[Dave Rice]

Yes, Ed was wondering if what I’d bought was a MAK key and if so would it make any difference.

I’m still not sure how the sellers come across these keys but I’ve been doing it long enough with W10 and O2016 to know they are legal enough.

[Dave Rice]

It’s a retail key. I use MAK keys and IIRC the console does show how many you have activated.

[Dave Rice]

Marvellous. I’ve been keeping an eye on his Facebook but no updates there since March.

[Dave Rice]

Confirmed, they do have a spacer. If anyone ever needs one I usually have a spare.

[Dave Rice]

I really doubt Google’s cloud is self-learning image recognition

Don’t doubt. I already have access to this technology for CCTV and it doesn’t cost the earth. You need a Hikvision 4 line camera and a DeepInMind NVR for Deep Learning Analysis. The processing power of the NVR would normally be capable of servicing 32 cameras but can only handle 4 for this type face recognition.

With 4TB the NVR is £5k, a typical camera is £300 (inc vat). Rather than me ramble on watch this live demo video from my supplier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8upp8w_voPw

Amazing. For those who didn’t bother you can add a face to a database and trigger alerts when they are detected. I’ve done my hands on training on this now and one thing you could do is detect a know shop lifter, swing a PTZ around and have it follow them whilst alerting the mobile phone of the store security.

Another thing is the search can access multiple NVRs, say on a large retail site. Lost child? You can bet mother has a photo on her somewhere. Scan that in, search and all the hits will appear on a map with time stamps.

If I can do this imagine what Google is capable of.

[Dave Rice]

All of the consumer laptops I’ve seen recently have no hatches. My Lenovo V110 is described as a business laptop but had to be split in two to upgrade the ram and get at the HDD.

[Dave Rice]

I don’t have a 3B+

[Dave Rice]

Ruined for me by watching Sky News at the wrong time. They blabbed the result with no warning as their coverage had finished.

[Dave Rice]

I agree with the idea of turning Windows on regularly to let it update. I’ve been caught out many times onsite when the laptop I use on the road decides now is the time to update. Sometimes even an update waiting for a reboot can cause havoc.

Microsoft security updates are released on the second Tuesday of each month, so some time over the second weekend of the month would be my favourite.

[Dave Rice]

Ed, it looks like booting with no SD card is a nightmare, but having just the basic bootstrap on the SD that immediately hands off to an external drive seems doable.

I don’t really want two external drives and an SSD will be too small for storage so I’m going to investigate partitioning a larger spinner. The alternative is a £20 mSATA SSD USB Adapter Board and a cheap old style mSATA drive from EBay as the boot device. It looks like a 2A power supply is enough for the mSATA and Pi combo. Instructions to do all the setups here

This will have to wait for funds though. Loads of quotes out there but everyone seems to be holding their breath waiting for something. I wish I knew what it was. The jobs aren’t going to competitors, they’re just not getting commissioned.

[Dave Rice]

It’s a blog on here and LinkedIn now.

[Dave Rice]

Doh!

[Dave Rice]

I might even do that. Could be one for the business Facebook page, or even LinkedIn.

[Dave Rice]

A mate of mine has just asked me to move him to Linux he’s getting so fed up with updates. His wife has had a Chromebook for 5 years and he uses Libre Office so they’re not afraid of the world outside of Microsoft.

I haven’t, but I have set up an Ubuntu VM for him to give it a serious try. We’ll review it in a month but his first thoughts are it will easily do all he needs. The only fly in the ointment is he has Apple devices and will need iTunes. The plan is to do a Windows VM on Linux but that may end up just as much of a PITA.

[Dave Rice]

Benchmarks? The OP used to call them willy waving. All I care about is that the PC now boots in 20 seconds and opening an office document is a couple of seconds.

Backing up to an internal drive isn’t ideal but at least it is a backup. It’s no worse than a USB drive left plugged in, but if cryptolocker gets on there it’s game over.

[Dave Rice]

On the road, tablets are very close to replacing a laptop for me . However the apps are not as feature rich, and more importantly just not stable enough. Sometimes though they do present a new twist on the solution that just doesn’t work on other formats.

One winner, the £85 IT UK 10.1″ 1280*800 IPS Quad Core Android Lollipop Tablet mounted on a £23 ZenCT Tablet Stand (both from Amazon) have been doing a sterling job of viewing the new CCTV system we put into the Legion. A swipe of the finger and they flick through the cameras, mostly to see who’s hitting the buzzer on the front door or who’s missus has turned up outside to pick up a pissed hubby ?

The police have already downloaded footage of a wake that turned nasty…

[Dave Rice]

Just used mine on an old PC that got moved to my mates office/ An X4 Phenom II 3.1Ghz (B50 so probably an unlocked X3) on an Asus M4A77T motherboard with 4GB ram and a Seagate 500GB spinner. Must be 6 or 7 years old by now.

Anyway, visited and it’s sounding like a bag of spanners in a washing machine and taking ages to load, straight into a temporary profile as it can’t access the proper one. How do people let things go this far? Especially as guess what? There are no backups and 2,124 files in 84 folders of stuff is scattered around the desktop.

It’s got Win 7 Home running a hooky copy of Office 2007 and I think all the apps that don’t auto update are in the same state they were when I handed it over. A quick trip to EBay and a tenner bought W10 Pro and Office 2016 Pro+. I have some spare Kaspersky licences and an old 1TB spinner retired from my NAS that’ll do as a backup target (Kasperskys come with basic backup software now).

So 3 hours later we have a fresh copy of W10 on the SSD, all software installed and up to date, files copied from the old drives – mercifully all intact. Just got to setup the backups and the jobs done. It tootles along very nicely indeed, £35 well spent.

BTW there are still some left, going to bag some more right now.

[Dave Rice]

I still can’t justify spending twice as much on a phone as my i5 laptop with SSD.

However the phone is taking over as a “quick and dirty” work tool as well as a just about every other aspect of my life. Consequently the Moto G4 is starting to be a bit lacking in storage with the number of apps installed. It’ll be 2 years old in November, I may look again then. Best phone I’ve ever owned though, and that includes the 1+1.

[Dave Rice]

Failed on my V110 laptop first time, second time all OK.

[Dave Rice]

It’s not just Grammarly, it’s anyone else it chooses to share that with.

By uploading or entering any User Content, you give Grammarly (and those it works with) a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable and sublicensable, perpetual, and irrevocable license to copy, store and use your User Content in connection with the provision of the Software and the Services and to improve the algorithms underlying the Software and the Services.

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