dhicks

Any answer and/or your usage of any language is going to be very context-dependant - can you give any more details on what you are trying to achive? Are you picking a general-purpose language to learn that has wide usage (which Ruby does, although mostly for web development), or do you have a specific usage in mind? If it's any help, I'm currently developing something using a couple of static site generators, one (Jekyll) written in Ruby, one (Hugo) written in Go. The Ruby-based tool was way more palavar to get set up, and wound up with a library version conflict with another tool. All solveable, and if I had more experience with Ruby I'm sure it'd have taken me a few minutes to fix, but the Go-based tool installed by simply being copied to the relevant computer and run, no other installation needed.

Yes - also, if you're just doing the one A4 page, you wind up with a fair bit of wasted laminate at each end as you wait for the page to come out from the rollers. However, in our experience we wound up wasting a fair few A3 pouches as they drifted around the staffroom, and A3 laminators seemed to get broken more often than roll laminators - we were maybe getting through one every 3 months.

Ooh - perfect timing, 6 years on from my original post and we were just discussing this the other day. We went for the GBC Ultima 35 EZload Thermal Roll Laminator in the staffroom, and over the past 6 years we've probably got through half a dozen or so. GBC have repaired them while under warranty, but our staff are just really good at breaking them. They are pretty hard to break, too - you feed the laminate rolls through the first set of rollers and the rest pretty much sorts itself out, there's pretty much nothing else to go wrong. Even with needing to be periodically replaced every year or so, they're still probably better value for money than the previous A3 flat-style laminators we had - those broke more often, and leaving a box of A3 laminate pouches in the staffroom resulted it them being scattered all over the staffroom by the end of the week.

We are moving to iSAMS from School Manager shortly - I'm keen to make sure we set up processes / workflows to use data from iSAMS in an as automated way as possible, an ability that has been rather limited with School Manager. You can PM me for further contact details or reply in thsi thread.

Both Pimoroni and The Pi Hut have whole Microbit sections: https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/micro-bit-uk?view=featured https://thepihut.com/collections/micro-bit-store

Your best solution might be to try and reduce/hide the complexity of that system - I saw a couple of AV control consoles at BETT this year which give users a nice touch-screen interface to all the kit installed on the stage. This assumes that your equipment stays put on stage, of course, and doesn't get shifted around between productions. I'm planning to have both companies come and have a look at the setup for our new stage area in the church hall next door (one was Stage Electrics, I don't have the details for the other to hand at the moment, but it did look like a nice, simple-to-use design).

We have three Chromebox-style PCs (actually older small PCs running CloudReady) set up to show a Google Slides presentation on loop. Works okay, and having staff edit content is simply a case of giving them edit access to the appropriate Slides document. Slides is a bit limited compared to, say, PowerPoint - there doesn't seem to be a sensible way of embedding video in a slide and having it transition at the correct time, for instance.

My workstation and the IT room are Macs, I've upgraded mine to Mojave already and found it's fixed another issue (mounting of Windows file shares), so I reckon the first step is to upgrade the IT room machines to Mojave and go from there.

What accessories do you think you'll be needing? We have a IT room with iMacs, so no monitors to plug the Raspberry Pis into, so I've set each of our Pis up with VNC server and NoVNC web-based VNC gateway. All a user has to do is enter the IP address or local DNS name of the Pi into a web browser tab and the Raspberry Pi's console appears. Quite handy - means there's only the power cable to plug in to the Raspberry Pi at startup time, no keyboards, mice or screens needed, and as we have power sockets with included USB ports there's no power supplies to loose. Does also mean pupils can connect to a Pi from remote locations around the school or, if you set up a suitable publicly-accesible gateway, from home - have the children run datalogging projects and check in on them over the weekend, or whatever. We've just ordered some air quality monitoring kits from Pimoroni, they seemed to have the best selection of affordable sensors. Edit: we put the Pis in cases, but left the lid off, so the children can see this is a "circuit board" computer and access the GPIO pins.

Hmm - just thought, I wonder if adding a cronjob as the root user to run every hour or so to sync the time against a DC via a command line would work?

We have similar (probably cheaper) foldable devices, the Asus C100PA. I've not seen them used in full-on tablet mode, but in our year 4/5/6/7/8 classes they often get used in "tent" mode, with the pupil using the device stood on their desks for reference while they hand-write something.

Crikey - so you mean the Windows Time service running on our domain controllers is some sort of Microsoft-specific time service, not standard-NTP compatible?

For some reason, that doesn't seem to work on our Macs - I haven't tracked down the root cause of the issue yet, but you'd certainly think just setting the Mac to pick up time from the Domain Controller would keep the time properly in sync.

We currently have our "media" store (around 4TB of photos and videos) syncing to/from Google Drive and local storage via InSync (£100 or so one-off cost for the "pro" version). That then gives us a bunch of local files to back up, which we currently do to both off-site backup (a server in another school somewhere) and AWS. AWS is costing us around £120 a month for storage backing up that media store plus our main file server (another 3 or 4TB) and our Exchange server (around 800GB) with full grandfather/father/son versioned backups.

A large screen might be cheaper than a projector if you're aiming for 4K resolution, and if you're going for a large screen you could get a touch screen. I agree with your other point about not building in things like iPad docks and similar, bearing in mind likely future changes in size and formats. It might be worth investigating house-wide wireless network options - as well as WiFi, some home systems might also handle Bluetooth and/or Zigbee for smart device control.

We used an HDMI signal booster to solve a similar issue: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01EC2YEX0/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07__o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Along with a USB-to-5v cable to plug in to a dedicated USB socket on a power strip: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0763RXLS3/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o07__o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Hmm - if anything, we've tended to find replacing long-run HDMI cables with CAT5 cable tends to work better than HDMI.

And, if possible, either side of each door, otherwise you always wind up wanting to plug something in where you have to lead an extension all the way over the doorway. Might be an idea to plan to have a small porch / entrance hall, with remotly-unlockable front door to the outside and possibly a fridge / freezer, that way delivery companies can deliver food and large parcels when you're not in. Provision extra-wide doors capable of taking a wheelchair, especially for the bathroom, and provision room for grab-bars - worth planning ahead for the future, and being able to get a wheelchair or walking frame through a toilet door easily makes for way less stressful times if you have ageing / disabled parents in the house. Also, Asian-style toilets with squirty hoses for flushing make way more sense than toilet brushes.

What bits are you building yourself - are you hiring bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, etc? Are you living on-site while the house is built? Self-building, especially, can take years, and technology can change over that time. How is the house heated / cooled? Is the garden big enough to fit a ground-sourced heat pump in? That, coupled with good insulation and some smart monitoring, could mean you have no heating bill and cooling in the summer. How is the house powered - will there be solar panels on the roof? Either way, you could plan for a Powerwall-style battery storage facility, either fed from solar or off-peak electricity or both. If you have in-house electricity storage, it might be worth thinking how you distribute that power throughout your house - you could provision 5V DC (USB) or 24V/48V DC (PoE) direct from the battery storage, with no DC-to-AC-to-DC conversion. Might also be worth fitting an electrical car charging point. If you're positioning CCTV, place PoE network points where they are useful for face recognition - head-height near doors. Also PoE points and additional power for actuators, should you want automated door locks / window openers. Servers / switches: probably a good idea to have some provision for a small on-site server / network cupboard, but check how noisy your server / PoE switch is before you buy - you (and/or spouse/children) might not want to put up with the kind of equipment we stick in our server cupboards at work.

Unlimited storage is free on Google Drive for schools and has several sync clients available (official and third-party). In case of a diaster, what data would you need back right away? It would take a while (a week, maybe?) to sync that much data from Google Drive (rate limited at Gogole's end, if not by your connection), and the same might be true for OneDrive / Dropbox. Something like AWS, though, should let you restore at whatever speed you can get out of your Internet connection. Do also bear in mind that synced files are a failover solution, not a backup - if someone deletes a file from local storage, the remote version will get deleted too, either right away if you have a live sync or during the next sync window. On Google Drive you do get a month to restore files, although the restore procedure is rather fiddly, and there's a paid-for option (vault) for proper backups. As a guide, we currently pay around £120 a month for backup to AWS for about the same total file size as you (5TB-ish), but that does include full grandfather-father-son backups, plus we backup our 800GB Exchange server, too.

Still available, at around £40 each - not bad, the cameras are simply plug-and-play, you don't need to use their software. If there are already iPads / Android devices around, you can use screen mirroring (via Airplay or similar) to display whatever the camera is showing on the tablet, in which case AirServer on the teacher's computer is excellent.

The bi-weekly PC Pro Podcast is also worth a listen.

The Raspberry Pi-orientated MagPi might be the kind of thing you're aiming for: https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/ Available to buy as a printed version, but also available to download as a PDF for free. There's a couple of other similar (paid-for) magazines linked to from Raspberry Pi's homepage now, too.

It looks very similar to the Amazon one I linked to above - same set of functions and input / outputs on the back panel, just slightly re-arranged. Should work nicely enough - the battery doesn't actually add all that much weight, I can pick ours up in one hand where I struggled with our older units. The mics aren't anything fancy, and you tend to get rustling / rattling sounds from them if they are used hand-held, but they're pretty good for this kind of price.

Indeed - I have a couple of their power banks to power USB-powered devices, and they seem very solid and reliable. I get the impression the larger "Powerbank"-style devices are a new area for Anker and similar companies, the UK version doesn't seem to be available right at the moment. After a bit of Googling, I'm now looking at some of Micah Toll's material on building 18650-based batteries - a custom-shaped battery to sit under a camera monopod would be very handy.

Hello All, Does anyone have any experiences with higher-capacity power banks such as the Anker Powerhouse or the Goal Zero Yeti 400? It would be handy to have something portable that we could use for various applications, possibly running higher-powered equipment away from the mains (large monitors, that sort of thing) or lower-powered equipment for longer periods of time (running science experiments with datalogging equipment over a weekend).