mikes

What a day for it to happen on!

He wants to have fleets of these things available, it sounds awesome! Passenger flights around the moon? He wants to have fuel carrying Starships in orbit; so you blast off into orbit, refuel, and then you can go off from there! Imagine a trip to the Moon to take a look at the Apollo landing sites. Would the Apollo 11 site be declared a historical monument, or would people be able to take bits of trophies from them?

Well I was shocked by those £200 earbuds or whatever they were. A pupil lost her pair, and said they cost £200 - for these tiny little earbud things. I spent hours on CCTV trying to trace where she'd been but they are so small (even the little case they came in) I had no chance. If I had £200 earbuds I don't think I'd want to bring them into school! either that or I'd have a massive chain glued to them both!

We have been informed that we are allowed to take an inset day next Friday. What so before, we weren't allowed? Are inset days set by the LEA or the government? I thought schools could choose when they took inset days and could pick any day? I saw the news on all the big news sites - "schools to close on the 18th". Then reading the actual article, it said schools may be allowed to pick the 18th of dec as an inset day" meaning there won't be any day off at all. We have a few years isolating but I don't think we do random testing at all. We have over 10 staff off, might be 12 infact. I would like to work from home because I live with two relatives who are over 60, and my father has problems with his blood pressure / and gets attacks where he feels feint. But of course that won't happen because I am needed to plug in HDMI cables.

Make it known that replacements will cost each dept £20 and I bet they'll last twice as long

Hi guys long shot here if anyone has any familiarity with Parentpay and NRS tills? Someone here managed to put the wrong Free School Meal value down in our ParentPay app for this school year, they had put down £2.95 instead of £2.55. This has caused numerous issues, it seems our Parentpay balances and our till balances were out of sync - if a student bought food worth over £2.55, they would end up getting an extra payment of 40p (or however much over the £2.55 it was, upto 40p). So their balances weren't correct. Anyway we adjusted the FSM price to go back to £2.55, and we started it from 1st Sept (so the start of the school year). But this has caused parentpay to recalculate everyones balances, and so a lot of students how have negative balances. I think it has tallied up all the extra payments (so times where students spent £2.90 instead of £2.55), and the total of that has now been reduced from their balance. So it a student has never put money on, they have -£10.45 for example. But if a parent put £15 on, they might only now have £2 odd left. Now the question is what to do from here? Do we just zero every negative balance? but then what if one of those students recently put £5 on their account? Or do we put the FSM period back as £2.95 for 1st Sept until todays date, and then put it back to £2.55 from today?? The school has already agreed to write off any "extra" money the pupils may have spent as the schools error.

Man bored with his job and his life, looks up a girl he dreams about on his works computer system. He later meets her but gets in trouble at work for doing so.

Too bad our LEA installed all of our switches, and they put every single switch on one ring; so every time there is a blip in the power, it trips the fusebox and I have to come in, unplug each switch; flip the fusebox and then plug in each switch one by one. And then they have the cheek to e-mail me and complain "You can't turn our switches off without informing us first..."

Honestly that situation of yours sounds like a nightmare, why do the 300 workstations all have unique software on them in the first place? All I needed to do was create an image, with base software built in (MS Office, SIMS.NET for laptops, and Adobe CS4), and then I only had specialized software packages per department (such as DT, or Serif for IT) - these are all in SCCM and auto-install with the workstation. Manually removing all of the RM crap from each workstation, I don't even know if it's possible considering how RM hijack even the logon screen. They hijack how SCCM deploys software, and they have many layers on top of what MS had. I know you could de-commission a CC3 workstation with a script, which worked OK-ish, but with CC4 I can't see how. Plus surely having these 300 machines remain unique is still a ballache?? Even our staff laptops - every piece of software that needs to be installed has a silent installer, if SCCM causes problems - I have a batch file I've written that installs software - a teacher just needs to ask for the visualizer software, and one command in Impero and I can do it from the office for any amount of stations. Plus rejoining an RM machine to a new domain, that'll cause problems too surely? I'd honestly inventory the software that is being used. Create a central store with the installers. Rebuild each machine from scratch, then use SCCM or another tool to deploy it. At least the machines should run a lot nicer too, all that RM stuff honestly made the machines 70% slower than vanilla. Our staff now use a lot of online stuff, so the software on each machine is minimal. Adobe, Serif, SIMS.net, visualiser software, I can't think of anything else that's needed now for generic use

We have a fair few teachers isolating now; someone will cover the lesson but the isolating teacher will still deliver the lesson via webcam; the laptop will face the class so that the teacher can see them via webcam; and the teacher is then projected on the board. Be interesting to see how well this works, a lot of our staff have big trouble operating the classroom speakers, because the volume knob needs to be pushed in for 3.5" input, and pushed out for HDMI audio, and that just baffles, confuses, and frightens most of our staff.

I'm being forced to come on site, because I might be needed to plug a projector's VGA cable in, or swap out a mouse. Our school is basically continuing as if nothing has happened, minus face masks, a one way system and hand sanitizer. I thought there were year group "bubbles" but I'm expected to breach that if there's a problem in a classroom. Our BM hates the lockdown, she basically came in every day during lockdown and resented other people being off.

Won't work on my phone. Needs Android 6 or later, I have Android 4. It's a perfectly good phone that does what I need, do I need to throw it away? What happened to not creating waste? I would have thought the most vulnerable to Covid would be the older and the poorer, who won't have top end new smartphones.

It's a fascinating universe, for me every time I read one of the Culture books, I feel a bit sad that I'll never get to live there :-( I might pick up Ringworld next; I remember reading that Amazon were going to do a Ringworld TV series. Though of course that might have just been them hoovering up IP rights

My Twisted World - Elliot Rodger A fascinating insight into what happens when severe mental illness gets ignored. Before that I had read Look to Windward by Ian Banks, one of the "Culture" sci-fi books (my ideal Utopian setting!)

Hi I am having trouble with Google Admin, I can't for the life of me figure out how to give staff access to reset pupils passwords in certain OU's! We have OU's for each year group, I remember giving staff access to 16, 17, 18 and they can reset those passwords, etc but I have dug through the UI now and can't find out how to give our staff access to reset users passwords in our new OU's I set up, 19 and 20 (I must not have done 19 due to coronavirus) Can anyone tell me how I can give staff access to do it? I can do it with my admin role but I don't want to give all staff the admin role. Googling it gives the usual garbage about resetting a users password assuming you have the rights.. (Incidently google's search engine seems quite poor recently, like they dumbed it down so it assumes you are searching for a popular item when infact you are looking for a niche one; like it ignores half the terms you put in... anyone know a better search engine that is like 2010 google?)

I wonder if it'll be marginal at best anyway

I do have an android smartphone but it is ancient, I use it mostly for whatsapp with my friends, plus the occasional app that needs testing - but it's too old for a lot of modern apps. I use a computer at work and spend time on my computer at home too, so I never really sit and fiddle with a phone. Why would I want to mess with a tiny little device when I have a core i7 with a 48.5" LCD panel I can use? Also being an IT tech in a school my salary Sucks, I'm poor so didn't want to spend a lot of money monthly to pay for one I'll barely use. I am on PAYG at the moment but I basically barely ever top it up as I use wi-fi. Problem is if I am stuck in traffic my data costs a fortune, so I am tempted to switch to a Data Only PAYG if one exists. I'd like it mostly for the Google Maps Live Traffic data, plus also whatsapp on the move. Oh I use mine as an alarm clock too which is useful. My dad is upgrading his phone soon so I might get a nice new smartphone with the rounded edges unless he decides to sell it off...

How did you get these units dude? We had to buy chromebooks ourselves so obviously we bought the cheapest most basic ones we could find. (Mind due to Chrome not being as bloated as Windows, even the cheap ones run very well) We were even given some old units from another school; we get their unwanted units and they get brand new units in return? This is in the Vale. We have just bought 50 so we have 55 in total. We just bought 20 and then the news came out we will be returning in July so it does seem a bit pointless; however if we can keep them they will make great classroom loaner laptops. Or is the plan that the disadvantaged pupils will keep them for as long as they are in School for (as they'll still need to do online homework?)

Hi guys, with this remote working business I am having to support workers who are at home. From our DA server I can ping and also RDP into off-site DirectAccess workstations fine. However this is limited as I can't remote into current sessions e.g. to show a user how something is done. The machines show up on Impero, I can send them files etc and use most of the Impero controls, however I can't actually remote into their session - it times out / fails. Does anyone know if there is a way I can get it working? Is it an IPV6 / IPV4 problem or a firewall issue?

we have 3 staff off isolating, but we are running assemblies as usual. Yesterday I was stuck in the middle of the hall surrounded by 200 year 7's. Now I am about to do it with 200 year 8's. So I've pretty much just accepted I'm going to get sick with this BS and I'm just glad I'm not fat or old. Feel bad for those staff that are...

not sure if this is the right thread but does anyone use IMPERO and MS DirectAccess? looking for a way to connect to machines that are off-site

I like money

Sorry to bump this, I have quite a few teachers saving all of their work to C:\Users\Wally\Desktop. I've warned them many times about this but they don't listen. I recently had one whose profile got wiped, all of the data got lost, and I had the old "I need these files nobody ever told me about this, all of my data should have been backed up" speil. Problem is, now if I turn on folder redirection to their home folder (n:\desktop) - what would happen to the data in their current desktop? When I enabled Folder Redirection when we used Win 7, we had nothing but problems - data in currently existing folders would just get deleted never to be seen again. Logons took 30+ minutes as it synced data - once I can understand, but it was trying to sync the complete contents of the folder every time the user logged on. I set their desktops to "hidden" but this alone caused pandemonium as I have put useful shortcuts on the desktop, and a large majority of staff cannot access the programs any other way (start menu baffles them, serious). Or should I just leave it as it is, send out a mass e-mail, and the next person who comes to me with a desktop query - print out that e-mail and tell them goodbye?

Sorry to bump this, I have been asked about this garbage too. Our students sign up for accounts but they only get a 30 day trial. Plus, when they are asked to pick the school; our school does not show up. One of our students tried the process to "add" the school, but it's been 30 days and our school doesn't show up. Now I don't get the option to add our school at all, it just goes back to the sign up page... When I signed up for a test student account, I closed the window where it asked for your school. I can sign in to my account OK but now I have no option to tell the account what school I belong to; it isn't in the account options. I'm regretting telling our DT dept. that I'd look at this now. You can see why some people hoist the black flag.. Do I just need to wait and hope the school will show up? or tell DT dept, to just get used to the 30 day trial or get new software?

We got new i5's but didn't have cash for the screens, so I'd get minimum 24" monitors for each unit. Probably consider getting 29" 4K displays if deskspace allowed it. Plus a 48.5" or bigger 4K display for my office. Have one at home and it's a great display, though wish I'd gotten the 55" one.