gear had been an ITV or Sky show it wouldn't be the problem it is, but because it's the BBC, that national institution, that public service, they are held to a different (higher) moral standard. Anyone else would weather the storm because they're a commercial entity and Top Gear brings the money, so their executives would back them, but the BBC are seen by many as representative of the country, and if they'd let him get away with it, there'd have been all sorts of whining in the House of Commons. Besides, if it wasn't for this, you know there'd have been something racist/sexist/daft in another three months and we'd have gone through the same rigmarole again. A cynical man might think Clarkson, May & Hammond have been feeling annoyed at the limitations of the BBC and have been deliberately pushing to get the excuse to leave and go to Sky where they'll have more freedom to do as they please...

Oh aye, it has to remain entertainment, and there wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with what they were doing - just the fact they'd been doing it the same way for so many years whilst losing all inventiveness and just repeating the same gags more and more frequently. It was getting difficult to tell if I was watching a new show or if I'd switched to Dave by accident.

Random 17" from about 8 years ago what were lying around. They don't even match. I've never quite been able to justify spending the money on us to upgrade. Two widescreen monitors feels like I'm spoiling myself (I am not going back to single monitor). If I really need to Photoshop something well, I'll move to the computers round the corner with their 23" IPS 1080p monitors.

Desktops: as much as 7 years in these days of Good Enough Performance, especially if you start installing SSDs. Reliability is what gets to them in the end; it becomes uneconomical to keep them going. Laptops: you're lucky to get 5 years, only bank on 3. All the extra heat crammed in that tiny chassis wears 'em out sooner, the hinges go, keys get mushy, trackpad buttons break... Tablets: I'm lucky not to suffer any here (we've trialled them, and not found any actual use for our style of teaching & learning) but I'd only expect a couple of good years, and replace them after 3. 10 years ago we didn't even have iPhones, let alone iPads. How can they expect them to last that long? I bet you can't find anyone still running a Windows Mobile 6.5 device from 2005, or even an original iPhone. Tablets are consumer mobile tech, not enterprise PC tech. Judge them by how consumer mobiles last.

I know this won't be a popular opinion in a 17 page thread backing Clarkson... but I stopped watching Top Gear a couple of years ago because it had become a parody of itself. It desperately needs some fresh ideas beyond Clarkson's schtick. Perhaps this is the chance it needs, though it's a rubbish way for it to come about. I can only hope that, in the short time remaining on his contract, they film a regeneration scene for him, Dr Who style.

As far as I'm concerned, mobile providers are like energy companies these days - it's awful service everywhere you go, so you may as well go where it's cheap. Hence I'm now with first:utility for the latter, it's not like being with the Big Six ever gained me anything in quality of service.

Right, BT SIM ordered, o2 upgrade cancelled, getting my PAC code tomorrow, leaving them after 15 years next week. If only they did things like, oh I don't know, rewarded customers for their loyalty, I might have stayed with them. I've been with them since they were called Genie, fer cryin' out loud. Did it ever get me owt? Did it buttery.

As above in my multiple edits: you are right, a review I read lied to me. And it's just one more reason to shift to BT from o2. I need motivation to deal with their customer service, so it all helps.