Yeah - hardly any mention of GCP in my line of work.
Azure have partnered with my preferred coding language to develop new solutions, which is why I want to learn that more.
AWS seems to be the solution of choice for most clients where I could be placed, though. So seems the most relevant for new pitches.
My theory is that if you know one cloud solution, then surely it’s not too hard to switch that knowledge over to the other one, or is it?
Yeah our senior cloud engineer had an Azure background and we use AWS so it’s fairly easy to switch and learn the differences and most places will be happy that if you know one, you’ll learn the other.
With such a shortage of skills, beggars can’t be chosers anyway.
I like AWS a lot. I found it much more accessible the Azure when learning. We use it at work and I use it at home for my personal IoT projects as well.
Cheers - that aligns to what I thought.
Right, time to sign up for those free Azure courses next week and get the free exam voucher for attending them 
Fo the TT IT experts, I want to run a 60m ish ethernet cable from my router outside to an office conversion at the back of my garage. What would be the best cable to use?
I would go for Cat6. Its not much more than Cat5 these days it will be ready for Gigabit broadband when you get it, if you don’t already.
Go for normal unshielded twisted pair UTP. Shielding shouldn’t be needed in the home, and it’s more expensive and a pain in the arse to use. If it’s running outside run it in conduit to protect it from the elements.
For turning on computers and lights it would seem like overkill - what do you do?
All the cloud people are annoying, like anything does 80% and no more, I made a poor AWS support bod quite unhappy after they were very helpful and said “no, surprised me too but it doesn’t support that” as I converted the ticket to a feature request of “do the most basic thing a “chatbot” product can do of send a message”.
Started with lights on and off. Its IoT setup is quite good for providing the MQTT broker, although there are others out there that are possibly more simple. I also am working on a Ring type camera which uploads the photo so an S3 bucket and then passes it to Rekognition for facial recognition. Long term plan to link that to a smart lock so you can open the door with your face. Will work when the kids forget their keys (which is always).
Biggest benefit of using AWS IoT is the Alexa toolkit has events built in so you can easily trigger a function from an Alexa intent. You can of course do that with other providers but being both Amazon its much more integrated. Currently working on a robot lawnmower as well
Thanks.
Oooo I knew there’d be a thread about IT. Quite far down but I persevered.
MS office or 365?
Just bought a new laptop for the Mr for his business/studies. I’ve realised I’ve not bought a new one since I was a well paid part-time student. What’s the best solution for MS office suite? Is it the one-off purchase at about £200 or the annual subscription? Any info appreciated.
I have the monthly sub, Its £6 / month. The one off is about £250 I think and Im not sure if you get future updates.
With the 365 sub you get 1 TB cloud storage for OneDrive and also a bigger Outlook mailbox.
If you are a student its about half the price for the one off purchase
I’d go with the sub as well, although I think there’s a family option for a few quid more if you need additional licences.
Do people even own their own laptop now?
I just use my work one for personal stuff, but without signing into the VPN 
Yeah my work laptop is a Lenovo heap of shit.
It’s a Nissan juke to the F1 car my personal laptop is.
Work - A Dell i7 ultrabook - maxed out ram and SSD for working with big data sets. But really bad graphics.
Home - MacBook Pro
Any tips ‘n’ hints for a purchase for the in-laws please?
It will be used for internet access and PDF viewing really, previously had office installed but beyond the stage of wanting to use that anymore.
Happy with their laptop apart from its lack of speed which is possibly down to its age. I would suggest an upgrade but they’ve passed the point of wanting to keep it and want to move on.
Chromebook?
Why I’ve not bought one in years. This is for a personal business at home - my employer might frown a bit if I lent mine out.
that was my first thought, do you have to read PDFs through an app? and do they automatically open or do you need to be in the app first? just want it to be as simple as possible as they are 80 and 84
err pass. 
I would say chrome book also.