dhicks

Ooh! Thanks - I think we last tried a year or so ago, and I understood the problem then to be that the Windows login provider was sandboxed off from accessing the USB ports. It sounds like that has changed (or I was doing something wrong), so sounds like it might be worth us trying again.

If it's any help (which it probably isn't, but you never know), we had to give up on using GCPW as we found it doesn't support the use of USB 2FA dongles, which we issue to staff. We are currently logging in to Windows machines with Google credentials using pGina: pGina - Open source Windows authentication The user logs in to Windows with their Google username / password, checked against Google's ldap service. No 2FA step is carried out, so the user then has to log in (with 2FA) to Chrome separately.

I've used a Gyro mouse years ago and found it just fine, the teachers we tried it with didn't seem to get on with it very well, though. We have also tried with plain wireless keyboards and separate mice - I find I can use a wireless mouse easily enough either on a desk or just by using my leg as a surface, but again any teachers we gave one to seemed to not get on with it and loose / break it within a few days.

I'm guessing you've already looked at the Logitech K400?: https://www.logitech.com/en-gb/shop/p/k400-plus-touchpad-keyboard Keyboard with included touchpad, plus media controls (volume and so on), which is handy for vontrolling videos and so on. We've had them in various classrooms / halls for years, they've worked well.

I was reading PC Pro the other day, they have the Mac Mini M4 (£599 version) listed as their "A-List" mini PC. Second on that list is the Geekom A8 (£899) - I think we bought the previous model for our Bursar to drive his huge great 4K screen and crunch big spreadsheets, which it seems to be doing very well at.

It's not a bad idea... A lot of younger people these days are very used to using portrait-mode displays the whole time, it might make the desktop PC a bit more approachable / useable for some. I did have someone (with limited vision) wanting a large version of their phone for using WhatsApp, one of the VeryPC all-in-one-ish desktops with a portrait mode monitor on the front (I think it just managed 27") worked quite well.

I had a quick demo of ClassVRs headset at BETT a few years ago, that used a gaze-based menu system - you might need to be able to move your head a little bit: https://www.classvr.com/

I think forum sponsers ICT Direct (@ICTDirect_Dave) do pretty much exactly this.

For the pupil ICT suite, 24" all-in-one iMacs. Anything bigger wouldn't have fitted in the available space, they are as close together as we can reasonably get them. Staff also have 24" all-in-ones in their classrooms. We have a few 27" monitors bought a while back for those doing timetabling, but most staff now find those too big - 24" seems about the biggest people want to go for a desktop machine.

For April 1st one year, we redirected Google searches to "magoogle.com", which had a picture of our headmaster (Magoo) instead of the Google logo. I think we still own the domain name, so we could use that as a filtering proxy for Google search results.

Sorry, can't recommend a particular Google Drive compatible text editor, but the "file management" bit should just be Google Drive - that lets users add / move files and folders. You could have a web server sync with user file areas and look for, say, a "www" folder for each user. That web server could be local to your organisation (running on a server in your building, if you want), or you could have something on a small cloud server and put the content behind a Google login gateway of some sort.

Hmm. I thought so, yes. I haven't looked at this for a year or so, so the current version could be different, but I'm reasonably sure that logging on to Windows via GCPW used to then pass login cookies to Chrome, so your user session would then be logged on when you started Chrome. The same was not true for the Google Drive client, and I spent some time fiddling around with the Windows startup mechanism to try and figure out a solution: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/application-starter I can't remember if Chrome maybe needed some specific registry settings or similar to say "use the cookies provided by GCPW", or possibly GCPW might also have registry settings that control its handling of cookies, too.

We are very urban, but at the distinctly non-gritty end of the scale - we can see the back entrance of Harrods from our performing arts building. Parking for contractors and deliveries can be a problem - parking in the area is £50 a day, and there's a 2-hour time limit on the bays directly outside the school building.

Sure, no problem. I've put most of the setup I've used into a Github project: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/remote-gateway The above produces a web-accessible (Windows) remote desktop gateway server, we've been using that configuration for the past couple of years. It should be tweakable to fit other situations - maybe have a fresh virtual desktop created each login, for instance.

I agree, some kind of virtual machine setup is going to be easier to manage than anything involving dedicated laptops. We use a (free, open source) Guacamole server for our general web-based remote desktop provision, you could have a dedicated Guacamole remote gateway for users to log on to to connect to virtual machines. We have our Guacamole server behind a Cloudflare Zero-Trust gateway tunnel that takes care of authentication, which makes for one less thing to manage / worry about. As these are virtual machines to be used for, hopefully, slightly more technical purposes, you probably don't need a Windows desktop, all your virtual desktops can probably be Linux desktops. Indeed, there are several distributions made for exactly this sort of thing, having a bunch of network analysis tools and so forth available, so that part of cost / licensing should be easy enough. If you already have on-site server provision (some kind of server room with power and aircon) then adding one more dedicated server shouldn't be that expensive - a second-hand server might cost, say, around £2,000. Whatever virtual machine system you use should let you provision and manage virtual switches, you should be able to put all the virtual desktops (and any test servers they're trying to break into) on their own dedicated virtual network and leave them to it.

I charge £300 a day (£200 the half-day), but it seems a little dubious in terms of legality to be paying someone to make an offline version of someone else's thing. Can you maybe explain in a bit more detail what you're trying to do, maybe there's a more appropriate solution? I'm guessing you have a requirement for some kind of music package that can run on a non-Internet connected device, can you provide more details?

It looks like the web page loads in separate audio files when it starts up. You might be able to find and save those resources separatly, then arrange them ina local folder such that the web page could find them.

You could try a cheap (£20) USB microscope camera: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jiusion-Magnification-Endoscope-Microscope-Compatible/dp/B07DRGR6LX/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?th=1 Looks like it should just plug into any computer (including your Raspberry Pi) as a generic USB camera, and it's the sort of thing you can try pointing at different stuff around the house / garden.

We replaced a Ruckus system with UniFi several years back. We simply set the same SSID and password on the new system as the old and replaced access points one by one. UniFi access points are nice and reasy to install, you just need to drill a couple of holes for the mount and clip the access point on. We did most of the installs in-house, but getting a cabling company in to get to fiddly sections / just do stuff quicker would be a good idea.

We bought a batch of VeryPC all-in-ones about 10 years ago: /forums/av-multimedia-related/190728-driving-4k-smartboard-using-integrated-graphics.html#post1630226 They're still going, currently as a classroom set we donated to a charity.

This one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Touchscreen-Monitor-Speakers-Desktop-Computer/dp/B0D7C61KD5/ref=sr_1_3 I've not got it out of the box and set up yet as there's possibly a change of plan as to exactly what we're plugging it in to.

Ooh - strap the Pi to the underside of a bit of wood, stick some springs on the side and make a tilt-able platform you can stand on to control the game...

We issue our teaching staff 14" Asus Chromebooks, a reasonably large screen for a portable device. You can, of course, plug pretty much any laptop / Chromebook into a desktop touch screen - we've just bought a 24" one for around £150.

Sold on Amazon as "customisable USB foot pedals", these (£15) and similar are good fun: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tiardey-Optical-Control-Computer-Keyboard/dp/B09TQFBS3C/ref=sr_1_5 It's a button you can program to emulate any key ("A", "B", "1", etc - I think you can even have it do strings of keypresses), and it works as a standard keyboard without drivers, so you can use it as an input device on the Pi or similar, or for something running a web browser. They are sold as foot pedals, so are quite robust and should be able to put up with a reasonable amount of excited thumping. You can, of course, have multiple buttons.

ChromeOS (and Windows and MacOS) have built-in accesibility options, are those not proving enough?