dhicks

No - I'm currently just using a Samsung Gear 360 (2017) and the included software, which would seem to be based on CyberLink's PowerDirector. The camera has two fish-eye lenses, and video is recorded as a 4k file with two circular lens images in, you then have to transform each frame of video into equirectangular format before being able to do much else with it. This step takes ages, but should be hardware-acceleratable. I haven't tried using Blender for this step yet, but I will investigate - I should probably get hold of a better-quality camera before I put too much effort into it, though.

Ooh - very useful, many thanks. Any idea how well the Shadow virtual machine handles rendering 360-degree videos, i.e. can it use hardware acceleration from the graphics card to render 360 degree videos from dual-lens "raw" images as produced by most 360-degree cameras these days? My current laptop takes about a day to render a couple of hours worth of footage, and that's before you've really got to the editing stage.

Another recommendation for Airserver - not just for its Airplay capabilities, but it also supports Android and (if I remember correctly) Windows devices, and licensing and deployment is really easy as well.

We bought one of these on Amazon for around £150: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01MRY9KD9/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ...and were impressed enough to buy a second one. Has an internal battery and can do bluetooth connections, and also has an audio output so you can link a couple together to cover a larger area. There's also a shower-proof cover available for use outside and it will sit on a standard speaker mount pole. The only feature it lacks is somewhere to actually put the two wireless mics it comes with, but we found some industrial-strength velcro solved that problem.

We have laptops of a similar age we're using as fixed workstations in the staffroom, with power supplies plugged in and batteries removed so staff aren't tempted to wander off with them. You could add a simple laptop stand and a keyboard and mouse, if you have the space for it.

I think we're having salmon this year rather than turkey. We've had goose in the past - if you're used to cooking turkey (which can take hours to cook and can be quite dry, if very solid) then geese produce a surprising amount of fat when cooked, the actual amount of meat can shrink somewhat (maybe 50%?) by the time you're done. The pheasants you get in supermarkets / butchers tend to have been shot, which means you wind up with bits of lead shot in the meat, which again can be a bit surprising to people if they aren't expecting that.

I think you should be able to simply map the shared folder as a drive and simply check any "remember credentials" tickboxes as you go along.

If I understand correctly, BT's "4G Assure" package is an ADSL line with an assured 4G backup solution in place should the ADSL line fail. The 4G hub delivery in case of failure is next-day, but I don't know if you can pay up front for a hub to be delivered so you have one ready to go. I seem to remember reading somewhere that if you have a mobile line with BT / EE they'll turn on unlimited data within an hour on your mobile, so you could maybe have a separate SIM card in a hub ready to go if there's an issue. Not sure on costs, but I'm guessing home / business ADLS rates, maybe £60 a month or so?

How do you mean by "4G"? I use Relish for my home broadband, and that's 4G-based, but separate from any phone account. I think I get around 20Mbps download and 2 or 3Mbps upload, which isn't bad for home broadband and might just about be suitible in a pinch to keep people able to send / receive emails if nothing else. Latency times tend to be much larger than fibre / ADSL connections, which seems to cause issues with VPN and/or SSH connections - I find SSH connections timeout at home if I haven't typed anything for a couple of minutes. I spoke to a couple of vendors recently about connection options, and someone mentioned a 4G-based "backup" service. They seemed to think that was synchonous - 20Mbps each way. I think they were selling this particular service as a temporary solution while they sorted out the cabled connection, so I'm not sure how generally available that solution is, or whether you can actually buy a syncronous 4G connection from anywhere.

Thanks - that does make sense, we'd be moving from a Xenserver setup, so maybe extended support at least for the first year would be a good idea.

That's kind of the idea - that price is for hardware-and-support, at the moment I am spending a fair bit of my working time (i.e. the school's time, which they are paying me for) sorting out issues with our server setup. If I didn't have to spend time doing that I could be doing something else. The main question, as raised earlier in this thread, would seem to be whether the support provided is going to be worth £10,000 a year. Interestingly, you seem to have bought just the hardware with, I imagine, initial configuration, and by the sounds of things that is working very well. If all we need to do is spend £20,000 now to get a couple of servers that simply hum away in the server cupboard for the next five years with no maintainance needed (maybe the occasional disk swap) then that sounds like a bargain. I could, of course, buy some new (or quality second-hand) equipment and configure a suitible failover-capable setup myself, probably for a hardware cost of around £10,000. However, the total cost to the school is likely to be around the same by the time they've paid for my time to figure out how to set it all up and make sure I've tested every likly failure scenario (a backup isn't a backup until you've tested the restore process...).

For a single TCP/IP connection between two servers with teamed network interfaces, can you actually utilise more than one interface's worth of bandwidth anyway? If I remember correctly, you can but both sets of teamed interfaces and the switch have to support some extra technology / features of some sort, otherwise teamed interfaces really only make a difference for multiple connections between multiple servers. You could, of course, add 10GbE cards to both servers, but that might start getting expensive. If both servers are VMs you could move them both to the same server, then networking speed limit should simply be a case of however fast the internal virtual switch can go.

I'd be surpised if network speed is the limiting factor, I'd guess it's more likly to be disk / swap size or speed, RAM allocation or database configuration. We attempted to increase the performance of our MIS by doubling the available CPU and RAM, but the underlying database simply wasn't able to actually make use of the resources - if the database is designed in a way where a bunch of tables are locked for a given operation then there's not really much you can do (although increasing the avaulable RAM or write speed of the underlying disk might help). You should be able to see if the network is being a bottleneck from a simple performance monitor - is the network actually hitting 100% usage at any point?

If you have existing laptops or desktops, you can switch them over to ChromeOS by using CloudReady's installer. Their Home version is free, which might be worth trying out just to see how you get on, and you pay a yearly fee (£10 a device) for a version you can manage with the Google Admin Console just like any other Chromebook. It's a good way of re-using older hardware, too - you can get a few more years out of your existing devices. We are using a mixture of Lock'n'Charge cabinets (the ones with the removeable baskets of five devices) and Loxit cabinets. In both cases, this is with children, years 4 to 8, and we're guessing most of our damaged devices are being bashed against the edges of the cabinets as devices are grabed and pulled in / out of the cabinet during registration. I don't think anyone's using the removeable baskets, and most of the damage we're seeing on devices is dents on the side and screens broken from the edge, the same sort of thing as you see on phones. We're still working on shifting staff over to web / cloud-based systems in general - I've just switched a bunch of laptops in the staffroom over to CloudReady, we'll see how the staff get on. We have a web-based gateway to a Windows remote access server, so in theory they can actually carry on just the same as they always have.

I used to live just over the road from a proper local cinema - I remember going in early one day to book a couple of tickets for a film later that night. The booking process was simply to walk up to the counter and ask to book some tickets - you didn't actually need to pay then or actually get a ticket, the lady behind the counter simply knew everyone and where they lived ("Ah! You're the chap from number 3 over the road, yes we'll reserve 2 tickets for the 8pm tonight..."). It also wasn't unusual for the start time to be delayed if one of the regulars was running a bit late and had phoned the manager to see if they could wait an extra 10 minutes or so - "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight's film will start 10 minutes later than advertised as Bob got stuck in traffic and is having trouble parking...".

That is Leicester Square, though, which is largly there to cater to toursists. At least they might have added some more toilets in the redesign - I went to see The Hateful 8 there a while back, and there was a huge rush for the toilets during the interval.

You tend to wind up dealing with any and/or all "technology" related issues around the building - power, lighting (stage and/or classroom), sound, and simply any issues anyone has involving, at some point in the process, a computer, which can get rather tiring and somewhat get in the way of jobs that need a bit of sit-down-and-concentrate time (configuring servers, etc). Rather like some primary teachers who spend too long speaking only to toddlers, it's good to actually have someone a bit nearer your level to actually be able to properly discuss issues with sometimes, otherwise your brain turns to mush.

Online, there's AWebWhiteboard and Explain Everything. If you currently use Microsoft Office, Powerpoint actually has suprisingly good annotation tools built in (just move the mouse cursor while in presenting mode, the annotation menu pops up in the bottom left corner). I haven't used the Office 365 version, but that might be worth a try, too.

As pointed out, software updates will eventually stop being available for older devices, although in practice I'd have thought you'd get at least 5 years of software support for most devices. However, we're finding the problem with our 2-year-old Chromebooks is finding spare parts for broken screens / keyboards - as soon as the device is replaced by a new model, the spare parts also stop being manufactured, so there's an increasingly limited supply available. We have our Chromebooks deployed in classrooms in cabinets, ready for children to use, and they're actually proving quite robust, but still daily use takes its toll. Something to consider when deploying a sizeable number of devices - how many spare devices to purchase, how many spare parts to keep in stock, who pays for repairs.

Currently 400 pupils and 160 assorted staff, but we expect the size of the school to grow in the next few years. We actually plan to move a lot of functionality over to cloud-based systems, but we intend to keep some local server provision for backup / failover purposes. The school currently operates over several different buildings (we're in central London, real estate is very expensive but Internet connectivity is good), the plan is to use cloud-based services for the most part and avoid the need for local server hardware where we can. That's a very good point, and the part that we need to investigate thoroughly. I was impressed by Stone's quality of work and attention to detail during their installation of some touch screens over the summer, but of course server provision is a different job.

Just to clarify: this is a system similar to what we'd like to purchase, we haven't got as far as actually buying it yet... That's two servers and all their storage / network hardware - each server is hefty enough to run multiple VMs, and should have enough capacity to support out entire network. If one server goes down the other seamlessly takes over, and any components are replaced under warranty - if something breaks, all we have to do is wait for someone to come and fix it. I guess, in total, over 5 years we'd be spending around £14,000 a year on hardware / support costs (technically a bit more as we still have to maintain an on-site server cupboard with cooling) - that's at least half the cost of employing someone to do the same job. I can, in theory, go and buy a bunch of hardware and configure it, but it takes time to get the specifications correct and test everything. In practice, a school environment doesn't lend itself to sitting and working on server configuration for a block of time, I get pulled away to do other stuff, which results in systems being put in place where we aren't confident are absolutely solid. The school's money would be better spent paying for a tested, warrantied system that doesn't need anyone on-site to maintain. You're quite correct in that £20,000 for a couple of servers is a sizeable cost, and if anyone from Stone or companies with similar offerings happen to see this then it'd be interesting to hear from them. I should add that £20,000 is quite reasonable compared to the pricing we've seen for some other similar systems!

We've looked at Stone's "Equinox" product, basically two servers set up with Server 2016 and Storage Spaces with all the required hardware and settings to handle failover and get nice, fast disk performance via tiered storage. I think the hardware and setup cost (based on around 20TB of available storage and 128GB of RAM to run VMs) was around £19,000 (price includes VAT), with around £10,000 per year for their fully-managed support package. That's possibly more expensive than buying some servers and setting them up, but you do save on your time on the setup and maintenance - I figure I'm easily spending £10,000 worth of the school's time working on server-related issues.

We run a minibus that brings some children from a set route in to school - one of the caretakers drives the bus and parks it at his house overnight, and there's a second member of staff he picks up on his way in to act as a helper. We're a private school, we simply charge parents extra for the service - I imagine a similar setup would be possible in a state school.

If I read the website correctly, that functionality would seem to be free. I've looked at Clever in the past, but it's still US-centric at the moment and didn't integrate directly with our MIS, so we didn't wind up using it. If you're US-based, though, it might be perfect for you.

Ooh, interesting - I saw a review a while ago and wondered at the time how suitible it might be for graphics editing. We have a couple of users who use Adobe Creative Cloud, so a couple of accounts might be useful. Edit: Have you tried mounting Google Drive or similar?