TwoZeroAlpha

I've run a couple of sessions with limited numbers of kids as "market research" is you will. Most popular are basic webdesign (I've got an old machine as a LAMP server) and hardware stuff. I'm probably going to run a hardware/linux type club soon if there's enough interest. Like the "computers don't byte" name, although if I let some of the kids loose it would quickly turn into "computers don't boot":eek:

Try halfords, they're doing wheelchairs now. Might also be worth trying to get in touch with your county Occupational Health dept (or the local hospital's OH dept) as they should be able to advise the best course of action. Something like Premium Push Wheelchair from Halfords Price £229.99 20% Off Any Mobility Accessory When You Buy Any Wheeled Mobility Product

£1500(ish) will get you a nice little holiday in spain, (flight accom car hire etc) and 18 freefall jumps. On the course you should earn your freefall ticket, so you can turn up at any DZ in the UK (and more abroad) and jump. Google AFF (Accelerated Free Fall) courses. London Parachute centre runs one. (I've not done one, but clocked 7 static line jumps in Germany in 2006, still want to go again)

Yup easyPOS cash register system | Get easyPOS cash register system at SourceForge.net But no hands on experience with it

congratulations, always nice to get a good result like that!!

I got a couple of wacom bamboo (A4) tablets for school. They are very good, proper screen mapping and pressure sensitivity. Plus a dual ended pen allows two tools to be used and switched between easily. Wacom Bamboo Fun Medium - Digitizer, stylus - Wired - USB Pickup up the bamboo fun (A5) tablet for £30 for my girlfriend as she does some of her artwork on GIMP. She loves it.

I started out tinkering about a year or two ago. Got Ubuntu (7.10 i think) installed on my HP laptop. Worked fine apart from the broadcom wireless card, however after much searching I got it up and running. Dual booting with XP but only really used XP when simulating/troubleshooting other peoples problems. I put a dual boot Ubuntu 8.10 and later 9.04) with XP on my work machine. Didn't use windows for around 4months, decided to save my docs and reformat. Now I've got Linux Mint 7 running on my work machine (Dell Optiplex 360) and it just works fine. There's no OpenGL stuff, but I'm not playing games here so no worries. late last year a friend of the family dropped off 3 laptops with me. He said he needed 2 up and running for home use and I could keep the third. One was ok spec (got XP put back on it as per request) One didn't have an XP key, so he got Ubuntu 8.10 and the last one (which I kept) got Ubuntu 8.10 (now 9.04) and sits in my parent's kitchen. My mum uses it to do all her online shopping (Sainsburys etc). I've now got a netbook and it has ubuntu 9.04 and I'm thinking of going over to Mint 7 with it. A couple of helpful pointers 1) Linux Format Magazine > Very very useful, lots of tricks and tips. 2) When installing try to partition your drive manually using around 10GB for root (/) 1GB for swap and as much as you want for /home. This means you can reinstall the OS without losing your documents and settings (mostly) My conclusion is that Linux can work, if you are willing to work with it. It doesn't have quite the same finish as MS and does some things better and some things less well. I've found it suitable for most of my day to day admin tasks.

Could you not use IMAP as a solution? As for re-downloading, maybe the local mailbox store has been corrupted or lost? Not quite sure where it is in ubuntu.

ohhh, I remember seeing that page when I was at school. Booking 30min slots on the only PC with internet access (think they had ISDN). Ah, those were the days!!

Fantastic, proper "home grown" free range eggs are so much better than anything from the supermarket. So much more colour and flavour. My aunt and uncle have some chickens and it's always nice to get eggs from them. Lightly scrambled for my please, with single cream instead of milk and a slice of white toast, golden and buttered Damn, I'm hungry now and it's not even close to lunch.

We have only two keys here, one stay locked in the finance office safe (and the bursar will only release it to me or the HT) and the other is on a keyring in the staffroom during the day and locked away in my keysafe at night. I've got class-room booking system taking care of who has them out, so if the key goes missing I can track down the person with it. IMHO having more keys decreases security. How long will it be before a teacher loses it and things "It's ok, there are four more around the school, I'll just keep quiet"

duh, feel retarded now, I'm stuck on 13, up to there it was easy.

PSN: TwoZeroAlpha Mostly playing COD4 with the extra map pack and Battlefield 1943

For those who have xkcd blocked

Thanks to XKCD.com xkcd - A Webcomic - Tech Support Cheat Sheet

Ah, I was under the impression that you could copy the cds quite happily as it was the licence key you purchased. Oh well looks like I'll have to do things the hard way and do a clean up of files and spyware. Damn.

Need some help here. I've got a Sony VAIO laptop from a friend to fix. It's currently got XP MCE on it and he wants it "back to factory fresh". However can't find any of the discs etc that came with it. Can anyone sort me out with an ISO of XP MCE, or point me to a link. Many thanks in advance.

I got some choccies from the HOD, but not holding my breath for much else from the school. Finance dept kind of got me air-con installed yesterday so I'm happy with that

Source? It's not always the prat in the blingged up Nova/Saxo/$rustbucket that gets dead, all too often it's the poor young mum walking her toddler down the street. A preventable death that could have occurred if the police had not been chasing so aggressively. This reason is very often why police back off when chasing a reckless driver. I'd happily support a move to put a disable device in cars. Police put reg into computer and get a "kill code" (scrambled for your car etc) or even have an RFID style transponder. Point device at car and immobiliser kicks in (also doors lock until released). Obviously this would not prevent people using cloned plates, but would be a good step in the right direction. Kill a chase before it even begins.

You can pretty much, there's an option in the client for how often it checks for updates. If the machine is to be on 24/7 then you just need to schedule the delay so that it updates at night. However this won't allow text based changes to go over instantly. My refresh timeout is 5mins, excessive maybe, but content is there pretty much as I add it. Steveg is correct, once the data is over it's only the changes that get pulled down. My xibo client is wireless and has a skynews feed. I've not noticed any drop in network or internet speed. Finally 4x50mb presentations!!! wow, what are you putting in them! If you want to show movie clips you could always put them locally on the client machine and use or something similar. Then you can just modify the movies on the share and it should reload automatically, better still if you couple it with the meta refresh tag.

@CAM - the following code in the head segment of each page should do, just change the target and timeout I built a version like this using html and frames for our screen, then found xibo. I haven't looked back since. I can't recommend xibo highly enough, a doddle to install and very user-friendly to operate. If the admin staff weren't quite as overworked I'd chuck it over to them. As it is I've created a couple of student accounts on the server and get talented students to knock up layouts.

You'll need to use something like "Likewise open" to take the (well most of the) hassle out of joining to the domain. Likewise Open Source Software that Authenticates Linux, Unix, and Mac systems with Microsoft Active Directory

Maybe some examples of what you've got already? Just to point us in the right sort of direction?

Good link, cheers, filed for future pedant-ry

[pedant] Can we please get this right, Swine flu is a variant (H1N1 I believe) of the flu virus, it is not a bacteria. Cleaning with anti-bacterials may not have a guaranteed effect. Cleaning with alcohol/dettol is more likely to be effective. If you take anti-biotics whilst you have flu you're likely to end up worse off, as the antibiotics kill off all the competition and "good" bacteria in your system. [/pedant] Sorry, the biologist in me got out for a bit there.