dhicks

If you really are trying to load a lot of data ("a lot" being a somewhat variable term, of course), make sure you know how many rows / columns your CSV file has and how many rows whatever version of Excel you're using can handle - Excel 2010 upwards can handle just over a million rows and 16 thousand columns, seemingly, but that might be something to check.

Do you need an XLS file or an XLSX file? XLSX files are compressed as simple ZIP files - if you rename an XLSX file to ZIP you can uncompress it using the standard Windows right-click. As already pointed out, that file will expand to the same size in-memory when you open it in Excel. Is this something you're doing on a regular basis - getting a bunch of data in CSV format and needing to open it in Excel, or is this a one off? There are a couple of Python libraries to read / write Excel files if that's actually what you need. If you think this is too much data for Excel to be able to handle, can you trim it down in some way - have a script go through and discard undeeded lines, maybe? Or load in to a database and query with SQL?

Sorry, I don't know of anything existing. It sounds like a solvable enough kind of problem - read XML data, re-write as a set of named columns with values, output as XLSX / CSV.

I got the impression Intel / AMD Chromebooks could have ChromeOS Flex installed on them, although on most models you might have to remove a physical write-protect screw on the motherboard. Just checking the list-of-certified-devices for Flex that Google publish it would seem that past the "certified until" date your device /might/ still receive updates, but those updates might cause hardware issues. We have Flex running on 10-year old laptops at the moment, so my guess is that Flex would carry on (with updates) for a while past the official date. Hence I'm thinking install Flex straight away, before you use up a management license. Admitedly, if you're buying new devices, it's probably best to budget for their replacements at the end of their expiry date anyway, if you get to that date and find that you can install Flex then another £30 per working device is still a bargain.

Something we were discussing here the other day: if you're buying new ChromeOS devices, complete with management license, before you deploy the devices are you better off installing ChromeOS Flex on them so you have a nice new device with effectivly no expiry date? You'd only have to pay the standard fee for the management license the once, too.

We are on a standard fibre-to-the-premises connection, no LGfL connection, and we're seeing the same problem, so I don't think it's an LGfL problem. We haven't had many reports of the problem, so either people aren't noticing or they've just got used to hitting Ctrl-F5 every now and then.

Ah - someone was asking me about this (I think) at lunch yesterday. It wasn't anything anyone else had noticed / reported, I'll see if I can get more details out of them and get them to try refreshing the page as you suggest.

I don't think it's possible to run it on the Asus Flip C100PA, which is a pity as we still have 140 of those in reasonable shape. We've retired them from use now, but we did use them for our early years groups (years -1 to 3) as basic kiosk devices for 18 months or so beyond their last-update date. No problems that we noticed, and probably okay for what we were using them for. If you can install ChromeOS Flex on your older devices that would be the best option.

That does require Microsoft Office 365 / 2007 or later for Windows. It turns out that the DOCX file format is basically a bunch of resources stuck in a Zip archive - change a .DOCX file's extension to .ZIP and you can unpack it. The text is in an XML file, editable with a text editor, hence it is quite easy to make a basic find-and-replace tool for DOCX files: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/docx-merge We have the above script running as part of a batch file that downloads a DOCX template file from Google Drive, does a find-and-replace to put live calendar data into the DOCX file, uploads the resultant DOCX file to Google Drive, downloads that file again (!), this time as a PDF using Drive's built-in download-DOCS-as-a-PDF feature, giving us a PDF document we can point people to for a printed calendar. I also have a utility to do a week-to-view version as a single "zine"-style booklet: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/pdf-n-up Neither of the above are really completed projects at the moment, they're just the parts we needed to implement what we were aiming for.

Do you mean you need something that keeps a number of applications running, and if any one of them closes it gets re-opened?

Pretty much any programming language will give you a way to do an infinite loop and run an application, you just want something that compiles to a Windows executable. A quick Google for "batch file compiler" brings up some options, or if you want a general-purpose tool for compiling handy scripts for automating various Windows stuff then AutoIt is very good: https://www.autoitscript.com/site/

Using Chrome as a browser? It does have a proper "kiosk" option you can use at the command line ("--kiosk", I think). Also, "app" mode ("--app") is often quite handy. Would a simple batch file do it?: :start chrome --kiosk --app https://domain.goes.here/url/goes/here.html goto start

I don't have recent experience with SIMS, and none with Arbor, but if you want to explain in a little more detail I might be able to help. I'm guessing the integration to be done is basically to pull data from one system and write it to another, in which case there are some systems that might already be suitable. Wonde have a system that extracts data from various MIS systems and provides a central point for other systems to connect to to get at that data. Clever does something similar, but is mostly geared to the US. Groupcall also do something similar. Salamander Software might be able to help you with more custom development, they already have a system that can read data from various MIS systems, you might be able to get them to look at writing your data to wherever it needs to go.

Hmm - most solutions seem to involve some source of relatively low heat and some sort of motive force to circulate air. Is anyone else thinking small-dog-on-a-treadmill? You could hook it up directly to a tumble dryer...

I live in a small, well-insulated flat, which is great heating-wise over the winter but does tend to build up a fair bit of moisture, hence we have a dehumidifier. I'm not quite sure exactly how much power it takes, but I'm guessing a fair bit less than most heaters. If you want to go for a larger solution, you could look at an air-sourced heat pump - basically an air conditioning unit that can be run in reverse to act as a heater. Typically 2 or 3 times more efficient than using the same amount of electricity to simply run a heater. Grants might be available for installation, it might be something worth looking into. The trick with any kind of heating / cooling system seems to be circulation - in our server cupboard we have a couple of extra fans to direct the cold air going through the servers, otherwise you get hot / cold spots in different areas. The same might help with your clothing - a simple fan pointed at the clothes horse should help circulate the air around, couple that with a dehumidifier.

It might be a good idea to have the start times staggered, otherwise you'll have a bunch of devices all start charging in one go, which might be a bit much for your mains to handle.

I've used the Blackmagic SDI / HDMI converters - around £30 each off Amazon, so easy enough to get hold of. They need individually powering at both ends of the link, but if the receiving end is a modern screen or projector you can often use a USB port on the receiving device to power the receiver. The Blackmagic SDI-to-HDMI has both an SDI input and output, so you can daisy-chain devices together if you want the same output on multiple devices (a set of TVs or whatever). For an event before the summer we had three devices daisy-chained together, a couple inside on a stage and one outside, probably 200m of cable run in total, no signal quality problems. I'm not sure on the exact details of how SDI works, but it looks like a more "old fashioned" cable, with BNC connectors on the ends like an arial or network cable from 40 years ago.

Ah, good point. I've tended to do setups like this via the unattend.xml configuration file used with a custom Windows installation, which lets you create local users, set registry keys, run arbitrary command lines and so on, but InTune is probably the more modern / better way of doing things. Please do report back when you have it figured out :-) Startup shortcut: I think (although I haven't checked) that Startup items can include batch files / PowerShell scripts, so you could have a batch file that does: chrome.exe mystartpage.com -incognito shutdown /p So the computer will shut down if the user closes Chrome.

Ah, great. If you want to avoid having the desktop even load up you can do the whole replace-file-explorer-with-a-script thing, then have that script load Chrome and, on Chrome exiting, do a shutdown, so when the user closes Chrome the laptop turns off. I'm not familiar with InTune, but this is just a registry settings (.reg) file that sets some registry keys, the kind of thing you can also set via Active Directory, so I would have thought you could configure the same thing via InTune. You can apply .reg files directly from the command line: regedit /S AutoLogon.reg If nothing else you could probably have InTune run that command line for each device.

Using the "Winlogon" registry settings (this works for Windows 10 and below, I haven't actually used this on a Windows 11 machine yet, although I'm guessing it's not changed). You can log on with a domain account or a local account, if you're using a local account you just use the name of the local machine as the domain name. For instance, for a machine named "MyComputer001", you could have a file "AutoLogon.reg" (just a simple text file) with the following: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] "AutoAdminLogon"="1" "DefaultDomainName"="MyComputer001" "DefaultUserName"="localuser" "DefaultPassword"="Password01"

No, the Windows login process comes first, after the machine is logged in Windows loads up File Explorer (or Chrome / Edge / etc instead if you want). Of course, you could use a registry setting to have Windows auto-login to a local account then load up Chrome / Edge in incognito mode so no user details are retained, or even load up a batch file / script that clears out the browser cache before starting up each time. Of course, for added confusion, the Windows login provider is itself separately replaceable (again, I think only for Education / Enterprise versions), so you could use the Google login provider so that users login with their Google credentials and have Chrome auto-load after login (with, I seem to remember, login details passed through to Chrome, so users can go straight through to Google services without a second login).

If I remember correctly, if you are using the education / enterprise version of Windows you have an option to replace the default startup of file explorer with whatever you want to run instead, so you can have a Windows machine start straight up (after login) into Chrome / Edge / whatever.

I assume so, too - they have a clunky, clicky sort of sound to them, when you press a key you know you've pressed a key, and so does everyone else nearby. I should point out that I have a newer, quieter Dell (RT7D50) keyboard in my shared workspace office to avoid annoying other people - it's still a full-sized keyboard, and the keys still have a good amount of travel to them, but unlike the Model M it's not quite solid enough to be used as a doorstop.

Ah - {rummage, rummage, rummage} - 8th of May 1992!

I have an original IBM Model M - not sure of the actual construction date, but probably early ninties. Currently up to £250 each on eBay, but still used daily with no obvious failings so far, so I'm probably getting my money's worth. I also have an original model Microsoft Intellimouse which is still working just fine, again used daily.