sonofsanta

To save others the Google, here's a Johnny photo from last winter's Upgradothon: *loads up Photoshop*

General theory, as I was taught, is that sans-serif fonts are cleaner and easier to read on websites, versus serif fonts being easier on printed paper. Honestly, though, it comes down to branding: if you want to look modern, go sans-serif, if you want to look traditional, go serif. We used serif on our website redesign, because we're a century-old grammar school, and it matches our image. Google Fonts is a rabbit hole that will steal hours from you if you're as nerdy as me dead easy to use on your website though, and entirely free. Pick a font that has real styles for bold, italic etc.; they always look better than a browser faking it on a roman style.

Main purpose is safeguarding on site--all visitors will have a different coloured lanyard and have a photo on their pass so you can see it's legitimately them and not a borrowed/stolen pass. It could be done with a webcam + the Win10 camera app and dragging the photo over and typing details into a template... but that's starting to get too involved for busy Reception staff to do multiple times a day. If it were us doing it for the occasional staff badge I'd be happy doing that, but I want to keep it as simple as possible for office staff for all our sakes'. tbh. Fair warning about the police--and cheers for the list of options

That looks the most promising option so far--I can live with £300 a year, and I really don't want to faff about coding my own!

Looks like the only thing they have now is--unsurprisingly--a full-fat overpriced-tablet carded-doorways-everywhere-for-everyone solution. This is becoming a bit of a theme--no-one does the simple thing I need because they're all doing the all-singing-all-dancing solution instead! Starting to look more and more like I'll be coding up a simple thing myself and connecting a label printer at this rate--just a screen laid out like the pass, a button to take the photo, some simple fields for Name/Company/Visiting/Date/Car Reg, and save it all to a database that I can robocopy to a server at the end of the day. Cos looking at pricing on some of these fancy pants systems, that could easily save £1200 a year...

I've seen that at another school but that feels like overkill for what we want here--we don't need people to tap through a sign-in system and say who they're here for, and have notifications go out to staff that their visitor has arrived and all that jazz. We're happy for (would prefer to still have) Reception staff to do all that stuff still, we just want an easy way to get the photo pass printed, and while we're entering that data to be printed, it may as well get saved somewhere to. Inventry would do everything we needed, but we'd use about 20% of it and end up paying 5x more than we need to for our purposes :/

The new Head has spoken: we need to do something more about site security. So begins a big project of great fun. One of the things he wants is photo visitor passes. I know there are various systems out there for taking a photo of someone on a webcam and printing it out, but, well, I don't know any of them. I figured you lot would have opinions (or at least, more recent than the last thread I saw on the topic). What we (I) want: Paper passes, not card, to keep costs low Simple software to take the photo via webcam/connected digital camera, and with a few fields for name, company, datetime etc., print out an appropriately sized pass to go in a lanyard Logging functionality so we have a copy of the photo on file against the details for six months or so (whatever is GDPR friendly) just in case Mr Plod would like a copy. Simple database would be fine. It's the kind of thing that I could probably kludge together myself with a bit of Visual Studio work, but honestly, it'd be more cost effective to just buy it in. Someone must have solved this problem already, right? And as a bonus point, if anyone has any recommendations for where to get decent branded lanyards, that'd save me some Googling too

Oh man The Boys is really really good. Really really dark, too, and not shy about its violence, but just brilliantly done. I love Karl Urban in it and his propensity for calling everybody a, uh... well, best not use that word here, eh?

TBF, I think this issue is wider than that requirement--we're just on 1803, not any LTSC version.

Spent all day hammering at this one too! Up to and including "sod it, I'll download and install 2019", which hasn't fixed the problem but has at least started a new 30 day trial. I've fixed it in the past by running cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\IDE" devenv /resetuserdata but that's doing sod all today. Gave up around lunch figuring it might be Microsoft's end and I'll try again next week. Seeing you lot with the same issue makes me think I made the right call there! I was going through Fiddler logs--it makes three calls every time you click that link, and the last one (when you went to the URL in a web browser) was returning nowt but null, so I suspect it is them.

This has been bugging us ever since we moved to Win10 but is becoming more and more prevalent as we slowly move away from VGA splitters. We often configure teacher's PCs with two monitors and a projector/touchscreen, and we do it by installing a low profile graphics card, running one monitor + the projector/screen from that GPU (set to duplicate) and the second monitor running from the onboard graphics as an extended display (set to be main). When it works, it works really well. However Windows keeps being "helpful" and rearranging the screens, usually by splitting them into three extended displays (and never in a useable arrangement, of course!) which causes no end of confusion. Easily fixed, of course, but it needs us to go over and sort it as it's just that bit too complicated for teaching staff. I've never spotted any rhyme nor reason to it--it might go two weeks without issue, so it's nowt to do with restarts, and it could do it in the middle of a day after being fine all morning. So: has anyone else had this and worked out why it does it, and thus how to stop it? Or, alternatively, is there a way to force screen arrangements as a startup/login script? Even if I end up with lots of specific group policies for individual rooms, it'll be worth it.

If you want economy above all, the HP PageWide business inkjets have been brilliant value for us. The HP 556 would be your heavy lifter right now, or the 452 if it's <2500 pages a month. Do you explicitly need a laser? If it's just general office printing, these work a treat; we've had a fleet of ~45 for 4 years now, and they've saved us about 40% a year compared to our previous laser fleet.

I've never done beer properly: it's a lot of faff with boiling it at a specific temperature for a specific number of minutes and then keeping it at a set temp while it ferments! I've done kits reasonably successfully though--never mindblowingly delicious but good enough for a session through the last Saturday of the Six Nations, certainly. But wine? You want to brew wine? I got you covered there, with blog posts and everything. (In answer to the thread question: you could get a funny taste from not cleaning stuff enough. Sterilising is your friend. Cleanliness is next to tastiness, my friends.)

AT LAST I'VE MISSED IT SO MUCH And yes, I still use Firefox as my daily driver at home and work, have done since v0.7 Phoenix in god, 2002? With the Quantum engine it's faster than Chrome, less of a memory hog, and has more extensions that I can tweak more to my liking (pro tip: Tree Tabs are a lifechanger). As for DownThemAll, the best use for it is when you have a page with 30-40 downloads (e.g. PDF guides, config files, whatever); you can tell it to grab everything (with a filemask like *.pdf if necessary) and it'll do it in a handful of clicks. It's a phenomenal timesaver in the right situation.

Well I mean, the Data Server crashed again this morning for no apparent reason, password resets keep not sticking and sometimes require me to restart services and knock the whole thing over for ten minutes, everyone is having trouble with their passwords anyway because brilliantly user accounts are tied to dataset and so when the Head created the 2019/20 dataset back in March to start timetabling it took a snapshot of the passwords then... and that's just this morning, without digging into the troubles the Assistant Head has with the reports and getting data out, all of which is over my head (I'm not so daft as to get involved in any admin work involving Facility). Plus our account manager won't commit to saying it'll be supported in three years from now. It is working for us, but I have a nagging feeling that's just because we're used to it, and once we start looking at new options built around modern needs and principles we'll realise how much we're actually missing out on.

Secondary, and a single-academy trust with--as far as I'm aware--no plans, needs nor desire to go MAT with anyone. Currently still on FacilityCMIS/ePortal and getting bored of it and its nonsense, tbh. About time we moved away from a product literally written last century. (Which is why I don't want to jump out of the CMIS frying pan and into the SIMS fire...)

We've had a new Head start this week (external appointment) just as the assistant head and I have started discussing an MIS change, as we've been on CMIS/ePortal a loooong time now, and it's getting very old hat. New Head is keen to go to SIMS as that's what he had before, which I think is a massive mistake and a sideways step at best (I'd say backwards...), so seeing this post detail your thinking so thoroughly has been very useful. And y'know, Bromcom keeps on coming up as a name... Which others did you look at, out of interest? We'll be going through all this over the next few months, and it's likely to be a decision we're stuck with for ten years, so I want to do it right.

I properly enjoyed Spiderman: Far From Home. Tom Holland is by far the best movie Spiderman there's been, awkward and funny and witty in that off-the-cuff, doesn't-yet-realise it way. The teenage romance between Peter and MJ is awkward as teen romances are, not some idealized nonsense, and there's some really touching moments in the film--brought a tear to my eye when Happy sorts the music out (you'll know what I mean if you've seen it). Plus Spiderman has the best villains. Human and relatable. The 2nd credits scene completely relies in you having seen Captain Marvel and is, uh, a bit of a spoiler for that film if you haven't. Hilarious if you have, though.

Argh! We just bought one of these in the last week, because they were going out of stock everywhere so I didn't want to risk not getting it, and it's £200 cheaper today. You can hack the firmware to remove the 30 minute recording limit (which is a stupid tax thing), and then they're really, really good 1080p/4k video cameras, so if your school needs such a thing: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Sony-DSCRX10M2-Digital-Recording-Tiltable/dp/B010X7TFVY EDIT: aaaand refund arranged, new and cheaper copy ordered. Why they couldn't just refund me the £200 I don't know, but I will make the effort to post the parcel to save that amount...

I laughed more than is reasonable or healthy at this collection of designs: The worst volume control UI in the world

Is the Nest Level when they get trapped in the thermostat? (more seriously, actually looking forward to this one. First one may be the best video game movie ever made)

This is a highly irresponsible thing to suggest. Go put your tin foil hat in a microwave and turn it on for a minute. Now your kitchen is on fire. THAT COULD BE YOUR SKULL NEAR 5G SIGNALS IF YOU WEAR A TIN FOIL HAT. This is the real conspiracy here: flooding the world with these microwave signals so it's NO LONGER SAFE to wear your tinfoil hat so now they can LISTEN TO ALL YOUR THOUGHTS and you can do NOTHING about it. Tell everyone you know! Preferably on social media where you put all your thoughts out for the government to just casually check on any time they please.

That's interesting... we were told we'd be okay on version 6 for another 4 years or so, at which point our tills would be 10 years old and we'd probably need to replace them anyway.

We pay £300pa for a local company to host it on Rackspace and give us support. That's with their own CMS, too, not Wordpress or similar. So yeah, £180/month seems a bit steep to me--about 7 times what I'm paying now. (Far from the worst rip off I've seen, though...) Regarding AIT--it may not be all bad news. AltmanIM have picked up all the support stuff, and were offering to honour old agreements. More details in this thread, and probably worth your time emailing [email protected]

This is such beautiful irony. I love it.