sonofsanta

What kind of example do we set if we say "well, it's illegal, but we'll do it anyway"? The law is the law, whether we agree with it or not, whether we think we'll get caught or not, and in our professional capacity we have to ensure the school abides by it. Morally I have a lot of issues with copyright law and its implementation these days, personally I act in a certain way (*cough*), but professionally I play it by the letter. I'm paid to. If anyone wants to argue, they can explain to the Head and the governors why they want to break the law and expose the school to the implications of that. (I do always phrase it as "I'm sorry, but copyright law says no" rather than getting angry, though)

Well, it's free for me Think of it this way - the dues you pay directly support the lifeline many of us rely on for support/company/sanity, and thus generates goodwill alongside awareness. So that should be some comfort, right? Plus @Dos_Box needs to pay for his gold-plated keyboard somehow. I hear his Caps Lock light is a genuine emerald!

There's the one what PC Pro do - ICT in Education or something similar? VeryPC asked about it a while ago - and I do read that when it lands. But tbh, I skip past the adverts. Of course I do, the internet has trained me to. I'd say being on here is a) free, apart from time b) much more effective at hitting your target audience in educational IT...

Legendary.

A user's UPN doesn't need to match your internal domain - before O365, our users were all [email protected]. I changed 'em all to [email protected] to meet the O365 requirements and nothing broke. Smoothwall still sees them as the old UPN in Kerberos auth, strangely, but it still works so I'm not bothered Basically, follow this HOW TO: Add UPN Suffixes to a Forest and then update your users - which you can do en masse in the GUI, don't even need to faff with PowerShell if you don't want to.

Apparently you're not alone in thinking the 2012 N7 felt slower: Lollipop on the 2012 Nexus 7: Not great, but not much worse | Ars Technica FWIW, my N4 actually feels snappier, though that may be purely subjective and due to swishy animations. Battery life seems to be holding up so far. Experimentation shows that priority mode is actually silent mode - when it says "no notifications", it just seems to mean "I won't make a noise unless it's a priority". There's still a notification in the drawer and apps don't stop checking in.

I use an Excel file where I can type in their old name, their new name, and it generates all the columns I need to save out to a CSV with the columns oldFName,oldLName,newFName,newLName,type,dn,oldUsername,oldUpn,oldHmdir,oldProfile,oldEmail,newUsername,newUpn,newDisplayName,newHmdir,newProfile,newEmail,newO365Email,newOrgEmail That CSV is copied to a domain controller as renameUser.csv, where the following script gets run Import-Csv .\renameUser.csv | foreach-object { # change majority of details $newUsername = $_.newUserName $newDisplayName = $_.newDisplayName Set-ADUser -Identity $_.oldUsername -SamAccountName $newUsername -UserPrincipalName $_.newUpn -EmailAddress $_.newUpn -DisplayName $_.newDisplayName -GivenName $_.newFName -Surname $_.newLName -HomeDirectory $_.newHmdir -HomeDrive "N:" -ProfilePath $_.newProfile -PassThru # Change distinguished name (can't be done through Set-ADUser) Try { Rename-ADObject -identity $_.dn -NewName $_.newDisplayName Write-Host "Renamed to $newDisplayName" -ForegroundColor Green } Catch { Write-Host "Display name not changed: $newUsername may already exist." -ForegroundColor Red } # Add old username to end of current description $newDescription = "(was " + $_.oldUsername + ")" Get-ADUser $_.newUsername -Properties Description | ForEach-Object { Set-ADUser $_ -Description "$($_.Description) $newDescription" } # Rename existing directories (makes our lives easier in future) Rename-Item $_.oldHmdir $newUsername $oldProfile = $_.oldProfile + ".V2" $newProfile = $newUsername + ".V2" Rename-Item $oldProfile $newProfile # Sort out proxy addresses, need to set up variables as doesn't seem to like $_. nomenclature $mailNickname = $newUsername $oldEmail = $_.oldEmail $lowerOldEmail = $oldEmail.ToLower() $newEmail = $_.newEmail $o365Email = $_.newO365Email $orgEmail = $_.newOrgEmail Get-ADUser $newUsername | Set-ADUser -Remove @{proxyAddresses=$oldEmail} -Replace @{mailNickname=$mailNickname} -Add @{proxyAddresses=$lowerOldEmail,$newEmail,$o365Email,$orgEmail} -PassThru Write-Host "`n============================================`n" -ForegroundColor Green } That's slightly longer than most people will need as every user here has at least three email addresses - @school.county.sch.uk, @school.org and @school.onmicrosoft.com It changes the username and all relevant fields to match (displayName etc.), renames & updates the Profile and Home directories, appends their old username to the description for clarity, maintains all their old email addresses as proxyAddresses and sets up all their new addresses. I then copy the CSV to my DirSync server (that has all the PowerShell modules installed) and run the following simple script to change their UPN (i.e. login) # based on http://community.office365.com/en-us/forums/148/t/17328.aspx Connect-MSOLService -Credential $adminCredential $Users = Import-Csv D:\Office365\renameUser.csv # change UPN for login $Users | ForEach-Object { Set-MsolUserPrincipalName -UserPrincipalName $_.oldUpn -NewUserPrincipalName $_.newUpn } At a guess, for the specific problem you're having, I'd say check the targetAddress attribute (should be SMTP:[email protected] - make sure SMTP is capitalised) and the userPrincipalName (should be [email protected] whatever your email address is). UPN has to be updated in Office365 directly with PowerShell - it won't rename based on your AD alone.

Congratulations again to you sir make sure to spoil your missus!

They should talk to some of the staff here who can't even get ADSL where they are, see how hard done by they are with their FTTC then...

The price being quoted in articles strikes as unlikely - it's bound to get a rise due to taxes etc. - but if it's true, £159, it looks like it'll be the best mid-range tablet now that the Nexus 9 is so pricey.

I dunno, Bernie would agree with that assessment...

Got the OTA update for my Nexus 4 last night Took about 45min - 1hr to install, as it goes through all your apps and optimises them - I assume it's compiling them with ART. It needs 500mb free to install, and after it was done I had about 300mb less free space than before. Thoughts: Good Lord it's beautiful. Material design is gorgeous, the new font is very slick, and the animation is smooth and fluid. Even little things like unlocking or turning an alarm off look wonderful. It may be only the animations, but it does feel faster, more responsive. The Nexus 4 isn't a new phone, but it feels as fast as anything. The new notifications drawer is brilliant - swiping down to expose settings is much easier than swapping the pane with the button top right. It's more useful as well - it has a flashlight, rotation lock, brightness, shows you your exact battery as a % It finally incorporates a lot of features that I've needed apps for in the past - adaptive brightness (Lux), battery % and power saving switches in the notifications (Battery Widget Reborn), notifications on the lock screen (DashClock). I've actually disabled the first two for now as their notifications look so ugly, although Lux does still have better control over the brightness - I can't get it as dark as I like with the system slider. New Task Switcher is nicer to look at and more useful, particularly the way it shows each settings screen separately. Might get to be a bit overwhelming with too many Chrome tabs, though I don't often have that many open on my phone. GMail being the email app for everything is a PITA though - I now can't tell with a glance at the icons if an email is personal or work, and the widgets are no longer differently coloured. There's no silent mode! As in, I can't actually silence my phone. I can get it down to vibrate; the closest I can get to silent is to turn notifications off (which also disables alarms, stupidly), or set them to priority so they're filtered. I don't want to do either of those things! I want to be notified of everything, but in a silent way, so that when I come out of a classroom I can glance at my phone and see if there are any emails without having to come out of some daft notification state to check. Hopefully just a bug, because if it's design, it's stupid stupid stupid. Battery life: don't know yet...

Someone at the BBC has a sense of humour; check out the first subheading in BBC News - Comet lander: Camera sees Philae's hairy landing

So, laptop deals as of 17th November 2014: Lenovo B50-70 - £300 (£250 after cashback) on eBuyer Intel Haswell Core i3-4010U Dual Core, 1.7GHz (ultra-low voltage CPU - lower performance, better battery life) 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD 15.6" 1366 x 768 display Windows 8.1 x64 Lenovo G510 - £300 on Amazon Intel Core i3-4000M, 2.4GHz 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD 15.6" 1366 x 768 display Windows 8.1 x64 Personally I prefer M processors to U processors, but £50 isn't insignificant if you are prepared to deal with the faff of cashback. Depends on personal preference, though. We also recommend the 256GB Crucial MX100 to upgrade any laptop, currently £51.74 on Amazon.

tl:dr; this will be a thread for laptop deals to recommend to other staff for personal use. Post good deals when you find them! In full: people often ask us what's a good laptop to buy, and we're happy to recommend so that they don't end up getting fleeced by a shop floor salesman nor end up with something chronically underpowered because it was the cheapest option. What's around/on offer/good value changes almost weekly, though, so I thought we could crowdsource this work a little bit - we can't be the only ones who do this, so there must be times when we can help each other out. My hope is that everytime you need to recommend a laptop to someone, you can check this thread (and mayhap, in time, it can be stickied); if someone has posted something in the last week, result! You've just saved half an hour of research and can send a recommendation straight over. If there's nothing recent, when you've done the shopping around you'd do anyway, you can post a link up here and hopefully save someone else the time. This isn't about the best laptop to use in school - it's about having an answer when people say "my son is going to University, what would be a good laptop for him to take?" Any laptop posted here should be available Joe Bloggs to buy on his credit card: no education specific models, no invoice only suppliers. I don't mind if suppliers post in here so long as they are happy for people to phone them and make personal purchases, and if it is actually a good deal, in line with previous offerings. In general, when we recommend a laptop, it's something that only has to run Office & Chrome but needs to last a few years. We look for something with an i3 or i5 in it (the latter can be good deals sometimes), 4GB+ of RAM and from a decent make - Lenovo and Asus get our approval for being fairly sturdy as consumer laptops go, you may have your own preferences. The ideal price point is around £300, depending on offers, and we usually recommend a 256GB Crucial MX100 SSD as well and copy the laptop image over for people (for the price of beer, ofc). Hopefully this grows to be a useful thread for curated laptop deals; I reckon we end up looking around every 4-6 weeks so even if no-one else posts*, maybe someone else can make use of what we turn up *but please do

I have a test group including the PCs in our office and the lobby immediately outside, and new updates are deployed here for a week and a half for testing. Assuming all is well, updates are then just sent to All Windows 7 machines. Servers I still do manually so I can see what is going on with them and control when they restart - I go through the updates every holiday.

Just had a (speedy) reply from @CSNM-Carl on the support ticket: For the record: internal access was fine as we have the domain set up internally on our DCs, to redirect certain external services on subdomains directly to their internal IP. The problem only manifested on external connections. Google's DNS servers seem to be fine, but BT Broadband's are certainly poisoned. That may be why the problem isn't showing up for some of you, if the poisoned records aren't propogated evenly. So this is more of a heads up now: if, like me, you've taken advantage of CSNM's wonderfully generous free hosting, be prepared for some phone calls in case you were affected as well. Massive disclaimer: none of this is intended as an attack on CSNM or a complaint about their services, it's just me panicking that I've done something stupid again. I'd still thoroughly recommend 'em as DNS hosts, especially for the price of free.

They do now, at last: Philae spotted after first landing on 67P | Rosetta - ESA's comet chaser

What a brilliant start to the week. Visitors to our website are being shown the following page this morning: It seems that, somehow, our main DNS record has been hijacked from our usual address to 209.99.40.222, owned by Confluence Networks in Austin TX. I've opened a support ticket with CSNewMedia (@CSNM-Carl) who host our DNS Zone File, to see if they can shed any light on the idea, because I've no idea. Our DNS Zone File there is correct, so I suspect it's a poisoned DNS server somewhere upstream, but if anyone has got any ideas on how it's happened (and would that have been preventable?) and anything I can do to mitigate, I'm all ears. I've already updated our zone file with new TTL values to try and trigger a new propogation but I'm conscious that this is a problem that is probably not our fault but is making us look stupid. Might also be worth you all checking your own websites; our school.org address was fine, but our school.county.sch.uk is incorrect (although only in the UK, interestingly - seems to be correct abroad).

As if IT wasn't undervalued enough, now we're competing with people who'll accept sweets and a later bedtime as payment

So what do we reckon Bernie's game is? I'd like to say "cor, he's off his rocker, he's gone cuckoo, it's all gone wrong in 'is head!" but I know full well that all the conflicting messages and daft ideas are part of a larger plan, and appearances of insanity are deliberate. He's going to save the smaller teams, he's not going to save the smaller teams, we want all the teams on the grid, no-one cares about the smaller teams on the grid, maybe we can have super gp2 cars on the circuit because even though I said the smaller teams are pointless lets have an even more pointless clump of traffic on the circuit yeah great idea, big teams could run third cars that score half points, small teams could run customer cars that score half points for them and half points for the manufacturer... I don't get what problem he has with the status quo. Smaller teams are essential for young drivers and engineers to come through, they have the chance to score points for themselves which is a massive achievement (Marrusia at Monaco), it gives you battles all up and down the grid and not just at the front - which is really handy when Vettel is off driving by himself, again, for the fourth year in a row - and it really shouldn't be that difficult to fund 11 teams from >$1 billion of income. Does anyone here actually want three cars?

I think the green socks were the slipper socks that you got as a prize with the mug in the snuggle kit, so only a few special people have them. I think.

It made me chuckle to see that Will's actual job title, written underneath his signature, really is "Hand of Marketing". If you expand, will you have a leg of marketing? An elbow of marketing?

@LeMarchand - you can always create a character to import at Dragon Age Keep, that lets you choose what choices would have been made in older games. There was a time, once, where I'd see a game described with "the main story alone will take most players between 50 and 60 hours" and it'd go straight to the top of my list; these days, all I think is "that'll take me over six months to finish, then". Being a grown up is rubbish

I suppose this is the space equivalent of "threw it over the fence", complete with bits of your precious cargo that don't work anymore.