synaesthesia

Has anyone else's Bromcom stopped certain bits on the MCAS app working? For example we've had a few parents call in to say the attendance dashboard no longer shows anything for their kids, and have verified that with my own too

For that to happen there must be an integration into whatever rollcall system you're using - you need to be looking at that primarily. However in the net2 console you should be able to see a Triggers section under View, this should give you something to go on or the ability to remove that trigger entirely. Careful though as it is likely to break said integration.

And there you go - ecosystem bought into, and a forced obligation to stay that way as changing when things don't go your way can be even more time consuming and expensive.

Oooooooh interesting - something to take a look at!

I have that through as an idea on their portal to help protect against things like this and local internet issues - just a cache effectively which could run on any local device. https://ideas.bromcomcloud.com/ideas/BRCM-I-7000

Have they tried feeding the hamster? Or upgrading to a gerbil perhaps?

As above, local profiles - there's so little that needs storing these days anyway it's not worth doing much else. Faster too if you're not forcing profiles to redirect to a network share.

What are people doing for their backups? Obvious paper registers are a thing, I saw a few posts ago someone is doing it on Excel. Anyone else doing anything clever that might save time & effort when this happens tomorrow?

Certainly worth relaying that information to Bromcom via your school's support call to them (I hope everyone is indeed raising a support call for every outage)

groan.... I wonder how much money, resource and effort is being collectively wasted over all of Bromcom's customers, rushing round applying backup methods, printing paper registers etc, shortfalls in safeguarding procedures. Wouldn't surprise me if someone decided to play Bromcom at their own game and get litigious.

Yup, all figured out now and we're all good Bought the Chauvet 4 way splitter in the end, could have gotten cheaper but 80 quid for something we know will work isn't exactly expensive. I'd like to shoot the muppet that set them up in the first place I think but the important thing is it's working in time for the production and the desk is going in the bin - using an Airstream DMX controller it can all be done via iPad or laptop and it's just a million times better. Spent a lot of time over the weekend documenting it, so no more surprises in the future!

Our Lenovo chromebooks from Covid would beg to differ, especially considering the 6 years of torture, vandalism, scratches, disgusting substances and Lenovo's diabolical build quality; and their direct replacements are still marketing for around the £200 mark.

I would suspect your IT manager has a grudge based on a past issue which could easily be countered by countless similar issues Intel have caused over the years - part of our job is helping ensuring value for money. None of our Ryzens have caused any issues - had them in Lenovo (cheap and cheerful) flavours and HPs and they've been popular and rapid. The i5's we had in our last batch of Lenovos however were bloody awful Not exactly apples to apples comparisons but I'd absolutely be buying Ryzen's again if the price was right. Frankly it scares the life out of me that people are accepting that 16GB should be standard for the typical laptop that does little more than open an MIS, run a powerpoint and book a holiday - hands are tied because devs and manufacturers are so ruddy lazy/rushed/pressured/rubbish and we end up footing the bill for it.

Last batch we bought were 14" Ryzen 5 HP Probook 445 G10 with 16GB ram which come to use under £450 a piece with no rebates. Budgets obviously vary per school so high end to me might be fossilized to someone else! They rip through everything required of them and there's not much these days which actually needs much oomph - only exception for us is Photoshop and they eat that up. With so much else being cloud based, it's easy to ask "why do we need a grands worth of kit to run a browser?" (And likewise, knowing most browsers as we do, 128GB of RAM might be appropriate! And less said about that cost the better.)

I'm almost surprised.

Depends on what the "target market" (cynically the "shiny happy people" REM always went on about!) thinks as they seem to want to shoehorn things in places Just Because. That money is high end staff laptop money for us, and people spending more than that without really good reason would beg the question "what are you doing with public money?" * Also aware that prices are generally a bit skewiff at the moment for obvious reasons which may actually mean that if the price point of the Neo is current and correct, it might be better value for money that it may first appear.

Long story short, I'm firmly in the Louis Rossman camp. Design to fail is understandable to a point at some price levels,but on products aimed at high end markets scammy. Anti consumer, anti repair, form over function etc. I'm a hardware guy and innovation floats my boat, which is something Apple only did for me (retrospectively) in the 80s. As said though I'm still interested in what this is capable of at this price point; it might even make hell a little chillier and make me pay attention

£400? I wince spending more than £200 on a Chromebook I'd like to say that I hope they stay in America where form reigns over function (REALLY hate Apple and their entire ideology) but I'm intrigued as to how that chip performs in reality compared to run of the mill devices at a third of the cost.

This one scares me a little. I'm definitely of the age where I remember this book vividly and must have read it time and time again. Enid Blyton had a very specific way of writing which made your imagination do all the visualisation work for you, with only a few hints from the book covers and illustrations, and the trailers seem to be so far away from that I worry about a "ruined childhood experience". Not that it's easy - LOTR managed to do it really well, the Hobbit less so. Charlie & the chocolate factory, both Wilder and Depp weren't too bad. The Witches was good (haven't seen the newer version so no comment there). Will certainly still watch it, fingers crossed! Would love to see an adaption of some semi-autobiographical stuff like Boy and Going Solo from Roald Dahl.

Alec, sorry that is a laughable thing to suggest. Although it might help you, it is insane to want anyone to believe you are not already aware of the issues before people start reporting them.

Yup same error! And of course bromcom service status page says AOK. Status pages should be proactive, not reactive - it should know before we do, and that isn't difficult.

Cheers. Thankfully have the fitting details so I've a good idea of the basics, however I think all but 2 of the lights are configurable (i.e. you can choose between 7 channel and 14 channel modes) which makes life a little more interesting! I'm making assumptions there's terminators in place, trying very hard to avoid having to go up a ladder to check - but I think this might be unavoidable Budget is nearly non existent, but might try and get the school to stretch to the Chauvet - a couple of the fittings are Chauvet

Hi, I'm gonna hijack this thread a bit rather than start another one as I understand DMX is a little niche (in our world anyway!) We usually have a company come in to do all our sound and lighting, and this year said company isn't available However this seemed a good opportunity to extend our production to allow students to help manage the backstage stuff too! Sounds great in practice, however there's literally noone who has a single clue about the systems in place! The previous network manager apparently gatekept everything and documented nothing - the little information I do have appears to be extremely wrong. We have a lighting desk, a mixture of DMX outputs in our A/V cabinet, 3 bars of lights, a wall mounted DMX controller which looks simple but isn't, but no means to connect more than one bar. So I'd love a little sanity-check from people with more experience than me please! Until last week, I knew absolutely nothing about lighting. I've read a lot and think I have a reasonable understanding now, but that might classify me as "knowing enough to be dangerous but not enough to be useful" So we have 3 bars of lights, from what I can make out all daisy-chained and each has an output in the A/V cabinet. Bar 1 downstage has a dozen fixtures, bar 2 midstage has 6, bar 3 backstage has 4 led strips. I can connect any of them to a basic controller and get most of them to at least do something. Our desk is a Zero88 Jester24 - ancient - and muppet here factory reset it, removing all the presets but I don't think that's major as the presets match the documentation i have regarding starting DMX channels, all incorrect. I've managed to get some basic addresses for some of them doing something suggested in this thread, cycling through the channels until something reacts and making a note of that starting address. Got confused when some of the lights started doing different things on different numbers, so assume there's some channel crossover. Biggest thing I want to check is connecting all these lights together - I believe we need a DMX splitter - tentatively looking at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Micvtve-Amplifier-Splitter-Distributor-AC100V-240V/dp/B0CH7S4QG3 I can't seem to verify if this is actually what we need as the documentation appears to suggest these are for splitting to each separate fixture - does anyone know if they will work on chains? When rummaging around various departments I've found useful looking things like an Airstream DMX which I'd love to be able to use, especially bearing in mind it'll be students running the shows. Got it working on a basic 2 light chain in testing so fingers crossed it'll cope with all of the main lights! Any useful tips appreciated. I'm fairly sure the person responsible for the DMX standard and the terminology used is the same person responsible for things like Github - entirely overcomplicated for something actually quite simple!

Aye, hit me hard this one. Huge influence in my early teen years and still to this day. My online gaming nickname to this day, since 1996 is Kryt/Kryten and the books are my favourite reads - looking forward to Titan, and it'll have even more significance now.

Yup been dead here for about 15 minutes so far.... joys. Bromcom service status is, obviously, 100% good.