Posts by Lazlo Woodbine 771 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2014
Pages is pretty, but the files are enormously bloated in my (admittedly limit) experience.
I've never used Numbers.
At the moment I get Office 365 free with work, when that changes I will switch to Softmaker Office, which has 99% of the features, no AI unless you pay for it, and works on my Mac and Chromebook...
Threads is full of angry right-wing posts, but they don't get any sympathetic replies, so I struggle to understand why these bots are posting to a room that is in total disagreement.
If they want affirmation of their abhorent views, why aren't they on Twitter or 'Truth' 'Social'?
I needed a demolition hammer to remove the bricks from a bricked in fireplace.
The local hire centre wanted £150+vat to hire a Kango for a weekend.
Aldi wanted £100 to purchase one outright.
The demolition hammer has been in the shed ever since, but I still saved £80 and have it if any of my neighbours ever need to borrow one...
Last night, while clearing clutter on my hard drive, I found a 4.7gb file called weight.bin
This is the file Google AI creates to store its AI nonsense locally.
This isn't so bad for a desktop computer with capacious local storage, but I imagine it'll be a ball ache for anyone running a cheap Chromebook with a 64gb eMMC
My previous job was working in a large, prestigious boarding school.
My job was mostly fixing printers and reincarnating dead PCs, and I was regularly called to work magic in the many boarding houses around town.
One of the 9 houses was mostly populated by rugby player, who made little use of IT, so I was rarely called up to that house, which was handy, as it was half a mile up a muddy track.
That was until one day when the house master needed to print something, and found the printer unresponsive, so I was called for.
Upon examination, I found a paper jam, which on the Brother printers we used in the houses was an easy fix as they had few parts to remove to reveal the paper path.
Once freed, I discovered the jammed paper was a piece of lined paper from a refil pad, one that had already been written on, the jam caused by the jagged edges of the torn paper.
Why anyone at a £50k a year school thought it was a good idea to run writing paper through a printer was beyond me.
Anyway, the house master was so happy he could print his letters he gave me a couple of bottles of wine and I never had to visit that house again in my time at the school.
I work in a school, when rolling out Windows 11, the teachers got it first, because frankly, their computer use is mostly limited to working within Chrome, so the OS is unimportant.
Then it was rolled across the admin staff, with me (data manager), the Exams Officer, the Timetabler and Finance being last, and we got a new PC imaged for Win 11, with our old Win 10 PC left in our office in case anything went tits up
A sensible roll out that worked well for everyone...
Electronic gates and a high fence are both OFSTED requirments to maintain a safe site.
Kids are slippery buggers and tend to run away when they think nobody is looking.
The fence is also to keep intruders, like local drug dealers, off site...
We use paper registers printed from the school MIS, without the paper register, no trip
Same for a fire evacuation, we print that morning or afternoon's paper registers to register students on the sports pitch, without the MIS, no accurate paper registers.
The school also reports no fire alarm or electronic locks for the gates, I'm sure you'd be happy to let your kids attend a large, maze like building with no working fire alams...
Back in the mid to late 80's, I worked evenings in a video library in the centre of town.
Most evenings, my last customers were this old couple who pushed a couple of hoovers into the corner of the shop and dropped a heavy backpack on the floor next to the hoovers while they browseed.
That couple cleaned almost every bank in the town centre, and that backpack held all the bank keys.
I once got a PC in for repair from a guy who carved gravestones.
Sensible guy, he realised the computer wouldn't like the dust, so he sealed up every hole in the case.
I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did before things started to burn out.
Needed a new motherboard and case and worked fine afterwards. When he got it back, he moved PC into the next room and ran the monitor, keyboard and mouse cables through a hole in the wall...
Our SIMS support company are usually great, and are able to fix most issues with a single call.
Not so a few years back, when I noticed we had no timetable after Christmas.
Calls and emails batted back and forth for a few days with no solution in sight.
Until one day, whilst I was on hold, I decided to look at the Academic Year setup and noticed the Spring term was set to start on a Sunday, not Monday.
I changed the date and as if by magic, our timetable reappeared just as the help desk operative came back on the line.
I explained what I'd done and the operative let out an audible sigh and told me they could now clear the problem for a couple of dozen other schools.
It seems that adding an extra bank holiday for HM Queen's funeral had shifted the timetable, because we'd done it the wrong way. We did it the correct way for King Charles' coronation the next year...
Can't be done, as the computer will be locked down, the pupils do not have access to the computer prior to the exam, and it will have an exams login that doesn't have network permissions with no access to a Command Prompt or system settings to try to get round the restrictions.
JCQ regulations are very strict, kids can't even wear watches now, in case it's a smart watch...
1) Pupils will not, under any circumstances, be allowed to use their own devices for end of Key Stage external examinations.
2) The computers, and any software required for the exams, will be provided and set up by the school's exams department, configured to JCQ requirements
3) Current requirements for students using word processors do not stipulate a platform, as the text is printed out for submission. The rules state the device being used must not have an active internet connection, and spelling & grammar checks must be locked off unless a student is allowed them due to learning difficulties.
I spent a few years working at a boarding school.
One of the House Masters had a particular hatred for Chrome, so we regularly got calls to rid his computer of the browser, which would reappear whenever his computer was reimaged, which was often as he was forever breaking things.
Our Chrome removal services were also required for personal devices.
I didn't mind these jobs, as they were easy, and the chef in that boarding house was always happy to provide me with lunch and a couple of bags of good coffee for the office coffee machine.
Anyway, one day I get the call to go over there to rid his daughter's new laptop of Chrome, so I wondered over with thoughts of a hearty lunch and a couple of bags of Taylor's finest on my mind.
That is, until I caught sight of the laptop:
Anyone know how to remove Chrome from a Chromebook?
When I moved into a rental property two years ago, a 4-bed house, not a flat, the tenancy agreement stated we were not allowed to drill through external walls.
This was a huge problem, as the house only had a copper phone line, and the local exchange would not reactivate that connection and they had no available copper circuits (or that's the excuse they made).
I asked the landlord and they didn'y even think twice, just told me to get OpenReach to drill into the back wall.
I fail to understand why anyone would object, especially in areas like mine that are not installing new copper.
Asda historically have had a shit stock ordering systems.
I used to work for one of the companies that supplied their cheese.
The marketing department would decide to run a promotion, but not bother telling the ordering team, so then I'd get an urgent order on Friday night to deliver 60 tonnes of sliced chedder by Monday. So I'd have to source and order 60 tonnes of chedder, have it shipped to the slicing plant, sliced, packed and shipped to Asda's Doncaster warehouse in 48 hours. And if it was late, it was my fault, not Asda's marketing team...
Google Workspace is fine for 99% of users, but that 1% will regualrly use features that are simply not available in Google Workspace, or the online versions of MS Office for that matter.
File sizes are also a problem, and not just sprawling 20 million cell spreadsheets. After about 50k words, Google Docs becomes incredibly laggy, and that's just plain text. Add formatting and sometimes even a slow typer can be a couple of lines ahead of the screen.
If you want a low cost alternative to MS office, Softmaker Office NX is hard to beat for less than £20 a year per user...
Yep, supplies were a major issue during Covid.
I was working in a decently run boarding school at the time, and through contacts in China, we knew what was coming, so had started to make plans.
We ordered laptops for all staff that didn't have one, webcams for desktop computers, additional bandwidth, everything we could think of.
The problems started when webcams started disappearing, presumably so staff could zoom family from home. Our usual supplier had run out, our back-up supplier had run out and Amazon had more than doubled the price. We eventually managed to order a box of 24 direct from Logitec in Switzerland.
The same with laptops, when the new ones ran out, and jealous owners of older laptops wanted one the same as a colleague, we found HP had put prices up by over 50%.
Can confirm this.
Back at the turn of the millenium, I was working in a large retailer. We didn't really bother too much about the odd hour with no power back then, but one year, the shopping centre was having an extensive refit which would involve completely shutting down occasionally, including a whole bank holiday weekend. This would be a problem for the freezer department, which could only stay below -18°c for about 12 hours without power.
We decided to look at the generator on the roof, a big old Cummins diesel. Dipping the tank found it to be empty.
No problem, we'd get a barrel delivered and pump it up to the roof using the pump in the loading bay provided for that purpose.
Nope, the pump was dead, because nobody could remember it ever being used.
We rolled the barrel into the goods lift, but this only took us to the level below the roof, so we had to very carefully, and slowly, walk the barrel up a flight of stairs to reach the generator, where we used a hand pump to fill the tank.
Then we tried to start the generator, and it wouldn''t.
Luckily, my dad is a truck mechanic, so he came out and soon got it running.
We tested the generator properly by shutting the power off, it worked fine.
The next day the shopping centre people told us they wouldn't need to shut the power off.
At least we now had a working back-up generator...
Back in the mid 00's I was a pre-sales tech support at a security equipment distributor; my realm being the nascent world of IP CCTV.
One of my customers was working on a system with a hefty non-disclosure agreement attached, so I couldn't know the end user, or the details of how the system would be installed or used; I only had the basic details of the number of cameras, recording rates etc. From this I had to spec the type of cameras, recording servers, storage, managed PoE switches and a UPS to keep the system alive for 6 hours.
I queried the UPS, suggesting a smaller UPS and generator, but the end user had insisted on using a bank of UPSes.
The system was duly specced, installed and commissioned by my customer and I heard nothing else for 6 months until I got a support call on Monday morning. The customer had experienced a long powercut over the weekend, all was good, the recording servers had run for the full 5 hours the power was down, but they hadn't recorded anything.
My forst though was the cameras, which were all indoors and this not fitted with infra-red illuminators, had recorded, but you couldn't see anything because the lights were out.
No, the guy says, the site had emergency lighting, so there should be footage.
As his customer was important to him, my customer paid to fly me to site; which turned out to be a large casino, gentleman's club and a slightly more exclusive gentleman's establishment in Berlin.
I checked the servers, and indeed they'd functioned all weekend, losing connection to the cameras the moment the power to the site dropped, so I checked the core switch, which had also stayed up, but had lost connection to all the PoE switches the moment the power cut.
It seems the installer had only connected equipment in the security suite to the UPS, so all the edge switches dropped with the power, and all the cameras dropped, as they were drawing power from the switches.
I pointed to a paragraph in my response to the tender, were I emphasised the importance of all switches being connected to the UPS, grabbed my coat and hopped on the next flight home...
I've used VLC since the early 00's, when I worked for a CCTV distributor.
VLC was the only media player that could cope with all the different codecs the various Korean and Chinese DVR and NVRs used. Back then, Samsung would use one codec, but Samsung Techwin (the former defence wing of Samsung, now called Hanwha Vision) would use a different codec, so even Samsung's own player couldn't play back video from all Samsung recorders.
Back in the dim and distant late 90's I worked for a large retailer.
Whilst our main business was computerised, with tills and stock ordering connected to Head Office on an ISDN line, the main operation of the store was still paper based, with fax machines used to communicate between branches.
That is until one day, when we were notified, by fax obviously, of the imminent arrival of "Workbench", a computer system that would provide online procurement for store consumables, online staff recruitment via a link to Job Centres, MS Office (97 I think we got) and email.
Our store manager at the time was something of a luddite, and had never used any kind of computer, so would need dragging into the computer age. To this end I found an old PC, loaded it with Windows and MS Office, then proceeded to teach him basic computing, right down to how to operate a mouse and keyboard.
Three months later, after the successful introduction of our "Workbench", which turned out to be a Wyse terminal linked to the Head Office mainframe, that manager left, presumable to join a company that didn't use computers.
As I was tidying his paperwork and getting the office ready for our new manager, I found the phone bill for the spare line I'd used to connect the PC to the internet, it was well over £2,500.
I'd set up the PC with a free ISP, so the calls were to an 0845 number at about 4p a minute. I think he'd been on the internet the whole working week for about a month.
I'd scrapped the PC after the Wyse terminal was installed, I dread t think what was on the hard drive...
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