Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

You guys are getting new laptops?

it’ll be 3 years with this cheap-o Intel Pentium Dual Core Laptop That cries when I launch Teams.
Being in the IT team does help! I don't use it much, I'd rather remotely connect from my own PC as it heats the room and I can have Spotify running. It's blocked on the company laptop.

Dell Latitude 7400 i5s, nice enough laptops but a bit temperamental sometimes, the lack of an actual power light causes more issues than you would think.
 
I’m beginning to see the downside of work issued pc’s aswell. Everything fun is blocked, including stuff like spotify and youtube. I mean I get why, but on the other hand I’m too damn lazy to make the effort of using my own pc and faffing around with screens and such.

Oh and the VPN makes every site think I’m in ireland so I’ve got google.ie as standard, which is weird
 
I’m beginning to see the downside of work issued pc’s aswell. Everything fun is blocked, including stuff like spotify and youtube. I mean I get why, but on the other hand I’m too damn lazy to make the effort of using my own pc and faffing around with screens and such.

Oh and the VPN makes every site think I’m in ireland so I’ve got google.ie as standard, which is weird
The worst I have is the hardware is low end, the filtering blocks porn, and if I let them, remove admin rights. That last one is a real problem for things like a program fucking up and needing a reinstall, or a printer driver needing to be reset.

While this has become less of a problem from XP, 7, to 10, It was a huge issue in the 7 days when we changed IT companies and their idea of protecting computers was different. We, the service techs have to use software developed by Siemens and Karl Dungs which is not updated on the regular. So when you have an issue with it, a reinstall helps. Not a daily, weekly, or monthly thing but it does catch you at weird times and you need a solution now, not when IT is available and where you can get internet, boiler rooms and factory floors aren't WiFi hotspots as it turns out.
 
Mine has silly filters to stop people doing stupid things, which I get because usually PEBKAC.

But I can’t delete ANYTHING without admin password. Even stupid things like desktop shortcuts I don’t need cannot be deleted... go figure.

I ended up creating a folder labeled ‘junk’ and just drag/drop all I don’t want to see there....
 
usually we are fairly locked down, too – but not quite as excessive. YouTube and Spotify are fair game, Netflix is not. Honestly though the filter is imported from not too reliable a source, since it regularly blocks actual pages I need to visit.
Lucky me, I am organizationally part of IT (since “innovation” is 95% digitalization), so at least I got admin rights for my machine straightaway :)
 
We have full admin rights on the machines (with a local admin user/pw separate from the actual user), the only things end users aren't allowed to touch are certificates, antivirus and inventory software, and full disk encryption. Otherwise pretty much do as you please. Seems to work out fine.
 
Oh, just to be clear: I know very well why our people usually don’t get admin rights :p it’s absolutely justified to keep some of them on a leash... may be a different story in a full on IT / software development business I’d hope.
 
Even as an admin I don't get full admin rights now, I have to elevate to an admin account for most things. It's fine, sometimes gets in the way of Powershell and command line stuff. Regarding web filtering I forgot that the Spotify web player is actually allowed, as it YouTube. Filtering is pretty fair and reliable, it rarely blocks things it should.

Nobody apart from us gets admin rights, there's just no need with their jobs. People still manage to break stuff even without them, that's when devices like old Surface Pro 4s aren't breaking themselves!
 
Whoops! :ROFLMAO: My brain stopped working at that point, clearly. There were times where it just didn't work at all for one person without us knowing. :p
 
I dabble a bit in stage lightning and pro audio as a hobby. Stage lights are controlled using something called DMX which is a venerable communications protocol where you chain all the devices together using standard audio cabling, with a controller on the beginning of the chain. The controller can be a manual lighting console or a USB dongle hooked up to a computer. The controller transmits values between 0 and 255 on channels ranging between 1 and 512.

A LED light capable of RGB needs at least three channels, one for each color. If you set its "DMX address" to 1 it means it'll listen on channels 1, 2 and 3 for R, G and B. You can chain as many lights as you want and set them to the same address, which means they'll listen to and obey the same commands, but you can also have the next one in the chain set to address 4 to run it separately from the first one. Etc, etc.

They recently finished a roadworks project near where I live, and there's a new bicycle bridge that's lit from underneath using DMX. I know because there'a public staircase that allows you to get a closer look. :p Here's the back of one of the lights. Apparently this one is set to address 85, so there are at least 28 (84 divided by 3) lights in the chain before this one.

IMG_1605.jpeg


I noticed the other day that they had figured out how to program a gradient that fades from white to red, back and forth. Pretty cool for a stage lighting geek to see, when you know the tech behind it.

IMG_1525.JPG
 
It's almost like there's demand for them. :p
Yes, but it's Apple who I thought had figured out this supply chain stuff, and had a decent stock. After all, there are no external changes to the hardware, just a new logic board with new chipsets inside.

However, there seems to be many providers who are having supply issues this year. Sony with the PlayStation 5, Xbox with the Series X, Nvidia with the RTX 3000-series, AMD with the 6000-series GPUs, and now also Apple with the M1-Macs (and the iPhone 12 Pro/Max).

Why? I don't know. It could be that since people are stuck at home due to Covid-19 and can't travel, many are in stead spending their money upgrading their tech, creating an unexpected surge in demand.
 
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I think there just generally weren't enough vans/trucks to deal with everything this year. That or manufacturers are deliberately making their products scarce, there's no way it could be that though. :|
 
Yes, but it's Apple who I thought had figured out this supply chain stuff, and had a decent stock. After all, there are no external changes to the hardware, just a new logic board with new chipsets inside.

However, there seems to be many providers who are having supply issues this year. Sony with the PlayStation 5, Xbox with the Series S, Nvidia with the RTX 3000-series, AMD with the 6000-series GPUs, and now also Apple with the M1-Macs (and the iPhone 12 Pro/Max).

Why? I don't know. It could be that since people are stuck at home due to Covid-19 and can't travel, many are in stead spending their money upgrading their tech in stead, creating an unexpected surge in demand.

I’m still waiting for my 12 Pro... i read somewhere that Sony can’t produce enough camera modules.
 
That's really odd, my Pro Max was shipped a couple of weeks earlier than expected but I still wasn't expecting to wait a long time. Did you order directly from Apple or a third party? Amazon's dispatch date estimate always looked grim, otherwise I would've bought from there due to the haul of juicy cashback points I would get on my Amazon card (3x vs 0.5x).
 
That's really odd, my Pro Max was shipped a couple of weeks earlier than expected but I still wasn't expecting to wait a long time. Did you order directly from Apple or a third party? Amazon's dispatch date estimate always looked grim, otherwise I would've bought from there due to the haul of juicy cashback points I would get on my Amazon card (3x vs 0.5x).

Local authorized reseller. Shipping times in the Apple app looked just as bad last time I checked.
 
Late to the convo but when we finally took admin rights away from the teachers it was a breath of fresh air. The amount of dumb shit we had to clean up went down dramatically.
 
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