sonofsanta

I was legit going to get that for my 19yo... but won't arrive in time for Christmas. Bah humbug!

Here's a late deal of interest to folk round here: if you've never signed up for XBox Game Pass Ultimate before (i.e. the subscription service with all the games included), you can get three months for £1 right now. That's my Christmas break sorted, then, and just in time for the shiny new nVidia card to arrive too

I go out for a walk at lunchtime each day--chance to stretch my legs and get away from my screen--and honestly, town seemed as busy as ever through Lockdown 2, certainly not like Lockdown 1 where everywhere was a ghost town when you walked to Tesco. Now, though? I passed a queue ten people deep for flippin' Card Factory

Well I had all my tabs open, and saw Currys post their Gigabyte Gaming OC model at £410 five minutes early... and added it to basket... and then in a fit of conscientousness, went through the effort to log out of my work account and into my home account, by which point I had missed my shot But! I did get a Palit model from Scan for £430 all in, soooooo guess I'm faffing about listing my 5700XT on eBay after all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (I blame @ICTDirect_Dave, he is a bad influence, he has been enabling me on Skype) ETA: related, anyone want a PowerColor Red Dragon 5700XT GPU for £370? Barely used, fully boxed! Going for £400 on eBay! Special Edugeek price!

Yup. 27in 1440p is the sweet spot for me and my desk at the moment. I figure I won't go 4k until about 5 years down the line, which would be new GPU time anyway. Mind you, by that point my eyesight will probably be so knackered that 4k would be a waste So the 4k card would cost another couple of hundred over the 1440p card, then I'd need to spend another £400 on a decent 4K screen, and I'd love all that but, alas, I have a mortgage and children, I have to make the sensible choices. (He says, eyeing up one of these cards and eBaying the one he got 5 months ago...)

I dunno, only prices for the 3070 I can see anywhere are ~£550, so that's a 50% jump from £370! Even the FE RRP is a good £100 more, isn't it?

Well if you've not been able to get anything so far, and it all looks a little rich for your blood anyway, the 3060Ti has just unexpectedly arrived. tl;dr: £370 for 2080 Super/1080Ti performance. Up till now I've not particularly regretted my GPU purchase 6 months ago--everything new has been lovely, sure, but always (a) way more expensive (b) impossible to get hold of--but it looks like this card might actually be the one that puts the 5700XT to shame for about the same price point. The frame rates are not hugely different--maybe 10-15%--but it's got all the fancy ray-tracing and DLSS gubbins in that the 5700XT hasn't. Curse my impatience!

Of relevance: if you sign up for the Tor mailing list (and, uh, pretend you're in the US/Canada), the five books in Seanan Macguire's Wayward Children series are being given away for free, one each day. Magical realism stuff, lots of award nominations etc., but most importantly: free, so nothing to lose by grabbing them. More on topic: have just finished The Hollow Crown by Dan Jones, his book on the War of the Roses. First time I've properly gone through the history of the period in a joined up way, and mother of dragons GRRM wasn't kidding when he said he based Game of Thrones on the period. Robert Baratheon is almost completely lifted from Edward IV.

Can't you just do it via GPO? Policies > Admin Templates > System > User Profiles > Delete user profiles older than a specified number of days on system restart Has always worked okay for me. Currently set to 15 days for us to accomodate the two week timetable; we were starting to get SSDs fill up from teachers roaming between classrooms cos of that COVID bubble thing and getting the Teams client in every new room. (Kids have mandatory profiles anyway, so nothing gets stored for them)

Humble have got their sale on too. I picked up Prey and Dishonored 2 for about £9 total.

The Model D is on that list--though it looks like the discount is poorer than it was at the start of the week, now £48 down from £53 when it was £40 on Monday. That's the right-handed version, where the O is ambidextrous. The RPS review speaks highly of it (and the O-)

Not that that's stopped the Daily Mail having a whinge this morning on the basis of one small village in Kent not having any deaths yet! Presumably they want the tiering to apply to regions on the hamlet level until they're so small they're meaningless

There's a chunk of good mice on sale on Amazon for ~50-60% off, which is handy as mine at home has started with the phantom double clicks. Got myself a Razer Basilisk v2 coming for £38, down from £80, which'll do me nicely; there's a bunch of offers summarised on RPS here. (Bonus: it came with a code to get three months of Xbox Game Pass for half price, if that's relevant to your interests too. I'm tempted so I can play Forza Horizon 4, always liked the look of it...)

That is deeply unsettling @_@ Although it does make me think you could do a decent stop-motion Goldeneye 64...

If you can get to the register, you can do the seating plan. You can only copy seating plans to classes for which you're a teacher, but you could maybe get around that by setting yourself as deputy head of subject so that you get all the classes made available to you--not tested, but that works for the Lesson dashboard at least

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/11/amd-radeon-rx-6800-6800xt-review-the-1440p-gpu-beasts-youve-been-craving/ $579 and $649 ain't cheap... Still waiting on Digital Foundry to post their article

Been on Vaioni for years now, now upgraded to 1Gbps/1Gbps for, uh, £6-7kpa, forget the exact figure Also worth talking to Coconnect IMO, very competitive pricing and the guy heading up the division was my Novatech account manager for years, so I'm comfortable vouching for the service even though I've not used the connection!

I've been trying to put across the argument that we'd be better off sending year groups home rather than trying to keep a quarter of them in, because hybrid learning needs the teachers to work 150% as hard to only deliver 75% of the T&L to each group (in school/remote learning), and if you just send everyone home it's less stress for the teacher and a lesson can be delivered in a style that suits everybody instead of this compromise... but I think it's falling on deaf ears so far. List has just gone round for Monday. 201 out of our 1222 off, before we even know about any new cases from the weekend. I think we have 8 positive cases right now? It's almost like schools are overcrowded at the best of times and drawing a 2m circle around any active case is going to scoop up huge swathes of the student body each time...

I'm glad our registration period starts at 8:50, then!

Working for me, and fairly snappily. On the phone to support with you, I guess! Good luck

Yeah, Children of Time is very science-fiction--it's an uplift virus designed to rapidly drive evolution in an attempt to terraform a planet, but the primates they dropped on the surface all die out early so the virus latches onto the spiders instead. It's very logical in the way it develops spider society from there, and thinks about how they'd communicate, how they'd interpret the orbiting space station (that's still transmitting, and houses a human-turned-AI-gone-mad) in religious terms, and how they then interact with the remnants of humanity that arrive looking for a habitable planet. It won the Arthur C Clarke award, so it's definitely got SF credentials Glad to be of service in selling my friends' and peers books, though. Good luck!

Yup--"full size" or "high quality" which is downscaled

Recent hard SF books, hmm, let's see... Top recommendation is absolutely Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky--phenomenal work of imagination, about a planet where spiders are accidentally uplifted instead of the primates, and so follows the development of spider civilization and its eventual encounter with the remnants of humanity. The sequel came out a year or so ago, too, Children of Ruin, which is equally brilliant, this time with octopuses/octopods/octopi. Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut series is an alternative timeline for the space race, where a meteor hits the Atlantic in the early 50s and so prompts an enormous space program to establish a colony on Mars. The Calculating Stars comes first, then The Fated Sky, and they were both my favourite books of 2018; the third book came out this year, The Relentless Moon, and I'm very much looking forward to it. If hubby enjoyed Hidden Figures as a film, this is absolutely in that aesthetic, and it's very engagingly written. If hubby was a fan of Asimov's Foundation series, then Noumenon by Marina J. Lostetter follows a similar structure of connected novelettes: it's set on a generation ship which is populated by clones in order to maintain the personality balance & skillset of the crew, and it follows successive generations as they deal with new problems & disasters, often ones caused by the solution the previous generation needed to enact. There's two follow up books, Noumenon Infinity and Noumenon Ultra, if he enjoys the first. Oh! Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty is amazing, basically a closed room murder mystery in space. Six backup clones wake up to discover the murdered bodies they formerly inhabited and no memory of the events that led to all of them being killed and needing to revive in their clones. Utterly compelling stuff. Autonomous by Annalee Newitz is a tech thriller rather than space-based, about robots and AI and freewill. Very entertaining and written with actual technical accuracy; I never got tired of robots exchanging polite protocol handshakes, amused me every time. If he's an IT nerd, it'll appeal. There's the whole Expanse series of course, about 8 books in that, and the Amazon TV series to accompany it. Ted Chiang had a new short story collection, Exhalations, out last year, and he remains unparallelled in modern spec-fic for his writing. Absolutely staggering stuff; from Wikipedia's summary, the collection is "nine stories exploring such issues as humankind's place in the universe, the nature of humanity, bioethics, virtual reality, free will and determinism, time travel, and the uses of robotic forms of AI". Heady stuff that makes you feel cleverer just for reading it. He's the guy what wrote the short story that was adapted into Arrival, if that film tickled his fancy (and that story is in the collection Time of Your Life from 2002, which is phenomenal, and still worth getting if he hasn't before). I still haven't gotten round to reading Liu Cixin's trilogy that started with The Three Body Problem but it's famously hard-as-hard-SF-gets and Barack Obama recommended it, which is good enough for me. Similarly, Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire series (starting with Ninefox Gambit) has a very good reputation, has won awards, and is hard military SF, but I haven't yet gotten round to it myself. That's everything off the top of my head/in my Audible library that I think is relevant to the brief, but let me know if all this has already been read and I'll come up with some others!

I think the announcement of the vaccine is a little premature given that the sample size so far is only what, 60-odd people?, and was made more in the spirit of "this'll really help our share prices!" than anything else, but this was one of the experimental approaches using RNA so it's very cool that it's bearing fruit at all IMHO

With the caveat that understanding and enforcing these rules is one of the few tasks that isn't my responsibility right now, we've never done that. We must have had, oh, ten or so cases now since October? And we've never been told by PHE/the LA team to send a whole year group home, even when there's been three cases in one year group and we've had something like 80-90% of said year group off self-isolating due to the 2m rule (based on seating plans, buses, and friendship groups). On the one hand this has worked well enough--every outbreak has been stopped before it can get a foothold--but on the other hand it'd be a damn sight simpler to just send them all home, because they'd actually get a better quality of teaching IMHO if everyone was remote than trying to satisfy both remote-learning and in-class-learning and having to implement a hybrid approach that falls short for both. It's far easier to plan a lesson where everyone is in front of you or everyone has a computer than a lesson where it's a hodge-podge of both. EDIT: just read the Guardian article linked above, and looks like the advice changed before we had our first confirmed case, as they switched from local health teams to privatised call centre for the responses. Another top :playball:s up then!