dhicks

We found the baskets wear / break, and that 5 Chromebooks in a basket are actually quite heavy for some children to carry. We found children were tending to pick up the Chromebook straight from the basket inside the cabinet, and if they did that in a bit of a hurry they tended to bash it straight into the top of the cabinet. We've found metal A4 lever-arch racks to fit the cabinets quite nicely - you can pack them in a bit denser than the supplied "toast rack" stands as well. Not sure if a search for "A4 lever-arch carryall" or similar might turn up a carry-able version.

Google's NotebookLM, now rebranded (as of yesterday) to "Gemini Notebook". You can give it a bunch of documents and then ask questions of that material. You can test for free on a personal Google account, but be wary of giving that version any personal data of pupils. If you have a Google Workspace for Business / Education domain you get a version that doesn't re-use data. One fiddly issue we found is that you can give it a Google Drive folder of items to process all in one go, which is great, but if any of those items get updated it won't automatically update its processing. I did look and see if options to to do updates / re-processing are available via an API, but there didn't seem like a good option at the time (might have changed just recently).

I remember doing this... around November 2022, looking back through previous support tickets. I seem to remember taking the case off the UniFi UNVR and finding a USB memory stick hot-glued to an internal USB port on the motherboard. Replacing that did reset the UNVR to factory settings, but I think we managed to reconnect to all the CCTV cameras okay and I think it even imported the existing footage. UniFi help centre notice here: https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/9188391314199-UniFi-Network-Video-Recorder-Extended-Replacement

Auto logon / load up of application (possibly in full-screen mode): I was working on this a couple of months ago using Debian as the OS (Ubuntu should be very similar) and XFCE4 as the GUI. That was for a remote desktop setup rather than a kiosk. If nothing else, I found I had to ask Gemini questions about the exact version of XFCE4 I was using, not just "how do I do X on Debian". Switching between two non-iframed views: not tried it, but you could possibly start two instances of Chrome (or other browser) from the command line, both in full-screen mode, then have a script that switches between the two by making one or the other the top window.

We use Cloudflare as our DNS provider, with various services on a number of sub-domains. Using Cloudflare means you can use their (free!) DDOS-protection and Zero-Trust tunneling services, which is handy.

Depending on your location / setup, your school might already a have a waste solutions provider who deals with your daily rubbish, recycling, confidential waste, etc, and will probably have an option to handle e-waste as well. We use Recorra, who I think mostly cover the London area, they can provide either a roll cage (the kind of thing you see supermarket delivery trucks delivering, about 2m high and 1m square, with wheels) or a large "gator tote"-style storage tub with a hinged lid. We use the tubs (we also have very limited storage space), which cost around £90 each delivered and taken away and with a certificate of data destruction if needed.

For staff, we issue USB 2FA keys. That might be a bit too expensive (£20-ish per device) and/or a bit too much work (dozens of pupils reporting lost devices each day...) to role out to all pupils, but it might be an option for some, especially if the pupils/parents have to pay for the key and therefore (hopefully) take care of it.

The new vape / air quality sensor was featured on the PC Pro Podcast last week: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode-796-can-eu-regulation-really-make-it-easier/id563487808?i=1000774194980 It's the last section, near the end, if you want to fast forward. They sound as though they'd given the device a good try-out (the person doing the review runs a hardware testing lab) and it worked well. Interestingly, although UK stocks have sold out, they had no problem ordering from France instead, which might be a handy option for some.

Does Google Chat directly accept HTTP POST requests in the exact format detailed in that documentation page you linked to above? I'd guess it has its own API and, as you suggest, probably an authentication layer (OAuth2, being Google). My guess is that you would need some sort of server (possibly local) to accept the webhook call and then trigger a login-and-post-a-message sequence on Google Chat. If you're lucky, one of the automation platforms (IFTTT / Zapier) might have a pre-build handler for UniFi webhooks that lets you connect them up to Google Chat, otherwise a custom webhook handler is the kind of thing you ask an AI assistant to write for you easily enough these days.

Yes, we had the same issue on our MacOS devices - each pupil user profile downloaded a separate local version of the files. A quick check with Google / Gemini produced a solution, I think for MacOS (managed with Moysle) we had to create a custom settings file, similar to a Windows GPO but the MacOS version. We also found that we could simply delete the folder with no adverse effect, although Chrome does simply re-download the files if it has the chance. Handy for a quick fix if your drive is really full, and can be done with a boot / login script if needed.

The ".exe" bit at the end means that's a Windows executable file of some sort, not a video. A quick Google for "Macbeth motion comic" suggests this is an interactive version of some sort, published around 2010. There seems to be a site-license version available on Amazon, which I'm guessing could be the version you have - it might have originally come with a straight video version (MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV) that you could use.

They do seem designed for mounting flush on suspended ceilings, I'm guessing with the same locking mechanism their WiFi access points use (where you have to poke a slim metal tool into a hole in the side to be able to remove the device fromthe bracket). Not 100% vandal-proof, of course, but if it's anything like the WiFi access points you would probably struggle to pull it off the ceiling before the ceiling tile came apart with it. I'm guessing data from the sensor might be available via Ubiquiti's API, therefore we could export that to a daily spreadsheet for wider access - possibly for use by pupils in projects. Is there anything people use to simulate vaping - maybe a squirty bottle of something?

Just adding a +1 for this option. Even a quite cheap (£30?) pair of noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones will work nicely as a headset for phone functionality (noise-cancelling headphones have built-in microphones in the ear-pieces, that's how the noise cancelling bit works), and the 3CX web interface is nice and easy to load up and use from home.

I think we do daily backups for three weeks, with weekly full backups and daily differential backups, then I think weekly backups for 3 months, then monthly for 3 months then yearly - is that around 40 backups? Most of them probably differential rather than full. We only backup around half a dozen VMs, probably around 800GB of disk image which winds up as a bit over 2TB of backup data in total, which costs us around £15 or so per month.

Software: for our Windows infrasturcture we use Veeam (Edit: around £65 per license, I think). I think they still sell licenses in 5-packs, possibly with a 10 license minimum(?), and you use one license per VM backup. If you have less than 10 VMs to back up you can use their free community edition. Veeam can connect directly to various cloud backup providers, we use Backblaze at £6 per TB per month. They provide an Amazon S3-compatible service to connect to, which I'd think most similar storage providers would do and which seesm to be the most common backup software / storage provider solution. The free community edition of Veeam, can't connect to cloud storage. However, you can sync your local Veeam backup files to a storagre provider if you can connect via a filesystem client of some sort - I've found rclone to work well in the past. It's another thing to set up and maintain, so not really recommended for a production setup unless you are very limited in budget.

I'm currently working on a hosted development environment, we're planning to have the Year 10s be using it after half term (so next week). This is a Linux (Debian) VM running a Docker setup, with each user having their own container they can log in to. Access is web-based via VNC or SSH remote desktop (via Apache Guacamole), with some additional web-based services available as well. The environment mounts a folder from their Google Drive, letting them see their Google Drive files from the command line / Linux desktop file browser if they want. A "www" folder for each user gets published as a website, complete with basic CGI support, hopefully providing a nice self-contained environment that pupils can safely tinker in. So far, I've added Python, PHP and Go as development tools, plus Microsoft's VS Code for the desktop environment. So far the VM has managed with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB harddrive, we'll see what sort of resources we need with the Y10s over the next week or so. This is hosted on-site, on a local server, so filtering is provided by our on-site Smoothwall appliance as with any other device on our network. The Docker environment should be self-contained, with no network access outside the container environment. This is all behind a Pangolin reverse proxy, authenticating against Google's OAuth (should work with other OAuth / cloud storage providers). This is all open source (Apache license), so you can install it yourself - the install script is as all-in-one as I could get it, mainly extending from the Pangolin install script by adding more containers and connecting code: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/per-user-web-server

We have one of these for general dust-blowing jobs: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dusters-CompuCleaner-electronics-environmental-compucleaner/dp/B073F9NY1X If you search Amazon for "air duster" there's some newer options, and there's also simple cans of compressed air. Those tend to have really thin applicator tubes, and are quite handy for getting in more fiddly places than you can reach sometimes with an electric unit.

We're not currently using a local Wiki, but I am setting up a locally-managed development environment, so am installing various components via Docker and handling authentication via Pangolin. A quick Google for a Wiki with an available Docker image install and that can accept authentication via standard identity headers (Remote-User) suggests Wiki.js, which does look nice and simple to install. I might try and add it as a resource to my current setup, as a Wiki server would probably be handy.

We use those too - a nice simple and cheap solution.

You (assuming you have Google Workspace for Education super-user privileges) should be able to get a report of every prompt inputted by users. You could then filter / search through those to look for anything along the lines of "Hey computer, write an essay about Henry V for me". That would show prompts inputted via your school-managed accounts - fine for in-school managed devices (where you can also block access to other AI tools), but pupils could get around this for take-home coursework by simply using a non-school account on a non-school-managed device when at home.

The features / controls for Gemini should be built in to Google Workspace for Education, manageable via the Workspace admin console. Smoothwall (or any filtering solution) should provide keyword filtering, so any trigger keywords typed into a Gemini prompt should produce an alert, same as with any text input box. You should be able to limit by OU what features are enabled / disabled for pupils - I think Gemini as a general chat interface is now disabled by default for under-18s, I think NotebookLM might be enabled by default still.

We seem to have had an issue today where a document was missing from the exam bundle provided by Pearson - we had the expected Python files for the programming exam, but not the language reference ("PLS") document. Seemingly the pupils had it available in the exam in printed form, but they were expecting an electronic (and therefore searchable) version. This didn't get flagged to us until after the end of the exam, and we've now double-checked the original archive downloaded from Pearson this morning and not found the file present in that, so our guess is that other schools have had this problem.

We have a (web based) remote desktop setup the pupils can log in to, with a variety of development tools available. That's in a Docker container, with no network access to anything except the internet via our onsite filter.

Might be worth getting transparent cases for them that you can put your own artwork (school logo, atc) inside, that way it's a bit more obvious the phones are official school devices.