steveking

I've fitted an A119v2 and it's good quality. I didn't go for the GPS module, but as you say it's only a tenner.

Mine is wall mounted, and it works fine around the house

I got fed up of years of various rubbish access points and 3 years ago I gave in and bought a unifi ( https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005VSY0VQ/ ). Coverage is much better than anything I had before, I get full signal everywhere and even in my back yard which no previous WAP managed. It's been rock solid, and I have a limited speed guest AP without routing to my internal network running along with my normal access point. I run the controller on my linux server, but that's not necessary if you only have one AP and don't want to log. I have it mounted in my hallway, and most people just assume it's a large smoke alarm.

I have a mobius too, and it works really well. I bought the capacitor to replace the battery as my old dashcam failed to work properly once the battery had died (I don't think li-ion batteries like the heat of being behind a windscreen all summer, so that meant that it never recorded the last section of video to the sd card). There is a cheap android app which works well with it too. I too have it hard wired to the fusebox, and it's mounted behind my rear view mirror so it's out of sight. It records everything visible (with both edges of the windscreen visible)

Depends for which year group. For year 9 (the first time I get them to use a web server) it's a shared ftp account with a directory for each pupil, and part of the setup instructions are to put their username in the directory box. It's not yet been abused (touch wood, although it's backed up daily so if it was it'd be easy to go back). We use dreamweaver in y9 which is easy to set up with the ftp site. To create the directories it's one line of bash to make a new directory for each username which the network manager gave me as a text file. It's running on a very old box, it'll be some version of Debian and it works just fine. As a teacher it makes marking their work dead easy as I can connect to it from my laptop and then it's one sub-directory per pupil. For A level I have a linux server which runs php, mysql, etc. which is perfect for our A level. As part of our gcse/a level course pupils get accounts on there as I much prefer teaching cs in linux not windows. They can connect to it through putty from the windows clients, or boot into linux directly on the classroom computers. The linux server is running on the old school server, again running Debian.

I also have a Humax box, which has been fine (although you need to press enter more times than really necessary!). It's fine for the catchup stuff live and recorded telly. I really like the skip 2 minutes button which makes adverts almost always vanish with three presses. I also have a nowtv box with plex sideloaded onto it which works fine, although after a server update it's not playing all media so I've been playing with emby which is similar to plex. I think the best way to use kodi is with one of those mini android boxes, but I've not actually tried it for years (it used to be xmbc right?)

My case originally had a PII233, I bought it from CCL in, I guess, 1998. I've only just stopped using the cherry PS/2 keyboard I bought at the same time, and only because my server upgrade means USB keyboard needed :-( The beige case has a black 3.5" front USB port, which looks a bit odd, but sod it.

Mine's skynet too, as my ISP is Sky... also I have openwireless for passers by and guests

We have a few SLRs and also a really small, and incredibly thin, Sony. We use the SLRs for the pupil portraits and general life around school photos (prospectus, visitors, etc.) and often lend out the Sony for trips. We don't get blurry pics with the SLRs, but then the two of us who do most of the photography are 'togs so we know what we're doing. I've taken a school SLR on school expeditions around the world, and it's still working fine - but then I do try and look after it. When we lend non-photographer staff the SLR I just stick everything on auto and tell them not to change any settings. We go for the Canon xxx d range for school kit, it's good enough for what we need (my own is a 5d3 so compared to that the xxx d are a heap of plastic junk!). If you're getting an SLR we get second hand ones from MPB. However, for some reason our school replaced the brick of a Nokia (battery life measured in years, ui a blind idiot can use) with some stupid windows phone (battery life measured in milliseconds, and a user interface so bad that not even a teenager can cope) as the school trip phone, as apparently staff wanted to take photos using it... whoever's idea that was needs a jolly good meeting with a LART!

Our P75 had a soundcard, pretty sure it was made by Aztech... it was almost, but not quite, a sound blaster pro clone... playing games in those days was a challenge just to get everything loaded up and working! Tell a kid about IRQs now and they'll wonder wtf you're on about! They don't know they're born.

Do Citizen still make printers? We had one of them, first attached to a BBC, and then an Olivetti 286, and then to the Escoms. Still nothing as good as the laser printer attached to the mac... the padded apple bag for the laser printer was HUGE (at least to me as a little kid) (I can attach that as Apple don't make printers any more!)

We had a 486 and P75 made by Escom... I tried a win95 preview on the 486, it couldn't cope. They did all come with OS2/Warp as well as Windows (with PC Dos to save a few quid!)

Hi I use backuppc to backup two linux machines, the second one added quite a bit after the first one. The guide I used is: https://www.debian-administration.org/article/588/Introduction_BackupPC_part_1 I can't remember the steps I went through to get the second client working, but I guess I just worked through the relevant parts of the tutorial. I don't remember anything being hard or not working, which means it was probably very simple.

Yes with the calibrating (I have an x-rite display calibrator, but it's very similar to the spider), and also yes for using a proper lab (but not photobox, a proper lab!). The lighting levels in the room matter too, which is why when you're not calibrating the screen the sensor sits under the monitor and adjusts the screen depending on the ambient lighting colour. I get photos printed at dscolourlabs, who are always quick (some photos I sent on Monday afternoon turned up Tuesday morning, and that's normal). They have their printer/paper profiles to download on their website, have instructions as to how to get them into photoshop and will also send you a calibration print to compare to your monitor if you don't have a calibrator. But you really want to use a screen calibrator and use a nice display, not a cheapo lcd. You'll never get good photos from a laser, don't even bother trying to make it better! Print Prices - DS Colour Labs and postage is £4ish I think. (I don't work for them, I just use them far too much)

We have an annual house quiz, and for that I made a flowol program using a breakout board (can't remember what it's called) with some pressure pads as inputs. Only one team can press at once (it auto resets after a few seconds) and makes a different noise for each team as well as flashing the buzzing house's colour on the screen. It all runs off a laptop which is about as old as Noah's Ark which only sees the light of day for one week each year. If I was to do it today I'd probably do it using a raspberry pi or an arduino and write a program to run it. Probably a pi so it'd be easier to connect to a projector and speakers.

I replaced my sky+ box with a humax hdr 1000s. Using the menu is a little slow, and you seem to need to press enter one too many times for most operations, but it works fine, is reliable and I'm happy that I ditched my sky telly sub for it. I also like that I can pause radio, which you can't do on the sky box. It doesn't have a built in rf modulator, so I had to buy one to let me carry on watching telly upstairs without rewiring the house - but that's not a big issue.

I have Sky FTTC, and since I got it ages ago I have a separate modem to the Sky router. I used to use a Cisco adsl router when I had ADSL, but since Sky at the time didn't work with other hardware for FTTC I did what you suggested and have a separate WAP to the router. The Sky router I have is actually pretty rock solid, it's current uptime is 650 days! It only is a router, I have the wireless turned off in it. For wireless I have a unifi AP, it's mounted in my hall (most visitors think it's a smoke alarm so don't give it a second thought) and it's signal is so much better than anything else I've tried at home. I get full signal everywhere in my Victorian terraced house, including in my garden. @Rob_D - is that a shiny black curved talktalk router with two lan ports? My parents have one and I had exactly that problem last time I visited them. I ended up giving my phone a static IP as I was on the verge of causing some damage to it's dhcp server as it was pretty obviously just broken.

My hiking bag must be 90% filled with SLR kit and the rest those annoying extras like food and waterproofs. My bag weighs a tonne and I wore out the shoulder padding on my last one from carrying too much camera kit up hills (always with a full size tripod strapped on for good measure). Mini tripods are ok (I have some), but they really limit your shots. Why is it that nice lenses weigh a tonne? On the other hand they take nice snaps! Man up and take a real camera, haha. But seriously, most cameras have a self timer, just bung all your bags in a pile to make a mound and carefully balance the camera on that with a timer so you can be in the photo with the trig point. I took a funny sequence of photos over the summer on a self timer, it showed various amounts of sky and lesser amounts of the group as the camera fell over while it did several self timer shots! It's ok though, it was a school camera and not my 5d3! S

I got a freesat Humax box (a hdr-1000s) when I ditched Sky's telly earlier in the year, and while it works fine it too is a bit slow when navigating about. It's not as bad as a talktalk freeview plus box my parents have, but it's noticeably slower in the menus than the sky+hd box it replaced. Saying that, it's £0/month and records just fine and I'm not missing the pay for telly so that's all good. Also due to a somewhat poor UI design you end up pressing enter more times than you really think should be necessary! A minor thing, but one thing I really do like about is that you can pause radio - something you couldn't do on the sky+ box (no idea why the sky box didn't, surely it's capable of doing it!)

How do you think you should be doing it? I guess vlookup, but you could also be wanting to use a sequence of IFs as the salary has been done (but this isn't anywhere as neat)

Look at the document properties - it shows the student's name, the school name, and even the teacher's name who created the task. If this isn't homework from a student I'd also be amazed! Ashen, if you are going to cheat you need to put way more effort into it. Frankly it's probably easier just to write the few formulas you need and do the homework yourself!

I run a website from home, and have done for, er, 15 years. My server is an Atom based machine, and with two spinny hard drives inside it it and it can't use much power as my entire networking kit draws about 30W (and that includes bt modem, sky router, unifi wap, gig switch, and the server) I did use no-ip (and even paid them for a few years to avoid the monthly nagging), but after they "broke" for a few days I put my eggs into different baskets and dynamic dns is now done by both dnsexit and changeip. I actually use some DNS voodoo (it's a nasty hack) to run my own dns server too. Yes, I know, it's bad to run the dns server on the same machine, and even more so when the backup dns server is the same machine - but then it's nothing vital and if the machine dies there's no point the dns pointing to it! It means I can play about and make sub domains easily. Sky offer static IP address as part of their fibre-pro, but as they refuse to give me any discount from £30/month I'm on their normal fibre with dynamic ip address (although it's pretty static - maybe one or two changes a year, and for £7.50/month I can cope with that). 10 megabit upload is more than enough, and on a drupal site I also run on it it's clearly cpu limited not bandwith limited - but that's ok too. There's no reason to run the stuff at home other than to let me play - a minimal vps for a quid or two a month would be better if you just want something simple - lowendbox.com if you want to find current cheapo virtual servers.

Ask your teachers why? And keep asking until they give a sensible answer! Or in pseudo code: while answer is rubbish { answer < input("no, really, why do you want to do this? ") } I can't think of any reason to complicate reading/writing to files at school level by using Excel as it's filetype - this is at any level up to A level. OCR GCSE only ever wants to read/write from text files / CSVs in their coursework tasks (and CSVs are just text files, although using the csv module in python can make stuff easier, although I often just stick commas in my output). If it's more complicated data type Python has a pickle function which basically lets you dump anything into a file, and then read it back. And I mean anything! The problem is that it's not a straight forward text file so only really usable by Python If it's complicated enough to warrant an Excel document it probably wants to be inputting/outputting in another format (sql, bigger data files, anything!) But, if you teachers must use excel a quick google shows several libraries and this looks helpful http://www.simplistix.co.uk/presentations/python-excel.pdf but seriously, why?! I keep trying to convince my students to write the simplest, shortest, most neat programs they can for any problem... and this is going against that! I have one student who is able to turn "hello world" into about 150 lines of code, it's hard work trying to convince him that the simplest answer is the cleverest!

Do you mean you're printing photos for people as a service, and making money off it? I do my school's school photos, and I just send them all away for printing instead of even considering self-printing. I use dscolourlabs as it's cheap, fast (next day - I ordered some today and I expect to get them tomorrow), reliable and on the few times I have a problem it's one phone call and I'm speaking to the person who printed my stuff and it always gets resolved. I probably spend at least £500/year with them, and am a happy client. The only time I use another company is peak imaging for really nice wedding albums (nothing to do with work that) We also have photo mounts made with our school's name printed on them, which we buy from photovalue in Ireland. I think a photo pack (individual photo in mount, form photo in mount, and a plastic/paper bag to hold them) costs us about 50p to produce (+ my time) and we sell them to parents for £10. It makes a few grand a year for school (we do years 7,9 and 11). About 10 years ago we bought a set of studio lights and backdrop but we paid that off with the first set of photos we did. The best bit is selling them to parents and getting all the complements about the quality of the photos. It probably helps that I'm a bit of a photographer on the side, and that I do it jointly with another photographer colleague. I can take them on my own (and often do), but it's so much easier with two of us - one to take the photo and one to check the photos and brief the kids on how to sit (and sort out ties, blazers, etc.). We've got it down to a pretty good routine now, we can take a whole form's individual photos (30 kids) in 20 mins during a form period. It then takes about an hour to edit each form's photos and maybe 15 mins to frame and bag them.

pm sent