unixman_again

I'm using number 3 to type this. It's got W7 and it is OK.

I go to the gym three times a week, but I don't do any legs; I get plenty of leg exercises doing my ballet classes. 1 If you are training legs, IMO squats are the way to go, but they are an awkward exercise to do correctly. Leg curl and extension machines are much easier. 1. As an added bonus, I get to hang around with a bunch of women who aren't wearing very much!

No you don't, you simply put a disclaimer on your website "Best viewed in anything expect IE".

I use Open Office exclusively, although the rest of the site uses Office 2007, and we are upgrading to 2013. I've never had any problems with it. Unlike Zag above, I hate the ribbon in M$ Office. M$ Office 2007 is installed on my PC and I have UBitMenu which makes it useable (IMHO). We have a few students who use LibreOffice at home and they don't have any problems with files they have created at home. When I worked for a mobile phone e-tailer, we used OO exclusively, but we were a Linux site. The boss did not have any M$ o/ses on site. The company is still going; I wonder if they sell Windows phones?

That is correct. I have a letter from Kia confirming this. Seven year warranty on my Kia. Not quite as good as Vauxhall but OK. I think the only time it has to go back to the main dealer, is if there is a recall. Mine has had one, for the petrol filler.

In the words of Cpl Jones, "Don't panic!". If you have a reliable garage, they will be able to fix any problems and cheaply too. I have had several wrecks over the years, Yugo 45, Lada Samara and Vauxhall Corsa and I've been seeing the same "little man" for years. He has always managed to keep them on the road. Five years ago, I took the Corsa in and he said it would pass that year, but next year would be a struggle, so I had a year to think about want to do. I got a new Kia Picanto with the govt scrappage scheme. I take this to the same place, rather than the main dealer. The main dealer want £350-£400 for a full service and MOT and the place I go to did it all for £200. The main dealer does wash the car as part of the deal but it's a damned expensive wash if you ask me!

We have a person who does marketing for us, and he has been writing an email to go off to a bunch of prospects, and in the email is a link to a "secret" area on our website. It's full of public info, like images, brochures, etc but you have to be in the know to get to it. Anyway, he said when he copied the link from my email to him (which worked) into another email, it lost functionality. I thought perhaps it was coping in all of the OWA crap that it includes in a url, so I suggested he open the link and copy it from the address bar of the browser. Nup, still didn't work. Anyway he comes in and we get onto his W8 laptop so he can show me the problem. He fires off internet explorer, goes to our OWA and opens a draft email. It's all plain text. So I says, he needs to select the html format button on the top of the email composing screen, except that it isn't there. Now I knew that I wasn't going do-lally, there should be an html button, so I fire off IE on my desktop, goes to OWA and it's all different. I have many more formatting options that he is seeing. I wondered if it that old chestnut we get, where things don't work in IE but they do in Chrome, Firefox, etc. On his laptop, I fire up Chrome, go to OWA and have him login. Bingo! It all works fine; he has all the missing options, so he can format his emails in html. This is the first time, I've seen an M$ site not work in an M$ browser. He said he was quite happy using Chrome. I keep telling people to use Chrome. It works much better. Go to our moodle and you can drag and drop files onto it, but not in IE. Go to our staff portal (Joomla) and the lightbox plugins display completely, but not in IE. (This is quite fun; the X to close the popup isn't displayed in IE, but if you hover over the place where it should be, and click the popup closes correctly.) The library catalog system works in Chrome but not in IE. (Really good this - type something into the seach box and IE sits there looking stupid when you click "Search".) The only reason they have to use IE is to mark registers; our MIS uses ClickOnce and without an extension, it doesn't work in Chrome. Although apparently it will on a Chromebook; shame we don't have any. The staff will keep using IE and I will keep pointing out to them it is carp and things will work better in Chrome. Rant over and breathe.....

My box has a working floppy drive and will run W8.

BBC News - E-Act chain loses control of 10 academy schools I found this quite shocking news as my last job was with an E-Act academy and it was all fine.

A common scenario is a shared area on a network (or several) which the various departments use as a dumping ground for their files, so that each person in the dept can access them. The problem is, that over time, as people leave the area becomes full of stuff that nobody knows what it is. Basically nobody takes ownership of the files. Some years ago I saw some software which you could run on a shared area which would : archive off all files older than a specified date these archived files were moved to another area and stored in a compressed format, which preserved the path a link was placed where the file came from, which said the user needed to contact sysadmin to locate the file The idea was that you to run this with a cutoff date of say 5 years and all those older files could be moved off. If after some other specified period, nobody had tried to access the old files, sysadmin could delete the links and remove the files from the archive, or move them to some hard to get at archive, like tape. Has anyone heard of some software which does this? Of course, we would like to prevent this happening in the first place. Ideally we would like setup one shared area for each department and the department head will have the power to create sub-folders, which are then assigned to someone within the department. The owner can then share that to whoever. When this person leaves, sysadmin will then either delete their folder or have the department head assign the files to someone else. That way, when we check if files have not been accessed for 5 years, we can see the owner and find out if they really want to keep them. They will, of course, say "yes", but at least someone is accountable for the files. We aren't looking at handing out admin rights to the o/s, but using a package perhaps web based which will allow this. We have been playing with ownCloud which looks quite good. Any other suggestions? We want something in-house rather than Dropbox, etc.

We do all toners; we order them, store them and install them. Paper is done by whoever is in charge of the room, so the librarians for the library printers, staff if the printer is in their office and class teachers for the classrooms. We have a few rooms without class teachers, and the paper is added by whoever is there when it runs out. Paper is handed out by the reprographics staff.

I'm not sure about that. Italy is a member of NATO but a nuclear free zone. If Scotland does eject Trident, I think the submarines should be parked along The Embankment in London; nice and convenient for the pollies to coo over! If Scotland does become independent, it does mean there will be a neighbour who might vote for the UK in the Eurovision Song Content. It will also put and end to the West Lothian question. On the other hand, I really don't care. It could be good for both parties or it could be bad, although I suspect the UK would be worse off, if it does happen.

Ah but which one? The original series was very good but I found the remake quite dire. CBS Action have been showing the originals (well the first four seasons). Sadly it finishes tomorrow. I do wish they would show the rest of them. Of the new series that I started to watch on Freeview this year, (Helix, Falling Skies, Hostages, Longmire, Battlestar Galactica, The Tomorrow People and Salamander), I've given up on all of them except Longmire.

Gosh that takes me back! Steve Martin - A Wild And Crazy Guy (1978) - YouTube (14-16 mins in)

A little known fact about St Valentine. He is buried in the Birmingham Oratory. Well one of the many St Valentine's is!

The lazy admins method of configuring iptables is to use Guarddog or similar.

I thought this technique was well known. Of course, a lot of wine now comes with Stelvins (screw caps), which solves the problem. Some premium Australian wines comes with ground glass stoppers.

Back in the 1990s there was a motorbike shop where I'm from in Australia, where you could trade in your old helmet and get $10 off a new one. I once asked the bloke who ran it what he did with the $10 helmets and he said "I sell them to guys with $10 heads".

There was a program on C4 a couple of weeks ago which had a bloke from the UK doing a back flip on top of a similar bridge. Don't Look Down - 4oD - Channel 4 The back-flip is at the 40 min mark.

We're a college, and we have a Facebook site which is used very occasionally when somebody decides to tell me what to add. Some departments run their own FB sites but I have no idea as to what happens on those. We have a twitter feed, which is used to keep the students up to date with events and this displays on the front page of our website. Ideally, I'd like a tweet a day but no one tells me what they want tweeted so not much happens. At the mo, we are having a new building so there are some updates about that. Admissions have their own feed, but it is rarely used, mostly when they go out and canvas local schools. ICT has one too, which is used to alert about major IT events. Again this feeds to our website. Our last tweet as 25/09 (and before that 09/07). The boss keeps saying "I must tweet more" and that's as far as it gets. To be fair, we have little downtime so it's probably as up to date as it gets. It has 18 followers! The music department has a youtube account and post clips of the annual concerts to it. We also have a Flickr with some art photos but that hasn't been updated in the 2 1/2 years that I've been here.

We've had it all in the Black Country today. When I came into work it was windy, then it started heaving down with rain, next a bit of snow and now the sun is streaming though the window, so brightly that I can't read the monitor.

Toothpaste can be used in a pinch. It has the added bonus that it gives your CPU a nice minty aroma!

There was an incident in Brum three or four years ago, where people were ticketed for parking on double yellow lines, which the council painted in after they had parked. This isn't an isolated case. Here's one from the Derby Telegraph and there have been several others.

I thought the obvious choice was either The Great British Bake Off or The Great British Sewing Bee. If I was the script writer, it would be Father Ted.

We use Helix Media Server where I work, which is great for small clips but I wouldn't want to do a whole movie, although there are some sites who use it and do. At my last school we used Clickview. HML is good as it plays in any browser so you can stream outside your local network. Think of it as your own youtube. Clickview needs a client on each PC but has loads of features.