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I have had multiple lessons trying to learn a language and each time I stopped and ultimately had to start over. With the improvements in AI, I was thinking of using an app for the ability to do a little bit every day in the hope that I will stick with it for longer. Has anyone had any experience (good or bad) with any of these apps? The objective is not to replace an actual teacher, but to get me back into learning and have the ease of being able to use it when I have some free time.

Is the limitation only being that you can't download directly to the kindle? I think mine lost support some time ago, but you can send to email and transfer it directly. At least that was the way I did it last year. To be honest, I was toying with the idea of getting a newer one with a direct light so I can read without the need for a night lamp, but the amount I read these days doesn't justify it to be honest. I think mine is still working OK, but my eyes are not as good as they used to be and last time I used it I had to increase the size of the test which didn't look so good on an older device.

This is what I am looking for without the hassle of downloading and trying multiple apps. Yea, I know lazy, but I'm sure someone must have done something similar and can save me the hassle of reading the limitations of everything. I don't mind ads on the app when I'm configuring it, but I don't want ads on the display when I just want photos

We have an older Lenovo tablet which is still usable for very light tasks, but as a usable device it is very limit as it is slow. As a result I looked into turning it into a digital photo frame for pictures as I had done something similar years ago. However, it seems there have been some updates which mean just using the default "slideshow" options from google flashes through he pictures quickly from start to finish, but then it stops - there is no cycling round. From what I quickly read, google changed the way devices handle this now and the photo frame setting is limited to specific devices (and mine is not supported) so I looked at Fotoo which looked really good until it then flashed up a 5min "lockscreen" wanting me to pay to get rid of it. When I started paying more attention I could see most free apps contain ad's which I don't want displayed but I also don't want to be paying for something which should be really simple to do. Ideally I wanted just to be able to use a google drive folder and share this with my wife so we could just drop pics into it and the tablet would sync the updates and display without me having to copy pictures over manually. Is anyone using older tablets for a photo frame and how did you do it?

Are you looking to get a list of the machines or you want to manage the local accounts? In my last place we created a GPO with settings to remove all local accounts except the ones we specified. We found over time, people were being a little lazy and adding people to local admin group so we set a policy via GPP which removed everything and set a standard across the domain.

Get some feedback from the staff to their main pain points. While it may no be as important as doing a full assessment, it can quickly build trust (and therefore time) if you can implement an easy quick fix for an issue which has been particularly annoying for some members of staff.

Bump for the work crowd

We are in a position where we have had an IPhone which is being handed down, but also have android (which I prefer). As a result, we are in the situation where we (as parents) will have both an IPhone and Android and kids who also have an IPhone and Android and we are trying to setup the family controls. However, we are in the situation where only 1 of us has the ability to manage 1 of the children. Previously this was done soley through android and worked well. However, I have used Apple family and I am having problems with getting notifications when a new app is being requested. As a result, I'm now looking at a single app which can be installed on both Android & Apple so that both of us can manage both kids. Is anyone using an app to do this? At the minute, I am at the point where IOS just doesn't seem to want to play nice and I am at the point of throwing it out of the windows. I'm sure it works well when everything is in IOS, but I just prefer Android but really need something which is easy to manage across OS so both my wife and I can control Android and IOS. Even if that is going to cost us to pay for an app

This is very similar to what I did in the past. And to be honest, I found it really useful to learn the newer deployment skills to enable me to test the things in the area I was working in at the time (as I wasn't doing this in my day to day job) Training wise, my employer has limited budget (as always) but we have been through some major restructuring also so I'm kind of looking to improve my overall skills in case I am one of the ones in the next restructure. I have access to pluralsight which has some good courses, but I don't want to necessarily go down the cert route now, but I definitely want the ability to get hands on experience so if I see any other job I am interested in I am able to transition. I also setup Hyper-V on my old computer, but I found that I quickly ran out of RAM and HDD space and eventually Hyper-V broke and I couldn't repair it and gave up. As a result, I am a little reluctant to re-use my day to day PC as a learning lab because if something breaks, I don't want to be troubleshooting something I use for personal use. This is why I was thinking of a dedicated machine again. One area I would like to increase my knowledge is DevSecOps as I know very little of modern day deployments and I feel I need to understand this for any future roles, including my current one.

Bumping this thread for the people coming back after the summer and potentially more visibility. In addition I'm curious based on the fact I am currently going insane in my current work and need to focus on something else.

Fibre to the the router and as I understand the current router is acting as the ONT/router. Which means I can't simply swap this out, but need to change the config to PPPoE so I can connect a new router to internet but leave the existing router in place which will convert the signal to fibre?

This is what I am doing. But the vendor router has VLAN associated with the WAN ports. From what I understand this is so the internet provider can manage the traffic. So if they are tagging the traffic with VLAN data, I will still need a router to be able to manage that? The only option is PPPoe Passthrough which should allow my new router to connect directly to the internet (as I understand)

I want to install my own router to replace the internet providers one I have. From what I have read I need to put it into PPPoe passthrough and then setup my new router to use PPPoe to connect to the internet. This seems pretty straight forward, but I noticed on my internet providers router that there are some vlans identified for things like IPTV and we do get our tv through them. My question is from what I understand if the internet provider is using vlans, I will need a router that is capable of using vlans to ensure I can connect and don't loose my tv. My question is, I have noticed some routers come with basic tagging for IPTV, but not full VLAN capabilities, but I only want to have the ability to tag the internet and TV traffic so I will be connected. I don't want to fully create VLANS for my own home. Do I need to look for a device which does full VLAN setup? How can I tell if the routers I am looking at will be able to provide a breakout for IPTV? I am referring to the WAN interfaces which show Name and VLAN/Priority with some VLAN details. Although I cant set anything, this is greyed out.

I'm looking for some feedback. Many moons ago I had access to create my "own learning lab" while I was working in Edu. However, since I left I found my access is a lot more restricted and getting my own personal instance of things setup required setting up my own personal home lab to be able to deploy new machines and do testing and learning etc. This was extremely useful while I was learning different things that I was working on but had limited access to test machines and internal policies made it very difficult to be able to just spin up new instances whenever I needed it. It also allowed me to test things which I didn't have access to in work, but allowed me to get a much better understanding of how things worked. I would like to spend some time learning more technologies beyond what I have direct hands on access to. I did look into some of the free tiers for cloud - but my concern here is that I could quickly end up spending a lot of money for learning cloud specific content that it would be costly over time. My main concern is that I am not looking to get certified in AWS for example, but I want to understand the concepts behind so that I can apply it to any vendor. I have realised that I know basically nothing about how to deploy machines anymore - the last time i was involved in that in my day job was deploying a VM which was running on VMWare nearly 10 years ago. So my thinking was that I could build my own home lab and learn about deployment "concepts" and also then use this to learn security topics against the machines, containers etc that I am deploying myself. That way it will help me learn how to deploy things securely and verify by performing vuln scanning, deploying vulnerable systems for evaluating etc. This could potentially allow me to learn a wider skillset but without the specific Vendor knowledge. It should also allow me to get the hands on experience I am missing when learning the theory on some of the online courses available. So I started looking at building my own home lab for deployments and learning things to keep the cost as a one off and also learn about how to deploy images quickly so as I need something i can deploy fast in a similar method to cloud deployments. The other thing is that I don't want to be buying licences to cover anything that I will be doing as it would likely be machines for a specific topic and then discarded. As such, anything with windows should be fine using the grace period and from what I read, free alternatives are available for learning concepts. Do any of you still have a home lab used for learning things or look at the pro/con of home lab vs using cloud resources?

We have handed down an older IPhone to my child and in order to setup some restrictions I created a child account and set it to be managed. However, coming from an Android background this seems to be a little restrictive. In android you can make the request and then I will review it and approve/reject depending on what I think. With a child account there is a limit on some of the apps which makes it impossible to even make the request. While I understand the logic, the problem comes when apps are rated to 17+ and some apps which I don't understand why. 2 apps so far include Block Blast and Chrome. While I understand Chrome can be used to search for inappropriate things. I don't think Apple should be blocking me from making that decision by marking the app as 17. I found a section to change the restrictions so I have increased this to 17 so they can at least request apps. Is there anything I should be aware of within the Apple ecosystem in terms of restricting/monitoring the phone use? Note - I am fully transparent with my child and they know they have to share their phone with me (and wife) when we ask so we know what they are doing and we explain things etc. However, blocking them from installing all sorts of junk is really useful and setting screen time limits saves us from keep telling them to get off their phone as when they run out of time, it stops.

If there is a tool that will be great. But I know virtually nothing about IPhones and having to manually delete photo's is a real pain

@machy- what cleanup tool? On Android I know it autmatically removes local copies of photo's, but last time I looked there wasn't an option in IPhone. Has this changed?

An updated question on this post. As ICloud is limited to only 5GB of storage, I found that you basically have to turn off everything to be able to regularly backup the phone. I ended up paying for extra (50GB)storage just so I could get a backup made as I am trying to transfer to a new phone. We also have OneDrive (1TB) and I was wondering if instead of manually removing photos from the iPhone to reclaim space, can you do the following. Backup to ICloud>Backup to OneDrive (I think this is possible) but then also delete from ICloud which will remove the photo's from the IPhone (saving space) but keep them in OneDrive? I am hoping that if this is possible, I would pay for the storage in ICloud just so it saves me the hassle of manually doing it and my wife doesn't get a phone which stops working because it runs out of space and she doesn't manage it

Lets hope something is worked out https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2025/04/15/cybersecurity-world-on-edge-as-cve-program-prepares-to-go-dark/

I will ask, what does your JD cover? Are you responsible for the budget/direction etc of IT or are you there to maintain. If you are there to maintain, it's really simple. They don't value your input enough to trust what you are saying. The consultant is just telling them what they want to hear as they have already made the decision NOT to spend the money they need to spend. This is the reason they have gone round asking for advice until they got someone who told them what they wanted to hear. Like others have said, raise your concerns in writing. I would be also tempted that an email is not enough and also print it out "just in case" and present your concerns were they have to acknowledge that you have done it. But lets be honest. If this is how they are treating you, the person that knows your environment the best, the only way it see it getting better is if there is a change in senior management. If this is unlikely, you will always be fighting a loosing battle. I remember being told something a few years back which sounds simple, but can be quite hard....Focus on what you can control. And let anything else go. Raise your concerns, highlight the risks and move on. Focus on what you can make better. Soon enough they will find the money when everything starts failing at once.

@dhicks - I wish I knew this sooner. We bought a microscope for my daughter for Christmas. AS far as I know, it was used once

I haven't yet. I looked on the bundles provided in a link here and there looks like some interesting stuff. One of the things I thought would be good is the outside camera. But I am reluctant to spend 100 if I can repurpose my old first gen Raspi. But I need to create some time to see what bits I have hanging around and see if he would really be interested. I already asked him and he seemed interested. But honestly, I think the best option in his opinion would be the retro game console....but we already have a Nintendo so I'm not interested in doing that. We need to find a compromise...but he struggles with keeping attention also so I'm going to go slowly

I have an old Raspi. I will take a look to see if there is something I can do with that. I am not sure he is able to hold attention for long so it needs to be something quick and easy. But at least I don't have to spend money on that

I have an 8 soon to be 9 year old who is taking an interest in gadgets. Now I want to encourage this, but I also want him to be able to actually learn more about the technology and how it works etc. Anyone got any advice, experience of things they were able to do to encourage their kids? The kids have an old laptop so if there is any free/cheap software able to run on an old laptop I could install that

In the past I've also used to the same process to remove local admin accounts that someone had added over time. Can't remember the exact setting, but something like remove all and then just add the specific accounts so the only admin accounts assigned are the ones you want. Removes the problem of rogue technicians adding local accounts or users to the admin group when they can't get something to work properly.