Posts by GDM 32 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2018
It's not like Outlook, which has been around a while and really ought to have finding emails figured out by now, always manages particularly well at finding the message you're looking for. And if that email was something that was mentally ticked off but not actually done, like "cancel subscription to Thingy before it renews at £lots", then it might be worthwhile.
Didn't get to do Christmas shopping on expenses one year but was sent from London to Edinburgh to do an office move. As we were shipping a load of kit back to the office by courier, I just added all the presents I'd bought to save me the faff of carrying them back, probably on the plane at the time, myself. They even all arrived intact.
<quote>Exchange Public Folders - and their almost complete failure to deliver what the market wanted</quote>
Although a lot of places did manage to get them to do useful things. Sort of. They were at least simple enough that users could have a fair stab at understanding and using them.
Having failed with PFs the first time, they tried again with SharePoint and managed an almost complete failure to deliver what the market wanted, but bigger! With even more things that were difficult to use or manage in any way you might actually want.
Had to do this for one of the huge Dell XPS luggables (big screen, dual RAIDed hard drives, can't remember the model number.) Had to bake the graphics card in the oven for a short while, after which it worked fine for the remaining life of the machine. Was a bit concerning for the 10 mins it was in, then the first power up afterwards!
Thunderbird, with Owl for Exchange so it can talk to OWA, works pretty well for me for both email and Calendar. There are a couple of areas that can have occasional weird behaviour (calendar invites sometimes) but no more than overall than with actual Outlook, which I'd been using for years previously.
(Penguin because no owl icon...)
Seems to be aimed at exactly the sort of person who would need to phone their Mum to ask them which programme to select. Once they'd figured out they actually needed to do washing and not just keep buying the latest fast fashion trend. Eventually Mum will just forward such calls to her AI assistant to deal with.
to take the upper stage and its inert payload to deep space and into an orbit around the Sun.
So having figured out that littering earth orbit is bad, we're going to spin junk around the rest of the solar system instead? Or is it heading into the sun and will provide spectacular effects for some yet to be announced rock concert? Good job space is really, really big anyway. I hope there's a set of hazard warning lights at least.
I once got sent out to a site I'd never been to before to deal with some server issue. It wasn't dead, must have been something else. Despite being in a small 'where everything gets dumped' cupboard it was on something where it wouldn't get knocked off or have stuff piled on it. It was also very well cooled, by a small portable air conditioner. On a chair. One of those metal frame ones with thick foam seat and back, such that the air con unit didn't quite sit up straight. This might have been fine it it had automatic evaporation via the hot air hose (which did go out of the room) but instead the tilt meant the level sensor in the water tank didn't notice the tank getting full, overflowing so it soaked the seat foam it sat on, then dibbling down the chair leg and soaking the carpet tiles. The squelch when you walked in the room was a giveaway.
For travel, I always prefer to tap with physical card and leave my phone tucked away somewhere, on the grounds that I can disable the card from my phone but not the other way around.
(People, you're coming up to a barrier, have your ticket or method of payment *ready*, don't suddenly act all surprised...)
I do wonder, in an uneducated way, if it wouldn't be better to build in some flexibility to return the samples to either some successor to the ISS, or moon base if the timescales for this slip more than that, rather than returning directly to earth. But I've probably read/seen too much sci-fi where doing that sort of thing goes horribly wrong.
Is whoever came up with eseutil
Not perfect but has been my friend more often than I care to think.
Once upon a time NetWare was rubbished because everything was command line, whereas the new and shiny Windows was all GUI, despite the fact a lot of things were better done in a command prompt, something I remember bringing up in a few Windows admin courses at the time.
There are some which are pretty close to that size. The biggest issue with the one I had (very cheap, similar models now are still about £8-£10) was the appalling bluetooth range - it was lucky if it managed 30cm. Even with the phone in a right chest pocket and earbud in right ear, looking right could lose the connection. This was a good few years ago and hopefully with the latest BT versions they're a bit better.
The actual audio listening quality was pretty acceptable, the microphone pickup was poor but just about understandable at the far end.
We use something, forget what, that sits on top of Windows printer sharing to allow 'walk up to any device and swipe your ID card' printing, rather than having to set up individual printer mappings for every device someone might possibly want to print to especially when they haven't first checked their nearest is not churning out a few thousand pages already.
I once changed the power supply in an Amstrad 2286, onsite, in front of a customer. That involved taking the machine completely to pieces, removing the power supply, opening the cover for that, remove PCB, unsolder mains cables, solder cables to new PCB, re-install and put back together. Not a particularly hard job, only took a few minutes and the gas powered soldering iron worked nicely. It was only when I went to plug it back in, I discovered the mains cable had been live the whole time.
How do you think small IT support companies manage their clients? They use things like Kasaya (or Labtech, Autotask, etc.) otherwise they'd be wasting time and money doing everything manually. Everybody automates as much as possible if they want to stay in business.
(Yes, I have implemented both Kasays and Labtech for a small IT support company)
While these aren't going to replace the Stemi Wi-fi equipped microscopes + iPads in our training room, the relatively low cost could mean much greater take up for our remote surgical training - we already send out about £25-worth of materials to attendees, who then have to juggle laptop and phone to be able to connect both into a Zoom-based training session. Adding an optional £85 kit of parts for those who need it could be feasible, especially for some of our less well-equipped international students who are effectively largely excluded at the moment.
Add a small variety of essential first aid stuff, spare t-shirt (also useful for padding) for when something inevitably gets spilt at an unfortunate moment and lunch, snacks and water bottle. The number of times I've popped to a client in the middle of nowhere for "just a quick job" and ended up there all day, I soon learnt to have something with me.
My current favourite backpack is from the uninspiringly named Kaka via Amazon, a 50l "3 in 1" thing which whilst not without minor quibbles has stood up to lugging huge amounts of stuff about really well, much better than some of the "big name" bags I've tried at various times.
My next exciting diversion is dealing with that fact that at least two of the credit reference agencies, work off the Postcode Address File which lists delivery points and omits sites with multiple households but a single mail drop point (37 households in our case). So, whenever I try and do anything which requires a credit reference check, it's a toss up what the result is going to be. Royal Mail do have a multiple-occupancy database, which I am on, but that costs extra so the obviously badly cash-strapped agencies don't bother with it.
West Yorks Police seem to be finding a use for it - have been following https://twitter.com/WYP_IanWIlliams and there's a lot of good stuff going on to stop officers spending quite so long on paperwork / in the office. Options for using the phone when out and about then popping it into a docking station when in a car or back at the station.
