dhicks

We use First Mile for our general waste and recyling collection, so as an add-on to that service they will provide a large bin liner to put toners in, which they will then come and pick up on demand. It does cost around £30 per bag, but that should take a good few toners. It rather depends on your current rubbish handler, though, as to whether they offer anything similar.

On our new iMacs running Mac OS El Capitan, we joined each one to Active Directory via System Preferences -> Users & Groups. This then made each user's network home folder available under /Volumes/home when they logged in. To match up their Desktop and Documents folders to their network versions we simply replaced each user's /Users/username/Desktop and Users/username/Documents folders with soft links to the mounted network versions, i.e. ln -s /Volumes/home/j.bloggs/Desktop /Users/j.bloggs/Desktop ln -s /Volumes/home/j.bloggs/Documents /Users/j.bloggs/Documents You need to be root to do this. On a machine used by one person just doing it manually should be fine, but I wrote a script instead that runs on startup / login.

Video editing professionals tend to have a set of tools, a whole "workflow" involved in capturing their video footage in the first place through to getting it to wherever it's going to be output. What sort of footage are you aiming to capture, and from what sort of equipment, for what sort of output? Are you aiming to produce short films shot with one nice high-end camera in a static position or maybe shoulder-mounted? Or are you planning to shoot multiple angles at once? Adobe Premier does very well at that kind of thing, although you'll want to read up on video codecs as used by cameras so you start with the best-quality footage you can get. I've found Premier Elements works very well, and is rather more affordable than the whole of Creative Cloud. Also, especially if you're looking at less traditional-style films (or maybe you are, but shot in a different way), then maybe shooting on a GoPro and editing with GoPro Studio (available free) might be a good option.

This sounds like an excellent excuse to buy a better drill, which is bound to come in handy for other stuff at some point anyway. Would a spot of Sugru on each NUC to hold it on to the backplate do?

How did you go about getting them to install the connection - are you in a block of flats managed by one company? We are, and we got an advert from Hyperoptic saying they would install a fiber connection if a certain amount of people indicated an interest, but nothing further seemed to come of it.

Just thinking: if this is a "single page" website you could have index.html be the only required HTML file, all content could be in separate Markdown (.md) files and rendered client-side.

As in a standard home ADSL connection, which will share its "backhaul" bandwidth with a bunch of other users. Looks like everyone else in your area has cleared off on holiday / outside for a barbecue.

With flights, it's going to be around £3,500 for a 10-day course. I think the idea of this kind of course is that you get an intensive teaching period along with meeting a bunch of other people in a similar situation to youself. However, I figure your money might be better spent on buying a nice new laptop, deciding on a project you want to complete, starting a free online course (or just get the hang of using Google to lookup stuff as you get stuck) and hanging out in a co-working place around silicon roundabout for a couple of weeks.

We're going to try out a Balance Box here instead of the motorised units we've used before - hopefully the people installing it will have this figured out by the time they install ours, but it's good to know.

How does the typical MDM run an application at startup / login time? Using a launchd-based method, or are some still using login hooks?

If you're aiming this to be a single-page website for a school, would including a Javascript user interface library / framework be an idea? That way you can add interface widgets and navigation around the page. I'm not quite sure what is considered simplest / coolest / up-to-datest at the moment - React, AngularJS, Backbone or just plain JQuery.

Hello All, I've had a rummage around in previous threads, but I can't find anything relevant, hence the new thread - do please point me at an existing discussion if there is one. We have a new classroom of iMacs arriving soon, all of which will be running Mac OS El Capitan. I have an El Capitan iMac in front of me that I'm now using as my day-to-day workstation. I have the Mac joined to our Active Directory domain, and domain users can login and see their network folders via Apple's SMB implementation. However, previous experience from our IT consultant suggests that using Apple's way of redirecting user folders to the standard Mac Home / Desktop / etc folders creates rather too much network traffic, with every user config file and so on being stored on the network. Seemingly this can get particularly bad when using things like iMovie, where you wind up with temporary video files being stored on a network folder. Therefore, I am manually redirecting selected folders. This turns out to be quite simple - simply delete the /Users/username/Home folder and create a symbolic link to the network version instead. All I need to figure out now is how to have this happen transparently for every user as they login. Deleting username/Home or username/Desktop folders needs root privileges (because Mac OS wants to try and make sure you know what you're doing before it lets you delete your home folder, which is sensible). Therefore, I need a script that runs as root every time a user logs in. Seemingly, Mac OS X login hooks are now depreciated, and might disappear from future versions of Mac OS. The proper method now seems to be to create a launchd item. Is that correct - am I going about this in the right way? As far as I can make out, I'll need to create a launchd Global Daemon that runs as root that starts at boot time, then have a launchd Global Agent run at each user login to signal that Global Daemon in some way to go and sort folders out. That seems slightly overly complex for a startup script, but that seems to be the mechanism that's available. Is that right, or am I missing something here?

As in you've already bought the cameras, or this is equipment you're thinking of getting at some point? We're vaguely considering the same kind of thing, and I'm more inclined to see how we get on with using an iPad as a video device - rather than output video from a camcorder via a hardware interface of some kind and have to have something encode it for live streaming we should be able to live stream straight from the iPad itself.

I've used Premier on one of our 5-year-old standard classroom laptops to edit a 2-hour-long, 3-camera-shot school production with no problem. Nothing fancy, just cutting between camera shots every now and then. I've then handed that same laptop over to someone else who had problems with it crashing every few minutes. The main issue I could see was that every time Premier had to pause for a few moments while it rendered / worked on something they tended to panic and mash every button in sight to get Premier to respond in some way. You do have to let Premier sit and process stuff at times - an SSD defiantly helps as it can reduce the disk access time. Otherwise, I'd agree with the statement above about Premier not liking the encoding of the video file in some way. Check how the video is encoded, and see if converting it to something else makes the problem stop.

Is this as a learning exercise for your own interest, or is it some homework you've been set, or do you just have a really good idea for something that you want to implement? If the latter then I'd go for a web-based microservices-style implementation rather than a platform-specific app. Can you give us a bit more context as to what you're building and why?

As in they defiantly want to use an iPad to take video of the lesson, or they just want some kind of camera they can put in the classroom to remotely see what's going on? Any CCTV-type camera should do it, we use UniFi CCTV cameras at around £150 each. For something a bit snazzier, and maybe a bit more portable, I've got on quite well with the Kodak SP360 4K, a "360 degree" camera (actually around a 235 degree field of view unless you have two-camera setup). It has an iPad app available that allows you to view live footage via wireless, which it renders in human-"normal" 120 degree field of view, letting you move the viewpoint around the scene. Cost around £300, which isn't bad, and with a USB power brick and a small monopod it makes a good portable setup you can place into a classroom quite discreetly.

We don't have a bell between lessons, we would be using these speakers for general announcements, alerts, and possibly a pupil "radio" station in some locations. These devices are simply VoIP receivers, like telephone handsets, so you'll need some central bit of software to send out audio to appropriate speakers. I think VLC has the ability to broadcast audio, so we should be able to use that.

We were considering something like the Algo 8186: Wideband IP Horn Speaker, SIP or multicast, HD Voice, weatherproof Those cost around £300 - we would need around 20 to cover all our various areas around the school, so the price would be getting on for around £10,000 by the time we add in cabling and installation work. We have used a Snom PA 1: Snom PA1 VoIP Loudspeaker Amplifier Nearer £100 each, but requires additional speakers. Our existing unit is set up with powered speakers and works very well, but for round the school we'd want PoE-powered devices. Also more bits to install, with a receiver unit and separately wired speakers.

We have a very old copy of Eclipse - I think the original installation came on floppy disk. However, it's not been used for a couple of years while we shifted the library around the school, so all the data is out of date now anyway, we assume we're going to have to re-catalouge all our books. We're going to have a refurbish of our staffroom over the summer, and we're now thinking to put a bank of laptops in for staff to use instead of fixed desktop machines. We need some way of making sure the laptops don't wander off without us having some method of keeping track of them, and we're wondering what (if anything) other schools do at the moment.

Hello All, Does anyone use a hardware checking in/out type system for laptops / ChromeBooks / iPads / etc? We're working out how best to let people pick up a device, register that they've got it in some way, then go off and use it, then have them check it back in when they're finished with it. We're aiming to start with devices in our staff room, so we're looking for a system that's very quick and simple for people to use.

This thread is a few years old, but it's something we've been looking at recently as the head has decided a school "radio" station of some kind would be good. We have a VoIP phone system, the handsets for which will act as multicast receivers, so all we have to do is add a few more speakers in areas where there's no phone handset (corridors, mostly). In our case we have PoE capable network switches with UPS backed power, so we just have to run network points to appropriate locations around the school and install VoIP-capable speakers. Whole-school audio (speech, sound effects, music if you have an appropriate license) can be broadcast as you wish.

Yes, we use an iQ PBX. We paid around £10,000 a couple of years ago for the PBX and around 60 Yealink phones. We had some initial hardware issues, but those were resolved and the device has been running with no issues ever since.

We've licensed Smart's software throughout the school, but I don't think it's getting much use outside of our Reception classrooms. Most of the senior school use the occasional touch-based game or website and have the children come up and press things on the screen, or sometimes they use the touch screen for navigation around Windows 8.1. The most use comes from using iPads and AirServer with projectors / screens - not actually that much more than some software costs per touch screen.

What address is proxied - http://www.yourschool.com? Ideally, you want to be able to add DNS entries (or get your LA to add entries for you) so remote.yourschool.com points to your external IP address. If that's not possible you could proxy by URL, so you'd split traffic to http://www.yourschool.com/web, http://www.yourschool.com/remote, etc. You could, of course, buy another domain name and point it at your external IP address, assuming you are free to add a reverse proxy in there somewhere you could then handle that traffic however you like. You could even host a Guacamole server on an external server and simply have it connect to your public RDP service, although I can't help trhinking that will introduce too much latency. You'd think a nice, pre-built web-based RDP service is the kind of thing your LA should be handling centrally, all set up and ready to go for you.

If you can control what sits on that external IP address, then Guacamole should work with a reverse proxy server, so you can have, say, several sub-domains all pointing at the same IP address (parents.school.com, guacamole.school.com, etc) and let the reverse proxy server figure out which web server needs to handle each request. NGINX seems to be the best known / most commonly used reverse proxy, and Apache has a mod_proxy module, but we use Pound and have found it nice and simple to set up. Theoretically, you should be able to reverse-proxy WebSocket connections, but if that is too complicated to set up you can configure Guacamole to use its own HTTPS-based tunneling instead, which should work with a standard reverse proxy setup. Edit: give your Guacamole server a DNS name along the lines of "remote.school.com" or something - no-one can spell "guacamole"...