maniac

My mum has a bosch machine that she's has for about 12 years now, still works as well as the day she brought it. I buy all my white goods second hand - if I can spend £50 on a washing machine and get a couple of years out of it, that's value for money in my book. My grandfather has an AEG machine he brought sometime in the 1980's that still works - mind you he's a retired engineer so when it goes wrong he fixes it himself.

Reminds me of Tom Lehrer - new math. (Bear in mind this was written in the 60's) [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Vb8CWJ-Ho]YouTube- Tom Lehrer New Math[/ame] (There is another version with the proper introduction he made to this song, but the only full version on youtube is some idiot standing there miming to it)

So what, another very popular forum I use has about 13,000 members, and only 112 of them have post counts above 100 - according to you that make regular contributors only 0.8% and it's ranked at about 10,000 on alexa. Another forum I frequent has 6,500 members and about 249 of them have post counts of over 100, makes a figure of 3.99% Another 17,250 members with 696 of them posting more than 100 posts - makes about 4% I could go on, but the fact it that the percentage of 'regular contributors' makes little to no difference to how 'big' the forum or organisation is. All the websites quoted are considered the best at what their forum caters for and that's what matters to me, not some meaningless statistic. Mike.

Lanschool, it's excellent - and you can mute the speakers remotely as well and ban the use of USB devices

Edit your DHCP settings and remove the PXE boot settings (Probably Options 66 and 67 will be set) then the machines will get an IP number, but then just boot from the HDD as DHCP won't tell them to do anything. Remember to make a note of what they are so you can set them back again when the Ghost server is restored. Mike.

I spend half my lif pieceing back together laptop keyboards, and replacing damaged equipment. Bill runs into £1000's a year just to keep it all in one piece!

I find the only infailable way to stop the kids destroying the equipment is for there to be no equipment for them to destroy in the first place! It doesn't matter what I try, I've never found a solution, although it is interesting to note that this doesn't happen in all classrooms, only some . . . . .

We offer £2.00 overdraft which they can only use one, once they are in their overdraft it blocks them from spending until their account is in credit again. If a student needs a lunch, doesn't have any money they will get one, but we also write to the parent informing them that their child needs to credit their account - It works for us. Mike.

Think this speaks for its self. edugeek.net - Site Info from Alexa

Slightly embarrasing for the school. Wallington schoolboy denied lunch after computer error in Sutton (From Your Local Guardian) Students here get a £2.00 overdraft if required so they can always get a lunch if this occurance happens. Bit of an OTT article in my opinion, but the student should have got fed, duty of care and all that. (The school does say he should have got given a meal at the bottom of the article.)

I have about 4 or 5 promethean serial leads upstairs in my store room, as every new board we've brought recently has come with one, but we don't need them as we use the USB lead for them all - I just like hoarding stuff as it seems such a waste to put a perfecally good lead in the bin. If you live near kent (I don't know where you are) or remind me to send one by PM'ing me tomorrow with your address, you're are welcome to it for the cost of postage (free if you collect it of course) Mike.

Slowly sorting printing out in this school, I've managed to sneakily bin all the cheap crappy inkjet printers now, so we have exclusively laser printers, except Art who have a couple of A3 inkjets which they look after themselves. We run Papercut for our print management. We issue credits on a termly basis. Students get 100 credits Staff get 200 credits for personal use Departments get 1000 credits, apart from enterprise who get 2000 as they are a heavy IT based subject. Printing costs the following: A4 mono page = 1 credit A4 colour page = 2 credits A3 colour page = 5 credits When a staff member prints they can chose whether to charge their department budget or personal budget. Admin and senior teachers aren't credited, although their printing is still logged. We have a restriction of 3 copies per document, any more than that and we expect staff to use the photocpying facilities. We also have a restriction of printing the same document within 60 seconds, mainly put in pace to stop people bypassing the 3 copies rule, although seriously some teachers will sit there and religeously print the same document 3 times every 60 seconds until they've got the number of copies they want - it would have been quicker to have walked to the photocopier. Needless to say when these teachers ask for more credit, we make it clear that we can see they've been bypassing the rules and they only get a small amount extra. Anything called Document* is rejected to encourage students to save their work before printing. As an additional rule, student printing has to be approved by a member of staff to most printers. When they print their documents, it goes into a queue and won't print until a member of staff clicks allow in the print management interface. We introduced this after the first few weeks when students were using up their credits within a few days printing rubbish out to the printers, so we had to give staff more control over what was being printed. Some staff like this, others see it as an inconvenience, but it works quite well overall. Toner wise, I buy compatibles from the local branch of cartridgeworld who deliver the next day, and it gives me a place to go back to in person if there's any problems with them. So far no problems at all. We keep at least 2 in stock of the popular models of printer in the school, and 2 of each colour for the colour printers we have. Some of the lesser popular models we only order when papercut gives us a warning that the printer has below 10% toner left, which it does a summary of by e-mail once a day. Toner is centrally provided by ICT to prevent 'ownership' issues if I decide to re-allocate the printers in the school. All in all, quite controlled here although papercut met with a lot of resistance when first introduced, but had the backing of SMT and others within the school and has now been accepted as the norm. Mike.

If you have Server 2003 R2 you can setup Storage Recource Manager to stop the students saving certain extensions in their home areas - we do that here with great success. You can also block Wscript and command, it doesn't seem to affect login scripts for us. Mike.

As usual, streaming out of my PC speakers we have Planet Rock, the UK's Classic Rock DAB Digital Radio Station. Not streaming so well today, keeps pausing for the odd second here and there, which is quite irritating when you're enjoying a song!

I couldn't find that earlier when I had a quick look, ah well.

I've actually ordered pretty much everything I need to make one of these now - I have an old kitchen cabinet I'm going to buther to make a table out of - if it works well I might put it in something better eventually, and I'm going to borrow an old projector from here to test it with - got an old mitsubitshi one in the cupboard that should do the trick. Also the webcam doesn't have to be a playstation eye - I mullered a logitech webcam last night and made it IR sensitive - works a treat, although I've not tested it with the relevant software yet. Thanks for that thread SYNACK, somehow I overlooked that the first time. It was longer ago that 7 months you posted it thou, that thread is 2008 Mike.

That's because Keyspan are now owned by Tripp Lite who don't make the adapters any more, though you can get the drivers from their website if you need them - as I did the other day. There are plenty of other types of USB-->serial adapters on the market however. Mike.

We run Kaspersky AV here, and I've had a hell of a lot of problems with my wireless clients updating the virus checker from the management console - I think it might be bandwidth related in that the clients detect the link is slow and don't update. I can't find anywhere to change this tolerance myself, so I wrote this script to solve the problem. Thought I'd share it here in case anyone else is experiencing the same issues. It's VBscript so save it as something.VBS and run it as a startup script. 'This file will force Kaspersky to run an update if it has not done so this week. 'There is a delay of 5 minutes before it does this Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") If NOT objFSO.FolderExists("c:\KASPERSKY_UPDATES") then objFSO.CreateFolder("C:\KASPERSKY_UPDATES") Week=(DatePart("ww",Date)) yr=(DatePart("yyyy",Date)) file="week" & week & " " & yr If Not objFSO.FileExists("c:\KASPERSKY_UPDATES\" & file) then WScript.Sleep(300000) cmds=WshShell.RUN("C:\Progra~1\Kasper~1\Kasper~1.0fo\avp.exe UPDATE", 0, True) Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile("c:\KASPERSKY_UPDATES\" & file) End if It creates a directory called Kaspersky_updates on the C:\ to keep track of whether the script has run that week or not - the idea being you don't want to force an update everytime the machine is turned on, that would be silly - I decided once a week was adequate for it to force an update, you could change this to daily if you wanted by editing the script accordingly. It has a delay of 5 minutes to allow the machine to startup properly before it starts running the updater. You can extend this by editing the delay value in the script. Hopefully someone will find it useful, it's certainly helped turn all those red computers to green in my management console. Mike.

Hang on, we've had too much general chat today - no one else post in general chat until we've had some more technical bits! Admins/mods can't control what type of threads are posted, so if those are the latest threads then so be it. The list changes all the time, it's probably only got those items in it because people tend to post more general chat stuff outside of work hours in the evenings and it's quite early in the day really. And I agree with above, why stir things up again!

Sounds like some of the filters inside the projector have got burnt, normally happens if the units aren't serviced regularly and they overheat. We had a stack of Sahara projectors go this way at a previous school. It pays to service your projectors regularly

I quite often e-mail myself things from work, stuff I know I need, little reminders to do things etc. so it's not that unusual request I don't think.

Turn on delivery reports to see if it's getting delivered somewhere or declined somewhere that may give you a clue as to what's going on. Mike.

Might be more for one of the admins to state the details, I probably shouldn't have brought it up.

While I agree with that in principle, never under estimate the power of expensive lawyers in large groups. I'm not saying I agree with the approach firms take on issues like this, but that's the way of business 'My lawyers are bigger than your lawyers' and Edugeeks lawyers are probably bottom of the pile - it's probably not the mods or admins personally having a problem with controversial posts surrounding companies, but they have to protect the site from legal challeneges like this. Anyone remember the Sophos incident a couple of years ago when the forum was a lot smaller?

Doing a lot of thinking out loud there dhicks I'd actually be very much up for doing some proof of concepts on some of this stuff, as there's some pretty interesting ideas there, and I think there's enough of the necessary componants in existance to build a working device along the lines of some of your thoughts.