jthompson

Same here (for Ubuntu). I have any security updates installed automatically, and then I have apt monitored along with other things on our monitoring platform (Checkmk). Auto-updates massively reduces the number of times I need to login to the servers. Not using Ansible but I fancy it at some point.

It doesn't look like there's any ballet in that at all. Hard pass.

There's not a great deal of control over the quick toggles, but Flight mode and Mobile hotspot can be defunctioned (greyed out):

Now I want Publisher back

One of my favourite Carmageddon's was the Android version. The original game but with improved graphics and controls. I enjoyed Max Damage a lot, but the original looms so large in my memory.

FYI, the new edition of Affinity (v3) is now just a single app to deploy, rather than three separate ones. The SSO screen when launching it also defaults to the "Sign in with Canva" option, rather than "Sign in with Affinity ID", which simplifies things for end users, too.

One of the features that I like is the option to play the training videos at 2x speed. That really reduced my time spent in the training phase. /s One thing that I think would help massively is for the web app to be properly responsive. That would almost entirely negate the need for a teacher mobile app.

This is really interesting: I'll be giving it a try at some point. I was literally thinking over the EWP situation last week and got to wondering whether a lightweight browser-based app (literally a single html file?) that uses Quill (or similar) could be put together to form the basis of an exam word processor. As a browser-based app, it could then be used on Chromebooks, and on Windows either as-is or in a Safe Exam Browser wrapper for stricter exam conditions. I talked it over with Gemini and it felt distincly possible!

Yep. Handbrake. You can add jobs to a queue with a view to batch processing. Most dedicated video cameras will produce very heavy filesizes on default settings (mostly down to using high bitrates?) so you can slash the filesizes massively without any noticaeble drop in picture quality. Previously I would have suggested FormatFactory, but that's regarded as a "PUP" vehicle these days, so avoid that.

I'd imagine "Are the resources scaling up enough at the start of the school day?" to have been the obvious, natural question from the outset. Like, the first thing to look at.

If the Bromcom web app were to get a couple of tweaks, I wonder whether that would significantly ease the demand on their resources. Namely, not opening up new tabs for things so readily, and not loading the full list of students/staff/groups before the end user has had a chance to provide and filters or search terms.

I have zero interest in having an on-prem MIS ever again. I sleep far better at night since turning off the SIMS server once and for all. Not just from an uptime and upgrades point of view, but from a security point of view. Let someone else take on that responsibility, thanks. I'm not paid enough!!! Yes, these service outages with Bromcom are frustrating, but they're not going to make my stomach drop and my face go all hot quite like a dead server can.

White Scars are channelling Samurai vibes. I'm sure you'll be recommended the 'Contrast' paint range to start out with, espeicially with some Space Marines. It's a paint that you're meant to just glob on: nice and quick painting. It's designed to have a very particular viscosity and flow properties, so that it pools into recesses to automatically give you shadows and highlights across the model, rather than having to paint all those affects yourself with a tiny brush. Yes, it can seem expensive, but if you enjoy the painting side of things, you can really go to town and wring every penny out of your purchases. Also, since Space Marines are always part of any boxed set, eBay generally have tonnes of unwanted Space Marine kits. I've always found Games Workshop's designs so fascinating. Everything is always a lovely melting pot of influences, and it's especially satisfying when those influences seem miles apart, but somehow get brought together to gel. For instance, I never would have thought that Abe's Odysee and Transformers would necessarily go well together, yet they kinda do when you look at T'au. Similarly, body horror, 1950's Soviet nuclear power station aesthetic and the hand-drawn sketches of Leonardo Da Vinci all come together in the delightful madness that is the Adeptus Mechanicus. It's expensive but the IP and design work is exceptionally good.

Space Marines are a good place to start, because the model count is reasonably low and they're designed to be user-friendly to paint, so represent the least work to bring to the table. It's also a faction with a massive range of options from a design point of view, so you're likely to land upon something that appeals to you on a 'cool' level. My personal favourite amongst Space Marines is the Dark Angels, who are enigmatic warrior monks in hooded cloaks. On bikes. Sub-factions generally have a signature colour scheme, so starting out I'd recommend steering clear of anything that's predominantly white, cream or yellow. Those colours are a pig to paint nicely. In any case, several thin coats are better than one thick one!

If the user account you're seeing that under is in the Protected Users security group (good practice), then its Kerberos ticket will expire after 4 hours. Lock the session, then unlock (or otherwise cycle your login) to get a fresh Kerberos ticket and try again. GPMC in particular will handle that expired Kerberos ticket not very gracefully (i.e. is the first to throw up various "I'm broken!" dialogues and generally needs to be closed and reopened after the ticket is refreshed). ADUC by contrast will fail more silently in this regard, and a simple refresh (after getting a new kerberos ticket) is sufficient for that one.

Turn any Bluesky profile into an RSS feed. Just append /rss to a profile URL. E.g. https://bsky.app/profile/edugeek.net/rss I have seen it mentioned that this can be done for hashtags URLs as well, but it's not working for me.

isbromcomup.com?

If each non-green pip were representing 99% uptime that day, then you could round up favourably. Am tempted to cobble together a script that will sign into Bromcom and check that pages are loading as expected, and plug that into our monitoring system. Do pages load as expected, and how long did it take. I don't use Bromcom much day to day, so often the first I know of an issue is several hours into the day, hearing people saying "Bromcom is down".

I had a look at adding deny privileges to the specific exe and dll files responsible for spellcheck in W11 Notepad, but it was a dead end. Deny permissions on MsSpellCheckingHost.exe had no effect, and deny permissions on MsSpellCheckingFacility.dll prevented Notepad from launching at all. I think because it's an AppX package, some kind of manifest check fails if that DLL is not available, and so the app fails to launch.

Just to dumb this down a bit, I have problems with that name: Neo It's like calling it "New MacBook". What happens when it's no longer new and there are several generations of it?* It's a bit like (but not as bad as) calling something a "One", and then inevitably having several different flavours of "One" and then a "Plus" offering just to make the word completely meaningless. *Oh wait, I remember. The "New iPad" quietly became the iPad 3 that everyone already knew it as.

I see this becoming the new default option for parents buying their sixth formers a laptop. Have seen waves of sixth formers bringing in their entry-level MBAs in recent times, so will expect this new line to become a common sight.

I remember playing some games on Tabletop Simulator during lockdown. It worked surprisingly well, and allowed us to play larger scale games, with armies that we'd always wanted to try out but had never collected. I think we added an extra rule that whoever loses gets to flip the table at the end.

If you're using WUfB, the Group Policy option "Computer Configuration → Policies → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → Windows Update → Windows Update for Business → Select the target Feature Update version" can be used to hold computers to a particular feature update, such they they won't automatically upgrade to newer ones once they become available. Also, if you have Windows 11 installed on hardware that isn't officially supported, you'll find that even if it's merrily installing the CUs each month, it won't be presented with any feature updates, regardless ofwhatever Group Policy settings etc you might have in place. If you have unsupported hardware running 23H2 and it's keeping up to date with 23H2 CUs, you'd need to perform a fresh 24H2 or 25H2 deployment to them if you want it to run that.

So many great lines! One of my personal favourites is (I think!) from "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", where Rimmer says, whilst Starbug is hurtling out of control towards a planetoid, "We're not going to get out of this in one piece... unless it's a big, round, flat piece".

"What a guy!" I loved reading the Red Dwarf novels back in the day. I'm of the opinion that Arnold J Rimmer, BSc, SSc is one of the finest comedy characters of all time. Also, I'd say that Red Dwarf is one of the best expressions of the British sense of humour (if there is such a thing).