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The lonely tech post thread.

I've got to check but the batteries I linked to look much taller than the originals - most of the replacement ones do which is a bit strange if they're also lead acid.
 
Had to renew the broadband contract. I'd have been perfectly happy to stick on 500Mb, but CF no longer offer that option. So it was stay on 500 at +£4/mo to go off-contract, or +£2/mo to go to 1Gb for 24 months. Seems silly. Also, the person who took my call was adamant that I should remember their name for the customer service survey, as if I was going to forget I was served by Sparkle. (she was brilliant)

AIUI, moving to 1Gb will lose me an addressable external IP address. Which caused me much consternation until I realised that I almost never do anything that needs one, and even when I did it was for the LOLs rather than something useful. It's always possible to VPN around the issue, just more hassle.
 
I upgraded my phone recently. I didn't really need to but got taken in by shiney shiney and special offers. :oops:

Anyway thought I'd splash out and spend almost double what I would normally on a screen protector. It's to early to tell if it really will last longer, but its nerfed to fingerprint reader, it works, but badly. And that's with enabling screen protector mode. The cheap ones are better, I assume because they are thinner. I'm using face unlock more as it's improved and I believe more secure then it was. But I miss the fingerprint reader being on the back.
 
Chz said:
Had to renew the broadband contract. I'd have been perfectly happy to stick on 500Mb, but CF no longer offer that option. So it was stay on 500 at +£4/mo to go off-contract, or +£2/mo to go to 1Gb for 24 months. Seems silly. Also, the person who took my call was adamant that I should remember their name for the customer service survey, as if I was going to forget I was served by Sparkle. (she was brilliant)

AIUI, moving to 1Gb will lose me an addressable external IP address. Which caused me much consternation until I realised that I almost never do anything that needs one, and even when I did it was for the LOLs rather than something useful. It's always possible to VPN around the issue, just more hassle.
Click to expand...

Several years on I've still not got anything with the 5 that Virgin give me, despite best intentions.

I set up some remote access stuff to one, but believe that it hardly ever changes on Virgin anyway so modifying DND records isn't the end of the world.

I moved from 400 to 800 last time because such a small price difference. I don't really need it, but it's great the speed torrents come down. I wish I had upload speeds like Community Fiber though.
 
UnderOpenSky said:
Several years on I've still not got anything with the 5 that Virgin give me, despite best intentions.

I set up some remote access stuff to one, but believe that it hardly ever changes on Virgin anyway so modifying DND records isn't the end of the world.

I moved from 400 to 800 last time because such a small price difference. I don't really need it, but it's great the speed torrents come down. I wish I had upload speeds like Community Fiber though.
Click to expand...
A neighbour was complaining that having a speed increase wasn't doing anything for download speeds. He wasn't aware that you cannot receive faster than the other end can send.
 
I am struggling to understand who pays for the 3Gb connections. That's like 100 HD film streams, and more than wired ethernet (even assuming something recent with 2.5Gb) can take.
 
Chz said:
I am struggling to understand who pays for the 3Gb connections. That's like 100 HD film streams, and more than wired ethernet (even assuming something recent with 2.5Gb) can take.
Click to expand...

It's what we run a fair sized hospital off...

Even if it was a couple of quid more, I'm not sure I would. Upgrading all my network kit to 2.5 or 10Gb is to rich for me for the benefit I'd get.

I wish that upload speeds were more important to most ISPs.
 
Anyone had a Pixel or other phone screen replaced? How do you did find someone professional to do it? Bit wary of the phone repairs/cases/vape all in one places
 
Was going to do some backups today but realised I've saved the passwords for the various external drives in less than helpful ways in the password manager so it's a bloody nuisance trying every one to unlock each drive. Gave up and will do it next weekend.
 
UnderOpenSky said:
I wish that upload speeds were more important to most ISPs.
Click to expand...
They are, which is probably why they're so low. They don't want you paying 20 quid a month to run a data centre.

xenon said:
Your privacy is important to us.
Do you give permission to share sell your details with to 17,328 of our partners.
Click to expand...
Is the way I see it. If they want to sell my details. I want a cut, otherwise they can get fukd.
 
Physician, heal thyself

After possibly one of the most taxing weeks at work (my morning started like the weekend never happened) and being at my absolute wits end I just about got away telling my manager to fuck off (in a very professional manner) after he asked me if I was aware of the weekends issues and if my update to CIO would be ready soon. I seem to go from a tiny MSP with a bonkers owner to a large organisation where the CTO still just fucking does his own thing and doesn't leave any documentation or even communitcations and change freeze means nothing. Or more to the point doesn't step into help when I'm trying to decipher what's going on. Like throw me a fucking bone. :(

So I come home to shoot things on my gaming PC and it's just black screening on login. It's only a local account, but the PC is domain joined for other stuff and those profiles load fine. So I suspect a corrupted user profile, but frankly it's the last thing I want to deal with tonight. So I'm sulking, but think I just reinstall Windows tomorrow when I WFH because I frankly can't be arsed.

1734377265130.png
 
So fresh Windows 11 install tonight. I could have easily fixed the last one, but it's been three years of accumulated crap and I've fast internet, so thought I'd go for it.

Thought I'd share how I got rid of most common annoyances, and I didn't pay for anything.

Download Win 11 ISO and made a USB stick
During install, I told it I wanted to join a domain. Because no domain controller was available, it just set up a local account.

I then ran this GitHub - Raphire/Win11Debloat: A simple, easy to use PowerShell script to remove pre-installed apps from Windows, disable telemetry, remove Bing from Windows search as well as perform various other changes to declutter and improve your Windows experience. This script works for both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Removed most apps I don't want, disabled telemetry, web search from taskbar, co-pilot and recall, customised (simplified) my task bar, restored the old right click and lots of other customisation options that would have taken me a while to set.

I then used the office customisation and deployment tools to download Office 2024 (the perpetual licence version of 365)

Download Office Deployment Tool from Official Microsoft Download Center

The Office Deployment Tool (ODT) is a command-line tool that you can use to download and deploy Click-to-Run versions of Office, such as Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, to your client computers.
www.microsoft.com

I then used this script to activate Windows and Office. It actually looks like I could have used it to download office as well, but I've not tried that.

GitHub - massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts: Open-source Windows and Office activator featuring HWID, Ohook, KMS38, and Online KMS activation methods, along with advanced troubleshooting.

I know this isn't a super detailed guide, I'm just throwing it out how easy it all was as there's been a few questions/grumbles recently. If you need more details on anything, I'm happy to help.
 
UnderOpenSky said:
So fresh Windows 11 install tonight. I could have easily fixed the last one, but it's been three years of accumulated crap and I've fast internet, so thought I'd go for it.

Thought I'd share how I got rid of most common annoyances, and I didn't pay for anything.

Download Win 11 ISO and made a USB stick
During install, I told it I wanted to join a domain. Because no domain controller was available, it just set up a local account.

I then ran this GitHub - Raphire/Win11Debloat: A simple, easy to use PowerShell script to remove pre-installed apps from Windows, disable telemetry, remove Bing from Windows search as well as perform various other changes to declutter and improve your Windows experience. This script works for both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Removed most apps I don't want, disabled telemetry, web search from taskbar, co-pilot and recall, customised (simplified) my task bar, restored the old right click and lots of other customisation options that would have taken me a while to set.

I then used the office customisation and deployment tools to download Office 2024 (the perpetual licence version of 365)

Download Office Deployment Tool from Official Microsoft Download Center

The Office Deployment Tool (ODT) is a command-line tool that you can use to download and deploy Click-to-Run versions of Office, such as Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, to your client computers.
www.microsoft.com

I then used this script to activate Windows and Office. It actually looks like I could have used it to download office as well, but I've not tried that.

GitHub - massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts: Open-source Windows and Office activator featuring HWID, Ohook, KMS38, and Online KMS activation methods, along with advanced troubleshooting.

I know this isn't a super detailed guide, I'm just throwing it out how easy it all was as there's been a few questions/grumbles recently. If you need more details on anything, I'm happy to help.
Click to expand...
I've been using massgrave for a while. It's very handy.
 
Saul Goodman said:
I've been using massgrave for a while. It's very handy.
Click to expand...

I've got an older KMS batch file that someone on here kindly gave me, but it didn't seem to always do the trick for office, so this was a good find.

For other people's simplicity, have you tested it downloading office? I'm aware the Microsoft configuration/deployment tools are pretty simple if you've used them before, but a bit much if you just want Office on an elderly relative's PC and are starting from scratch.
 
UnderOpenSky said:
I've got an older KMS batch file that someone on here kindly gave me, but it didn't seem to always do the trick for office, so this was a good find.

For other people's simplicity, have you tested it downloading office? I'm aware the Microsoft configuration/deployment tools are pretty simple if you've used them before, but a bit much if you just want Office on an elderly relative's PC and are starting from scratch.
Click to expand...
I haven't used it to download Office. I prefer to download a clean copy, direct from Microsoft.
 
Saul Goodman said:
I haven't used it to download Office. I prefer to download a clean copy, direct from Microsoft.
Click to expand...

Well, it will be downloading it from Microsoft.

It's a lot harder for regular folk than you might think, you can't just go grab an ISO, unless you've got a volume licensing account or have purchased it. You can use winget or the tools I've mentioned above, but they fail the user-friendly test. But I'm happy to stand corrected.
 
UnderOpenSky said:
Well, it will be downloading it from Microsoft.

It's a lot harder for regular folk than you might think, you can't just go grab an ISO, unless you've got a volume licensing account or have purchased it. You can use winget or the tools I've mentioned above, but they fail the user-friendly test. But I'm happy to stand corrected.
Click to expand...
I have a friend who pays for Office for his business.
 
Saul Goodman said:
I have a friend who pays for Office for his business.
Click to expand...

Most companies/people will pay for 365 these days, because it's frankly stupid money to buy a perpetual licence.

If you need to do get an up-to-date copy you don't need to bother them again, you can create a customised installation from the Office Configuration website listed above. It creates you an XML file you feed into the Office Deployment tool which then goes off and downloads it's for you with your settings. Like I'm never going to use access or outlook at home and configures all my settings for me.
 
So here's something I should have thought of, but only just used. Word does a fairly good job of extracting text from PDFs which you can't highlight it in.

In the past I've just used those free online tools as it's not something I need often, but the large warnings of "Confidential" gave me pause for thought on that one
 
UnderOpenSky said:
So here's something I should have thought of, but only just used. Word does a fairly good job of extracting text from PDFs which you can't highlight it in.

In the past I've just used those free online tools as it's not something I need often, but the large warnings of "Confidential" gave me pause for thought on that one
Click to expand...
Excel can also extract stuff form PDFs- useful if you want to bring in a table or other numerical shenanigans
 
Ah apologies if was duff advice.
As well as importing direct into Excel, I have colleagues that use the Power Query bit of Excel to bulk import pdfs. Which may (or may not be more robust) - YMMV
 
nick said:
Ah apologies if was duff advice.
As well as importing direct into Excel, I have colleagues that use the Power Query bit of Excel to bulk import pdfs. Which may (or may not be more robust) - YMMV
Click to expand...

It's not duff. I'm sure it will work on some documents. It's more that PDFs are a bit of a nightmare to work with and fortunately it's not something I have to do often. :)
 
Saul Goodman said:
It's definitely a handy repository of links. Saves searching Google anytime you want one.
Click to expand...

That's kind of my point. Try and Google an office download.

I'm pretty sure these won't be a link on an official Microsoft page or rather you'd have sign in to download it.

My guess is this where various utilities point at.
 
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