Rob_D

Started watching The Ark on Sky over the weekend. Similar vibe to CW's The Outpost (and some of the same cast). If you liked Killjoys or Dark Matter I'd recommend giving it a shot.

Massive thunderstorm here at about 3 Sunday morning which made a load of our UPSs complain, but everything seem to be working okay. And it has brought in some cooler weather for now, although forecasts show it back up to about 30 by Friday.

Depends on the version, when I was a student, Morrisons own "corn flakes" were almost texturally and flavouraly indistinguishable from the box they came in, while the Tesco ones are alright. TBH, I can't think I've seen any own brand Weetabix.

If you could send keyboard commands using autoit or something then 'Win + down arrow' will minimize the active window. Although if you're going down that rout an autoit script could just minimise the target window: https://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/functions/WinSetState.htm

The Doctor ain't getting very far with that fur coat in today's 30-degree heat.

You joke (I presume), but for years we had blue stain on the wall of the conservatory where the thermometer did blow up.

Maybe, but the couple of times I've forgotten a tie in the winter (and thus had top shirt button undone) my neck has felt noticeably colder.

I wonder what happens if you show up at local station at 5?

Not so bad here today after a blisteringly hot weekend. Hoping we hang on to the mid 20s most of this week and I get some sleep again. Recent years, it feels like the UK doesn't do moderate summer temps anymore, it's either slightly chilly and overcast (which TBH I don't mind) or hot enough to scour all life from the face of the planet. *You might be able to tell that I don't like the hot weather. Only 80 days to September...

Anecdotally, I'm starting to see Sophos and Fortigate take a reasonable amount of market-share.

We use Smoothwall appliance and cloud for firewall and on-site/off-site filtering. Also used Sophos for cloud filtering (never had the appliance).

It's worth noting that playing a video in WMP (even if minimized) will do the same thing.

We have news screens around the school that combine, in school stuff like upcoming events, revision timetables, behavior posters (anything that would have otherwise been printed and blue-tacked to the walls), with BBC news RSS and the weather feed from our school's weather station. Library has their own which includes a feed of recently added books and the in-school news/posters, main reception screen shows rolling promo videos under a generic welcome message with a tickertape feed from our twitter, PE kind of do their own thing with the sports hall screen (they mostly have upcoming events and alum that have made it big). The screens outside the dining hall switch over to showing todays menu at lunch time. Parent's evening we normally have maps of where to find the teachers (one day I'll get them to stop taping last minute changes to bottom of the screen), and there's a whole raft of custom promo stuff that comes out for open evenings. I also sneak a happy Christmas/Easter/Summer message up on the last day of term. The social media team manages putting things into the in-school new feed (using Xbo's Datasets so there's no faffing with layouts), and everything else is either pulled from other RSS feeds, or one off stuff. And we use Xibo too.

They start to get their act together a bit more (and there's more of a focus on the mythology/mystery) season 3 onward. But if you're not into at least some of the core characters (the Stones, Zeke, Sanvi) then probably not as it's all very much character centric.

Finished the final season of Manifest today. Epic and very satisfying conclusion.

My dad had a Specialized gravel bike a few years ago. It was great for prepared tracks like the downs link and not bad on rougher stuff (about what you'd expect from a non-suspension bike - getting fat tires can help a lot), but the more road-bike-esque riding position made it surprisingly bad at riding out potholes or really rutted paths. If you want more options , city-bikes aren't bad for the occasional hard-top track, and the more upright (mountain-bike like) riding position can make the rougher stuff easier. I think Hybrids are city bikes with front suspension - or you can just get city bikes with suspension as well.

You could use the desktop background to help - have arrows with "this way to projector" on. If you can get a custom layout to stick then maybe consider "up" as the universal direction for the projector (it's above them, right?).

We've been using predominantly user based filtering since we moved away from the County provision in the early 2010s. I'd have thought user based would give you more flexibility, and potentially options around off-site filtering. And there's no reason you can't hybrid both. We're mostly user but have IP/VLAN groups for (for example) servers and phones. If you're moving to a new system it's the ideal time make the change as you've got to set it up anyway and presumably you'll already have vendor support for the setup who'll be able to help you with this (at that point it's not going to be much additional work to ad AD/AAD sync on top of everything else). I've mostly used Smoothwall, but from what I've seen, Fortigate is a similar setup. Just put your domain details in and set what AD or AAD groups you want to sync, then you can apply filtering policies to that group the same you would to an IP group.

It's also available on Sky if anyone's interested. Parents watched it a couple of years back and thought it was very good.

Hi guys, We're a mid/large secondary with around 1400 students, SLT are looking into implementing student ID cards/lanyards, which would be used for print release, canteen and the library, and possibly for access control. I'm hoping we can outsource most of this (at get least the initial and new cohort bulk printing done for us). Can anyone who's been through this change offer any advice, suggest any companies, or have any gotchas that we might not have thought of? Thanks!

I don't know if it applies to the A3 as well, but for A1 the Student/Faculty licenses are used by Teams/SDS to determine who's allowed to "own"/be teacher for a class team.

If you're reasonably happy with the final result (the actual settings/restrictions applied to the PCs), you could use Group Policy Results to get a summery of the applied settings and use that as your starting point.

If you're in 365 you could use a power automate (when new email arrives > send email). We've done this for automatic replies from mailing groups before.

I'm sure most of the big resellers, Softcat, CSS, BSL, would be able to hook you up.

I would assume it's because MS recommend users have access to the new QOL updates as they come, so they have the best "Microsoft" experience possible. LTSC was designed to be used in kiosks, POS systems, etc where the user (if there even is one) never interacts with OS, hence being a more bare-bones experience. But I could be wrong.