Norphy

I've got a ticket that's left me a little, well, stumped to be honest. The request is: Please set this slider to be six months: The trouble is, they want the user to be able to change it if they want to, so I can't do what I'd normally do and set a GPO as that will stop the user from being able to change it. Is there an easy way to set this? Could be a registry entry or a script, I don't care. I've looked and I can't see any obvious way to do it.

@Roberto doesn't work in education any more. I would imagine that the figure he's quoting there is what is coming from his own suppliers or contacts within Microsoft. Prices for Microsoft products have always been significantly lower for education than they are for industry in general.

Sixth gen i5 will run Zoom quite happily, but they aren’t on the Windows 11 HCL. You’ll only get another year out of Windows 10 without paying for extended support. I would not get anything earlier than eighth gen.

Scottish kids have been back for a week already!

I don't know what I'm doing, but it's going to be child free. I live in Scotland; the summer bank holiday up here is the first Monday of the month, rather than the last so he'll be at school. HOWEVER I work from home for a company who bases its holidays around the English ones, so I'll have Monday off. The disadvantage to that, of course, is that I don't get the extra day around Hogmanay

I've got to disagree with that. A lot of the Star Wars content that's been produced for Disney+ has been at least above average or excellent. Andor was fantastic Mandalorian was mostly good, although the third season wasn't as good as the others. Ahsoka was very, very good. I enjoyed Obi Wan Boba Fett could have been better but it had a lot of good moments. I've not seen Acolyte, admittedly. The stuff based on Clone Wars was good too. The Sequel Trilogy... yeah, that was pretty bad, the last one especially. I think JJ had a lot to do with that, he really threw the baby out with the bath water after The Last Jedi. His Star Trek films weren't the best either. I also think that Marvel has just been overexposed. It was good to begin with, but the relentless treadmill pushing out production after production... it's exhausted everyone from the writers to the actors to the audience. They need to give it a break. Other stuff, like Only Murders in the Building, also fantastic.

The MAT I used to work for used this lot when I worked for them: https://cvdgroup.com/ They were pretty good. Diverse lines from OpenReach and Virgin. Generally well managed and good support.

Indeed. It took me two years to save up the deposit for my house, and that was a 5% deposit in a relatively cheap area. 20%? What is that guy smoking?

So, this is how I did it when I worked in schools: We had an "Internet Transport" switch. The Smoothwalls plugged into that switch, and the NTE went into there as well. The Smoothwalls (We had a redundant pair) also were plugged into the core switch, and the core switch used the Smoothwalls as their default gateway. There's no reason why you could replicate the same setup on the core by setting up a VLAN.

Yeah, I've read Good Omens and the Long Earth series. I think the only stuff left is The Carpet People, the Johnny Maxwell series and the Bromeliad series, as well as his short stories and the non-fiction compilation.

I've never seen a staff room microwave oven that didn't stink either of curry or of fish, so maybe that'll be the trigger to get the thing replaced, then you'll be a hero! It could happen, right? Right?

So you don't have any Enterprise RADIUS Wifi authentication schemes, they're just PSKs? You want two SSIDs, one for guest and one for office. Are these devices just wireless access points or are they internet gateways/routers as well? Do you have managed switches that handle VLANs? As for the unified/managed question, I'd say have a unified system as you'll be able to manage them from a single pane of glass and have a single admin credential for both of them. Makes life easier, even if it is just for two plus it makes adding more on later easier as well. Recommendations for hardware: Depends on your budget. Aruba InstantOns are good. I've not used Unifi but it's good value and probably good enough for what you want as well. Same goes for TPLink Omada hardware. Meraki if you're feeling flush, or an Aruba Instant cluster (different to InstantOn), or Ruckus.

Fair enough. The model came onto the market back in Feb 22, so I was just concerned about them sitting in a warehouse for two years. If they're new stock then I don't see an issue.

How long have they been sitting in stock? What are the batteries like?

Andy Weir’s novels so far have ranged from ‘Very Good’ (Artemis) to ‘Excellent’ (The Martian and Project Hail Mary’). The film adaptation of The Martian was good as well, I’m looking forward to the PHM one. At the moment, I’m reading Nation by Sir Terry Pratchett. I need to get hold more of some of his non-Discworld stuff. I liked Dark Side of the Sun and Strata. Didn’t like Dodger so much but I’m enjoying Nation. I don’t know if it’s his best book ever, like he claimed, but it’s good.

It's been a long time since I built a gaming PC (Battlefield 2 was the new hotness, so gauge the usefulness of this post by that if you wish!) but the motherboard I was using had an on-board sound card that, on paper, sounded very good indeed. Six channels, loads of voices, hyped up DSP, 24 bit/192hz and all that crap. I decided not to buy a discrete sound card because I got taken in by the marketing and it made it sound like the on-board was a massive step up from AC97 and would be enough. Playing the aforementioned Battlefield 2, whenever my position got shelled, the sound got very choppy but I put it down to the game being new and still buggy. It was coming up to Christmas and someone like Scan or Aria had the SoundBlaster Audigy on offer. My dad asked me what I wanted for Christmas so I said to him that he could get me one of those if he wanted. Well, I put that thing in and the difference it made was staggering! Not so much in sound fidelity but just being able to keep up with things. No sound choppiness in BF2. Actual working surround sound. I stayed with discrete cards until I stopped gaming. I don't know if things are still the same, but honestly if I were to go back into PC gaming (And I might because my son is starting to show an interest), I'd probably buy whatever the modern equivalent to an Audigy is, if there still is one. /edit Looking at the Creative website... The Audigy is still a thing! It doesn't look like it's been updated significantly since, what, 2008?

Was it a Hauppauge by any chance?

I always tried to have a Trinitron monitor, but I usually cheaped out and went CTX or a brand similar to that. They were still epic monitors though, I do kind of wonder what 20 year old me, going to LAN parties with 17/19/20" CRTs, would have made of my work desk with two 27" and a 24" LCD monitor attached to a £450 laptop

I don't think either particularly won out there, tbh. This was about the time CDRs were becoming mainstream

I don’t know, it wasn’t that bad. It had its moments I think. Certainly nowhere near as bad as modern Simpsons, anyway. And better than Disenchantment too.

There are two keyboards I really regret not having any more: The Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro. I've never used a better membrane based keyboard. The sole reason I stopped using it is because I started getting wrist pain and bought one of the bad boys below Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I was stupid and bought a Microsoft Wireless Sculpt set because I wanted a wireless keyboard. That thing ate batteries like there was no next week. After the Sculpt, I swapped it for an Apple keyboard as I gained a taste for them after using MacBooks for a period and after that a Dell lookalike which I've still got as a spare. I currently use the latest Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard but it's not as good as the 4000. The layout is worse, it doesn't have feet at the back, the keys don't feel as nice and there's no gap between the number and function keys so I still have a habit of whacking F1 when I want to press 1. I wish someone would produce an mechanical ergonomic keyboard the shape as the MS one but all ergonomic mechanical keyboards seem to have really esoteric layouts which I just can't be bothered with. And yes, I like Microsoft hardware I've had MS mice, keyboards and gaming controllers in the past. The MS joysticks and gamepads were amongst the best I'd used.

I sold a lot of Compact Flash adapters which used that form factor too.

I had a Lian-Li case, the one closest to it on there was a PC60. It cost me £180 back in 1999 and it was a thing of beauty. I really regretted changing it but I wanted something a tad bigger and the Enlight cases my workplace sold at the time were too tempting to pass on.

The Nomad predated the iPod by a little iirc. I remember a line from Slashdot when the iPod was released: That aged well.

That wasn't to control the power button, it was to lock the keyboard! The Baby AT cases at the time had actual power switches which physically interrupted the power supply. There wouldn't have been a way to lock the power button I don't think. I also remember those LCDs on the front of the computer which displayed the clock speed of the computer with a lot of fondness. I remember being irritated when I upgraded to a 200MHz CPU and the display max being 199