dhicks

You'll maybe need to expand a bit on what you're trying to do - are you trying to get some Python-based application working on a server, or are you trying to deploy a Python learning environment on pupil machines, or something else?

Possibly within reach of a point-to-point wireless connection if you can come to some agreement with a person 5 minutes down the road?

Good point - I use 5g broadband at home, which has been very reliable, and our second building with around 100 pupils / staff in used 5g for a while until we could get a leased line in. Depending on what, exactly, you mean by "failover" it might work okay - if you just need a connection to have some kind of internet access while the main connection (which possibly has a commerical-grade Service Level Agreement associated with it) gets fixed.

It's probably going to vary around the country, but I keep getting adverts offering gigabit leased lines ("from") £250 a month, so £400 a month does seem a bit high. Might also be worth pointing out that satellite connections are now available - Starlink is around £75 a month, download speeds somewhere around 100 Magabits a second.

The CONCATENATE function in Excel - if your data was simply in the first two columns, put a forumula something like this in the third column: =CONCATENATE("rename ", A1, B1) Replicate the formula down the sheet, then copy-and-paste the results to a .bat file and run it.

There's a couple of recent threads on here about this already, listing most of the well-known options. We use Trello, with the SendDesk plugin to enable general users to be able to email in tickets. We also have a Google Form that people can fill in that then gets emailed in to create a ticket, so no need for every user to register with a helpdesk system. I really like Trello's Canban-style view of tasks, with tickets that you can change around in order and move between lists - I'd like to have the whole admin team using it so we could swap tasks around between us, rather than just the IT team.

They can make a good base for interesting robotics projects. I did my master degree research project in the University of Reading's cybernetics lab, which had a Dalek to hand - this was a few (25?) years ago, I'm not sure if it was a reproduction or an original prop. If I remember correctly, the original design was intended for someone inside on a tricycle, hence the kind of angular shape and low centre of gravity. As props, they tend to be rather heavy, and from the pictures given in the link I don't know if the top can rotate on the base. Our Dalek was intended to act as a fire extinguisher - you might be able to convince your wife that it's a fire-prevention tool, then you even have a good excuse for it to be rushing around yelling "Exterminate! Exterminate!" the whole time.

I've cloned the project here: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/Infrastructure-Monitor I'm part-way through changing the script around somewhat, but one of the things I've already done is have it pick up config settings from an Excel (or CSV) file, which might be easier for some people to edit. This is where I found Go rather useful - the standard compiler includes cross-compilation for all the platforms Go compiles to, so whatever platform you are developing on you can produce binaries for other platforms.

@SamDavis - as you're here... I'm currently looking at options for headset wireless mics. Looking at the website you linked to, and the link from there to their supplier's website, there seems to be a very large range of prices - some mic packs seem to cost £2,000 each, whereas I can get a set of 4 headset mics off Amazon for £120 the lot. Any idea what the difference is, and if that will make much / any difference from the point of the average school performance?

I was just reading the Micropore FAQ: https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/82089O/common-questions-micropore-surgical-tapes.pdf Seemingly, the trick is to dampen the skin first, then apply the tape, then it sticks better when dry. I don't know if that then makes it less sweat-resistant, though.

As suggested, Transpore or similar hypoallergenic tape - from experience, something in standard surgical tape (possibly the adhesive) irritates my skin. Depending on just how neat a result you want I think you can now get tape to colour-match various skin tones, although standard mostly-transparent tape is probably fine.

We allow staff (but not pupils) to share externally - I think we've mostly managed to ween our staff off using third-party sites / tools we have no control / oversight of now that sharing a file with someone is a nice and simple process in Google Drive. Somewhere on the to-do list is to find / write a tool to better audit site-wide external shares.

We use iSAMS, with accounts automatically created in Google Workspace by Salamander Soft (they also support Office 365). Data is also exported from iSAMS (iSAMS have a good API for that kind of thing) to Wonde. Wonde is used by various third-party applications to get limited pupil data, including usernames - I think Timetables Rockstars, Busy Things, Brain Pop, Explore Learning, LanguageNut and White Rose are supported, although you'd need to check exactly. For applications that don't support Wonde / OAuth login-with-Google and that require a CSV file of usernames to be uploaded, I have a set of scripts that get data from iSAMS and export CSV files in the formats needed.

As others have suggested, a USB audio interface for the laptop might be an idea. I find the Behringer UM2 quite okay, and affordable compared with other devices at around £40: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Behringer-U-PHORIA-UM2-Computer-Interface/dp/B00EK1OTZC/ref=sr_1_2_sspa That will give you a 1/4" stereo headphones output and left/right phono outputs - probably connect your existing twin-phono-to-XLR cable to the left/right phono outputs.

Depends on what the website is actually checking for - my guess is that there's some client-side Javascript checking for either particular features or checking the browser user-agent string. There'll probably be a command-line option for your browser to set the user-agent string to something different, so instead of telling the website it's running on Chrome-on-Ubuntu you can tell it it's running on Chrome-on-ChromeOS or whatever instead.

Hmm - does sound somewhat like snoring.

You could try asking Zoom themselves. We had someone from Zoom turn up on the forum a couple of years ago (checks dates - 13th October 2010 - exactly two years ago!): http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/218045-zoom-education.html In that thread I don't think we got much further than confiming that yes, the person posting was the UK education lead for Zoom in the UK and that meant he lead education for Zoom in the UK.

Are you sure? When we manually updated some of our workstations, we ran Help -> About ChromeOS -> Check For Updates, that updated to a particular version, when we ran "update" again ChromeOS worked for a moment then returned "Nothing to do, all up to date", but when I check another machine it had a (slightly) later version. I checked that workstation the next day and it had updated at some point, so all sorted in the end. The current (October 11, 2022) release version of ChromeOS is 106.0.5249.112 (according to a quick Google search).

Another thread described a similar problem: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/229673-cant-access-google-classroom-chromebook.html One thing to check: is your ChromeOS install the very latest version? You can check version / for updates in the "Help -> About ChromeOS" menu. We found with some ChromeOS Flex machines newly upgraded from CloudReady that we had to prod them to run a couple of updates until they were functioning okay. ChromeOS does, generally, just keep itself up-to-date in the background, but sometimes if a devices isn't used for a while it can get behind.

Possibly dependent on your exact setup, but do you actually need on-site servers / services at all? If you had Windows or Mac machines log in to Google Workspace or Microsoft Teams accounts you shouldn't need your own directory servers, and that would take care of email and file storage as well. Pretty much all you need on-site these days is an Internet gateway and maybe some smaller devices for things like WiFi, print and telephone services. You might want to keep a local backup of any cloud-stored email or files just in case.

I meant your code - sorry, the bit of your post I quoted was a bit random. Would you mind if I used your code as a basis for something that runs on my webserver, with some added functionality to pick up settings from an Excel / CSV file? Same goes for your other recent bit of code - I'd like to be able to modify it to run on my webserver and have it available as an installable utility for schools to use.

Is this code released under any particular license, or is it public domain / free for anyone to use and modify?

You might want to try: https://moneyfacts.co.uk/ I used to work for them, a long time ago - they've been doing savings / mortgage comparisions for longer than most others in the business (they used to be a magazine).

Sorry, as in that's recommended somewhere in the updated Keeping Children Safe In Education document?: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1101454/Keeping_children_safe_in_education_2022.pdf I've just been reviewing the above (still catching up on start-of-school-year tasks), I don't remember anything about schools being recommended to check social media during recruitment. I seem to remember some news stories from a few years back about people being asked for social media usernames / passwords in job applications / interviews, which I think caused some complaints and was generally considered to be a bad idea.

Sorry, I don't know anything about simplesaml, or really much about PHP, however you should, hopefully, at least be able to tell if the issue is at the Apache side of things by looking in the Apache logs - generally /var/log/apache on a Unix / Linux system. If there's nothing in Apache's error log then at least you know it's not Apache that's the problem, which might be a start. Sorry if the above is obvious to you, I figured it'd be worth mentioning if you didn't have any idea where to start looking.