Norphy

This is one of the reasons why I always use tier 1 suppliers for computers, because they provide monolithic driver packs to integrate into SCCM. Dell go one further by providing a plug-in for SCCM which downloads the driver, creates a package and distributes it to your DPs.

Not a political post etc TIL that the minister for food, farming and fisheries for the UK is called Mark Spencer. That tickled me for some reason.

Dell Optiplex, Latitude and Precision hardware is generally very good. Warranties are good and service is generally very quick when they go wrong. You get things like driver packs and good integrations into management systems like MECM. Things like BIOS settings and driver updates can be managed centrally and easily updated. I'd avoid the Vostro and Inspiron lines, if only because they don't have that driver management

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/phone-internet-downloads-or-tv/cancelling-a-phone-tv-internet-or-mobile-contract/ As long as you’re quick, there shouldn’t be a cost to cancel your contract if they’ve raised the price.

You're not negating the purpose of a higher DPI screen by turning on display scaling though. Yes, there's the same working area as the lower DPI screen, but text on the screen is sharper and you have more detail in images. Again though, I suppose that depends on how good your eyes to decide if that's a benefit or not. I think the best illustration of that is when Apple went over to "Retina" displays on their products. There is a huge difference between 165 DPI and 330 DPI, but all of the interface elements remained the same size.

Depends on the size of the screen, I think. On Windows at least, I think that 1080P on a 13" or 14" screen is too dense for most people without some sort of scaling going on. For me, 1080p on 15" without scaling is fine but my eyesight is above average.

Looks to me that the ones on the left are cooked and the ones on the right are raw.

Have you checked that you can access port 443 from the remote computer? It could still be a firewall issue, even if you can ping it.

Nothing to do with Jon Culshaw or Jan Ravens then? Bah.

Bit of epoxy resin would do the job, but you'd never get them off again

One of the places I used to work for replaced a load of the plug sockets in the dado rails with sockets with 13a sockets and integrated USB ports in common areas. They could then bring their own lightning/micro USB/USB-C cables and fill their boots. We also didn't restrict them from using the USB ports on computers to charge their devices either. Much more than that, I'm not sure what else you can do. I don't think PAT testing them is practical, that's going to be a huge time sink.

Whelp, last night was a bust. Completely clouded over. Gutted

Supposedly the Northern Lights were visible from here last night and are going to be again tonight. I'm going to go out and see, if I get anything I'll post!

I have no idea, but the distance between New Galloway and Ynys Enlli is only about 160 miles so I wouldn't have thought that they're far enough away from each other to make a substantial difference for someone wandering around with a camera phone and a tripod

I'm only a few miles away from the Galloway International Dark Sky Park. I'm a bit too close to Dumfries to get the full effect but it's still an order of magnitude darker here than it is in London.

I don't know them well, but I'm pretty sure it's Orion in the first picture, and Ursa Minor in the second. Couldn't say for the third.

Another clear night, so this time I’ve gone out with a tripod and a MagSafe mount for said tripod. Reasonably pleased with those

The possible issue I can see with that is that you either need to daisy chain the switch from an existing edge switch in the cabinet, or you need to take up an additional port or ports on your edge switch and that assumes that you have free port(s) on the core and available fibre/copper uplinks running back to the core. Neither may be a problem for the OP, admittedly.

Patrick Stewart's real life wife is only in her early 40s I think.

S3 of Star Trek: Picard The first episode was pretty good, in my opinion. I’m cautiously optimistic about the rest of the season, but the first episode of season 2 was pretty good too Hence the caution.

It’s all eggs, bacon, beans and a friiiiiied slice

But if the switch is modern and/or does what you need it to, what is more fiscally responsible: 1) replacing a otherwise decent switch which could cost anything from £400-£1500 plus having to dispose of the old one? 2) keep it in and spend £60 on an injector rack? If you were planning to replace the switch, then sure, buy a PoE one; you’d be daft not to unless there were space or power constraints but in the OP’s particular case, I’d say that the injector rack makes more sense.

Try adding this to the top of your script: [system.Windows.Forms.Application]::EnableVisualStyles();

Absolutely, but getting from a certified third party manufacturer is a good middle ground. That way, you can have a reasonable assurance that it won't burn your house down but don't have to pay the eye watering prices of the first party OEM.

Or there will be third party suppliers, such as Anker, Amazon and Monoprice, who have or will get MFi certification and sell cheaper certified cables for a lot less. You know, like they do with Lightning cables at the moment. I agree to an extent that it's a method of extracting as much money from your customer as possible, but certification of accessories isn't necessarily a bad thing either as we've all seen how dangerous knockoffs can be.