Nibiru

Harry Potter & the goblet of ire - our hero drinks from a goblet & gets really annoyed Di Another Day - She cant get here today Live and Let Di -leave her alone ...... back to work now

Oldfinger - a study of pensioners hands.

We have a dozen or so old RM CY25 laptops reconfigured as stand alone computers. No network access on them at all - and no school wide wifi, so the kids cant do anything with them except what the teacher wants them to do - which is normally word processing using open office. The department loves them as they cant be used for anything else Theres also 30 or so Brother HL 1250 classroom printers still going - all installed in July 2000. Superb little printers, and after 14 years they dont owe us anything now. With a bit of occasional tlc most of them just keep on going, although they are succumbing to minor electrical faults now, and the fusers tend to go bad on them.

Thats what I understood from yesterdays news but things have changed again BBC News - BBC One to gain half BBC Three budget Half of BBC Three's commissioning budget will be ploughed into BBC One drama programmes, in plans outlined by director general Tony Hall.

In cities & towns maybe but there are still millions of us stuck with substandard ratty old phone lines and no prospect of an upgrade anytime soon. As the crow flies Im 1.5 miles from the town centre. The phone lines run 3 sides of a square and are over 3 miles.

Most of the BBC 3 shows are supposed staying on the new web delivered version. Well that blows a big hole in the alleged funding saving doesnt it? Transmission and distribution costs are a tiny part of the ~£85 million running costs for the channel every year, and anyway the satellite & dtt capacity is already contracted for as its split time with one of the kids channels. Note the carefully avoided point in the news that BBC1 +1 will be launched in the not too distant future. Wonder how much THAT is going to cost in repeats fees to already overpaid "stars"??? I dont watch much on BBC 3 but I wont be watcing anything once its web only - our sub 3 meg "broadband" isnt fast enough to stream tv. It struggles with scaffy quality youtube videos a lot of the time....

28E (the Sky satellites) generally speaking have very strong signals now, Most of the elderly ones have been decommissioned. DONT try it unless you have COMPLETELY safe access, and if you can take an old portable tv outside and hook everything up there you will find it much easier. If theres any hazard at all about getting to the dish dont risk it, you are better off paying an engineer than putting yourself in hospital. Also remember you need to get the up/down and left/right set correctly.. Chances are its just the left/right adjustment needs sorting, but to tweak it all up properly you may need to adjust the up/down a tad. Once you get some sort of signal *gently* push the back of the dish at one side then the other to see if things improve. Also check the "skew" of the lnb - the cable connector should be set at about "7oclock" when you face the dish. If you get a signal but no pictures you are probably on the wrong satellite, dont panic - just nudge it round a bit further, maybe marking the dish mounts / bolts with permanent marker or a pencil before you move on so you have a quick reset point if you get hopelessly lost. Take your time and dont try to rush it -these things dont go well when you are in a hurry.. Good luck! Oh and the tea towel trick does work - a damp teatowel over the lnb (the bit on the arm) weakens the signal when you are trying to optimise the dish for a weak signal.

I still occasionally get asked to rescue files off floppy discs. Thank goodness for usb floppy drives. 5.25" floppys still turn up in the back of cupboards every now and then - when Im asked whats the best thing to do with them they get lobbed into the wastebin

Get yourself a can of Fospro switch cleaner and give the control pots a good soak in it whilst wiggling the controls around. Dont use wd40 or similar as it tends to dissolve the carbon surfaces!

We have a few BBC micros lying around in cupboards somewhere. No monitors - I dumped those long long ago. Most of the BBC's I found lying around were scrapped 10 years ago, but a few got missed. When I started here there were a huge pile of RM Nimbus base units in store. For what reason I have no idea as they were only collecting dust their network having been dismantled years before.

Pretty much the same here, although as the school level IT support here consists of just me I get to sort out toners, paper jams, those little bits of paper that get stuck in the most awkward places, cleaning the paper pick up rollers when they get dusty (frequently due to cheap paper) etc....... We are slowly withdrawing the classroom printers and switching to departmental network units in bases. The classroom printers are mainly Brother HL1250s - absolutely bomb proof but at 14 years old most definitely well past their best now. As they break down they are getting removed.

If you ignore the pay nags you get free time extensions - ive had whatsapp for over 18 months without paying a penny to them

The double prong of the Lotus is by far the worst looking design this year...

Might be worth asking your janitors if they have a cable detector. If so pull the board down and give the wall a good going over. And have a look the other side of the wall and see if any new power cables have been run. Or has one been run next to the usb cable between the computer & the board maybe? Or if it started recently has the teacher got an electrical heater near the board, running an experiment with a badly shielded motor, someone put a new fridge in the base next door etc etc.

The only "wobble" Ive ever seen is on one board. When drawing a straight line across the board you got a "kink" in the line. Reproducible over and over again across a good proportion of the board I never got to the bottom of it although I suspect its a damaged membrane behind the surface. I just swapped the entire board with one from a nearby classroom who have a iwb but only ever use it as a projector screen

4G? Theres a lot of areas round here dont have any mobile signal at all, just large white gaps in the coverage maps.

Yup thats the one. Hmm now its a case of isolating where the problem is Stick the software onto a laptop and connect it to the board instead. If the fault persists its definitely on the board. The other problem we have found is the electronics on the control board failing. If you have a second known good board you could try swapping the control boards over. They are held in place by a small screw - its pretty obvious once you have fetched it off the wall.. Then you can identify if its actual board related or control electronics

Have you tried resetting the control board. This cures a multitude of ills with these boards - we have loads of 680s Locate the small hole on the control board behind the lower right corner of the board. Push a pencil into the hole and hold for a count of about 5 until the pen tray lights all flash.

Speak to your FOI officer before you answer. All big organisations have them. They will know whats a reasonable enquiry.

One of my recent desktop pics: 3 of the 6 surviving A4 Pacifics gathered at York Rail Museum last October Bittern Mallard & Dominion of Canada A fourth one was behind me - Dwight D Eisenhower which is green instead of blue I do have a rather nice head on pic of the 3 blue ones if anyone would like to see it.

I partially cured my fear of heights when I stood on the glass panel at the CN Tower in Toronto. 1400 feet straight down, and it frightened me so much I decided nothing could possibly scare me so much again And it worked, I can dash up and down the mobile scaffolding tower in the hall when the projector filter needs changing without breaking a sweat now. This video clip of the radio antenna rigger climbing up the outside of a broadcast tower still makes me feel ill though

It'll be 20 years next year since I had my first home pc - a 486 with a 14" crt monitor, 8mb ram & a 850 mb hdd. It took me 3 years to fill up the hdd! I went online with that machine in the early days of the internet. It was fine as long as the webpage didnt have any pictures in it - if it did the browser crashed (an early incarnation of netscape was my favoured browser way back then) I upgraded the ram to 24mb at enormous expense at one point. That base unit sat around for years until it turfed out into a scrap bin up at the local tip.

One of my fav bits of kit was a chunky Panasonic SA-HT70 DVD & home theater system bout for about 300 quid 8 or 9 years ago. A lovely rich sound came from it so I was rather gutted when the dvd drive packed up (a common problem with these apparently) However it didnt get junked - its now here in my office, and the heart of my computer sound system connected to some lovely old JVC speakers I was given a few years ago I cant turn it up too loud or I get complaints from next door

Dark coloured cargo trousers for me - very comfy, and 6 pockets are great for dropping tools, network cables, phones etc into

The backlash is growing... BBC News - EA faces criticism over mobile Dungeon Keeper game