Duranis

I really hope this ends up being good. I have all of them on DVD so might have to convince my Mrs to do a binge watch over the next few months in preparation Ashamed to admit that I have never seen the last 3 seasons of xfiles despite having owned them on DVD for a good 10-15ish years.

lol my Mrs loves to annoy me and one of the things that always works is when she comes out with "Well you don't know that people actually went to the moon, it could all be a big fake". Even though I know she doesn't believe that herself I end up biting every time.

Thanks a lot everyone. All in all we do seem to be paying a bit more than normal but I expected that. I would love to have a backup onsite for the bulk of the "less important" stuff but there is no other place where I could securely set something up. I did think about going for the tape drive and having the backups stored at another school but seems a bit "old school". Also wouldn't want this as the primary backup for the really important stuff as if something happened to me the school doesn't have anyone else here that would know what to do with them. At least at the moment they would just need to make a call to the company and it can be restored remotely. On a vaguely similar note how do you guys deal with file clean up? One of the reasons I'm looking at backup solutions is the file server is getting pretty bloated and I struggle to know what is safe to get rid of. A lot of files haven't been accessed in months but I know if I deleted them the next day some teacher would be looking for them. Sadly none of the teachers are keen on going through them with me despite all of them saying that it needs clearing out and is full of junk.

Just curious how much people are paying for offsite backup? Currently we pay £585 a year for 200GB of monitored backup space. This seems reasonable to me as they do provide a good quality of service. Everytime there has been an issue with the backup they have contacted me right away, even though I get the alerts it is nice to know there is someone else watching over the backup as well. Also means if I'm not around for any reason they would contact the school directly and talk the office through sorting out whatever is wrong. However I'm going to have to up the packages soon as 200GB is very tight so thought it would be a good idea to see what other people are using and how much they are paying.

I feel sad that I not only have never been but had to look it up because I have never heard of it Looks really good though, might look at going next year. If I take my boys the Mrs wont complain too much either

Yep sounds like my job. My job description is "ICT Technician", my actual role is Admin, IT tech, Network manager, ICT coordinator, occasional TA, TA/teacher assistant, AV engineer, Stock taker/ordering, IT trainer, general dogsbody and probably a few more. I actually don't mind it too much, I like getting involved and helping people. I do always prioritise the workload and the core jobs always come first but I'm happy to help Y5 edit some videos or helping the site manager shift some stuff about. I am lucky that I have good staff here though and they understand that a lot of what they ask for is outside of my role and I don't always have time to do it. Yes this does mean that the workload is almost always super high and I don't always get as much time to work on things as I want (i.e. a lot of rainy day projects like converting our old laptops into digital displays take a log time to get going). However it is nice to be a valued member of the school and pretty much the "go to guy" for anything nobody else can solve. I would say though that if you are not getting time to get the core work done then you need to get your line manager on board and explain to them the problems you are facing. Just saying "this is not in my job description" while technically correctly has never sat well with me (though of course there are exceptions) but saying "if I do all of this I don't have time to do the work in my job description" is perfectly valid and any halfway reasonably manager should be understanding and supportive.

Yeah tried that on a few of the laptops here for office and windows 7. The keys it pulls off though are not accepted via the MS website for office and windows so not sure where they come from or what they are. Office at least seems to be pre-actived so I'm assuming the office software package I have on the CC4 server was supplied via RM at some point.

I can see what licenses we have purchased with invoice numbers but not the keys themselves. If I click on one of the invoices and then click on the details for the license I get a screen with the below message. This is an RM Select Licence. Due to RM`s agreement with Microsoft we are unable to give the Product Activation Code to the end user under any circumstances. This licence can therefore be used for software that is going to be installed: - using the Community Connect 3 /4 station build process - with a Curriculum Choice /RM Integration pack - performed by an RM Engineer(Please request the Sales Person to cordinate the Installation).

hmmmmm I'm feeling rather bad now, I never gave much thought to making an IT welcome pack for new staff. All I did was set up the accounts and pass them on to the office staff to deal with. In fairness I have been working on putting together documentation for all the staff to help with the IT side of things and its not often we get new staff here. Now added "IT welcome pack" to my todo list.

Thanks a lot for the info. Still chasing RM and getting bumped around departments but hopefully will get a result.

Not sure if this is the right section but probably as good as any. Has anyone here purchased Microsoft licenses through RM and actually manged to get the activation keys from them? I started here about a year ago now and I've finally got around to sorting out the mess that has been left with the licensing. Technically we are licensed for what we have here but most of it is through RM and so far they will not actually give me the activation keys for any of the products we purchased (various versions of office, Server 2012, windows licenses, etc). They say it is part of their agreement with MS that they don't give out the activation keys. The people I have spoken to at MS say this is rubbish (but they wont give me the keys either, even with proof that we have paid for them). I'm now stuck in a difficult situation where I have no license keys and no physical media to reinstall laptops here as stand alone systems. Worse is if I want to dump RM's CC4 software I will have to rebuy all the windows and office licensing again. Trying to get some response from RM now but was wondering if anyone else had been through the same. I have no idea why my predecessor thought buying over 200 single licenses from RM for office and windows was a good idea instead of going for a volume licensing option and saving a fortune.

lol I have the same argument with my oldest boy. I have always preferred the gameplay in Pro Evo, fifa always felt somewhat sluggish. My boy is a MASSIVE football fan though so has to have all the correct names, etc. Hate to think how many £hundred's he has spent on the fifa games, player packs, etc. Honestly to me there never seems to be any big gameplay difference on each years release and it seems more of an exercise in making fans spend more money again. However as I have never really got into it that much I may be missing it.

I finally get to upgrade my phone in the next couple of weeks but really not sure which one to go for. I have been using the Galaxy S Series phones since they were first launched but the lack of micro SD card and the fairly small capacity, non-replaceable, battery is putting my off the S6 a bit. The alternative is the HTC One M9 which looks like a very nice bit of kit (lower screen res but on that size screen it isn't an issue for me and just means longer battery life). It also has a stronger processor then Samsung's self produced one they use which has had issues in the past. I used to do a lot of work with HTC in the as well and they make some quality kit. The only problem I have is I really like the touch wiz interface on Samsung and the camera isn't as good as the S6. The outside option is to get the Note 4. I mostly use my phone for emails, youtube and quick checking stuff on the web anyway so the bigger screen would be pretty handy. Only downside is the extra £5 a month on the contract to get it. Anyone had a good play with the S6 and M9 and can give some feedback on what the preferred and why?

Pretty sure you can do this with just Movie Maker. Import all the photos in, set the transition time to less than a second, make sure the photos are arranged in the right order then drag them all to the timeline.

Back in the day the IT company I worked for were setting up new computers in the control tower of a small local airport. Had to lug a ton of 21" CRT's up 5 VERY narrow, VERY steep, VERY long sets of winding staircases. Was not fun times as the stairs were so narrow you couldn't take them up in the boxes and even then they still barely fit (and at the time these were seriously expensive bits of kit so dropping them would have been really bad). Even now a good 15-16ish(?) years that was one of the worst jobs I have had to do.

I have been playing the hell out of this game for the last week, its really fun. Couple of tips that I have come across in playing. You really want at least 1 high stat dweller and 1 really good gun (ideally 20+ damage) out of the first few easy lunchboxes you get. If you don't get this then restart and try again. My GF didn't get any good guns at the start or high stat dwellers and it took her ages to get everyone in the vault armed as nobody could survive for over 12 hours in the wasteland. I got a decent stat guy (stats all around 4/5) and a fatboy mini nuke launcher at the start and this really helped bring in a lot of items at the start as I could just send him out for ages to collect stuff. Don't upgrade rooms until you need to. The higher the room level the stronger the incident encounter (hence why you get super touch molerats or fires that seem to take days to put out). If you are planning to have rooms without people in (storage rooms, living quarters and probably medbay/science bay) then build them lower that the main rooms so they are not touching other rooms. This way when in incident happens in one it wont spread. Don't expand to quickly. The game difficulty scales based on your vault population and room levels. At around 30 dwellers you start seeing mole rats, at 60 dwellers you start getting attacked by deathclaws. Raider attacks get stronger as well (better weapons, more raiders). Lots of people get put off the game as they build upgraded rooms really quickly, get a ton of dwellers in the vault and then get owned by the incidents because all there dwellers are low level and unarmed. You can put in some "population control" by building what I like to call a murder room. Just build a single room of any type that can be rushed. Make sure when you build it that it is not connected to any other rooms so events wont spread out from it. Now remove all the items from the dwellers who's services are no longer required put them in the room and keep rushing it until you fail. After enough fails they will eventually die and then you can just remove them. I used this quite a bit when I kept getting "deliver babies" type objectives but was trying to keep my population cap below 60. Train 1 person up with Luck and Int. This is your rush guy for making stimpacks and radaways. Early on you might need people working in the medpay 24/7 to keep a good supply in but once this guy gets his stats up you can just rush them. My int/luck 10 guy (with extra int/luck armor on) can rush the medbay 3 times before the fail % gets above 20. I have 2 triple roomed fully upgraded medbays which means this guy can crack out 62 stim packs in less than a minute. Children inherit stats from their parents. Try to use your highest stat people for breeding. It doesn't make a massive difference, even breeding two 10Perception stat parents doesn't seem to give more than 3 stat points to the childs Perception but that's still better than it being 1 (especially if it gets 3 to all stats, that saves quite a few hours of training). Triple merged rooms are much better than double rooms. Merge rooms before upgrading as it costs less. If your resource bars are in the red when you are turning it on then you don't have enough storage for that resource. Build extra empty rooms to increase your storage capacity of that resource. That way you have more of a buffer of resources, so when the game runs after you turn off, it wont run it into the red. This is still annoying though as you still need to play the game long enough next time to refill your resource buffers (makes turning it on for a quick check hard to do). Mr Handy's do fix this problem and you don't need to buy them (hint, the save file is stored locally on your device and can be edited...). I did buy the £3 Mr handy pack just because they game has given me at least £3 of entertainment but cheated in a couple more for when I expand my resource collection. I don't feel having them unbalances the game as it fixes an annoying problem and doesn't add much else. They also die fairly often and cost 2K caps to revive so not a super powerful addition. Don't bother wasting people to guard the vault door. They don't gain XP or contribute to the vault. Best vault defense is to have a triple merged "guard" room to the right of the vault door with dwellers in it and armed all the time. I have my main power generation in that room and raiders die pretty much as soon as they run in. Deathclaws suck. Don't go above 60 dwellers unless you have ample resource storage, a large supply of stimpacks, decent level people and everyone is armed with decent weapons ("guard room" at least should have 10-15+ damage weapons, everyone else a min of enhanced shotguns). Deathclaws run from room to room so it is a good idea early on to set up your top 3 levels of the vault so they have to go from one room to the next on that level rather than having elevators they can go down right away. This way you can get all your best guns nearest the vault entrance and it should take them down before they get to far. Wasteland exploring is important. Ideally send high strength/endurance people at the start as they will last the longest. Send out every spare person you have to begin with as you want to get everyone in stat boosting armor and armed asap. Even if you are sending them out without any items at the start most of them will survive just fine for a few hours which will get them a couple of items each. Remember they don't take damage coming back so you can leave them out until they are almost dead and then recall them. All stats are important and will increase the length dwellers survive and the quality/amount of items/caps they find. Items finding events are generated around every hour for all dwellers that are out, so if you look through their logs to when they last found a weapon/armor you will know roughly how long until they find the next one. There are also scripted events that can be effected by stats (found a locker/fridge needs str to open, encountered slave/talon company needs char, etc). At around 2 days and 12 to 13 hours exploring they will come across a National Guard Depot. At this place they have a chance to get a legendary weapon (about 1 in 10) or much more common just XP. Once they reach this point it is generally best to bring them back so you can send them out for another shot, there does not seem to be any more scripted events after this point (just the standard once per hour random loot generation). Level 16 seems to be the sweet spot for sending out dwellers (if they have a decent weapon and half decent stats). This gives them enough health to start out with and still have enough space for lots of level ups. Every time they level up their health regens which saves them using a stimpack. Most of the dwellers I have sent out at 16 have been level 50 by the time they hit the 2 day mark.

There must be something wrong with me but I actually really like it. Would I purchase them for use in school, hell no, way to many moving parts and possible fault points. However I would get one for myself if I had a need. I personally hate having the trackpad in front of the keyboard. The vast majority of the time I'm on a laptop I'm writing. Maybe its just the position I hold my hands in but I'm forever hitting the trackpad on most laptops which results in the cursor jumping to other places or things being opened/closed unexpectedly. Not to mention on a lot of laptops the keyboard is all the way at the back so your arms are not in a comfortable position. I like that the screen can be angled in multiple positions as well, as a home device I can think of more than one situation were that would be useful.

And here

Many years ago I bought some 3D glasses for my PC (this was a long time before 3D on every TV was a thing). They were really expensive (around £300) and took a long time to set up. I think I used them for a total of about 10 hours as they gave me a massive headache. Still have them in a box somewhere. I also have a DX1 keyboard which is honestly amazing but has not been support for a long time so can't get win7 drivers or software for it. I used it years ago for a short while then when I moved house it got boxed up and never used again since. I would love you get it working again but writing working drivers and control software for it is beyond me.

Finish on Friday and have only been authorised 1 day for overtime over the holiday (were I'm going to flash the AP/Controller firmware and empty/rebuild the server room to get rid of all the junk and try and give me space to work). I could do with about 2 weeks of uninterrupted time so I could refresh all the laptops and do a bunch of clean up on the server/disk images. That is not likely to ever happen though so will have to continue trying to do it on a live system that is constantly in use.....

Depends on the paint and what I'm doing (base colour layer not so thinned, blended layer very thin, etc). GW paints generally need a fair amount of thinning. I tend to use just water and mix my paints on a wet palette to help thin them and keep them usable for longer. Hard to say how much water/paint you need as it depends on the paint and how you are using it. Some of the new GW layer paints dont need much diluting at all while their foundations need a load (and often don't work well with being mixed with water that much). I have just picked up some acrylic medium I'm going to try though which should help with wet blending as watered down paint dries too quickly. Also go for vallejo paints. Cheaper, you get more in a bottle, there is a better choice of colours and they need less messing about with to be usable. The only downside is nobody seems to stock them in actual shops so you have to order online which can make picking the right colours/shades a little hit and miss (though there are conversation charts out there if you want to get GW like colours).

Depends how bad your eyes are I would say no though, especially at the start you don't want to be worry about trying to paint details small enough to need one. I have a couple but never use them. If a detail is small enough you need a magnifying glass to see if from 1ft away then its not big enough to worry about as nobody will see it when its on a table among 40 other models. That is another important point as well. If you are painting to have an army to play the game don't get caught up in trying to paint 500 shades/highlights and details on every single model. Most models will be in groups and most of the time they are being viewed from a distance. If you are painting to a reasonable table top quality then just get your base colours down, shade with washes and then 1 highlight layer. It may not look amazing on each individual model but a whole army that is painted consistently (and is fully painted) looks pretty damn good when together on the table (and much better than an army that has 2 models that are extremely well painted and the rest that are just plastic/undercoated).

Thanks. Don't worry about screwing up the paint job. As long as you are using normal water based acrylic paint (i.e. GW, vallejo, etc) and it hasn't got a ton of varnish or anything on it then it is fairly easy to just strip off the paint and redo it. Best stuff I have found in the UK for taking paint off plastic models is brown Dettol. Just leave the models to soak in this for a little while and scrub them with a tooth brush. Edit: Wear gloves when you do this, neat Dettol with do bad things to your skin. I know from experience If you enjoy the painting side of things then I would recommend going on ebay and just picking up cheapo models. Then you can use these to test out painting methods, colour schemes, etc without having to mess with you main army. You can often pick up job lots of badly painted models for a couple of pound then just strip the paint. Edit: Also don't be disheartened if your first models look like crap. Painting in general is a learned skill and painting on small scale is something else again. the more you paint the more little tips and tricks you will develop and the better your models will look. I have only painted about 40 or 50 models in total (at most). I would like to think I can paint to a fairly reasonable level now but the first couple of models I did look like they where done by a 5 year old . Also the first 20 I did I wanted to immediately go back and repaint because I had learnt so much in the process that I knew I could do a better job on the next one. It is very easy when your painting to get stuck in a position where you have an idea in your head of what you want but you doubt your ability to actually pull it off. You then end up with a bunch of unfinished/unstarted stuff and you have done nothing to help your painting skill either. Best thing to do is just plow ahead and learn that nothing will ever be 100% perfect. I have fallen into this trap more than once where I start painting a model and it isn't quite coming out exactly how I wanted. I lose interest/get frustrated and rather then just going on and having a finished model that in reality is probably fairly decent, I have a half finished model that sits in a draw for the next 3 years

Can't give much advice on playing as I have never played a game in my life. Painting though I can help on As mentioned its not that hard to get something together that looks halfway decent and there are a few really good hobby forums out there with lots of advice and info on them. Airbrush is really not needed. It can speed things up a little when painting large models or lots of models and there are some things you can do which are difficult to do with a brush. On the other hand there is stuff you can do with a brush that you can't do with an airbrush. Thinning your paints and using a wet palette will help a lot. A wet palette is just a container with wet paper towels in and a bit of baking/greaseproof paper over the top. You put the paint on to here and it stops it from drying out as you are using it. Also I would recommend vallejo paints over GW paints (much smoother and nicer to paint with). A lot of the vallejo range is designed for airbrush use but works really nicely with a brush as well. GW's washes are some of the best IMO though and some of their technical paints are also quite nice. As mentioned with regards to colours, paint them however you like. As you can see from the photos below I don't like the "super clean" look that a lot of people tend to go for either. I have recently started painting up my Tau army which I have had for about 4 years and never took out the boxes. Firewarriors http://i.imgur.com/2jQpzy0.jpg http://i.imgur.com/jIBFoF1.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oisv4xK.jpg XV8 crisis Suit (weapons are magnetized to swap them around) http://i.imgur.com/kVCzkoe.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oQ7JKgB.jpg

Thanks for the heads up, will certainly be handy for the future.