[Dave Rice]

Not really a car person myself, still an ex-biker (who has finally realised he’ll never get back on one). Our cars are always “practical” as there’s no point in anything else with the Mrs driving ?Hence the choice of a Meriva after the Zafira, but if we ever do move to Cornwall practical will mean something that can go up and down hills and round corners at A road speeds.

B-I-L has a Tiguan and I always thought it was a nice motor. He does a 2 year lease these days, so it’s going to a Volvo XC60 shortly (made an offer impossible to refuse). All he’s interested in is getting the golf bag up to the Cotswold Edge course once or twice a week and others within the West Country and South Wales when the fancy takes. S-I-L has a VW Up to get herself to work and the shopping in.

[Dave Rice]

Ideal I would think for the usage that sort of kit is likely to be put to.

My only question would be is the printer supported?

EDIT – I did think that an option would be to install W10 from a USB stick and just wipe the whole 32GB. But I fear that would only put off the day we’re back here with the same problem.  I’ve always been skeptical about these 32GB Windows devices since they appeared with W8.

[Dave Rice]

You’re right John, it’s all soldered to the motherboard. I think the idea is that like a Chromebook you store everything in the cloud. You can add an SD card for storage but that won’t help with the filling up the system drive problem.

Now you’re on 10 I’m not sure if you can delete the recovery partition, but try typing Recovery in the Cortana “Ask me anything” box.

If you are lucky Recovery Manager will be found, if it is start it.
Click Advanced options.
Select the Remove recovery partition option and click Next.
When prompted to verify that you want to delete the partition, select the Yes option, and click Next.
Allow the removal process to continue and restart the PC.

Whatever you do DO NOT use a partition manager to remove or tinker with the recovery partition as you’ll end up with a non booting Stream.

[Dave Rice]

Sorry but this looks very much like the story touted in the Bulldozer article. A very narrow and focused set of “leaked” results.

[Dave Rice]

Do you still just want to view, or do you want to do anything like recording?

You can use VLC to view, I believe I gave a link to create the url it needs to access the RTSP feed in an earlier post.

Blue Iris is popular (but not free) if you want to record and a Synology NAS will do it too.

Linux I gave up on but Zoneminder looks worth a go.

[Dave Rice]

I have my solution using tools they already know. PowerPoint save as MP4 file, VLC to run it.

I did have a look at Impress a few years ago and compared to PowerPoint it’s very crude.

[Dave Rice]

Maybe it could but they have limited ICT knowledge and they know PowerPoint.

Believe me it’s a struggle even showing people how to use TightVNC to remote onto a PC and transfer files from one to another.

[Dave Rice]

I really hope you’re right.

[Dave Rice]

Fecking Microsoft.

The original plan was to use VLC to play content on the screens, but I found out they were never going to have more than one presentation and always going to use PowerPoint to create it.

Simples! Use PowerPoint Viewer. There’s an option in PP 2016 to set the presentation in kiosk mode (full screen and repeat) and with timed slides that would work a treat. Plus I could set it on start up to always play a file called default.pptx so if there was a power failure no intervention would be need. The box powers itself back on and automatically starts the presentation.

Mocked it all up on my laptop last night and it works a treat. Get onsite today, copy PP Viewer and the pptx files to the media PC. Fire it up and it’s not running full screen and won’t repeat. Test my laptop again, it works. Look at the media player it doesn’t. It’s the same bloody software and the same bloody presentation running on the same bloody o/s.

No internet access so take ine of the media players out of the rack and bring it back. Mock up everything in the workshop using a different PC in case it’s my laptop. Same result.

May be I have an old version of PP Viewer or something, but why does it work on the PC and laptop but not the media server? Go back to Microsoft and the download page definitely says “Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer lets you view full-featured presentations created in PowerPoint 97 and later versions.” But I notice another link on the google search page to “View a presentation without PowerPoint”.

This says:

“PowerPoint Viewer is a free download from Microsoft.com. (It was created in conjunction with PowerPoint 2010, but it can also be used to view newer presentations created in PowerPoint 2013 and PowerPoint 2016. However, if a presentation uses a PowerPoint feature, (such as an animation) introduced after version 2010, that feature can’t be shown by PowerPoint Viewer.

You can open, view and print presentations using PowerPoint Viewer, but you cannot edit them. All transitions, videos and effects appear and behave the same when viewed using PowerPoint Viewer as they do when viewed in PowerPoint 2010.”

and

“PowerPoint Viewer opens supported presentation file types only if a version of PowerPoint is not installed on the PC that is being used. If PowerPoint is installed, it opens the presentation and PowerPoint Viewer is not used.”

So the presentations are created in PP 2016 and use the kiosk feature which 2010 didn’t have. My PC and laptop have Office 2016 installed on them, so even though it appeared to be using PP Viewer it wasn’t. It was using PP 2016 code in the PP Viewer shell.

Barstewards! I’m not adding £330 to the bill to install PP 2016 on the three media servers. Save the presentation as an mp4 file, use VLC to run it and set the media PC up to autorun default.mp4 on start up. Works a treat and was Plan A.

Arrrgggghhhh  :wacko:

 

EDIT – I forgot, on the same page it says “PowerPoint Mobile If you are using Windows 10, PowerPoint Mobile is installed on your system. It is a slimmed-down version of PowerPoint in which you can view and edit .pptx and .ppt files. To find PowerPoint Mobile on your computer system, go to the Cortana Ask me anything search box next to the Windows Start button on your computer desktop, and type the name PowerPoint Mobile.”

Oh no it isn’t installed, it must be downloaded from the store. Not possible on an isolated PC with a local account.

 

[Dave Rice]

Just found this old article  “Official AMD Bulldozer (FX-Zambezi) Benchmark Slides Leaked, Performance and Pricing Detailed”.

Dated 24/9/2011 and Bulldozer was released on 12th October, so timescales not too dissimilar to where we are with Ryzen today.

“When compared to Intel’s Core i5 Processor, The Bulldozer CPU which falls around the same retail price tag (<245$) would provide 4 More Cores, 8 Times more L2 Cache, Faster Frequency, Advanced ISA’s, Full x16 Bandwidth in CrossfireX mode GPU’s and fully unlocked Processors. The graph also compares total PC cost of an FX-8150 Processor with the Intel’s Core i7 980X CPU. The Intel solution would cost a total of 2120$ while AMD’s Bulldozer in comparison would cost 1286$ and the performance difference in between both solutions in barely noticeable as shown in the benchmarks below:”

“Most of AMD’s Benchmarks consist of games where Bulldozer definitely outperforms the Intel counterparts. At a resolution of 1080P, Bulldozer easily dominates the Intel Core i7 980X which costs twice as much as FX-8150 and the CPU is also 10-20FPS faster than the previous gen Phenom II X6 Chip in most benchmarks.”

“Bulldozer also shows 10-30% improvement in CrossfireX enabled rigs against the Intel CPU’s. That’s mainly because of 4 Cores bottlenecking the GPU’s full potential which the extra 4 Cores of AMD will unleash. In CPU intensive apps, Bulldozer falls between the i5 2500K and i7 2600K Processors, Only in a few benchmarks it outreaches the 2600K but in most situations it’ll lack behind. The new AVX/AFX Instruction set also allows an 3x improvement in hardware encryption over Phenom Processors. You can see more on Bulldozer below:”

We all now know what a load of bollocks this is. It’s why I will not believe anything about Ryzen until it’s in the hands of third parties.

[Dave Rice]

No, it’s about a metre square and clearly “home made”.

Weighs a ton.

[Dave Rice]

Higher wattage is so yesterday. They will win no friends by doing that.

Quite honestly I couldn’t give a flying flip about the high end stuff, I want to see the CPU that takes on the Kaby Lake Pentium G46xx series or even the Sky Lake G44xx series. Having just built a G4400 / 4GB / 240GB SSD machine the damn thing flies for “every day” tasks.

[Dave Rice]

We do get some interesting projects to work on, largely because we’ve got a reputation for lateral thinking.

Big companies have certain ways of doing things and rigidly stick to them even if they don’t fit. Sometimes, like this one, you only find out on the job but we are flexible enough to change the solution to fit the new problem if we can.

[Dave Rice]

I refer you to episode “420” the 12th in the 7th season of Family Guy.

I can’t link to the whole thing, but here’s a link to the Bag Of Weed Song (to the tune of Me Ol’ Bamboo) from Brian’s bid to legalize cannabis http://tinyurl.com/gttggkn

Pure genius.

[Dave Rice]

Unfortunately my oppo got called out to a gale related emergency so we didn’t get onsite until 11 so had no time to poke around.

But someone had turned up who knew about the system to get the existing PowerPoint presentations off so we could use them on the new. The reason we couldn’t power it up was a hidden push switch, which when pressed did the business. He put a keyboard and mouse in the other hidden USB ports and copied the presentations off to the USB stick. All I could see was it was XP running Office. Of what vintage I don’t know, but the presentations needed a bit of work to run properly on W10 / PP Viewer 16 not least of which was converting to 16:9 from 4:3. So the flat panel could well have been pre widespread 1080P kit.

I still don’t know any more about the hardware except it’s AMD and judging by the shape of the HSF mount at least AM2. The southbridge has a big “AMD chipset” logo on it which probably all points to Jetway (or similar second tier) M2A 690G type mobo.

No-one knows it’s origins for sure, but it’s rumoured to be an in-house job by an ex-employee, definitely not a lag.

[Dave Rice]

I’m going to ask, but I’ll hopefully have some time to have a better look today.

[Dave Rice]

It’s all PR until March 2nd.

[Dave Rice]

The film is very different to the HBO series. The premise is the same but HBO expand massively it and twist it like a twisty turney thing.

Two words Steve – Kodi Exodus.

[Dave Rice]

You turned off Westworld?

Get on catch up right now, it’s a fantastic series.

[Dave Rice]

People do dip in and out of series or start half way through.

[Author]

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