mikes

Wow We have over 200 100e 2nd gen and every single one has worked flawlessly. I'm having massive problems with the Windows laptops the e590's USB-C charging port has failed on over 10 of them (in under 3 years of use) meaning the motherboard needs replacing. Also E14's 5 out of 30 had faulty keyboards out of the box

Our requester specifically requested their name in many ways, e.g. Mickey Old Mouse, Mickey Mouse, M Mouse, MM, MOM, Mr Mouse, Mick... Problem was the MOM 3 letter "staff code" they use quite common, was also a common Welsh word, and there were a bunch of e-mails in Welsh I couldn't understand. I dumped them all and deleted the ones that obviously had nothing to do with the staff member (there was another staff member with the same name acronym e.g. Marvin Older Martian), going through them one by one, which took hours. Anything at all that mentioned her name, or the Welsh ones where I wasn't so sure, I left in, the HM and DPO had to go through each e-mail of which there were thousands, and sort it out. Still it's a good incentive now to set our e-mail retention to just 1 year, maybe even 6 months, this summer. But it seems anyone with a bone to pick can file these SAR's just to waste school time. This person requested a SAR then requested another one with slightly different parameters, I don't know why the staff member left but this thing seemed to be designed to waste our time because I never saw anything worth mentioning in there. If you left on unhappy terms right when you know the DPO and management will be super busy with exams you could file these 30 day SAR's knowing how much work it will cause them?

Ours worked OK, all of them showing as finished. Not sure if I need to press "upload responses" on them or if that is only for offline tests?? And yeah I wish there was a PIN you could put in that gave you a test exam, I'm sure they could program in some autogenerated mock test just to test if the damn software works. The way it is now you have to a) pray that when the kids sit down it will accept their keycodes, and b) when the kids sit there for 2 hours solid typing, it actually uploads the results to the server.. it's not a pleasant experience. Also we had the paper exams but the PE dept chose to do it on computer instead of using the paper exams. Baffling to me why on Earth would you choose to do it on computer and add all that extra worry and confusion for the students, when they could sit in a nice quieter cooler room and do it on paper?

we are in the middle of an exam now.... seems OK so far

We are having an exam today so will see what happens

Or could it be...

One big problem with BTC as a means of exchange is the TX fees and the fact that it takes ages. They proposed the Lightning Network as a fix for this but that never took off. Meaning you have to pay from 5p to £2 to get your transfer confirmed, and it could take 5 minutes upto 4 hours. You can put in for a free transfer but that might take days. So you could never walk into Burger King, pay for a burger with bitcoin and leave in 3 minutes, as you'd have to either pay a £2 transfer fee on a 99p burger to get a 10 min confirm, or wait 3 hours for a confirmation before you can leave. There are other coins with much shorter TX fees/times but they haven't really caught on. So BTC atm is half a speculative investment, and half a useful means of paying people who banks do not want to deal with. It's still a great idea, the ability to send actual money over the Internet just like an e-mail, without it having to go through banks; hence no worries about your bank account and personal details being exposed, and you can send to somebody in the slums of Delhi just as easy as your mother in the next town over. But for it to be really useful it needs to transfer in seconds and TX fees need to be at most a few pence. And that's also not mentioning volatility it isn't great being paid a monthly salary of £1500 in BTC only for it to be worth £1200 the next week.

Is this software free or does it require a license? Can't find any purchase info but the software deffo looks retail quality!

We just had an inspector from the exam board show up, he was very unhappy with our physical storage and other things that aren't my problem, but with regards to the laptops he only asked 1 question / had 1 problem - he said the pupils using the laptops were sat too close to other students, meaning the noise of them typing will be distracting. That was something I hadn't even considered. He didn't ask any questions about the laptops config (locked down exam accounts via GPO, exam saved locally + network disabled)

yeah IMO that is the way to play with crypto, put in a few quid and you might get lucky. My mate put £20 into Dogecoin, I thought it was a stupid memecoin and spent my £20 on snacks from tesco. He gained £500 and I gained about 3lbs in weight. I keep hearing about people taking out loans to invest in crypto and IMO that is just crazy.

I was tempted to buy £100 worth of Luna when it was at £0.01, but Binance disabled buying it "for my own protection". I cursed them thinking I didn't need their nanny state protection. But now Luna is at £0.0002 so I thank them for it now. I've never seen a coin crash so hard in such a small amount of time. People posting they had $200,000 in Luna and now they've lost it all. But then a lot of these are people who put in a few hundred quid and watched it soar to $200,000 - thinking they are rich - but let this be a lesson, until you cash out all you possess is a number on a screen!

I always just used the job description, Office-Rec Office-Repro Office-M4 but it did backfire when one particular individual saw their computer was called Office-PITA and asked "what is PITA ???" But then we are a not a massive comp and don't go through computers that often

We haven't gone fully cloud - the majority of our staff just use Google Classroom and so the kids submit work as attachments on the homework section and the staff recieve work that way. Only our IT dept really use the ability to go into student home folders and even then they barely use it. When I started here in 2008 staff had no access to student work, in 2012 or so I added a drive mapping for them but I think the vast majority of our staff have no idea what the drive map does, and before Google Classroom in 2020 was introduced, I'd often get a frantic phone call from a teacher "So and so student is off ill, and I need some work from their user area, can you get it for me!" being totally unaware they could just go into drive X:\ and get it themselves. But I think the YoE 17 YoE 18 etc structure was too confusing for them. Anyway are you planning on going fully cloud or could you just ease them into it? 5 years ago moving to the cloud / Google etc would have been unthinkable for us. Now it is what the majority of departments use and only IT and DT really use our on prem student fileserver any more.

I'm a big fan of GZdoom and doom wads, the actual Doom2.WAD is still commercial so you need a copy of Doom 2, although a great deal of community wads will support Freedooms WAD instead. Just played The Adventures of Square, if you like retro style shooters it's great fun. A good doom Megawad combining 32 levels, with a gameplay wad like Brutal Doom or the Doom 4 copy D4t, can be more fun and action packed than a lot of these modern shooters IMO. Plus I find for all the "graphical improvement" these new wargames have, they look so ugly, overcluttered, brown and just boring.

Same here, Twitter is basically a newsfeed for posting pictures of classwork / "feelgood" stuff. Youtube can be used to host videos the Drama club etc have made. (all vetted and cleared by SMT). We have a facebook account but its placeholder account that isn't really used. We do not communicate with parents with any social media, all comments are disabled, so the school would never communicate or answer any question from a parent on Twitter for example. In todays culture where you can get blasted for saying the wrong word, it just isn't worth it, all communications done with parents is in private via e-mail or letter; social media is purely a news bulletin for us. If a parent commented on Twitter about say their child being bullied, it wouldn't be appropriate for the school to reply to that parent on Twitter for everyone to see, especially when there might infact be a feud between another pupil who attends the school and their parent. It's basically so parents in our local area, they might see an item from a local business pop up in their feed, then they might see an item about year 8's doing fancy homework modelling castles come up on their feed. If a teacher has something good they want to show off they'll e-mail the business manager who will put it on the twitter. If we left comments enabled, the pupils would just post memes as a reply. The school learned that when the headmaster posted a short photo and message, only for a pupil (using their own name) to reply with a photoshopped in alteration with "snoop dogg" sunglasses and a particular kind of roll up cigarette in their mouth as a reply. Not sure about TikTok, I've never used it, I've seen a lot of innocent cute videos on there (pet rats) but from what I've seen of what the pupils use of it, they mostly use it to show fights, or booty shaking, so I'm a bit dubious about using TikTok to post exams revision. Imagine a Year 8 who doesn't really use social media, is a bit innocent and sheltered, and the school directs them to go onto TikTok to get their exam revision. They then scroll across a few videos after the exam revision is done and they see booty shaking. At least with Youtube you can set it so your page will only show what you have put there and there is a Youtube Kids mode as well.

Couldn't tell you about robot maids, but I could tell you about - prices rising by 25% and wages rising by 2.5%. Smartwatches/smart bands will eventually take over from smartphones, you'll have a wide, sleek, flexible band around your wrist, it might even have a lil projector on it so you can project things onto walls. But when you think about it, 2031 doesn't sound that long away. But man, thinking back, 2011 for me is HUGELY different to 2021/2022. I remember working in the school in 2011, we still had Windows XP, there was basically no remote access - now staff take working from home on the computer for granted. Back then working on the school network was like working on the school gym, there's no way you could do it at home. Electric cars were a joke, Elon Musk's talks about building a rocket to send astroauts into space was crazy billionaire talk we'd all heard before that we all thought would go nowhere. But we've had alot of maturing when it comes to computer power, if the same happens again things will be interesting. I wonder if ultimately speeds won't get much higher per sé, they'll just become much more efficient e.g. my desktop has a 6 core 4GHZ CPU, but it needs a big box and blocky cooler. In 2031 I might only have a 6 core 4.5GHZ CPU, but it'll fit around my wrist and will be powered by a thin flexible battery.

Makes me wonder if RedLetterMedia and the other youtube review sites might feel a bit bad now, recently they have put out youtube videos slating Bruce Willis's latest movies - he would do 3 or 4 of these low budget, rubbishy action/sci-fi movies - they had speculated medical issues might be to blame as Bruce would apparently turn up on set for 2 or 3 days during the entire film shoot, he would only do single takes, and it got to the stage where he had to be fed his lines through an earpiece - he couldn't even remember single lines. That was why in his recent films his acting comes of as, well, reading lines from a script - or just repeating what comes through an earpeace. It got to the stage where you would blatantly have a stand in running, jumping, shooting and fighting all shot in camera from behind - then it would cut to a frontal shot of an old Bruce, standing or sitting totally still, reading lines slowly like an old man at an eye exam. He'd get paid a large percentage of the budget, then the rest of the unknown new actors would finish the film proper. I guess the name was still a box office draw and Bruce really did work right up until he physically can't any more. Personally I think he should have retired a few years ago but that is just my opinion. Coming from someone who probably has Bruce in 2 or 3 of his top 10 films, I especially loved the Fifth Element. Really goes to show what time can do to a man.

Another post here, our brand new school built and planned by our local authority, has cameras in the toilet areas, although the toilet areas are just corridors perpendicular to the main corridors, all rows of cubicles, so anything you can see on the CCTV, you can see with your own eyes when you walk down the main school coridoors anyway. They could easily convert them to unisex toilets just by removing the "boys" and "girls" signs. I wouldn't be a fan of installing CCTV that can see "sensitive" areas and relying on software to block out these areas. In my experience the software can go wrong, or if the cameras are PTZ, the motor can fail without the software realising, so you end up with a moving privacy bar but no moving picture. If the camera froze on this sensitive area, then the privacy bar could scroll out of the way revealing it. IMO it would just be too risky to rely on. I'd make sure the cameras are only fitted where they can never see anything sensitive just incase.

The user wanted e-mails sent from one particular user (hosted on o365, we have a hybrid deployment atm) to an external organisation, mentioning them; only a few of our users are on O365 so I have no special backup policy in place for these mailboxes yet, TBH reading the guidelines if O365's e-discovery returns recently deleted e-mails then that will have to do. But on O365 the hold on items deleted from "Deleted Items" (end users can purge items from this backup but they are also kept under "Purges") - the date range is only 14 days however. Anything that has been deleted from Deleted Items for more than 14 days by default is removed even if it hasn't been purged. The date range the applicant specified was this current School year (so Sept up until now). I guess to really fulfil the requirements I would have to put a retention hold of 6 months or a year on every single mailbox we have hosted ??? as we have no idea who would file a SAR for what reason. Is that what people here do, put a retention period of say 6 months ?? or change the default "purge" retention to 6 months ? (edit Interesting what Koldov posted, they want their "purge" retention time to be tiny) The SMT user didn't delete any of the e-mails maliciously (like was stated here, even if they had done, the e-mails would still show up under Recoverable Items > Purges) it is just they only kept mails for a short amount of time. Kind of like when a student says they need an older copy of some work but the copy they want is dated 4 months ago or someone wants to see CCTV for an incident that was 3 months old... the ICO says "the general rule is that you cannot hold personal data indefinitely ‘just in case’ it might be useful in future" and this external organisation board issue had been closed and dealt with, or so we thought prior to this SAR...

Hi guys we have had a staff member file a SAR wanting copies of e-mails about them sent by a particular individual, problem is (well it's not really a problem IMO it is good practice) that person keeps a clean mailbox and deletes e-mails older than 3 months if they are no longer relevant. (and obviously we had no idea this SAR would be filed so the mails were deleted) Do I need to do a mailbox restore and run the SAR against that to get older e-mails or is that beyond the scope of the SAR??? it is an O365 mailbox so I'm not even sure if that is possible? (I have already ran the discovery search, there was no hold on the mailbox)

Hi guys we were moved onto the PSBA (public sector broadband alliance) by our LEA, but every month or couple of weeks it'll grind to a halt and we'll have a morning with barely usable Internet until it is fixed. Just curious is anyone else on PBSA anywhere in Wales with a similar issue?

yeah for us it stopped working yesterday afternoon now our office lady can't send attachments. It just hangs then times out with an error message. Edit - it's on their support page now Current Service Status: (yellow) You may be experiencing intermittent issues when trying to send emails with attachments. Please be assured we are working to resolve this as a priority.

Same, made a GPO for the rooms with full HDD's and cleared the profiles that way. Delprof2 just would not report any valid profiles to clean no matter what I did. Making a GPO to wipe stored profiles older than 5 days worked fine. Of course use caution if you have local profiles and allow desktop saving etc

I've been driving since 2005 and was always taught that pedestrians always have right of way under all circumstances, will definitely check out the videos though. I don't want to become one of these oldies who think the highway code hasn't changed since they passed their test in 1951!

Ours are technically still provisioned with HWB as otherwise we'd need to buy licenses for them all, but our LEA set it up so the HWB provisioned chromebooks allow us to log on to our actual school domain - the user must turn on the chromebook, choose "log in with a different account" and then our schools domain is pre-filled in. This means we don't have to use HWB usernames (which would be a nightmare as our google stuff is provisioned on our own domain) and we don't have to buy our own licenses. But the problem is the management is crippled, pushing apps / checking who last used the chromebook doesn't really work as you have to log in to the HWB management section and it barely shows you anything. Struggling to get Impero onto our hwb provisioned chromebooks.