synaesthesia

Hah, nope - my own tried & tested kit in office. So far though, *touches wood* the PC Poltergeist doesn't appear to have struck since it got put back...

Oooh yes. If done badly they can be a proper chain around the neck. A previous SBM here thought it was a great idea to lease our phone system including the handsets themselves. With no exagguration, the cost of the lease for one quarter (3 months) of this 5 year agreement was more than it is costing us to procure a new cloud hosted 3CX system, years license, installation/setup fees and SIP rentals altogether. If we add in the cost of new handsets (which we are thankfully not needing to do) it would have been about £100 more than that single quarterly payment. 80 phones. Sometimes it's good to spread the payments or shift the balance sheets around a bit - just not when they're doing it knowing it's not going to be their problem in a few months! Same with our Inventry - expensive enough on it's own, but the lease (same company) was diabolical. Now say that word how Billy Butcher says it. One year of Inventry lease not including the actual licensing for Inventry itself, paid for 3 years of SignInApp, the MIS integration, a brand new iPad, stand, the RFID reader thing and still enough spare to buy another iPad if we so wished.

Slightly worrying, especially as certain conditions push us towards the cloud filter even with some on site devices and particularly if using GCPW for google schools.

Oooh, I'll have a look into that. I take anything Gemini says with a pinch of salt, even when it is regarding Google's own products - ironically it seems to be more accurate at feeding me 365 information than Google stuff! Google's own support were aware of it being a possible issue but were not forthcoming with any best practices, so this is definitely worth putting some time into. Particularly considering how difficult it is to match up project ID's with the entirely different ID it generates for oauth requests - that's one thing Gemini could do better than Google's own support though!

Yes, this was a nightmare - especially as the vast majority of people just make the script from a copy & paste job, click save and off they go. Nearly always called "Untitled Project" - so imagine the fun when I removed permissions for every single Untitled Project for the trust! (We asked them to rename them, with instructions, first). It's a royal pain in the bum for existing/long standard tenants It doesn't of course mean that's the only problem, there's nothing stopping a bad actor from calling their dodgy script "Completely_Normal_MIS_Sync_Project_Honest.json" I'm not sure how widespread this particular issue is, it feels sort of targeted in our case but no real way of knowing and there isn't a huge amount in the wild when searching for it!

Hi, the Edugeek Edit announcement this morning made me think I should pop this post up further to an issue I mentioned before half term, with regards to App Scripts. If you use Google Workspace, or at least enough to make use of App Scripts and linked systems (Google Cloud Projects and of course the linked OAuth APIs) please note that app scripts are just as, if not more dangerous than the old Excel Macros we spent years worrying about, and default settings from Google are not enough to prevent attacks. By default, all "internally created" app scripts are given full trust, and are able to request access to any oauth API without further checking. This hit us by means of student accounts being compromised, a script uploaded to their Drive (therefore "internal") and executed, giving permission for anonymous actors to use their account without authorisation as a spam relay. We were lucky - the very same script could be easily amended by someone with limited knowledge to gain access to any API including Drive, Classrooms or more. Obviously with staff accounts or anything with higher privileges this type of attack should be pretty much stopped in it's tracks thanks to MFA, but with students this isn't quite so easy. Not to say MFA is infallible, as it isn't. It's therefore imperative to lock permissions down in Workspace admin. This isn't just about attacks either, it also involves good practice with staff and the prevalence of "Sign in with Google" prompts. Also by default, anyone over 18 can visit a website, think "ooooh this looks nice", clicks "Sign in with Google", logs in with their school account and before you know it, that member of SLT has granted access to TheirFavouriteAdultEntertainmentSitewithDodgyPeopleOnTheSide.com for Email, Drive and Limited Google Admin because they just so happened to have access to reset student and staff passwords and didn't think twice about the permissions they were granting. So as part of the same settings, it's very good practice to lock these all down. Remove the automatic trust of local scripts. Remove the ability for students to click "Log in with Google" on anything. If they should have that, you'd have already seen the DPIA or notified that it's been cleared, along with the site and you've already set up permissions. Remove the ability to staff to allow any more than basic access to Log in with Google but allow them to request permission. So when they sign up for TeacherResources.com, pay for it themselves, don't fill out a DPIA or do the necessary checks and come to you to ask why it isn't working, you now have a traceable record to hand to their line manager and Finance Plus of course you then have an auditable log of what services have access to what data. Hopefully this is of some help to people!

This. I'm torn - we go through more HDMI cables than a hungry chinchilla hankering after it's owners high end AV system but the wireless on our prometheans is so flaky and finicky to use The viewsonics are a bit better for this but still a bit finicky compared to "plug and play" - and the Microsoft adapters were as close to plug and play as it was possible to get for wireless!

Ah, cheers - not worried about the support for these, reliability concerns me though particularly as I was looking at 2nd hand units. Are they just stopping working or is it physical connection issues such as HDMI connectors failing please?

It can differ a bit depending on the tech you're using - as a Google school, we have limited root drives for each department where only IT and the curriculum leader(s) for that dept have manager access and can create folders, view files internally etc. Google is limited with permissions, so you can't give everyone view permission at the root but lock down further folders like you can with on site or Sharepoint. Once that's done, each department is pretty much left to it with this in mind so if they have a HoD folder noone else should have access to, they know to store that in the root and add permissions accordingly. We give guidance and it would be nice to keep it as a standard, but we always ended up with so many exceptions "X needs it for Y" that the "standard" in fact became the outlier - mostly as one size never actually fits all, no matter what the government/DfE would like schools to believe

Consumer TV's are cheaper until someone pokes one too hard or a kid throws an empty water bottle at it. One replacement and suddenly the £1000 properly fitted, properly specced panel with all the necessaries built in is already better value for money - especially when cost savings are so blunt that people go for built-to-fail stuff like Hisense or Vestel based rebadges (wharfedale, some sharp and toshiba, blaupunkt etc). Not a great strategy. Quick stopgap fix by all means, but no solution there. If there's nothing built into the panels you have already I always found the MS ones easiest by far, is there a particular reason you're moving away from them? I haven't looked for a long time but the MS ones we have are a great fallback and have been eyeballing some cheap 2nd hand to make up numbers where the panels are older or have faffy tech (promethean!)

Blimey, blast from the past. And indeed, with everything being cloud based, things like this wouldn't really have much of a place left unfortunately. Gone the way of VPNing in to school to run a report, VLEs and RM Easilink

They're not going to need any more than 30watts - if you really still need to use them, you can get in-wall mounted amps from Vision relatively cheap or amazon special for under 20 quid! Edit: Eek, they weren't this expensive when I last bought them! https://www.jp-uk.co.uk/sound-systems/amplifiers/vision-techconnect-tc3-amp-amplifier.html El Cheapos : https://www.amazon.co.uk/XRLUC-Amplifier-Channel-Powerful-Streaming/dp/B0D623QCGQ

Our digital signage runs on old laptops - Win 11 LTSC. With latest updates up to May 2026 "26H1" the install footprint is 43GB. Thats the base LTSC image and Chrome only with no other apps, doing something that can be done (and I used to do) on Windows 10 LTSC on the Intel ComputeSticks which I think were 2GB ram and 32GB storage.

Yeah, anything like that should either be in WEEE or have ChromeOS Flex installed, then they'll last until they're either physically destroyed or out of support with Google. But as things are price-wise it's easy to understand why people are scraping the barrels. I'm absolutely in awe of the fact (negatively) that windows 11 needs a) so much space and b) so much bloody RAM. Take away the AI nonsense and ensh**ification of the OS and browsers, even with security updates in mind, and 4GB should still be a usable amount of RAM. The fact that since the last round of updates all our 8GB staff laptops are HORRID to use is absolute evidence of the ensh**ification and it'll be a cold day in hell before I'm bulk buying RAM to get around the laziness and horridness of this system. I think turning staff devices into Chrome would be an easier sell to SLT at the moment!

Exactly - no clear plan for what they're going to be used for is a plan for failure. It's clear they didn't because they're rushing to hand them back at the end of the lease.

Hilariously bad. It'd be funny if it wasn't ultimately our money. Badly thought out hairbrained schemes like 1:1 provision of iPads and no plan for them. This is what shiny-shiny syndrome does.

Yes, it's very nasty with HTTPS inspection - I couldn't ever get it to work, only would when inspection was removed.

It's usually about midday when I get to these, when the lack of catching kicks in and I need something to keep my mind active and keep up the pretence of patience But yes, there's always coffee involved!

Oooh think I remember that one. Adamant and Sorin from electronicsrepairschool make up much of my Sunday viewing when I'm fishing (and clearly not catching!)

Ooh cheers, will do; I know the stuff from AliExpress tends to come sans-documentation (or as good as) so good to know!

I sh** you not, I have one winging it's way to me from China as I type this Not for work specifically but it's being delivered here (hopefully) so you never know!

Yeah, done the whole shebang there including shorting the battery connectors while hitting power button (power disconnected) for 30 seconds to clear. Currently attempting to flash it - I said I had done that but I was clearly thinking of another machine, it's refusing to do so. I might be tempted to desolder & replace the BIOS chip as I have a dead motherboard for one of these

Thanks Tom, much appreciated. I don't think our DSL's appreciated the initial reply from our support call 2 days ago as it was a bit dismissive but the last one plus your reassurance has them happy

Bum, nope not that. Battery is fine but still thinking along those lines perhaps - damaged BIOS maybe. Been flashed to latest version already. Investigation continues!

Unfortunately as it's dead I can't see that, but I'm inclined to suspect you might be right about the battery - exported the event logs and seeing time drifts of around half an hour every couple of hours. Cheers