synaesthesia

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.

Should hasten to add - we have dedicated users for the exam accounts which mean they can't do anything other than use examwritepad and print. Simple, foolproof, doesn't get abused and little to no management overhead.

Indeed as above - filtering on own devices should surely be a no-no regardless of the account being used. If it's the school device then it's a different ball game. GCPW removes the windows side of things (the main reason I can't entertain it as an option) so filtering is browser based only. Too risky IMO.

Still too much involved Standard device - meaning you can use ANY device. Impero/Netsupport/ABTutor/Insert any classroom management tool here. ExamWritePad. (Or online equivelent and add that to the whitelist).

Christ, that's horrid Hope everyone's OK most importantly, and hopefully they have a disaster recovery plan in place to allow for continued learning remotely. Hard work for every member of staff!

Ours are basic as hell CRT 7WP models. No encryption, we do have our own frequencies but also a strict policy on their use. Breaking that policy is taken seriously and if it results in an active breach then that's effectively gross misconduct. Rock and a hard place here, wifi reception is good but not good enough thanks to the building type to rely on it for safeguarding purposes, and phone reception is akin to a faraday cage in all but a couple of tiny places. And to top it off, the financial reserves of a hobo means that spending on fancy systems is out of the question. So risk management ftw - you break the rules, we break your..... employment?

Jinx! That was ticket #650256 - looks like all is in hand, I'm going to restore to 32 in 10 minutes. Been holding off our vlan changes until Summer when we'll be removing 1 entirely (at last!)

Just got off the phone to Smoothwall - Maiden 33 has a bug which only affects people still using the default vlan of 1 which may also be affecting you if you're struggling. Roll back to 32 and you should be golden They're working on a fix for Maiden 34.

I'll have to get back to you on this - since updating to Maiden 33 last night, our setup has completely failed As Smoothwall is the only thing that has updated, I've reached out to them for urgent support.

Apologies if that came across a bit blunt - I am naturally cynical and skeptical about just about everything these days (an age thing perhaps!). With ever-dwindling budgets, it would appear difficult to justify spending what I imagine would be a decent amount of money to do something that *should* (acknowledging schools and their occupants are fickle beasts at the best of times) be doable by any school internally with minimal effort, a decent disaster recovery and business continuity plan and communication. Whilst vagueness can be good in security, there's also the saying about "security by obscurity is no security at all" - that's another red flag for me at least. There's a reason that the most secure systems on the planet are open source.

A somewhat odd post from a "dormant" company with no recorded assets, a wix hosted template website and little to no actual history?

Would love some details on this please!

If anyone is looking at Posterbooking, I wouldn't bother. Small print time - the "free for 10 screens" is only a trial for 3 months, after which you can't even deactivate your account or edit your profile without paying up. False advertising IMO and lack of transparency shows a lack of trustworthiness.

Idle timeouts in Impero - if they're sat for over 10 minutes they log out - plus classroom control (naive but hopeful!) and teachers have impero too and are asked to double check. Not perfect but the same goes for staff, and usually kids get the idea when others start messing around with their files.