jinnantonnixx

I've got an ancient Humax Foxsat box and it's still trucking on. The menus are very clunky, but it's utterly reliable. Coupled with a Chromecast and Netflix and there's more than enough choice with which to fritter away my time. Virgin broadband-only coming into the house. No phone line.

@ohickmott You might not need this any more, but nevertheless it might be of some use. I used the free InstEdit software to create an MST transform file (never edit the main MSI directly), but I guess the principle is similar whichever editor you use. By the way, I've abandoned this for now as I couldn't get SOLUS to work across different domains when I last tried it.

Quite so. Hands up. Who remembers this? http://youtu.be/ElE0JXkPHgc?t=4s

As mentioned earlier, both. Scotchlite reflective strips/panels are excellent as they reflect a driver's own lights back at them in a very effective way. During daytime, bright yellow or orange clothes are far more visible than any other colour clothing. You need to stand out. As for rear lights, a steady light is arguably better than a flashing light as it allows others to more accurately gauge distances. I can dig out the link if pushed.

Many of the observations in this thread are textbook. You notice a non-peer transgression, but fail to notice the normalised transgression (speeding, tailgaiting, driving while on the phone,etc). It's not a criticism, it's human nature. Sabotage and hatred: what have people got against cyclists? | Life and style | The Guardian This is a very good read: https://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2015/07/drivers-antagonism-toward-cyclists-termed-classic-prejudiced-behavior

Be sure to set the database compatibility level for your SIMS database to 2012 release or will get horrible performance problems. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/147490-sims-slow-after-upgrade-sql-2014-a.html

A German advert along similar lines

Some good ideas here: Why Did You Buy Me That: Archive Some of my favourites: http://whydidyoubuymethat.com/post/1115844198/baby-octopus-thing Why Did You Buy Me That, Ahhh!!! Why Did You Buy Me That, Teachers Get The Worst Crap Why Did You Buy Me That, Best Worst Painting Ever

The Oatmeal nails it. Why It's Better To Pretend You Don't Know Anything About Computers - The Oatmeal

I ended up going for the Lenovo Tab 2 A8 (reduced to £79 at Argos) I set it up ready to go as a Christmas present, and was really quite pleased with it. It's only got 1G of RAM (but 16G of storage+SD), so you might see some apps reload if you do a lot of multitasking with heavy apps. Apart from this, it's a good performer and is stock Android (5.1), which is nice. The sound is excellent. For the price, it's a winner.

I hope you rushed out and bought loads of bread and milk. Because... well, just because.

Do you have more than one domain controller? If so, be sure to wait until replication has taken place (or force it). Impatience is a mistake here. The Loopback with Merge should work as this is how to apply user-side settings from a machine policy. Try a simulation in Group Policy Modelling. As it's a simulation, you must make sure that you select only the appropriate WMI filters for the machine (if you use them) as the simulation can't 'know' the physical properties of the machine you intend to run it on. How to use the Group Policy Results Wizard - Virtually Impossible

Whichever ones you buy, make sure they can be programmed with a 'scrambler' function. It overlays a tone over the signal (which is of course decoded by the receiver). It's not very high-tech, but it will thwart casual eavesdropping.

Retevis H777 radios are clones of popular big-brand radios. The need a radio site licence to operate lawfully. You can programme the 16 channels to frequencies between 400 to 470Mhz so they can be outside the frequency range of licence-free PMR sets. Google them and you simply won't believe the price. Pretty much disposable.

My suggestions (things I own and recommend): Hot air popcorn maker. A healthy snack as long as you don't load the popcorn with sugar and salt. £ varies Aerobie AeroPress for the coffee lover. I've had mine for two years, it's quick and easy to clean and makes a good coffee. £ 20 ish Chromecast Audio. A neat gadget that plugs into a hi-fi or powered speakers. Can cast from a phone of tablet, but comes into its own when you cast from a native app like Spotify, Google Music or Deezer. Tip: upload your MP3s to Google Music for free and stream them to the Chromecast Audio. £30

Oh, the (in)famous re-index patch. It switches your recovery to simple (trashing your log backups), shrinks the log file to 1 Meg (with the immediate result that the server throttles-back with lots of log growths (10% growth of nothing is still nothing) and finally gets to the business of re-indexing. A patch should perform one function, and one function only IMO - it certainly shouldn't wreck your backup routines. Anyway, gripe over. Good work @minimoo on debugging the client. I've always headed straight to the databases, but I've been digging into the clients today as I think we have a few problems too. How did you go about discovering the memory leak in the SIMS client? My normal WinDbg process is: .loadby sos clr sxe clr g !threads !pe (at exception) or !clrstack -p I tried looking for handle leaks using two snapshots but nothing seemed to be showing up. !heap -s I've got out-of-memory exceptions, but I ran out of time today. Maybe tomorrow will be more fruitful.

Can you imagine Christmases of bygone ages? I don't think any of these would get a CE approval. The 8 Most Wildly Irresponsible Vintage Toys | Cracked.com You must check out the Atomic Energy Lab The 8 Most Wildly Irresponsible Vintage Toys Part 2 | Cracked.com

^^^ This * 1000. Right/Wrong answers to complex questions are fine for an exam, but they will give you no indication to the depth and breadth of a candidate's knowledge. If the candidate is lucky, they will know the answer, if they are unlucky that particular tiny facet will have escaped them. It's far better to give a leading, open question asking them to talk on a particular subject. You as an interviewer should draw them out into points they raise, or don't cover, to discover how well they know the topic. The objective is not to catch them out. That's easy, anybody could do that. The objective is to find the best candidate. As an aside, I went for an interview once and was given an impossible task. I found out later that they weren't looking for the answer, but how you approached the problem and if you went to pieces during difficult times. It was an interesting angle.

I don't think so. If your amp has HDMI, you're good to go. However, this review suggests that in some circumstances the Chromecast Audio delivers better audio quality than the regular Chromecast. Chromecast Audio Review: You Can Just Throw Away All Those Crappy Bluetooth Dongles Now I bought it because my amp only has audio inputs, and so for this application it's ideal.

Well, the Chromecast Audio came today. Two minutes to set up, and all systems go. How does it sound? Excellent. I hooked it up to my modest Rotel RA920 amp and Mission 760i speakers, and the sound from Deezer is getting pretty near CD quality. I'm really pleased with it. I'm glad I held off buying into a Sonos system. If you have a dormant HiFi, this is a great way to bring it up to date.

I also expected something far more sinister. However, it seems that it's just harmless banter on Speakers' Corner or something similar. All concerned seem happy to engage each other. To me, the discussion is as futile as arguing over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. An utter waste of time. I'll leave this statement by the incomparable Bertrand Russell, who in three and a half minutes sums up with far more eloquence and precision what would take me a day to convey. http://youtu.be/asvg5Kf97Hw

I've treated myself to an early Christmas present. A Chromecast Audio. I was toying with the idea of some kind of streaming Hi-Fi, like a Sonos system, but balked at the price. The Audio version of the Chromecast is £30, and will plug into exisiting Hi-Fis. It hasn't arrived yet, hopefully it will be good. I'll let you know.

And? It's nearly Christmas - you can tell, because the Easter Eggs are in the shops.

I want to buy an Android tablet for a Christmas present - £100 limit. Apart from the dismal battery life, I like my Hudl2, so this is #1 on my list. Is there anything better at this price?

Paper tape? Luxury! Back in my day, we had to use ones and zeros. When we ran short of ones, we had to use lower-case 'L's. But we were happy....