Norphy

I did the same trick with the Geobooks and have done it for other devices where things like webcams and fingerprint sensors are a bit more obscure. It's a useful tool to know about!

Dell Something like this? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dell-P2214H-LCD-Monitor-Reconditioned/dp/B0B3DX7QT3?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=A336AW3N110LWP

That’s amazing, I use the same combination for my luggage

You can get refurbed Dell Latitude 5420s on eBay for between £250 and £400. 11th Gen Core CPUs, generally 16GB RAM and NVMe SSDs. That's the model I use for work and it's good enough for Windows 11. I see it being good for another four or five years, easily. Stick to business line laptops (Latitude, Thinkpads etc) and you're golden. /edit You can get 5430s for not much more! 12th Gen instead of 11th, but that's the generation Intel started using P and E cores, so you should get better performance and/or battery life out of them.

Because Broadcom bought VMware for $61B and they want to recoup their investment as quickly as possible. I suspect it's also because on-premise virtualisation is becoming legacy for a lot of clients and they're losing their lunch to the likes of AWS and Azure. Which, ironically, raising their prices will probably accelerate their losses here.

I did it again a few years later at the MAT I was working for at the time. The MAT had VMware Essentials, so going to Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager was actually something of a step up in functionality as I could now do live storage migrations and other things. In terms of hypervisors, I'd say that ESXi and Hyper-V are pretty close. The management tools that VMware offer with vSphere Standard and above are considerably better than what's built into Windows or what you can get with Virtual Machine Manager. That said, considering Hyper-V is part of a Windows license that you have to buy anyway and System Center costs almost nothing for education, the value proposition for VMware arguably wasn't there when I did the work four years ago. These days, it's even harder to justify it. I'd go Hyper-V, XCP-NG or Proxmox if I were doing on-prem virtualisation these days.

Blackbird stealing from our planters:)

This is where I first heard the Star Wars Day pun, many years ago [emoji4] (Skip to about 13:50 if you’re impatient)

If it’s any consolation, I work for a Fortune 100 company and the support that we’re getting from Microsoft has been pretty dire as well.

Admittedly, this isn’t a brilliant picture but a few days back I went for a walk to take advantage of a rare bit of Scottish sunshine and went in a route I’d not been on before. I got a good view of the village, the Abbey, the local hill (Criffel) and the Waterloo monument and decided to take a picture. Thought I’d share

It's been a long (long!) time since I've touched anything Stone, but every Stone branded laptop I've ever seen has been a Clevo unit with a Stone logo silk screen printed onto it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but Clevo laptops are very generic things and I found getting things like BIOS updates and driver updates more awkward than I did for the likes of Dell. Dell laptops (Latitudes, anyway) also plug into software like Dell Command which makes integrating them into systems like MECM a doddle, make updating drivers and firmwares a lot easier and, with Dell at least, they seem to be supported for a longer time with new BIOSes and suchlike.

"Tat for humanity". Hmm. That could be the tag line for The Range/B&M/Home Bargains etc

Honestly, I thought it'd been deprecated. The more modern equivalent to it was WimWitch iirc, but even that's stopped development as the devs feel that native tools are now good enough.

How are you defining "removing" here? If you mean uninstalling the CC components from an endpoint and server and expecting them to carry on working, then I would agree with you to an extent. That's not something I would ever suggest doing. However, you can remove the CC components from a domain and keep the domain intact with little to no risk. The way to go would be to deploy a couple of new domain controllers to the AD domain and build an OU structure outside of the RM part of it. Once that's done, you decommission the RM domain controllers and get on with your life. All that you'd be left with would be some dormant schema extensions in your domain that you'd never touch again. Obviously you'd still need to rebuild all your endpoints and deploy new software to replace the RM functionality you were using, but a completely scorched earth approach to removing RM is not required.

I've got to admit, after years of driving Golfs I found the length of my car difficult to get used to. I still park with its backside hanging out a lot of the time and I'm very glad for its reversing sensors!

I think it's normal to an extent. When I got my last car (which I also wrote off!), it had a problem where it kept on cutting out when cruising. It turned out to be the high pressure fuel pump. Even after the thing was replaced, I was paranoid about it cutting out again and that paranoia carried over to my current car despite this one so far being relatively problem free. I feel for you losing that Superb though, I've now got an Octavia which doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but it has enough for me to be sad if I lost it!

In a previous job, we had Galleon time servers, synced from GPS. They were very good. I wanted one for the last MAT I worked for but could never get the budget.

For the longest time, everyone thought it was an April fools joke. 1GB was utterly unprecedented

I like village living, but the one thing I do miss is easy access to takeaway food when I'm feeling lazy. The best we can get is a (admittedly very good) pizza van that visits the village once a month. I miss being able to go to the chippy!

How about Swann? I have one of their CCTV systems which connects to their cloud service and that has a free tier. Their doorbells can connect to it as well. You also don't have to use the cloud service if you don't want to. https://uk.swann.com/swifi-buddy/

No, you're right. You can't connect a SFP+ module in one switch to an SFP in another and expect a connection. You can, however, put an SFP module in an SFP+ port and use that to connect to the SFP switch.

Well, it's .tr so from their point of view it must be 0°...

With BT at least, you can use your own router and connect it to the ONT instead of the Smart Hub. The trouble is, the Smart Hub isn’t just a router, it’s also some kind of pseudo-SIP phone which provides the digital voice functionality that they’re pushing now. The handsets connect to the hub via DECT or something like it and if you use a third party router, you can no longer use Digital Voice. Frankly, my plan is that when I get FTTP, I’m going to get the Internet connection only and use a third party VOIP service like Vonage instead of whatever the Internet provider provides

Hmm, him card read good.

My reservations with Verkada are threefold: 1) Their salespeople are absolutely relentless. They do not leave you alone. Hopefully, however, that's mitigated if you go through a reseller. 2) They follow the same licensing model as Meraki so if you decide you don't want to pay for licensing anymore, your equipment stops working. One of their founders was the COO of Meraki, so I suppose that's not surprising. 3) They had a pretty significant security breach a couple of years back, where it was reported that hackers had access to more than 150,000 cameras from all over the world.