We are delighted to share our passion for travel and photography with you in a way that can make your day brighter and cheer those around you.
Grab some cool photos from our site, upload them into your video conferencing tool as virtual backgrounds and change them as often as every virtual meeting or even mid-meeting if the mood takes you.
Share the cheer, be inspirational, make them laugh and open the meeting with some all important personal chat, LovingMyDesk.com is the perfect video conference ice breaker and its free!
We have built this site to share the love, as an initial concept first so please click away download photos and use them on your computer, tablet or phone. If we see enough people having fun we may take it to the next stage, until then let us know what improvements you would like to see.
All we ask is you enjoy, share the goodness and perhaps leave us the odd comment if you like this idea whether we should take our super lean, hacked together start-up concept to the next stage?
So tell us what you think, like and share with others who might need a smile too.
Renier Botha joined the Shawbrook Bank staff who have ‘virtually’ tackled one of the most iconic road networks in the world to raise vital funds for frontline workers in the NHS.
The 14-strong group of colleagues decided to embrace lockdown boredom head-on by sign- ing up for the online ‘Route 66 Virtual fitness challenge.’
Hosted by the Conqueror web- site, the challenge saw partici- pants complete the 2,280-mile route online by recording the completion of physical walking, jogging and running exercises at home.
Travelling virtually from Chi- cago to Los angeles, the group gave themselves a three-month target to complete the entire length of the Route 66 highway.
However, they smashed that tar- get in impressive style, completing the gruelling trek in less than a month – and raising £2,940 for the NHS at the same time.
Gareth McHenry – who launched the charity effort before roping in his colleagues – said the idea initially came about to relieve the boredom of lockdown.
Gareth, head of delivery and innovation at Shawbrook Bank, said: “Lockdown has taken its toll on lots of people across the UK – not just within Shawbrook.
“So we decided as a group to have a think of activities that we could do online that would help alleviate the boredom and the monotony of lockdown and at the same time help us stay fit both mentally and physically.
“Route 66 is one of the most iconic – if not thee most iconic – highway in the world and so we felt this would be a great project to start off with. We decided to go for it, and to try and raise some funds for our NHS frontline heroes at the same time and it just grew arms and legs from there.
“We have a group Slack channel that we use to communicate and from within that we just egged each other on. We initially gave ourselves a three-month target to complete all 2,280 miles but we absolutely smashed that within a month – raising almost £3,000 in the process.
“all in all, it’s been a very worth- while exercise and we’re all delighted with it.”
The Conqueror website describes the virtual Route 66 trek as the “ultimate running, cycling and walking challenge’”
But after just six days the team from Shawbrook had managed to cover more than 400 miles.
Gareth added: “this gave the team a little bit of focus out with work and helped us re-create a bit of workplace atmosphere at the same time. after enjoying it so much we’re now trying to plan our next challenge.”
The successful team from Shawbrook Bank included Gareth McHenry, alex Richardson, Chris Kerr, Edward Grainge, Giselle Kelly, James Popham, John Culli- nane, Jonathan Hotchkiss, Nigel Cooper, Patrick Coughlan, Renier Botha, Stephen Birrell, Brendan Ellis and John Kelly.
Download the latest hoop – unzip and copy it to a overwrite formatted SDCard which are then used to boot and load an appropriate OS for the RPi
Remote Desktop Control RPi from Mac using XRDP
sudo apt-get install xrdp
GPIO – General Purpose input/Output
A General Purpose Input/output (GPIO) is an interface available on most modern microcontrollers (MCU) to provide an ease of access to the devices internal properties. Generally there are multiple GPIO pins on a single MCU for the use of multiple interaction so simultaneous application.
I2C is a serial communication protocol, so data is transferred bit by bit along a single wire (the SDA line). Like SPI, I2C is synchronous, so the output of bits is synchronized to the sampling of bits by a clock signal (the SCL line) shared between the master and the slave.
I²C, pronounced I-squared-C, is a synchronous, multi-master, multi-slave, packet switched, single-ended, serial computer bus invented in 1982 by Philips Semiconductor. It is widely used for attaching lower-speed peripheral ICs to processors and microcontrollers in short-distance, intra-board communication.
Pulse-width modulation, or pulse-duration modulation, is a way of describing a digital signal that was created through a modulation technique, which involves encoding a message into a pulsing signal.
Pulse Width Modulation, or PWM, is a technique for getting analog results with digital means. Digital control is used to create a square wave, a signal switched between on and off.
PWM is a way to control analog devices with a digital output
Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) is a fancy term for describing a type of digital signal. Pulse width modulation is used in a variety of applications including sophisticated control circuitry. A common way we use them is to control dimming of RGB LEDs or to control the direction of a servo motor.
There are many different ways to control the speed of DC motors but one very simple and easy way is to use Pulse Width Modulation.
Maturity models are tools that can benchmark current performance against best practise. It provides valuable information on the current status of operations and point out areas for improvement that could increase the operational effectiveness, not just from a processes perspective but also the involved people, the tools used and the interaction of different disciplines within an organisation.
P3M3 is a management maturity model looking across an organization at how it delivers its projects, programmes and portfolio. P3M3 is unique in that it considers the whole system and not just at the processes.
P3M3 provides three maturity models that can be used separately to focus on specific areas of the business, or more generally to help the organization assess the relationships between their portfolios, programmes and projects.
The three P3M3 maturity models are:
Portfolio Management
Programme Management
Project Management
Structure
Each sub-model is further broken down into seven perspectives:
Organizational governance
Management control
Benefits management
Risk management
Stakeholder management
Finance management
Resource management
The P3M3 model has five maturity levels:
Level 1: Awareness
Level 2: Repeatable
Level 3: Defined
Level 4: Managed
Level 5: Optimized
P3M3 allows an assessment of the process employed, the competencies of people, the tools deployed and the management information used to manage and deliver improvements. This allows organizations to determine their strengths and weaknesses in delivering change.
There are no interdependencies between the models so an assessment may be against one, two or all of the sub-models. It is possible for an organization to be better at programme management than it is at project management.
Benefits
Through baselining an organization’s performance it is possible to identify areas where an organization can most effectively increase its project, programme and portfolio capability. Therefore the sort of benefits expected from using P3M3 to develop and implement an improvement plan would be:
Cost savings
On delivering project outputs and programme outcomes
Integrate processes across an organization
More effective use of budgets
Improved benefits delivery
Improved quality of delivered projects and programmes
Improved customer satisfaction
Increase return on investment
Providing plans for continual progression
Recognizing achievements from previous investment in capability improvement
Focusing on the organization’s maturity, not specific initiatives (you can run good programmes and projects without having high levels of maturity – but not consistently).
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