jthompson

FYI v4 will install alongside v3 as a separate application. There are quite a lot of changes, so being able to retain v3 alongside is handy. V3 is an EXE installer but V4 comes as an MSI now. I'm currently deploying FFMpeg alongside V3 in order to enable MP3 exports. IDK if that's still required for V4 or not.

If there were a long-running startup script, I've a feeling that's where the computer would wait for those to complete before presenting the login screen

There was me thinking I was clever rolling out lots of automation and custom applications using combinations of Apps Script, AppSheet and PowerShell. Is this the sort of stuff I need to be getting to grips with in order to not have my job disappeared by somebody/something else?

We have firstnames in the givenName attribute (i.e. the attribute AD uses for firstname) and surname in sn. Display names in our first-party systems are "Firstname Surname". We're a secondary, where that hasn't ever appeared to be problematic. I've added a personalTitle attribute to AD and use that to hold Ms, Mrs, Dr, etc. That's synced to our Google Directory as a custom attribute. The only place personal titles are used in our first-party systems is in staff Gmail signatures, which are automated and include that custom attribute. Some staff choose to have their personal title omitted from their email signature, which is why it's held separately from other name fields.

I've been weighing up whether or not to buy a new Pebble, as my original is no longer water resistant (due to having 3d-printed buttons) and has a replacement battery that I would rather didn't catch fire. With the vibration alarm being the only feature I actually want from it these days, I decided to instead fend off any risk of obsolescence (and fire) and instead spend a lot less money on Casio's new W-738H vibration alarm watch. It's not a new module, but it's now in a retro square design that I really like, with levels of water resistance and QC that a Pebble will likely never have. Only a single daily alarm with no snooze, so not the flexibility of a Pebble, but the countdown also vibrates and serves well for snoozing purposes (a single press will dismiss and restart it). A watch with vibration that will run for 10 years on a CR2032 battery seems pretty awesome to me. I can't think why Casio aren't adding vibration to more of their watches if it's that efficient. Only gripe is that the LCD viewing angles suffer in comparison to the MIP display on my G-Shock 5600.

This is fascinating. That thread includes a link to an amazing blog post that they wrote about adapting a CLI to cater for use AI agents - https://justin.poehnelt.com/posts/rewrite-your-cli-for-ai-agents/?trk=public_post_comment-text I suspect that's the direction Google want to take and so that's one way for my job to evaporate. 😐 Off-topic, sorry.

I would love for Google to have made a first-party CLI tool along the lines of GAM. Preferably in PowerShell. Hopefully some nice Googler somewhere will spend their 20% time doing just that and then baking it into Cloud Shell by default. Google Classroom should be lauded for being (and remaining) so education-focused, but there are some glaring omissions in its UI that really make me wonder exactly how Google think a school operates.

It's nice when an actor can play both protagonists and antagonists well enough that they get roles in things where you're left guessing as to which one they'll actually turn out to be.

I thought he was so good in Peaky Blinders. Untamed and Apples Never Fall also spring to mind as really good watches from recent years. I was sad to hear the news this morning. Jurassic Park is an all-time favourite of mine (it carries a lot of nice nostalgia for me) and he always seemed to come across so well (warm, funny, genuine) in interviews.

We're deploying it via Chocolatey here, so not in a task sequence, but we use the following msiexec flags if that's any help? /quiet /norestart CREATEDESKTOPLINK=0

Does that mean the strands/core need to necessarily be thin? It seems like the flexion at the cable/connector joint is what kills most USB-C cables.

Never used it, but Nakivo was suggested to us a few years ago when we were initially considering Veeam. It was pitched as basically doing much the same under the hood as Veeam at the time, but at a lower cost. I wanted the comfort of sticking with Veeam, since the vast user base makes Googling your problems that much easier.

Hooray! https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/06/work-with-delegated-gmail-accounts-from-mobile-devices.html

Try getting Gemini to throw together a simple web app for you. I did that for a single web camera feed, to be used as a simple visualiser app. Worth a try. Or perhaps, have it throw together a single web camera viewer and just have it open in two side by side tabs.

I'm assuming that there'll be a biting satire of all of this within the game itself.

As long as they don't start making minis out of plastic that's designed to denature after 36 months, then I think I'll have to stick to the painting and modelling side of the hobby and largely forget about the actual game. That way I can pursue a hobby with sensible pacing and value proposition.

I'm assuming that the release cycle for rules is tending more and more towards a subscription model.

Yes, Google Workspace supports syncing the main ones through, and you can then add whatever custom ones you want. One for a personal title (Mrs, Ms, etc.), for instance. One of my gripes with AD is that it assumes people don't have more than one role or belong to more than one department. Not very school-friendly! If a sysadmin weren't populating any of that stuff, though, they might never have been confronted with the fact that other people can see this stuff that they are entering into their management tool. Not saying it's okay to store a password there, but doing so won't have felt so much [to them] like they were leaving it lying around. It's totally not me, by the way.

The trouble is, not all USB-C cables are created equally (so won't necessarily allow charging at the same rates). Also, USB-C is pretty disappointing when it comes to robustness: I tend to find myself babying it more than I ought to.

Maybe plugging your jump pack into your computer was not such a clever idea. It sounds like your car has become infected with Windows' propensity for needing a forced restart each month.

I mean, in fairness, unless you happen to know that those fields are potentially readable by curious regular users, there's nothing in ADUC and the like that specifically spells that out. If you're using ADUC, and stuff like phone numbers, line management, department, etc aren't being used by end users in a business context (as they might in a very different sector to edu), then it's all going to have the air of being for the admin's eyes only. Even so, having any sensitive passwords written out in plain text ought to 'feel' icky anyway.

Just imagining a heat wave in 1976. The smell of leaded exhaust fumes and cigarettes filling the air, chalky dried-up dog turds at every turn, discarded ring pulls and Golden Wonder packets littering the baked pavements as children play out dangerously unsupervised. Have I imagined the 1970's sufficiently accurately? Back on topic, this heat can do one. Whenever it's this hot I always think "who's idea was this?!".

Credentials on the deployment share would suffice for the OP's needs, I suspect, as a way to keep end users from starting any TS.

Just encountered this issue. We install MuseScore via a Scheduled Task (chocolatey), so run under the SYSTEM user. It looks as though after version 4.6.5, installing the msi under the SYSTEM user will fail to create the shortcuts or appwiz.cpl entry for all users, even if the ALLUSERS=1 or MSIINSTALLPERUSER="" parameters are used. Applying a transform that adds the ALLUSERS property with value 1 to the Properties table fixes it.

From my notes: You'll then want to set up suitable permissions on your deployment share, such as a dedicated security group that you can drop users into as required.