mikes

We whitelisted all the URL's in that page but still had problems with the sign in, or certain Google apps not working - I will test again and see what happens edit - in the new Devices/Browsers settings section of Google Admin there are a billion new settings but can't see one for whitelisting only of sites?

So what happens with all these software providers that made us use WONDE under the understanding it was a free service? We paid for e.g. some maths software, that forced us to install the WONDE data sync client, as part of this maths software, and now we are being charged a yearly fee? Surely the software providers should be handling that?

SIMSLOAD sometimes works but for us mostly it does not work. Our SIMS server is upgraded by our LEA and they don't use SOLUS or either that or we have to pay a huge fee to use it, I ended up writing a batch file that called Simsapplicationsetup, AMpark and manual setups with the silent switch, then I have to run that via Impero to upgrade stations. It's a massive pain in the backside but before that the way our school upgraded SIMS was to walk to each machine and manually run SIMSinst every upgrade!! Our new head is inquiring about automatic updates, does everyone have to pay for SOLUS separately to SIMS ?? how much does it cost?

Our head of IT is looking to get an apprentice in but it would have to be on site 5 days a week. And as we are in rural Wales I cannot see anyone wanting to be in a school 5 days a week doing IT monkeywork for an apprentices wage. For a remote job I'd look at a big corporation, a lot of my friends worked in Admiral and they are now mostly WFH.

So if I work from home would I be able to commute in one of these?

Yeah I'll definitely get some netting up. Don't think I can handle aversion therapy just yet the thought of those spooky eyes and that wriggling body holy hell ! It's cooling down a bit though so that's some relief. I knew the weather would get very wet and miserable this week, because this week is when we have our Sports Day and without fail it always rains on our sports day!

Yeah I think they are decommissioning fibre links now. We changed our broadband and they would only sell us fibre to the prem packages, so we had the new fibre box installed in our house. Not that I'm bothered it is a better link after all. I read the copper links are being decommissioned or abandoned in 2024. As for me I've cut down on sweets and junk food, probably a good thing for the lil belly I've got developing anyway

I had one of the worst nights of my life Wednesday/Thursday, I am terrified of moths and arthropods in general, anyway my window was open at about midnight it was so hot. I turned on my bedroom light in order to tidy up some things, then I hear a ruffling noise. A big moth had flown in, but then I saw a 2nd one fly in, in the space of 5 minutes over 10 massive moths had come in and were flying about anywhere. I was in the corner of my room and the door was shut and there was a big one on it, so I was afraid to go near it and was waiting for it to move. Then when the others flew in a few of them took to dive bombing me flying right at me, in my hair, I've never been frozen in terror before but man it was awful. Yes it's kind of pathetic to be scared of harmless moths but they just look unnatural to me. Horrible. Anyway I got out, got some RAID, sprayed it and had to wait for them to slowly die then I could rip all my furniture apart getting each one out one by one. I was stood in my room while the gas took hold and my room sounded alive with just flapping and buzzing sounds it was a nightmare. Took me until almost 3am to kill them all and to ensure there wasn't one left somewhere. Anyway I can no longer open my window so I have a little USB fan but it doesn't do much, I hope this summer isn't going to be as stuffy as last year but already it's almost gotten there and we're not even in july yet. Where those moths came from so quick, it must be the tree outside, does Elon Musk still sell that flamethrower thing?

Honestly when I see the local authority IT support being able to work comfortably in their homes with daytime TV on and I'm stuck in a cold gray office with kids banging the door every 10 minutes I often wonder WTF am I doing here???

We ran an exam in 2 rooms with about 40 students for our Digital Technology exam so far they seemed to have uploaded OK, had one issue with a dodgy Ethernet port on one computer so it wasn't showing as uploaded for that student but once I swapped ports it showed as uploaded. Problem is with scheduling these computer exams - they had lessons in before the GSCE so I had 10 minutes to get 2 rooms set up for this GSCE!! so we had 1 kid with a spacebar that was dodgy because the kids love pulling the metal bars out, and the room was very stuffy, a paper exam in the hall would be much better IMO. But I guess you'd have to compare results from schools doing it on computer and schools doing it on paper to find out. But if they really do work better on computer isn't that unfair to pupils whose schools make them do the exam on paper???

Wouldn't society moving to a 4 day week cut down a lot of pollution? Automation and computers were supposed to give us a better standard of life (see science fiction in the 50's predicting a 20 hour work week) yet we are still being driven like slaves. I'm not saying a 4 day week would cut down 20% of pollution but it would help ?

We were licensed to use Autodesk Professional 2023 until Oct 2023, but I got an e-mail the other week saying our license was due to expire at the end of the month (May? I got the e-mail on the 26th) and I needed to renew. I've renewed the license which is until Oct 2024, but haven't imported it yet as the software still seems to work and I don't want to mess with it yet. When our Professional 2022 license expired I could not get a new one for the life of me, it would only let me generate one for Pro 2023 - so I had to waste days manually installing it on 70+ computers as the deployment wouldn't work via SCCM or other methods I tried. A real pain but at least I have a license until late 2024 now.

It wouldn't let us use the HTML delivery method, we are with the WJEC however. The WJEC specifically said we have to use the Windows client we can't use the HTML one, I guess the WJEC haven't set it up yet? Speaking of the client, we are trying to push the MSI out with SCCM using the /QN silent installer - it works fine if the machines don't have the older version of Surpass installed - but if we try to deploy it to a machine that has last years version - it won't overwrite it?? and so the old version gets stuck in the stupid update loop. Does anyone know if there is a fix?

Yeah that's the thing, if it wasn't mandatory (which it will never be) - I can't see a school or even a business willing to pay £30 an hour for an IT Tech when they can get away with paying £8.50 an hour for someone straight out of college. Even if that lower paid technician is a clown and costs them a lot more than the £30 an hour tech's wage ever would - PHB's don't think that way and will still pat themselves on the back for saving the wage money.

Hi we are using the software and it's working great, I have a question however - we have really bad LEA wireless in the school and it goes down more often than it should - it hasn't gone down during an exam yet, but I've set the software ATM to write to the Exam User's network drive N:\. My Question is - if the wireless goes down and the network share is gone, will it write a copy of the students work locally anywhere? I see in the config it says DefaultBackupPath is All Users \ Application Data - so if the network goes down halfway through a kids exam, would it then save it locally to this location so the student won't lose his exam? I know word keeps temporary files but unfortunately if the user quits Word, even if there is an error saving, if Word is quit then the temporary backup files are wiped. My worry was a kid trying to save, getting a network path error, but closing the software and it wiping the backup file thinking it's no longer needed. Bit of an awkward Q but it's always stressful for me when kids sit an exam and I'm waiting for our wireless to go down !

yeah we had issues with presenter mode cutting out projector output, even if the laptop was on duplicate. MS trying to be clever for their own good yet again... when a user would close powerpoint the HDMI output would shut off and the user would need to re-enable HDMI out again. Dumb.

I bought a Hisense 55" TV from Amazon - with a debit card not credit card, it arrived OK but when I turned it on it had odd faint horizontal lines through the display, 2 days later it died. I eventually got my money back but it took almost 2 months and I was without a good monitor the whole time (I use a large TV / monitor as my main PC display as my eyesight isn't too good, I bought it to replace an Acer 48.5" monitor that died 2 weeks after warranty). The only way I could contact Amazon support was over some chat, then 4 days later I got a call from a repair company, they had a slot 2 weeks later to pick it up for repairs. They pick it up and 2 weeks later they ring me back and say it can't be fixed and they'll return it, and I need to contact Amazon. 2 weeks later I get the broken unit back and a code I can use with Amazon to get them to pick it up. 2 weeks later they pick it up and I get my money back. So I did get my money back eventually but wasted 2 months without a good display. And the comms was awful so I had no idea what was going on half the time. IMO buying expensive items off amazon is a total gamble, it's good for cheap tat only. I bought one from a local curries after getting my money back, that failed about 14 months in but at least they managed to get it fixed in about 10 days.

I have unreliable signal on an old phone, usually by the time my phone starts vibrating and actually allows me to answer the call, the person phoning has actually been waiting 7 - 8 seconds and usually hangs up before I can answer. Probably my older phone rather than Vodafone themselves. But the Alert came through basically dead on 3PM. I'd forgotten it was coming and it did frighten me a bit! That sound you usually hear in disaster movies or video games! (well I guess the sound does what it is designed to do!)

Amazing to watch. If I ever win the lotto big, I promise in 10 years time I'll give any takers here a free ride on one of Elon's Starships around the Earth, or where-ever they may be going in 10 years time. Any takers?

If they implement forced USB-C on laptops they need to enforce a mandatory 10 year warranty on them. Too many USB-C charging ports have failed, and no they can't blame user error, our last circular charging ports with the same staff we had 1 failure in 7 years due to a drop down 2 flights of stairs, now with USB-C we have 15+ failures in 3 years? Or - each USB-C charging port is on its own daugherboard easily replaced. BTW are USB-C ports meant to be interchangable or not? I had a staff member who has a smaller laptop than normal buit it's USB-C. Her charger wasn't working so I plugged one I had for the 15" laptops into the USB-C port. Anyway smoke came out and it stank of a burnt out chip. But the laptop still works luckily there's a 2nd USB-C port that still works fine, even with the different charger? I wonder if the USB-C port is so fragile it's just that easily damaged by staff who move 5 times a day hence it's a very poor design IMO.

Looks to me like they might have phished one user and have exfiltrated what that user was doing - on the Vice Society and other ransomware gangs websites, if you go onto their school data a lot of it is just a phish of one user - they'll post that user's e-mails, documents, and any shared drives they may have access to - but it's obvious they have only phished one user as there is no list of user home folders etc on their darkweb sites. Of course even a phish of just 1 user can be devastating if our CP person got hit it would maybe reach Welsh national news! It's my worst nightmare worse than having a car accident!

Sorry I can't remember 100% but I think I end up updating it manually using a batch file and Impero to run the installer silently across all machines. It's a massive kludge but it's what I've been doing for now. Been a while since I updated it as I remember last time it needed something to do with the Opera browser?

Any reason why they only accept the over 60 Welsh Concessionary bus pass? I had the under 60 version for an epileptic episode and it had my photo on it and tbh it looked identical to my mothers over 60 one ??? BTW we didn't get that letter I only heard about this last night at a family dinner. No politicial opinions but I wouldn't be suprised if we all get a government electronic user account/ID thing before long, and we could use it to securely vote on local issues too (e.g. you could log in to your Local Authority section and see votes about new plans they might have). A more direct or e-democracy, isn't there already a country that does something similar?

It's a good idea but the objection about secret phones is a good one (people in abusive relationships may have hidden phones as a lifeline to friends and family and if this alarm reveals one, it could be bad). Thankfully this seems to be well publicised and you can turn your phone off at the specified time to avoid it. Wonder if they'll end up making a silent less intrusive bulletin board you can check when you want, for notices of e.g. missing people like an electronic version of the US Amber Alert ??

Nope, I'll have a bunch in the morning, some needing a charger (forgot to charge mine at home), others left theres at home, sometimes a teacher needs 3 to cover isolation... it's a real nightmare especially with no automated method of knowing who has signed into exactly what device due to our peculiar welsh govt enrolment system. Am working on a system asap but stage 1 of that is me laser engraving a MASSIVE number into the front lid of the chromebook and finding out a way of tracking when they are logged on off-site and exactly what they are doing when logged on at home. Plus getting each devices MAC address so I can check which AP they are connected to. During covid we had a nightmare with ones we had loaned out, the member of staff responsible for tracking up on them left jobs (I bet the stress of doing it contributed) and we had a nightmare getting some back. Does anyone know if there's a fiddle for resetting them? We disabled guest accounts and set forced re-enrol so if you powerwash them, or even re-install the OS via USB, they should still re-enroll. So in theory the chromebooks should be useless when we disable the school account as they can no longer log on. But so many didn't come back I am convinced there must be a hack for them to restore them to standard use. I wonder if there's a hacked USB OS you can use to factory reset and re-install a hacked version out there. I really think schools shouldn't go the Trolley/General Loan method. They should issue each pupil a Chromebook, and that Chromebook is then there responsibility. If they don't have a Chromebook or a Charger, then it is on them and they can provide collateral for a temporary replacement if needed.