maniac

I'm not worried about it going through the launch window to get into the applications, I just want it to skip the screen which invites users to register the products etc. which only has to be run once for each user, but it's still a pain.

Just wondering, is there an easy way to get a Mac to skip the openoffice welcome screen, you know the one where it invites you to register etc. I did this on windows by including the OpenOffice settings within the mandatory profile, but is there a simelar way I can do this on a mac as I don't really want it coming up every time a student runs it. We have an OSX server to control them with, so if it can be done using some clever trickery I'm all ears, as I'm very new to macs on networks. Mike.

It's all down to the size of the image sensor in the camera, as explained here. Image sensor format - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Oh god, now you're asking. Bands I've seen and really enjoyed include Muse, Foo Fighters, Iron maiden, Metallica, Pearl Jam, Placebo and Rage against the Machine. Its too difficult to set them apart from each other, as they're all damn good. Bands I saw that I was un-impressed with include Guns 'N Roses and Red Hot Chilli Peppers. I'm quite easy to please when it comes to gigs, and I've been to a lot! Don't goto as many now as I can't afford to since buying a house.

I'd go with Nikon as my brand of choise, and get a Nikon D90 with the standard 18-55mm or 18-105mm kit lens to start with - you can always buy more len's as and when you feel you want them, but the standard kit lens' will be adequate for most people just starting out using a DSLR. If you don't want to spend as much as that, then personally I'd look at a second hand D60 or D40x. I would avoid the D3000/5000 series, the build quality on the newer Nikon entry level DSLR cameras is rubbish in my opinion. Once you have it, learn how to use it properly! I frown every time I see someone using one of our very nice DSLR cameras in the dreded auto mode - if you're going to buy a DSLR and just bung it in auto mode, you may as well get a good compact camera.

I have a few machines without AV on here, but they are all dedicated devices like Digital Signage that don't get the oppertunity to pick up nasties as easily. I never used to run AV on my home machine, but then about 2 or 3 months after completeing a very large assignment (which luckily had been submited) I lost the entire contents of my hard drive to a virus in such a way that it was un-recoverable as well. I well and truly learnt my lesson and have run AV ever since. I thought, just like some of you here, that I was tech savvy enough to avoid all the pitfalls that usually lead to machine contracting a virus, and that AV software was a waste of money. Thign is it's well worth remembering that some genuine viruses are so subtle that the only way you'll notice they're on your machine is when they've done whatever nasty deed it is they were designed to do. It my case, the program was slowly overwriting portions of my drive with blank space in such a way that evetually the whole thing got corrupted beyond repair. The first I noticed of this was when windows started behaving improperly, and eventually crashed and wouldn't boot. File recoverey software proved fruitless as the virus had done a lovely job of destroying the data on the drive, so throrough that a lot of data destruction companies would have been quite proud I think.

It may be worth having a chat with the bank the charity uses, as sometimes they can provide the facility for accepting on-line payments, and I expect for a charitable organisation the normal fees for using such a service would be heavily reduced. Don't write off paypal, for charities they have much lower fees and it's also relatively easy to integrate paypal into a website. Mike.

I've e-mailed numerous companies, but usually just to create humour, rarely to complain. Two I remember were complaining to Typhoo that there was no 'ooo' in my tea, as per their recent TV ad campaign "you only get an 'ooo' with Typhoo." Thinking back, I expect many people did that so I didn't get a response. However my e-mail to Heinz regarding the availability of the tomato ketchup tree in their (at the time) recent ad (You remember the one where the ) Well that got a humourous response which unfortunitely I've lost now, but it was along the lines of they felt demand for the product would out strip supply, so they have chosen not to bring the product to market. I also got a voucher through the post for that one. Mike.

Dunno what mine is . .. hang on EDIT: I see it's 92. Not bad really. I also see I'm number 31 in the reputation ranks! lol

If the image put onto the laptop is the same as the origenal image, there's actually quite a good chance of getting documents back using something like this PC Inspector File Recovery - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com as there's every chance the image will have over written the same portion of the disk it was origenally on, so hopefully the portions of the disk with the files on may still be intact. It will take a while to do a byte by byte analysis of the disc, but it's your best chance of getting anything back. AS for the rest of your day have a hug Mike.

Most of the viruses on USB memory pens are activated by the autorun procedure, so if you diable autorun on external drives this goes some way to stopping a lot of the problems. We just make sure our antivirus is absolutely up-to-date, other than banning their use completely I can't see any other way round the potential risk of viruses on them. We did evaluate this quite in depth and decided the risk was small providing we invest in a good virus checker, so we did just that. Mike.

Also don't forget the Edugeek essential software list in the edugeek wiki. The Essential Software List - Wiki

Check what license the software has been sold to you under - that may be the standard license terms, but educational licensing sometimes differs on account of the fact it's very heavily discounted by the likes of Adobe. Businesses pay hundreds of pounds per licence, even on a volume agreement, our CS4 license worked out at about £13 per machine for comparison, so the license terms are tighter.

We use our local branch of cartridge world who we also get our toner and ink supplies from. If there's ever any problems or we need something really quickly, we can pop in in person to the branch and get it sorted right away.

I know you're a primary, but I think most of this still applies to the decision making process. We have 12 laptop trollies in our academy, stocked with 28 or 30 laptops depending on the size. Our main drive behind it was increased availability of ICT to encourage active use of things like the learning platform in lessons as a matter of course. Each department has 1 or more cabinets depending on their size and access to other ICT resources e.g Science have 1 cabinet because they have desktop PCs in some of the labs, but English have 3 cabinets because they have no other access to ICT in their department as their rooms are too small to accomodate desktop PCs. The idea is to make ICT integrated into the school instead of having seperate dedicated facilities. Of course this has taken us 3-4 years to get to this stage, they wern't all brought in one go. The very oldest laptops (Dell D510's) are getting very ropy now and take an age to start up on a fully patched windows XP install. They will be phased out this year and disposed of. My advise. Choose your laptop cabinets carefully, and choose your laptops even more carefully. Buy the best you can afford and with a 3 year on site warranty or longer if you can, and try and get a warranty that includes a battery replacement as you will have to replace the battery on most laptops at least once in their lifetime. Also ensure your wireless infrastructure is reliable and can support this number of devices and that your network is optimised to take account of wireless devices and the fact it's slower than cabled workstations. e.g our desktop, start menus and wallpapers are stored locally instead of on a network location to reduce the amount of data travelling over the network at login. The other advice I have make sure management are fully aware of the increased costs of maintaining and running a resource of laptops, and the added technical support it may entail. We spend much more time maintaining our laptops that the desktops we have. When done properly laptops can be very effective, but I've seen it all too often where the laptops themselves are great, but the intrastructure to support them is inadequate making the whole resource impossible to use properly. Mike.

OK, we have progress. I have most of the aspects of the macs working fine now except for 3 things, and they're all user/password related. Firstly, it prompts for a username and password whenever someone accesses the net, which is a pain. We run Websense as our proxy - has anyone got any idea if it's possible to stop this happening by it automatically sending the credetials for the currently logged on user? Secondly we run papercut here, and I've got the client starting at login which wasn't a problem, except it also prompts for a username and password when it is run. Anyone know if it's possible to stop this and send the credetials automatically? Thridly, it asks for a username and password whenever you print to a shared printer, again simelar to above, is it possible to stop this? I know you can save passwords in a keychain, but that's only as good while the password is the same - as soon as the password is shcnaged (ever 6 weeks on our domain) the saved passwords are then invalid. Any help much appreciated - I don't really understand macs and I'm impressed I've got as far as I have. Mike.

This is from a popular motoring forum. I can't garuntee the accuracy of the information, but it seems to tally with what I thought. WINDSCREEN - Chips or cracks in the windscreen directly in front of the driver, in the area swept by the wiper blades, are acceptable if they are less than 10mm in diameter. - In thae rest of the swept area up to 40mm damage is acceptable. - Official stickers (parking permits, tax disc etc) in the swept area in front of the driver will fail if they are more than 10mm in diameter (40mm elsewhere). There nothing regarding chips which fall half in one zone and half in another as far as I know, so most MOT testers are going to be cautious about this, after all it's their testing license at risk if they do it wrong. Of course the easiest way is to fit a slightly shorter pair of wipers to the car, then the entire chip will be in Zone D. Mike.

What's the program - I bet it's available on-line somewhere. I've never had a problem doing this with my parents DVD recorder, just make sure you select the right input to record from and it works fine normally. If you're really desperate, there are methods involving removing the HDD from you sky+ box and deocding the recording directly, but these are not recommended.

OK forget that one, seemed I had a group in a group in a group that had somehow applied admin priviliges to my two test student accounts which I'd never noticed before. There's other restrictions in place on the PCs to stop them gaining access to areas they're not supposed to, but the macs are a bit more open hence finding this flaw - all fixed now thou.

Well I can browse into them, and save and retrieve work from them, but I can't do this in windows, it quite rightly reports I don't have the correct rights. This is now worrying me because it's a massive security flaw, and I can't work out for the life of me how it's doing it!

Thanks for that reply Since posting I've got the shared folder mounting in the dock, it's fine it being there as it's only use for distributing information to students. It seems macs don't like hidden windows shares. However, I've just noticed something quite alarming - the macs appear to bypass the windows security somehow? When browsing the main share with all my students home folders in, it is possible to get into folders that you shouldn't be able to. This is confusing me a lot, as I've tripple checked the security on a selection of folders, and yet my student user that only has normal student rights can browse into them, and indeed read and save work to the folder. I thought initially somehow it must be using an adminitrators account or something for browsing the share with, but my file server actually reports the open session as being the student user in that folder - it's dead confusing. Any ideas???

Good afternoon Forum, well after several days of work, I've finally got my nice shiny imacs working on my domain, with an apple X-serve to apply preferences to them and image them with. So far so good, preferences are working and applying, logons are quick and everything is working fine. However there's a few things I can't seem to figure out. 1) Is it posible to get Safari to transparently authenticate to our proxy, at the moment it prompts for a username and password when a student starts safari. 2) is it possible to mount a shared folder for all students. I've tried adding a group folder, but that doesn't seem to work - it just comes up with a question mark in the dock. Our student shared folder is shared as \\SERVER\STUSHARED$\ from a windows server 3) I applied application restrictions to the workstations, but kept getting an error 'you are not allowed to run application "student" " or something like that at login. I think the program in question may be the lanschool client, except I can't find the correct application to add to the allowed list to stop this error (I've tried searching for it) anyone have any idea where lanschool hides its self on a mac? 4) I would like to ensure the papercut client starts when the students logon, any idea how I can add an item so it starts up at login for every student? I'm not that brilliant with macs, this is the first time I've used them on a network environment, so as simple steps as possible if anyone can help me. cheers Mike.

You can restrict who can send to them, look at the group properties in Active Directory on a computer which has the exchange extension installed, goto exchange general tab and set delivery restrictions in here - only from and select the users or groups you wish to be able to send to the list. Everyone will still be able to see the distribution list, but only those with permission will be able to send to it. Mike.

You're doing better than me, I'm struggling to get AD and OD to behave themselves at the moment! Looks like I'll soon be having this very same problem as we have CS4 as well, so when you do get it to work I'd be interested to know.

I have just a 2 year old PC, still on windows XP (well if it ain't broke, no need to change it) which has some componants dating back 5 years or more (DVD writer and 2 hard drives still going strong) 750GB external drive (almost full) which houses all my data. My 17" Phillips TFT was brought by me in 2003 and is still going strong. I also have a very old laptop which I ocassionally use. I used to have all sorts of bits and pieces setup at one time, but I just got bored with it all and applied the KISS principle to my home computer use - plus servers use a surprising amount of electricity so they had to go really. Mike.