LosOjos

Yes and no - you can write your own code, but there's a "if this, then that" type interface to setup rules that looks pretty simple. Either way, I am a coder so this doesn't concern me too much (I'll be the one doing all the setup, SO will simply be an end user [so to speak]) Yeah this is something I'm unclear on RE Ninja Blocks - they appear to be compatible with a range of devices but I'm not sure how easily the system can be extended to support any additional devices. As it's open source, I'd imagine it would be no more difficult than it is for Indigo though... need to research that. To be fair, this is the point of Ninja Blocks as far as I can tell; to provide a central hub to control other smart devices from a variety of eco systems. It sounds like Indigo and NB have similar goals. This is where I'm a little unclear with the Indigo system - does that £130 include a starter pack of some sort? I'm assuming it'll require a central hub to 'speak' to the various devices in the home, does that come included in that initial cost? Or is it really £130 just for the software? Seems a little steep for what essentially sounds like a front end to run some Python scripts... Sorry if I'm coming across negative, it just seems like a major expense for something that (at least on the surface) appears to be no more than a GUI... and I'm not trying to say NB is as good/better, the only reason I keep referring back to it is that's where most of my research has been focused so far. I appreciate your input!

Looks great but bloody hell, how much?! As a newbie to this kind of tech, why is that software worth £130 when the likes of Ninja Blocks are free (software)?

That's an awesome version of what I had in mind for a Kodi plugin! I was just going to take an average scene colour a couple of times a second (depending on how much of a CPU drain that proves to be), then use a 3 point moving average to change the colour/brightness of the bulb - this is how I imagine (with zero research of course) ambient lighting on TVs works. Would be cool to get the light flashing along to a thunderstorm, but I suspect the only reliable way to do that would be a scene-by-scene scripted setup such as the Sysfy app appears to use.

Sometimes, when I try to add rep to posts nothing happens. This happened today and I happened to have Chrome's inspector open so noticed vbulletin is throwing an AJAX error for unknown post, however the post number matches that given by the permalink: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/154511-home-automation.html#post1324518

Yeah I'm probably going to get some Hue bulbs (have an idea for an "immersive lighting" plugin for XBMC/Kodi which would work similarly to the ambient TV surround lighting - may or may not be totally irritating! ) What I'm looking for though is a system that ties various appliances together, like the Ninja Block, so they cann all be controlled centrally. If multiple apps are required to control things, the SO will not use it and the lot will have to be taken out. Needs to be as simple to use as humanly possible - she struggles with the universal remote!

You can buy PIR light switches to do this independently of any other hardware (we have them in certain rooms in the school) but the problem with that approach is, if you're sat still for a while (watching TV for instance), suddenly all the lights go out! I wonder if there's such a device that will simply sense a large heat source, rather than a moving one (as a PIR does). I imagine the reason for the movement necessity is that's the easiest way to identify life rather than, say, a radiator. There has to be a smarter way to deal with it though...

Wow, sorry to hear that! Hope it all goes smoothly for you and I'm sure I don't need to say it, but don't Google it!

I see they've gone a bit radio silent, doesn't look good! Great looking product though, just hope it comes through... I may be too impatient!

I'm about to buy my first house (yay!) and part of my bargaining with the SO is that I get to automate certain aspects of the home So, have any of you done this and if so, how? I know there are various proprietary systems, but I'd prefer something open. Of course if the proprietary are leagues ahead I'll consider them, but the tinkerer in me is drawn to something open I can develop on top of. Main things I'm looking to achieve: - control lighting - control power sockets - control heating - "if this then that" style events Ninja Blocks look very appealing to me as they seem compatible with a whole range of devices, meaning I could buy smart sockets/light switches and connect them to the Ninja Block (I think?) Also thinking about the control side, I don't really want to rely on my phone for that, would love to set up a cheap Android tablet as a single purpose device (i.e. only runs the Ninja Block app for example) or purchase something along those lines that can be configured to control whatever I add to the system. I'd love to hear first hand from someone who has done it so I know which pitfalls to look out for.

To be fair, she donated it - they could have kept quiet and she'd never have known! Also means someone there obviously spotted the value in what they had, so they could have quite easily said "yeah, pile of old circuits, I'll bin it" and pocketed the cash themselves - I doubt anyone in my local charity shop would have a clue! So, could have been a whole lot worse IMO.

You wish you'd just unwittingly given away ~$200k worth of equipment?

A house

If it's only happening with one report, try remaking it and seeing if the new version runs. I have known reports to become corrupted between upgrades, though admittedly I've not seen them crash SIMS entirely like that, they usually just give an error in a standard message box and don't run. Worth a try?

EA sales techniques and Nintendo's business model? Bye bye Ninty...

There's an entire area just outside Wolverhampton known as Fighting Cocks. PETA are quite frankly a disgrace these days. If you haven't yet, I recommend reading about the behaviour of their representatives in New Orleans following Katrina (SPOILER: they killed many family pets and vandalised homes who were known to have pets)

I found this a while back too, can generate all sorts of random data for tests: https://www.mockaroo.com/

I keep meaning to look in to this, sounds perfect for school use as the DB can exist in their documents folder, totally isolated. @CAM - I'd look in to this if I were you!

I believe you can specify a script with '-f', so if you wrote your series of commands and saved them in script.sql (for example), you'd be able to run the lot like so: db2 -f script.sql DB2's Command Line Processor and Scripting

Yeah that's the idea. You have to create a login for the server (using their domain name), then a user on each DB they can access using that login. For instance, this SQL script will create a database for the user "JoeBloggs" on the domain "ALPHA" and assign them the rights to administer it (sans 'DROP DATABASE/TABLE'): CREATE DATABASE JoeBloggs; CREATE LOGIN [ALPHA\JoeBloggs] FROM WINDOWS; GO USE JoeBloggs; GO CREATE USER [ALPHA\JoeBloggs] FROM LOGIN [ALPHA\JoeBloggs]; GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE TABLE ON JoeBloggs TO [ALPHA\JoeBloggs]; I've not tested it because I'm not an NM so don't have any test accounts to try it on, so I'd suggest you play around with it. You could of course create a script to parse a CSV list of usernames and set them all up for you in one go. Another way I was thinking of doing this here was to have a PHP/C# intranet page on the server which, when accessed, would check for the existence of the currently logged in Windows user in the DB. If it didn't find them, it'd run the above script to set them up. If it did find them, it'd list some details about their DB, such as table names, to give them some feedback on anything they've done. Never actually got past fag packet planning though!

First and foremost, make sure your DB permissions are water tight. You don't want students losing all of their work because another student accidentally/maliciously issues a DROP on the DB. If you're using Windows machines, you can set it up to use Windows Authentication, which makes it quite easy to assign permissions. I'd seriously consider setting up each student with their own DB (just use their username for the table name for simplicity) then you can give them free reign over that DB. I'd still lock down permissions to drop the DB though, for their own good. You'll want to back it up fairly regularly too for the reasons listed above. Daily 2 week rolling backups ought to be plenty I would have thought, YMMV.

WARNING New, LCD/LED TVs are fairly safe to work on and the caps discharge quite quickly as stated, but unless you're a qualified TV engineer never open up an old tube TV/monitor (CRT) - the power those things store is more than enough to kill you instantly!

Hi @SouthCoastSaint - we've just started doing exactly what you describe this year. We have set up gradesets (and corresponding aspects) for each subject in each year group, our grades are lettered (to avoid confusion with other numbered gradesets we use) and we use the descriptions on Ind Reps. To help the teachers complete their reports, I email them a list of the available grades and their corresponding comments. I can understand the appeal of displaying the comments on the marksheet, but one thing to bear in mind is that would make for a very, very wide marksheet and if you're staff are anything like ours, they'd complain about it being awkward to use. We're also using them to aide tracking. At the moment, we use progress grids that generate cohorts for each grade type. This helps teachers/HODs to quickly find what kind of help is being provided to different cohorts of students. I'm working on (but have not completed) an Excel template which I will drop my marksheet data in to and which will then perform a VLOOKUP against the comment grades to display their corresponding comments on the spreadsheet, as our HODs feel that would provide a good overview for them. So, although SIMS itself won't do everything you want, there are ways and means of achieving what you want to if you're willing to do a little data manipulation in Excel.

You're not supposed to talk about the New Geek Order publicly @elsiegee40!

Are you missing a [/sarcasm] tag? Ah, you were being meta. Sorry Abed!

I literally just came to post exactly that... https://youtu.be/ByP2pQSbSmE?t=9s