synaesthesia

I saw that, being quite local I know I'm getting old as like many of us, have found plenty of senior staff's stashes in the past Thankfully 99.9% isoprope is a bit easier to explain away than a case of Baileys or Scotch! (and neither are particularly useful in this use case )

I don't think it's a Black Friday thing but Argos have (out of stock currently though) 2TB Samsung 990 Evo's for under £100 and Pro's for only a little more.... Edit - it is Black Friday, stock is silly low. However, I've apparently bagsied the last 990 Pro 2TB with heatsink for 139.99 which I've just collected

Always handy to keep a couple of bottles! Great for removing labels and grubby stains, cleaning up bad connectors and also doubles up as the best disinfectant and de-odouriser for lockers that someone has thrown up in. Yup, happened

Soak under the brackets with iso alcohol , leave for a couple of minutes and then prise off with a spudger

Oooh @dhicks raises a good point - iPads/tablets are ideal for this! I've recently saved 8 old iPads from WEEE as PE for their coursework need to record and view what they do - but not save, so they didn't need any connectivity or file sharing/retrieval. More up to date iPads, phones certainly would be ideal!

Always made me bring spare pants! Did it again more recently when I acquired a BBC master and Cub monitor, and that feeling never quite goes away! "CHISWICK? FRESH PANTS!" (wondering who gets that? )

^^^^^^ THIS Hopefully just teaching grandma to suck eggs but, large flat blade screwdriver, ground it, make sure the handle is insulated and insert just under the flappy rubber thing to touch it to the contact underneath.

Yeah, some caveats though - we have to copy the files over from them due to USB/portable storage restrictions so they do them in bulk and hand them over, doesn't take long. Also means we can resize them into something sensible too, so we don't have lots of 4GB, 5 minute long videos Still think it's less hassle than faffing with webcams, staff are often using their laptops anyway so it's best to keep them separate IMO.

Exactly our thinking - with the changes to Promethean, and our trust going Viewsonic anyway, now seemed a good a time as ever. All the same functions were there, so it'll just be a matter of a little staff training and hopefully intuition - but our supplier has also hooked us up with staff training if we need it too.

Yeah, those prices match up with what we were given - I was suprised as the last AP9 we had was only just over a grand, but the inclusion of the OPS unit gave the reason. We've used the OPS hdmi in a few times where age & abuse has damaged all the other HDMI ports! Got a couple of the Viewsonics in now, will try and get one hooked up ahead of fitment time to see how it behaves!

Now I remember why I have a strong preference for Dell servers. First HP server setup in 15 ish years today, a new Gen11 380. What a palaver - why on earth is getting and installing all the drivers so difficult? "Just grab the service pack!" says a load of helpful misfits on the Interweb but don't forget to get a degree in technobabble and nonsense beforehand, trying to understand how it works takes hours let alone HPE's support site downloads being slower than erosion. I could have had a brand new Dell unboxed, installed and in place in under half an hour.

Oooh cheers that's not half bad, the rest are some brands I wouldn't trust with someone else's barge pole. I think my hope was replacing my 3.5" 2tb spinning rust with a sata SSD, as I have a pair of 1tb nvme drives already. Wondering if I can sacrifice a TB by removing some of the million games I bought but never played

Yeah that's been annoying me - I've been on the hunt for a 2TB SSD, ideally 2.5" sata but prices have gone stupid. Only last month could have picked up an NVME one for £90.

Just don't fall into the Hisense trap. Great TV's for the money - the only guarantee is failure soon after the warranty expires.

Oh, so I see. Cat amongst the pigeons there then, 20w speakers in the LE so they do learn something then! If they're still around the £1000 price point for 75 inches then probably a decent option.

How's that working out with your false positives, or have you got the staff well trained? We get at least a dozen a day and they would *all* have had to be escalated to us with a message along the lines of "WTF is "furaffinity.net" and why are our pupils searching for it?" I could sit down and discuss Rule 34 until I'm blue in the face, but it's far easier & faster for IT to discern context & false positives than for investigations to take place for every single one, however wary this may open us up with liability a bit - otherwise leveraging Halo seems like a good idea!

Word of warning on the LX panels (do you mean those?) - the speakers are DIRE which is why I've instantly ruled them out going forward. 10W isn't enough for any decent size classroom IMO - the 15w in the full units are only just good enough.

Again though, why would anyone other than SLT and specifically the DSL need access? I don't know this for sure (so open question), in the case of a possible safeguarding issue concerning your head teacher's internet use, the DSL would be first point of contact anyway?

I'm still unclear, as you've now added a 3rd "option". We were told originally that Cloud Reporting would make it easier for our DSLs , however in practice and from a support call with SW it was apparent it only works for Smoothwall Cloud devices (i.e. chromebooks) and not on-site devices. I haven't heard about it taking over the on-site (it definitely doesn't but then again may be related to the issues I've mentioned) For 1) though, there should never be any reason any member of staff other than DSL would need to run such a report, that isn't anyone's job other than the DSL or their deputies. Here it's just me, DSL and DDSL, both of whom are SLT.

For us at least just putting the block in for www.youtube.com has worked, and we also have *youtube* in the caption detection and that seemed to catch everything properly the last couple of lessons yesterday. It's a pain as it's one of those sites that can very often be needed at short notice, otherwise I'd have just put it in Smoothwall, but being able to allow/deny it at a moment's notice (or when someone is messing around) via Impero is a huge time saver. I'll be keeping a close eye on Monday anyway and will update if anything changes

yeah, for now I've fallen back to a block on *youtube* in the window caption for now. Smoothwall thankfully is good enough to just handle it as a category so we can block for KS3 - I only kept it in Impero as it was easier to lift that restriction if a lesson needed it.

Cheers Tom

Smoothwall confirms, at least for us that logging into Google now means it hits https://accounts.youtube.com/accounts/CheckConnection?pmpo=https%3A%2F%2Faccounts.google.com&v=...... I'll therefore need to tweak our policies to allow the above but block the actual video site.

Morning, Just wondering if anyone else has noticed a problem recently referring to Google accounts logins? Since yesterday, all our students were having Impero close their browsers when they tried to log into their Google account, with the reason "access to youtube.com". They were just going to gmail.com or even accounts.google.com to sign in. This didn't appear correct, so have just got off a Zoom call with Impero support who had seen this come up elsewhere recently and may be pertinent to how you block access to YouTube. It may also have an effect when filtering with other products such as Smoothwall. I had hunted around the google login page's source to spot any reference to youtube with no luck, but Impero directed me to the Website Visited log and it showed this! I'm just checking our Smoothwall now, but it might be worth a check over if you've had similar issues when limiting access to Youtube.

Just asked our AV supplier if they could get hold of any older units for this reason - they've come straight back to me to say that all their bundles come with the OPS-A2 unit for this exact reason. Could be a potential life saver!