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Thanks Graham a useful tip. My wife’s PC keeps behaving very badly (An Intel NUCwith Samsung M2 drive – a combination that frequently seems to have Windows 10 issues – her problems came after the carp Anniversary updates). I can see that an inplace repair may well be my next attempt to stabilize the darned thing.
John SkyQ has two deals. One the expensive 4K big storage deal at £120-150. The other is a non-4K package for around £50-£60. I am not sure of the value of this as the new SkyQ box eliminates ALL the old RF distribution options, but you do get pad reception options.
The costs for 4K are high, and usually involve an extra LNB and a new cable run. Probably where John’s £150 originated. If the existing LNB/cable is old/corroded this may well have to be replaced as well as the band-width is well outside the old hdmi cables. Without the 4K £50 is a more reasonable charge.
Richard, we learned a number of lessons as the process evolved over a number of years.
a) The initial ‘back of an envelope’ project justification was only used to justify manpower investment investment in a detailed evaluation. (normally 3 month) and to earmark funding should that outcome look viable.
b) It was absolutely essential that the team was business led by someone with clout who could work and get things done across a wide range of business groups.(large IT projects rarely if ever affect just one silo). As the process evolved the senior manager was assigned to stay right through the whole system implementation and subsequent post Audit i.e HE/SHE carried the can!. Without full business commitment to a project IT are wasting their time.
c) With packages it is essential to be able to change business practices right across the company to meet the package wherever possible. This in turn means questioning and justifying information needs (eliminate nice to haves). We also questioned and in most cases simplified the “metric management monster”, and the VERY expensive auditing that goes with it. (Normally this process justified the whole scoping project pre-investment). This is a lesson that our NHS, Police and Schools could well learn! We eliminated many paper-pushing layers of our own ‘Civil Service’ through this process.
c) It was vital to have an Audit representative on the team to advise what Audit checks were required and how (where possible) each part of the system should be self checking and produce meaningful traffic-light management reports (burying managers under reams of audit outputs is self-defeating). Of all the changes this was the hardest to implement as Corporate Audit used to take great delight in being wise after the event!
d) 95% of our IT projects were finished on-time, under budget and produced the designed cost savings.
Quite frankly it depends on the resolution of the screen and your field of vision. (someone with mild tunnel vision may well need advice from an optician.) That said the screen on my Asus 27 inch PB279Q is just arms length away, and I find its 4K 3840 x 2160 picture amazing. (I use it for general purpose, programming, games, photography and running two+ vms simultaneously).
Richard I suspect that most of the people involved did not really appreciate the complexity of the Munich Business System.From memory the original IT manager who drove the change did not have a lot of business experience. His focus was entirely on Office Systems (the relatively easy bit to change).
In contrast, it used to take us about 30–50 man-months to go through an entire affiliate business system and document the existing business system (paper/info/decision plus usual cash/inventory/purchase flows and audit check loops) It then took a big team of ‘users’ plus IT and Audit under a dedicated senior line manager to define what was necessary in the new system, what business changes were required to accommodate the package and what package changes (ABAPs) could be cost justified. We spent a LOT of money before generating one line of code. I think Munich did the whole process on the fly and probably ruined a number of careers in the process.
Siting a combi-boiler in the ‘correct’ place is an art. The first item is the positioning of the flue. Many older installations can no longer be reproduced due to new carbnn monoxide risk legislation. The second more subtle problem is the boiler condensate blow-down line. This effluent has a high concentration of dissolved acids, and if improperly routed can either dissolve mortar/cement or get frozen solid – if the latter your boiler stops working in the middle of winter. If poorly routed it can also get into problems with air-locks. I know of at least two friends who have found themselves tearing their hair out over their combi-boiler. breakdowns
Bottom-line not a job for a ‘Gas Safe’ cowboy, find someone with a good reputation (not necessarily BG as they have been known to occasionally employ incompetents just like any other large organization).
Tbh it was not a BAD film, however I found that it totally failed to live up to the hype of all the various awards that it won. I am sure that if you work/worked in the media industry you would find things that resonated with you, but as an outsider I found it a yawn lacking the catchy music or dancing of other musicals.
Setting the storyline revolve around an arrogant self-centered Trad Jazz player’s angst in a disappearing audience did not make it something with wide audience appeal, and I could not for the life of me relate to the Jazz-Rock music which he apparently made highly successful (fat chance). I preferred his (poor) Trad Jazz. Without detracting from her acting award I thought the female lead’s part to be one-dimensional – a fault again of the script and storyline.
It is NOT a ‘girly’ film but neither is it one I can see having a lot of appeal to your grand-daughter.
Virgin may not ‘count’ streaming from their sites when administering caps. I believe BT (when it had its Sky rival) did not count BT TV downloads at all.
I remember that a pervert attempted to abduct one of my friends (we were about 8 years old at the time), he was chased back to his car by a horde of screaming kids all brandishing six to eight inch scout/commando knives. I very much doubt if he attempted that again in our small town, and he was very lucky that we did not catch him.
Money again John . An MRI costs about 20 times that of an XRay ~ £1000/pop.
As you say, such a check is only of value in the case of KNOWN perverts. It is my understanding that the vast majority of the worst cases of abuse are carried out by close relations such as uncles and step-fathers where such checks are rarely of any value. Your comment amplified why I think much of this is just bureaucracy and ‘well-meaning’ law makers gone mad.
“Way back on the 80s, you could get a magazine, spend a weekend typing in code, and you got a decent result, that won’t wash today, but a simple servo and motor, moving a car, will instantly grab kids that didn’t know they liked coding. And once they grasp (you give them) the low hanging fruit, they will naturally want to then learn a little more code, to do more advance stuff.”
All very true Duke, and as you know it can still be done today in a much more simplistic fashion using a Pi and Scratch (I personally cannot stand the latter and would much prefer they used the more powerful ‘Idle’.) It isn’t even big bucks to go this route as all up a Pi+7 inch screen+mouse&keyboard will still leave change out of £100 – if the other kit can be scrounged a Pi zero could be set up with wifi etc for under £20.
Although funds are tight (especially in Southern England thanks to the idiot way schools budgets are allocated), I do not think money is the problem. The real problem is a lack of training for the teachers, particularly in the Junior schools.
Maybe knowledgeable old pharts like us should be helping out, but even that would be impossible thanks to the requirement for each volunteer to be CRB cleared, a process that even now takes a month+ per person. (low down on police priorities)
The real problem with this country is far too much bureaucracy and a zero-risk nanny state.
Some companies offer bridging loans in your situation. It depends how much they want you. Again chat with the HR folk as any company with more than one operational base has to have procedures for moving people around.
Back in the days when you could use socket spanners, feeler gauges and screwdrivers I was reasonably competent at maintaining my cars. Once ECM systems and a whole raft of specialist tools became necessary, I gave up.
Unfortunately the car and electronics industries have made it increasingly difficult for DIY maintenance/repairs. Some like Apple seem to deliberately make it extremely difficult even to get into their kit and not a year seems to go by without the need for a totally new ‘security’ screwdriver. I suspect that fears of over-regulated Health & Safety laws and litigation are the root causes.
Sorry about your back John. Your latest pic appears to show SIX component connections in two rows the bottom seems to be labeled input and the left-most one is the video. I would guess that the top row is component OUT.
Good Luck Drezha – House Hunting is a major pita.
My own personal experience is that the first priority is to find yourself some acceptable rented accommodation that you can use as a base for an extended stay, then give yourselves plenty of time to look around the area and figure out in your minds where you would really like to live. Chat with HR – they can often help in pointing you in the right direction for housing. If your new company has a good deal with a serviced apartment grab it with both hands as a base. Take your time, and chat to your new work colleagues about the best areas to live in. (the two of you should both do this).
Avoid getting to the point where you have had enough and want to grab the first moderately acceptable place from the estate agents. Unless you are VERY lucky it can take at least three to six months to exchange contracts, and sometimes even longer than that. Far longer in fact than the time spent looking at properties.
It used to be the Watford Gap because it was the first Service station on the M1 to the north of London. The north-south divide was then extended to the west in a line that follows the M4 ‘corridor’. If you are a ‘weather watcher’ there is actually a tiny bit of factual rationale behind this saying. The M4 corridor and on to the Watford Gap and south-east down to the ‘anus’ of England often act as a demarcation line on the weather charts between good and bad weather. (a function of local weather flows being heavily influenced by the ground terrain. For us real ‘Southerners’ the North and South Downs have similar influences on local weather patterns.)
Ext out on some TV sets is not on a menu, but instead requires that you flip a small switch at the back (reason is that normally EXT is used to pipe in from a DVD etc.)
Just to maybe dot an i. From my reading it is a Bios detection issue, where the bios gets confused as it cannot see through the usb connection to ‘find’ a PS/2 connection. Very weird as when it comes down to basics both usbs and ps/2 connections are just serial interfaces.
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