synaesthesia

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

Strange one, wondering if the hive mind might have any insights! We have a HP Elitedesk 800 USFF desktop which started exhibiting odd behaviour starting a couple of weeks ago. Presented automatic repair screen on reboot, and that happened out of the blue with no damage or nincompoopery from students. Brought the machine to my office to investigate, decided it was likely an SSD issue so swapped it out (NVME), rebuilt and it was happy. For a day. This was last week, but the joys of staff only reporting things days down the line meant I only noticed today when I went in for something else. Swore and brought it back up to my office. HP diagnostics all pass with flying colours. I check the CCTV in the room to see if someone was messing with it. Nope. But I do notice it turning itself on at 01:20 the first morning it presented the issue after my initial fix. Unprompted, no rodents treading on keys to wake it up, no other machines in the room (all identical) doing anything similar and unlikely to be power supply related as I also replaced it as part of caution the first time around. Nothing in BIOS is screaming out to me - no remote management options like IME, no scheduled power on, nothing. Only thing capable of waking on LAN (on purpose) is Impero and that didn't do it. The only thing I can think of is the possibility it might be on someone's Intune or other MDM still, as it was bought as a refurb. Waking on LAN shouldn't present any problems like the auto-repair regardless, but maybe forced remote wipe commands? I'm clearly clutching at straws! Any cunning insights welcome!

DPIA for us was quite simple, very nearly a mirror copy of Impero as it works in very much the same way. Only real difference is that the data is then going external and processed by said external company, so the risk levels rise appropriately. Not unlike an MSP who might support a school remotely perhaps even outside of an IT scope - data protection for example. Full transparency, this is the first real issue we've had with Monitor. We had previous problems relating to integrations but support was always spot on and it got resolved quickly, and even as a non safeguarding person, I think it's worth every penny. @tom_newton - it took me too long to wonder why you're trying to avoid capturing 3.1415926.... Been dealing with GDPR this morning too so it shouldn't have been difficult to understand!

Ah that's good to know, thanks. I wasn't sure if I needed to speak to CPOMS or Smoothwall, so raised a case on both sides just to cover all bases. (Half expected it to be something CPOMS needed to do to pull the correct field). For the time being we're having to get them to log into Monitor and check manually, unfortunately another time-taking step for their ever increasing workloads I'm still quite in awe at how Monitor works in terms of man-power so on the assumption that staffing might be an issue on top of workload. Have always said that without Monitor we'd need to have a full time member of staff on safeguarding.

Is anyone else getting large delays on reports from Smoothwall Monitor? Up until last month the longest delay we ever had on any report was end of the same day. Over the last couple of weeks, we've literally had a week's delay on one report, 5 days on another, 2 days on another. For such an expensive service, this seems to be very problematic. Their reasoning so far has been "it wasn't relating to a child and wasn't a high priority event at only a level 3", however the others were relating to children. Also only level 3, but I don't hold out much hope for their triaging recently. Had quite a few reports come in at level 2 that should have been 3 and therefore automatically going through to CPOMS. Also hitting another issue I'm raising with them regarding the integration - when it does go to CPOMS it only shows the time and date of when the event was raised, not when it actually happened. Our DSL felt silly going stomping into a classroom to find the student involved not anywhere near a computer and hasn't been for 2 days!

If you've had the email, you're eligible. You will need to liaise with your PFI provider and they may need to be involved from the first webinar stage - they may also be hands off however that's unlikely as it will nearly always need their input. Some PFI places won't let schools staple something to the wall let along hang an AP or drill a hole.

Is said PDF not provided with all the necessary information already present? What would the exam word processor do to help that, surely it'd be entirely defunct? (aware this is Pearson we're dealing with, so anything from that company is about as trustworthy as a balaclava'd man running towards you with a machete)

Sorry, that made me snort fanta out of my nose. Entirely missing the point of PDF files!

Seems to be a fair bit of leaning on it being a Virgin issue when no other sites on Virgin backbones are struggling. Wonder if it's therefore specifically the NNI Virgin put in place linking their infrastructure to Talk Straights and also assume therefore that TS customers not on Virgin backbones are unaffected.

Took ours out of commission a couple of years ago but I kept one along with the modules just in case. Ol' Reliable!

Anyone having issues today? Neither of their websites work.

Have you spoken to Paxton? Interested in how they have handled (pun sort of intended, sorry) this. I have also been looking at these recently for any possible retrofits but likely to stick with old fashioned maglocks and paxton readers. I would prefer a robust solution relying on locking the door rather than a bargeable magnet which either rips the door off the frame or the mag off the frame, depending on how well they were fitted

Still have to be careful, could they be individually identifiable? I mean, many of us would be able to pick out at least half of these:

Where do those AI generated images come from? Amalgamations of images they've already chewed - for all I know, my face has already been consumed and spat out in some amalgamation of big footed balding fat bloke Prospectus' could look rather crap going forward. Of course this isn't a ban - it's be more careful, monitor more often but even then I wonder what's the point - once that image has gone onto the internet, it's there forever even after you've expunged it from your own website.

Yup, said this to our DSL earlier. Schools unable to use images of our entire clientbase (ugh, sorry!) in any promotion because some ***** keep pulling stunts like this. Sick people. Unfortunately inevitable I suppose with AI as it is

See if you can pick up some Ryzen Pro USFF machines - HP, Dell or Lenovo. Enough grunt in the APU to run Premiere Pro quite easily - although frankly most modern CPUs will despite adobe telling you to go buy Quadros and enough RAM to need to remortgage part of the school buildings.

The others are identical! Well, with the exception of the new one we bought with our first SIA install which is a 10th gen. And apologies for the word-worm It only popped in thanks to watching one of my favourite episodes of Red Dwarf the night before. Tim Spall!

This was a cracking watch, highly underrated.