dhicks

That very useful, thankyou. A very quick Google for the on-the-OfCom-list Hi10-5S-Pro suggests a price of around £1,200-ish, so probably around £2,000(?) by the time you've added arials and installation. Probably a bit more if those arials have to run through anything complex, which of course they probably will because that's why there's signal issues in the first place, so probably nearer £3,000.

No - just replying to add myself to this thread. I have a very similar issue, trying to get a mobile signal to an underground electricity metering cupboard under a block of flats, I would be interested to hear any advice from others and how you get on.

Around 120", I think. Unfortunatly we had to move out of the building we were looking at that for, so that project never came to anything, but seemingly we might be re-doing our main hall over the summer, and I think a 120" display would work very well in there.

We (and most other schools I've seen) use a projector in our main hall, users don't seem to miss the touch capability. We did actually look at a modular large screen setup (via @VeryPC) rather than a projector, they aren't completly out of the question money-wise (when a large projector might be in the £5,000 area these days) and the system we looked at was composed of small, replaceable modules, so if someone did break one with a football you just pop the broken section out and pop a new module in.

Yes. I thought it was because I was running ExamPad+ on a remote Debian session accessed in a web browser using Wine, XFCE4, VNC, Pangolin and Guacamole, so the display had several additional layers to get through so a bit of flickering was to be expected!

On our MacOS devices, managed with Moysle, we seemed to be getting a additional 4GB per user profile, which was starting to fill the harddrives up. There might have been a different / better fix, but adding a settings file to Moysle for that set of machines telling it to not download the AI component does seem to have sorted it.

Interesting - which helpdesk are you using? We are currently using Trello as a (reasonably basic) helpdesk, which currently seems to fit the way we work quite well - we have it hooked up to emails to people can email tickets in and we can reply, and I like the kanban-style view of tasks. It would seem to be the perfect place to start using an AI agent - give the agent its own column / task list in Trello, anything we drop in there it deals with.

The more recent new items have been about things like OpenClaw, a "personal AI assistant". It's software that runs on a device somewhere (your local machine or a server - seemingly the Mac Mini works well) and can use an LLM (one of the public cloud ones, or possibly a local one if you have the hardware available to run one) to do whatever tasks you can think of to give it. You can add "skills" and, via MCP servers, give it ways of interacting with external systems (websites with APIs, I think sometimes vision-related capabilities, etc). The more ambitious projects have done things like handing it access to a bank account and email server, pointing it at the internet and have it run a coffee shop. This kind of thing is very much in its early days at the moment - really just since teh start of this year. Most of the stories about interesting / succesful projects seem to have been by developers working for larger organisations, where spending £20,000 on LLM server (token) costs in a month is seen as an interesting side project. In our school setup, we have a Google Workspace domain, with Gemini licensing for most staff. At the moment, we have a number of staff using Gemini features in email and in Google Slides to help produce presentations ("Computer, turn this document into a slideshow, with some illustrations along the way"), which seems to be working quite well. We've had a few people try out NotebookLM, which seems like it should be a great tool for exam revision ("Computer, take this pile of lessons notes and process them into an interactive document I can ask questions of"). I've tried installing the Gemini command-line assistant in a development environment, but that seems to require a different billing setup for some reason, so I haven't got much further with that yet. I find Gemini useful for answering detailed programming questions ("Computer, how do I go about writing a custom Java authentication plugin for the Guacamole remote desktop server?"), although I don't have much else to compare it against as yet. I aim to try, as someone has suggested, the Gemini "programming assistant" Gem when I can get a suitible environment set up.

We've just had a similar query from our performing arts department. To be honest, our 10-year-old Panasonic HC-V270 camcorders are still working just fine. I'm not sure exactly what the latest model equivilant is but a quick search suggests camcorder features haven't really moved on much in the last decade. They are small and light enough to be mounted on a simple single-pole mic stand, they can run from a USB battery bank for hours (cabled-tied to the pole, so no trailing cables needed), record on to a single 128GB SD card for something like 12 hours, and the zoom lense is good enough to frame a picture from a decent sized school hall. If you want something with a larger image sensor to get that "pro" / cinema fell, then an entry-level DSLR with the standard kit lense is probably still a good option. DSLRs might still limit you to half an hour video footage at a time (for import / tax reasons rather than anything technical), but for modern social media promo purposes that might be more than enough. If you want something you can have (keen) children train on for later profesional use, then maybe look at something like the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema. Around £800, although you'll also need to buy a lense. Maybe costs could be shared with the performing arts / ICT department if they do any video editing in the curriculum. Blackmagic make / own the DaVinchi Resolve editing software, which is free to use, so the hardware is just a one-off cost. If you do decide on an iPad, then maybe look at the Padcaster, which adds a bigger lense and a frame that lets you mount the iPad on a stand like a traditional camera: https://padcaster.com/

We have our standard install of Windows 11 installed on a 14-ish(?)-year-old laptop with 4GB of RAM, only used for sports days as a stand-alone and somewhat disposable device. Actually surprisngly usable - takes alittle while to boot, but once it gets going it's fine.

You can buy mini PCs on Amazon for around £200 - £300 - I'm not sure if you can consistantly buy larger numbers or depend on the same model being avilable, but the ones I've used seem reasonable enough.

A basic-but-still-useful test is to run Google's built in internet speed test (just type "internet speed test" into Google search, it should pop up its own built-in tool). If you can run it on a device connected directly to your core switch / router (which should give you pretty much the speed of your core internet connection) and then try with an office / classroom (which might be a few more edge devices away from your core) you can see if there's a difference between the two. Anything connected to your core should probably get to 1Gb, but wireless devices might only be 100Mbps or less, depending on exactly which wireless version protocol they are using.

The only place it causes us issues is when logging in to an account inside a remote desktop session and with only USB keys set up as 2FA options. We only have a few staff still using our remote desktop, and I think they've all added phones or similar as additional 2FA devices for when working offsite, so a very limited problem.

I find AI tools (I've mostly been using Gemini) can do a pretty good job of writing code a function at a time - ask it to write a function to do a specific thing, copy and paste the code, maybe adjust to fit your exact usage, it does reduce the amount of time you spend of the more fiddly bits. It can generally create HTML page templates quite nicely as well, so an AI coupled with a static site generation tool (Hugo or similar) can turn out a website quite quickly. I've used Google Drive / OneDrive as the content store for a website - all the content consists of Word / Excel files than get converted into Markdown and then run through Hugo to create a website. Interestingly, with the current focus on AI, this means you also have all your content handily ready in Markdown format for feeding into an AI if you want as well.

I found (a few years ago, so more up-to-date devices mioght be different) the GoPro tended to overheat if run for a long time, especially on external power. The lack of a physical zoom lense made it more fiddly to get set up in a room, you have to be able to place the device at the right distance from the action, as opposed to being able to place it whereever is best and being able to adjust the image zoom appropriatly. If you are looking at GoPro style action cameras, you could look at a 360-degree camera to place right in the middle of the room and capture everything.

Full MacOS, with no differences / limitations that I can see compared with, say, our school iMacs. So far we've run Microsoft Office and browser-based applications on the Neo with no problem, at some point I plan to try it with QLab / SweetLight for sound and lighting control. I haven't tried compiling / running any of my own (Golang) applications on there yet, either.

I have a Neo myself, my girlfriend has been using it for general Microsoft Office and for audio playback for a theatre production, which it seems to have handled just fine, no slowness or delay (which you would notice with audio). She (and I) disliked the mouse pad, but that might just be because we're both simply unused to them. We use Moysle to manage our 20 classroom iMacs in school. Works okay, but if you're using the devices as multi-user devices rather than assigned to one user we found user profiles started to fill the harddrives up. The main culprit seems to be Chrome, which turns out to download several GB of AI model per user per device, so we've set a Moysle setting and/or login script to try and sort that.

We're still using our 2010-era Panasonic camcorders. They have batteries but can also be powered from a USB power bank and so, along with a 256GB SD card, will record for pretty much 12 hours at standard HD quality. Reasonable optical zoom so you can frame the scene you want, light enough to be mountable (along with the USB power bank) on a single-pole mic stand, so can just be picked up and moved into position, no trailing cables. Current model Panasonics seem to start at around £500, which might be a bit more than you were aiming for, however I notice when I do a Google search some second-hand / refurbished options from Backmarket come up, which might be an option.

We use 3CX as our phone system, with a PoE-powered handset in most classrooms / offices. Those handsets are also set to listen to a broadcast address and put out on the speakerphone speaker anything that gets broadcast. We have some handsets (front office, SMT office, etc) set to be able to transmit. We've also been adding separate SIP speakers to classrooms and other areas as we found the handsets were sometimes a little too quiet. We've mostly handled the installations in-house, with some tricky bits done by the electricians.

I found Gemini very helpful for the display template HTML/CSS page itself, and for generating the border image around the sides. The fiddly bit is finding somewhere to host the data file, script abd output files.

Took a quick picture this morning:

Are you sure you weren't just smaller?

The chap dressed as Henry VIII? Yes, that looked fun. We went round with the free audio guide, which was pretty good - did make me think how easy it would be to make something similar usable by children, so they could make their own tour guide as they went round.

A quick Google / Gemini suggest that RCC signal boosters are a thing - seemingly, you can use a Raspberry Pi as a local time signal booster in some cases.

Woa! I went the same day! One of those things we'd been meaning to get around to doing but you never do if you live locally, so this week we finally got around to it.