dhicks

When heating, does it tend to dry the air, as air conditioners do? I live in a very well-insulated flat, the only heating we use is a 1KW fan heater for warming feet up in particularly cold weather. In colder weather we do need to run a dehumidifier to take the moisture out of the air. I wondering if we had a modern air-sourced heat pump / air conditioner it would both do a bit of heating and dry the air?

Sorry, I can't really answer your questions, but just to say we did have a very quick try-out of Photoshop-for-web (free evaluation account) and were quite impressed with the hardware it would run on. I think we tried it on a couple of our standard Chromebooks, our 7-year-old iMacs and even a 12(?)-year-old laptop, and it worked (if somewhat slowly on the older machines) on all of them.

Ah - problem actually turned out to be users were reporting "WiFi not working" error message / icon appearing on screen at login. That is, indeed, correct, as the machines aren't joined to WiFi, they have a wired network connection. MacOS still shows a "WiFi not connected" icon on the login screen, though, which some users thought meant "no network". Network was actually fine.

I think Trello bought out SendBoard at some point, so I think if you now set up a board-with-email it's cheaper than it used to be (£10-ish per user per month?). I think the free limit is three addons, so for 3 users using just the email plugin you might just squeeze in under the free limit.

We use Trello, which allows for arranging of tasks into ordered lists, all on a shared workspace. We then use the SendBoard add-on to process emails, so people can email a specific address (or fill in a Google form) for a ticket to be created.

The kind of thing you're possibly aiming for is a customisable "USB foot pedal", e.g.: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Annadue-Customized-Sensitivity-Mechanical-Programmable-default/dp/B0B1J4HQFW/ref=sr_1_11 These are great fun / very handy for physical computing projects in general, you can customise the foot pedal (basically a large, heavy-duty button) to produce any keypress you like, and I think the software also supports triggering macros and so on. I've used a bunch of them to make quiz input buttons, you could possibly use them for panic buttons.

Sorry, turns out the test machine needed a bit more testing than I thought - disk failure. I'll be doing a different machine on Friday, I'll try and have a look then.

Are you able to expand a little on what sort of role you see this being? Is this something for a full-time member of staff, or are you wanting someone part-time / on-demand? It sounds like you have existing staff doing some kind of data management, are you needing to expand on their current skillset by hiring in someone with specific expertise? Is there a particular set of tools / environment you are working with, or would setting that up be part of the new Data Manager's role?

Just having a test machine install at the moment, I'll get some settings oof of that when it's done - I'll try and get to that tomorrow. Something I found after my last post here: we wound up needing to install stunnel as an LDAP proxy server - the local machines connect to stunnel, stunnel connects to Google LDAP. Once I'd figured out stunnel installation and configuration it's been running with no problems (on a Windows server) for the past year.

Ah, neat. I've also seen a couple of camera-app-for-work apps on the Android store that (by the looks of things) give the user an easy-to-select choice of destination for the photo(s) they've just taken. Handy if you want separate folders for different types of photos.

I guess so, although if that's simply you sending out an email it'll probably just get ignored along with the other not-immediately-important emails. A handy feature I've wanted several times is for login-with-Google / Microsoft functionality to work right away without needing the IT admin to set anything up / sync any data. Most schools will have a Google / Microsoft domain, so all their logins will be of the form "[email protected]" or similar, so if on setup you can just allow any login from the "theirschool.sch.uk" domain, maybe just assigning them the most basic pupil account, that might the getting started process a bit smoother.

We have a room of 21 new iMacs (M3 processors, I guess), with USB-C hubs that connect into both of the two USB-C ports at the back of the machine to provide USB-C and (a single) USB-A port at the front. That hub also provides a wired network port. It would seem that, on waking from sleep, the network port isn't coming back up - a reboot seems to fix the issue, but that's an extra step for users to have to do.

Ah, you've pretty much answered my post as I was typing it! Just from experience, the less steps / buttons to press for the user to log in, the better. If you can somehow give the IT admin a choice of, say, "just Google logins", then instead of having to show the user a "enter username/password" box and give them a "log in with Google" button you can go straight to the Google login workflow. Cloudflare do this quite nicely with their zero-trust tunnel gateway, our remote desktop users just follow a link straight from a menu page, if they're already logged in with the Google account the "log in with Google" page just whizzes past, I don't think most of them even realise they're logging in with their 2FA-protected Google account.

Do you have any idea why? Are teachers / admins not realising you offer an SSO option, is it maybe not obvious enough in your documentation / sign-up process? I'd guess most UK schools have either Microsoft or Google accounts for their pupils by now, it should be much simpler in most classroom situations for teachers to say "now, login with your Google/Microsoft logins".

As previous comments have said, try and make sure you don't spam / overwhelm the parents. You might want to separate out actually-important notices from marketing stuff, so if a parent wants to unsubscribe from your marketing emails (or just marks them as spam) they can do that separately from unsubscribing / blocking stuff from ParentMail or similar. We find Mailchimp works nicely for handling a marketing email list, and you can have that sync with data from your MIS easily enough.

Yes, we have several ChromeOS Flex desktops - no laptops ourselves as we tend to buy Chromebooks. ChromeOS Flex works on Macs as well, older out-of-MacOS-updates iMacs make for nice ChromeOS machines, I use one as my day-to-day working machine. ChromeOS Flex is, generally, easy and free to install, although you will need a one-off management license (£30) if you want to make it a managed device.

I think the last batch we got were the Lenovo 500e - around £270 each before VAT. For a school environment, you'll be wanting both managed user accounts and managed devices. There's a one-off management license needed per managed device - around £30, probably best to just include it in the initial purchase cost of devices. Most of the settings and so on you'll want to apply actually go to the user account rather than the device - in ChromeOS, things like browser extensions and so on follow the user around, they aren't installed to a particular deice. Having a managed device mainly means you can stop users logging on with a non-domain account, so pupils can't simply log on with a home account. The Lenovo's we bought are full-flip devices, able to be used in "tablet" mode, complete with rear-facing camera, and even come with a built-in stylus stored in the device's body. Everyone instantly looses the stylus, so I'd recommend taking those out until actually wanted (maybe by Art). ChromeOS doesn't let the end user run applications as such, everything is contained (and sandboxed) with in the browser. For a schol environment you'll probably be wanting some kind of filtering / keyword detection, which will probably run as a browser extension assigned to users.

I think Google are wanting you to use a managed Chromebox device for kiosks / digital signage - I've just been looking at the Lenovo Chromebox Micro, around £400-ish, which does include a management license.

We have a mixture of ChromeOS and Windows 11 machines logging on using a Google login. We've found that Windows 11 (with an Education license, so automatable with an unattend.xml file) will install on quite old hardware (think about 12 years old is our current record, although that machine wound up being very slow), and future updateability might vary. If you just want machines with a web browser, then the most-easily-managed option is going to be ChromeOS - again, ChromeOS Flex will install on older hardware, and tends to perform (a bit) better than Windows 11 - a 12 year old machine is still probably a bit much, but we've had some 10 year old laptops running ChromeOS okay. If you do decide to give Linux a try, I'd go for Debian (probably the Raspberry Pi distribution), with the standard desktop removed and just running Chromeium browser. I use a Raspberry Pi running both Chromeium and Firefox browsers on a daily basis as my office machine, as a simple web browser machine it works fine. You'd need to figure out how you handle logins, or you could simply set up as a kiosk machine, giving each user a fresh, blank web browser that they then log in to with some kind of web-based account. ChromeOS / Google Workspace is probably going to be easier to manage, though.

I can't seem to find anyone who makes a mouse with a sensibly-lengthed cable for use with a laptop. I still have a few Logitech M-UV55A mice around, which are great - nice short cable, about half the length of a normal mouse cable so they don't get tangled or sprawl all over the desk.

I think AB_IT is aiming more for a "Maker Space" kind of setup - if the skills they have are more around setting up a computer than programming then it would seem to make sense for them to offer that as a holiday / after-school club. If hardware in the form of desktop PCs is available for free then, again, it makes sense to use those. The inside of a desktop computer is something most children don't wind up seeing, so it might be an interesting exercise for them. Modern single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi are nifty, and would take up less space in a possibly already-crowded child's living space, but that might not be an affordable option in this case. Licensing: my guess is that once people have a computer they've put together and set up, they're going to want to take it home with them to play with. It might be a good idea to make sure they can do that, even if that's a paid-for extra option. At one point I think you could get licenses for Windows for refurbished PCs at around £30-odd, I'm not sure what the current setup is - one of the Microsoft licensing suppliers on here might be able to explain better. There is, of course, Linux - probably one of the retro gaming-orientated distributions in this case. Or, possibly, ChromeOS for a home machine to do school work on, although probably not as fun an option. If a child is taking home a PC, the next thing they're going to want is a keyboard, mouse and monitor to plug it in to. You might want to see if you can find a supply of monitors - if they have a TV to plug into, you might want to have some long-ish HDMI cables on hand to dish out. Depending on the school / area, if the child has a laptop / Chromebook at home they can use that as a monitor with an HDMI-to-USB adapter.

You probably don't need to set up a whole new project entirely from scratch, various similar clubs / schemes exist, something you might be able to join and set up a local branch of. CodeClub would be the place I'd start looking at: https://codeclub.org/en/

Same here - I think probably our bursary charity, but let me check with SLT first.

I had a look at the Ipevo stand at BETT this year: https://www.ipevo.com/ We might be getting one of their desk-mounted cameras as a visuliser / scanner / conference camera. While looking up the website above, I came accross what seems to be their handy free-to-use web app: https://apps.ipevo.com/pwa/visualizer.app/

I have one of these in my hand right now. Well, not right now as I'm typing on my IBM Model M keyboard. Also, mine's a kind of off-white beige rather than pristine white - I can't quite tell if that was its original colour or if it's just weathered that way.