I am currently testing out Internet Explorer 9 64-bit on a copy of Windows 7 Home. Very smart looking, I like the Facebook web slice and the browser seems fast. Visiting YouTube however was less then enthralling as it starts demanding me to install Flash.
But wait, doesn't IE9 support HTML5 meaning Flash isn't required for YouTube? Correct, but it takes an extra step to get it to work courtesy of YouTube putting obstacles in the way.
To enable the YouTube HTML5 player in IE9 visit YouTube
Soon! I'll be heading off tomorrow, time to get packing I guess. Should get my gadgets charged just in-case, and find the charger for my netbook. Those universal ones are useless.
Hmmm, DSi with Advance Wars will keep me occupied on the train. If my next blog post is from Wales you will know I missed my stop because of it.
Geeky T-Shirt, got plenty. Which one to pick!
Have I forgotten something? Oh yes, a pen and notepad so I actually remember what was said! See you guys there!
Following on from the previous posts in this series, I am continuing to find weird things in the school library. The kids appear to be slowly building a menagerie of animals created from bits and bobs found round the school during after hours study, though I'm not sure what they made this out of.
And what is with the words kraken along the top?
Me and my library co-worker think it may be a cake decoration but we didn't want to take it out of the packaging, it looked too delicate!
A little game for you. Exceptionally geeky folks may get this immediately (or even know already what this post will be about). What is wrong with this picture?
I'll let you look at that for a minute. See anything?
OK? Done.
Note the command itself:
dir "windows/logs"
I had no idea until today that, if you include the full path in double quotes, Windows will happily accept the / symbol in place of the normal \ symbol for separating folder names. Go try it now, but wildcards wo
And I made a biggy!
This year we decided to set up SIMS Learning Gateway to comply with the 2010 Online Reporting requirements. These required us to provide a means of serving school reports to parents online for which Learning Gateway does perfectly. But as we roll into the close of the written reports cycle, there are lessons to learn.
First off I overestimated how much Assessment Manager can cope with. Figuring staff were used to it for single grades, it is terrible when it comes to wri
Some may remember my previous post about what bored kids do with their time afterschool. Recently, the cousin to the confectionary based caterpillar turned up. I present to you, the Tiny Paper Snail.
Only school kids can take something so simple and make you go awww.
To my local newsagent, please correctly label your sandwiches. When I buy a tuna and sweetcorn sandwich I expect tuna and sweetcorn as a filling, not for half the tuna to be replaced with shredded cabbage. If the sandwich was labelled "Tuna and Cabbage with Occasional Flecks of Sweetcorn" I would have left it on the shelf.
And thus, a rants category is born on the blog.
A while ago, I recall Angry Technician discussing how he had a chronic case of "The Ear," an ability to walk past any machine, stop and instinctively know something is wrong and require fixing.
I had such an episode today dealing with tick grids for the end of year process in SIMS. I believe they call it curriculum assignment but after a while, hours of ticking boxes against a list causes the brain to melt slightly and simplify the entire system down to "Tick Grids." And I had a feeling that
Nothing makes your mouth water quite like two large boxes of biscuits appearing on your desk. We are talking nearly 100 per box of various delicacies from jammy dodgers to shortbread. Tasty!
But wait, these biscuits, I recognise that box. We had those for supervised study...a couple of...years...back...
Librarian: "Oh those are for the bin. I found them in the store cupboard and they went off September 2008."
Surprisingly, they still look like biscuits. Even more surprisingly, someone d
This blog post breaks from the site's tech theme. I know, it's a tech site and this is probably a tech-based blog system but it's also my only blog at the moment. It gets a little political, think of it as a personal post.
As some are aware, I've been taking an interest in the surroundings of the Hackney fox attacks and particularly the diabolical news coverage of it. One particular paper has been it's usual shameful self and I find it pretty sad I have to see it's front page when I go to buy
Sometimes strange kit get's pulled up from the depths of the school and sent off to the school's technical team as "potentially useful." It's a common occurance and every technician with a blog has probably posted recollections of their old kit found in the dark corner of a classroom or server room.
Today is no exception when I was handed some old kit that the PE Department had cleared out of their gym. Amongst them was a still camera with a likely usable lens and couple of camcorders. There
A few things I didn't realise about the Windows key in Windows 7:
- The Windows key plus any number "clicks" on the corresponding icon pinned to the start menu, reading from left to right.
- Use Windows key and space to hide all windows until you release the Windows key.
- Windows key and = will zoom in with Magnifier by 100% per press of the key.
- Windows key and Home did err, something. One moment it switched windows, the next minimised and restored one.
- Windows key and Delete brough
London Grid for Learning has announced that it's site will be changing. On the 28th June, they will move to http://www.lgfl.info and a preview of the new site is available at http://portal2.lgfl.org.uk/
The old site will remain up for now and be accessible, but no longer updated.
The former LGfL Portal of choice, Digitalbrain, will be closing it's doors at the end of July. Anyone still using the service will need to back-up their Digitalbrain content by the 31st July as anything could happen to it after that time. Namely websites ending up in the virtual limbo of Internet Time Machine sites and Google Cache but I wouldn't rely on those as a hosting solution.
The EduGeek conference in Chorley went very well this year, with suppliers and school technical staff alike descending on the Woodlands Conference centre for another day of talks, raffles and free coffee and curries. There was much on the agenda with software such as the EduGeek Logon Tracker to the mind-blowing Mobotix cameras and a glimpse to the future from Microsoft's teams of anthropologists predicting what IT will be like in 2019.
Please note that, while links to companies and suppliers
Back in the days of limited memory and general user-unfriendliness, cryptic error messsages were common place and understandable only by the computing elite. As time moved on, error messages became friendlier and geared towards the user by hiding the cryptic error codes and debug information. Microsoft even announced this as a key design concept of Windows 7 compared to earlier versions.
However, some software manufacturers have other ideas, especially with SIMS (connection error spouting mor
Year 13 chose today as their "muck-up day" as the pupils call it. Hence the current sights of Post-It notes declaring how we are going to miss them (amongst other messages) scattered accross the whole school. I'm not kidding either, every wall in every corridor and room accessible to the pupils are scattered with Post-It notes. It's like a tornado of sticky bits of paper whisked through the school over Period 1 and as fast as they come down, the walls are covered again.
It's pretty hilarious
I spotted a little quirk today in Assessment Manager that anyone using it for reporting should be aware of. Over time, staff members will change and the Marksheets that have been assigned will slowly become out of date. In our case, a baby boom amongst the staff population led to a large number of maternity cover teachers being employed and thus assigned to the now teacherless classes.
This lead to the Marksheets that were assigned at the start of term to be out of date and still bound to the
When I went to attempt registration of Visual Studio Express 2010, Microsoft had the forethought to ensure everyone was included in the list of roles in the company. Even "that guy in every company who knows computer-based stuff and does it when he probably shouldn't be" is included.
Today looked set to be another normal day, camped at my desk with a cup of coffee and tinkering with the homebrew system to set up school reports. As it stands, my heart sank when I fired up SIMS and an update appeared (also interfering with my project monitoring the SIMS server through MMC). At the same time, the webmail system was upgraded by external providers to a new one. We knew it was going to happen but not when. Today just got interesting.
Fortunately training the Admin staff in both
Unless you have been under a rock over the weekend, you will have heard of the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano blowing it's top. Ironically, World Earth Day is this Thursday giving Geography or Library departments a perfect chance to run displays based on current events. What ideas could you use?
Teach pupils to say the name correctly
Explain how to spot the ash by looking for the sky going from blue to grey as you look towards the horizon
Explain how volcanoes work and the effects
What econ
One of my jobs each week is to assemble the school's display that is shown above reception. This typically involves a slideshow of images, which this week was provided by staff who were on a ski trip.
While looking at one image something stood out. That familiar stall where something isn't right or unusual on the screen and prevents me from moving on until I twig what it is. Students, check. Restaurant, OK that's normal so check. Appears to be at the top of the slopes, nice view in the backgr
...you stick pins in marshmellow caterpillars. Wait I don't think I got the little Internet meme correct there.
Some may recall my previous blog entry of why the education secotor is so enjoyable. The discovery of this little chap when cleaning up after the afterschool crowd further reinforces this. How random but cute!
Recently, I was asked by the Headteacher to look into using a centralised system for the internal school display. I settled on Xibo, a system I could set up for little or no cost to the school. Unfortunately I lacked a machine to test it on.
The end result is a working Xibo install running on a Ubuntu-based Apache webserver. This proof-of-concept test server is installed on my...memory stick?
No fast hard disk, no large space to store files, just an 8Gb memory stick plugged into a random o
First of all a belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone on Edugeek. A new year has begun and schools are enjoying their first day back to work, but 2010 looks set to start as 2009 ended.
Already there has been a lot of closures accross the country due to snow. More looks set to arrive tonight (if it hasn't already) and that means more risk of school closure. It is best to test your notification systems now rather then later, bearing in mind how much strain your school websites w
