synaesthesia

Lenovo QC these days is absolutely awful. We've just had a load of 100e chromebooks and they're OK, but the general quality of the devices & the service is just awful Think I'd rather go Acer these days, and that's saying something!

See above - every single 2power one I have is looking like they've had a few too many mince pies. I would avoid 2power like the plague.

Necrothread, for awareness. every single 2power battery device we have is being written off These are from refurbished laptops with new 2power batteries, only 2 years old. There is an extreme fire risk.

Yeah, I did wonder about the FttP but any extra cost will be prohibitive, especially when it's only a short term solution. Looked at just getting a data sim and our own router but as even the basic ones seem to be a few hundred pounds, it was actually cheaper to get something in at 30 a month for 12 months. Personally I'd have been far happier having a competent provider in the first place! (and it would have more than likely been @Wave9_Lee )

Hi, I'm investigating backup internet connectivity for our site. Very limited budget and physical connectivity is either ADSL grade "broadband" at a max of 37Mbps or leased line options at £hellofalot. An ideal solution would be 5G - we have decent connectivity here for that, however looking at some options is confusing. Now on paper this solution seems perfect: https://business.ee.co.uk/mobile-broadband/smart-5g-hub/ Business grade, unlimited data, 4/5G, would be easy enough to plug into smoothwall to manually fail over if/when needed. Obviously some things will need taking care of like telephony but that's easy. My question relates to the terms and conditions these people seem to lay out - this is unlimited, but at several points in the T&C it states that even for unlimited connection after "using your full speed allowance you will be capped to 0.5Mbps" as well as "We deem anything over 600GB per month excessive and may move you to a more appropriate contract". Neither sits well with the term unlimited for me, especially for a business connection. I don't for one moment expect we'll ever exceed 600GB - our typical month is around 2TB and if our leased line drops for multiple days we should still be OK. But I would still like to check we're not going to be falling foul of anything else! Has anyone else gone down this route and considered these issues, or am I overthinking it?

As cables get thicker, the worse they get to terminate! For Cat6/6a, only use keystone patch panels and for RJ45 the pass/crimp through connectors are the easiest. Still fiddly, but that's always part and parcel. Run each cable through your finger and something smooth like a pen to straighten them before getting them in the right order.

Am I being cynical, or does this feel like an insurance job? I mean I don't know how it works in this industry, but they might as well have soaked their house in petrol, lit a match and gone "Oops, what a shame, I wonder how much we'll get"...

My last school went down the bazooka for a fly approach with Avigilon. Far better, fully compatible, but I'm 100% certain you could do the same for less. Popularly mentioned is BlueIris although not sure how well that scales up to larger deployments.

Ditto for IVMS - it's awful, but less awful than trying to get browser version to behave short of using IE Mode. Make them a user with limited access. We have a standalone desktop for CCTV purposes but getting IVMS put on certain machines. Hikvision is absolutely fine (security-wise) when installed by someone competent and the cameras are head and shoulders over everything else remotely near their price range. Just a shame the software is poor

I wasn't directly comparing - I like Edulink for a start

It's probably hosted on every schools SIMS server via IIS6...

Saw this and indeed such sad news. A proper all round human being and he made the time to speak to everyone!

It does make you wonder, if that's what £40m buys you when Edulink is a comparatively tiny outfit, competing with and beating most similar providers and they all work better than SIMS's own offerings. Frankly SIMS might just do better to feed a couple of parameters into chatGPT and let AI do the work for them. Cost them under a tenner, and a rough saving of £39,999,90!

Not acceptable IMO - biggest issue being no proper containment and the bend right on the edge of the roof - movement=friction=failure.

I have questions - can I assume this is prior to completion?

Are there any decent options for remoting into a MAC? The built in VNC is diabolical to use, akin to using ISDN regardless of how bad the settings are made (apparently this is down to Apple's "interesting" implementation of TCP). I read a little about xRDP but the installation process for that looks long and painful, and most of it is based on files no longer available. Mac OS Sonoma on a 2012 MBP if that matters.

I'm still highly irritated the original RDR hasn't been made available for proper computers

Wire baskets with handles; simple, cheap, easy to find the right size and can be stackable.

No, its a dedicated app (TrilbyTV) which is cloud based. There's versions for android etc which I'd like to do, just a shame the displays aren't smart which would make it lovely and easy!

No it's a good thought, but shouldn't be an issue internally at least - one thing I've done to rule that out is to just slam a switch between the the mac and the iGit to no avail. It might even be old mac/newer macOS syndrome (mid 2012 ***pbook pro, 2017 OS) but other folks with the same issues are using up to date stuff. And as expensive as it is to change out the signage solution, it's probably cheaper to replace all the signage appleTV's with androids/smart TVs than to buy a recent Mac

3rd party app which again I'd rather didn't exist, but it works and don't have the means to replace. I've gone simple with my configurator too, even just as far as only setting up wifi settings & management addresses but they just constantly time out whether on ethernet or wifi

I could quite easily create an essay about how unintuitive, unreliable and generally poor the entire Apple ecosystem is outside of a consumer environment. I've made a further 24 swear words out of Apple related kit and software in the last 3 days alone. I do not and likely never will be able to understand how people can possibly advocate the use of this equipment in education; I rank them below £40 Android tablets of spurious manufacter in terms of reliability and usability. So, rant out of the way, I've been attempting to sanitise and manage what we have on site. A fair few iPads and Apple TVs; more than the likes of Mosyle will handle on free licensing but not enough to warrant spending money on an MDM, but JamF is looking tempting. Until then, we have a **apbook on Monterey and Configurator to do what we need alongside ASM. I've just given up on the TVs. They "should" be manageable, but it just doesn't work. Googling and scrolling through pages of threads about how difficult it is has given me a migraine, with hundreds of people having the same problems; not pairing, not preparing, blueprints not applying. They all have the same problem, and the fixes some have found only apply if you're hopping on one leg during a blue moon singing the opera song from the Fifth Element. But Apple's are so easy. Has anyone got real world experience managing apple TV's in this manner? They should never have been bought for their purpose here (signage), but it's what we have. They're the 4K models with no physically connectivity other than ethernet, hdmi and power. I've given up for now and starting to attempt the iPads, which I have done before but no doubt will find a million foibles and workarounds to make the simple even slightly feasible.

Definitely going to be a larger, different topic. IMO the more you need an MSP, the less value they bring. So if you only *need* someone for a day or so, they're probably better value for money than someone on site, but if you need someone for multiple days and have ongoing projects, an MSP is more than likely a waste of money.

Down that route I'd probably suggest the nothing phone 2 but unsure how good the camera is in comparison

Used lots of times - local company, always plenty of stock and expertise in hand and very quick turnaround on parts and warrantys if needed.