dhicks

Where is that data currently held - in Exchange or some other email server, or in your school's MIS, or written on assorted bits of paper? We export from Exchange to an iCalendar (.ics) file which then then be imported into various applications, in our case into our VLE. .ics files don't have to be public, you can place them behind whatever security you like, so if you can get access to your existing data somehow and write it to a .ics file that might be your best option.

As discussed above, you'd have the generator supply a UPS which would then supply your devices, smoothing out any power spikes and covering the time it takes for the power to go off and your generator to kick in. We have a suitible UPS in the basement, set up so that we could add a generator in the future if we wished. The UPS supplies several workstations and switches throughout the building as well as our small-ish server cupboard. The work was done by some contractors from Essex - PM me if you want their details, although they're probably a bit far away from you. All things considered, it didn't actually cost as much as we thought it might - I think it was under £10,000 for installation of the electrical cabling around the building. That didn't include the cost of the UPS - add maybe another £5,000 for an 8,000VA UPS and a couple of expansion batteries. A generator isn't that much more, either (£2,000-ish?). Our main issue was going to be figuring out where to store a large tank of diesel - we don't have any spare room on site and are in central London, but a school with larger grounds would probably have less of a problem. Edit: momentary power cut this afternoon, just after I'd posted the above - lights flickered off and on a bit, but servers and UPS-backed workstations all fine. We have an inspection next week, and teachers and staff are all working hard getting stuff ready - I figure that's £20,000-odd on UPS equipment well spent :-)

As in you found the Ricoh interface somewhat dated compared to Sharp's interface? We have Ricoh machines here, and as pointed out above they work okay and integrate well enough with Papercut. The user interface on the devices could do with updating - people are used to slick, iPad-like interfaces, Ricoh's seems to be rather cluttered and confusing at times. In particular, the way it reports errors is causing confusion: the device will give a "warning, low on toner" message whenever toner levels of one toner (out of four) hits a certain level (20%-ish, I think). With four toners in each colour machine, each machine pretty much always has a "low toner" warning blinking away on the screen. It's annoying and distracting and confuses people when there is an actual error (a paper jam or similar) as the device beeps and flashes a red light next to a separate button you need to press to actually read what the error is. We get quite a lot of phone calls along the lines of "The printer is beeping and saying there is no toner" when there's actually something different wrong. Will maintainance of the devices be down to Ricoh directly or down to a third-party company of some kind? If the latter, it's that company that you want to check out - the actual hardware is pretty reliable, but you need to know whether the maintainance company has parts available in stock for when things do go wrong or whether they have to wait a couple of days for delivery.

How do you mean? Their documentation should be good enough that I can figure out how to get their software installed without having to ask them. I currently seem to have the ESET Antivirus client installing okay. The problem is is that when I re-install the client, either just by re-installing the software or reimaging the whole machine, we get duplicate machine entries in ESET's console. The entries are identical (computer name, Active Directory location, MAC addresses and so forth), so you'd think something server-side could match up and eliminate duplicate entries.

I'm just setting up the new version (v6 - Endpoint client version 6.3.2016.0) of ESET now (on Windows 8.1 machines, Windows Server 2012 R2 domain and servers). With version 5, you generated an MSI file with appropriate settings from their console, then distributed that MSI to your Windows clients. With version 6, you now have a web-based console. You install the Endpoint client by first installing the Remote Management client, then selecting what software to install from the server. This seems to add a further manual step to the process - I liked being able to generate an MSI installer containing update server settings, distribute it to clients then forget about it. This way, I seem to have to log in to the management console to update any new computer I add to the network - another manual step to remember to do. I'm currently trying to get an auto-install to be triggered whenever a new machine is added to the network, but it doesn't seem to be going well - the client doesn't seem to want to accept its license key.

Yes - I came in one morning to find our in-rack UPS had tripped the main breaker switch, when I flipped that back on there was a loud bang and (a bit of) smoke came out of the front of the UPS. I was rather under the impression that UPSes shouldn't do that - if they fail they should simply cut off, not make loud bangs.

Can you join your Linx 8 tablets to your domain? I thought they came with Windows 8.1 / 10 Home - have you managed to get a different version of Windows installed on them?

Thames Clippers also run from the O2, so you can travel to / from the cable car via the river. I can't help but notice that the Excel centre is handily placed for docks, and that it's off-season for those RIB speed boats that whizz up and down the Thames during the summer - we could just hire us a speedboat to skip us past the queues on the way home...

You could skip the whole locally-installed hardware setup and go for remote servers connected by a fiber Internet connection - let it be someone else's problem to take care of the hardware for you.

My aim was to write a framework to do this kind of thing for Google Drive over the summer, but there was simply not enough time available. It's still do-able enough with Google Drive, though - create a form that produces a file in a particular folder when submitted, set a watch on that folder so a script runs when a file is updated (i.e. when a form is filled out), that script notifies whoever needs to deal with the form.

We seem to be getting on okay with the Panasonic HC-V270: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Panasonic-HC-V270EB-K-Full-Camcorder-Optical/dp/B00S9BDIIS We have two of those at the moment, we've been using them to record plays and so forth in our main hall. Both picture and sound quality are great - I haven't seen the footage myself, but the chap who does the videoing now was impressed by the quality. We use 64GB cards in ours. You could also get monopods with feet rather than tripods, they take up a little less space in a hall, and a USB external battery for extended run-times.

Darn - many thanks, I'd better check that.

We've got 40-odd Lenovo laptops, and like yourself I don't think we've had any paticular problems with them - a couple of broken screens, but they seem pretty robust as far as school laptops go. Also, for your older Samsungs you might want to look at Neverware Cloudready to turn them into fully-managed Chromebooks.

We had this application pointed out to us a while ago by a parent. Checking their website, you can request geo-blocking (or geo-fencing?) for your school's specific location. It turns out someone had already requested that for our school, and not having a suitible phone myself I didn't have any way of testing it out, so I'd assumed it was all okay (the site is blocked on our internal filter, of course). Obviously it doesn't stop people using the app away from the school, but we can't do much about that.

We seem to be getting on okay with a couple of Panasonic HC-V270's: Panasonic HC-V270EB-K Full HD Camcorder: Amazon.co.uk: Camera & Photo We have two of those recording the nativity in the main hall as I type, and they've already recorded 2 nativities and 3 pantos this week. Both picture and sound quality are great - I haven't seen the footage myself, but the chap who videod it all was impressed by the quality. We use 64GB cards in ours. You could also get monopods with feet rather than tripods, they take up a little less space in a hall, and a USB external battery for extended run-times.

Good plan. Just so you know, we are using 2TB WD Caviar 7200rpm "green" drives for our CCTV storage array - when new they were sold as affordable "large capacity" drives, if a bit slower performance-wise. However, we've found performance to be absolutly fine - we have 10 CCTV cameras managing to write to an 8-disk array of these drives 24 hours a day with no disk performance problems. Reliability has been good, too - I think we've swapped two drives out in the last 3 years or so.

We use Ubiquiti's cameras and software. The software was certainly easy enough to install and set up, but we're finding the playback facility a bit limiting - all recordings get split in to 10 minute chunks, and locating a particular event at a particular time can be rather long winded. There's no double / quadrupel speed fast-forward through a video file, and trying to export a bunch of video all in one go to sift through in an external editor causes the export operation to crash. We also found the record-on-motion option to be impractical (we have a very busy school, there's motion most of the time during the day where the cameras are located). The video quality is very good though - you can actually identify faces from the footage. In your setup above, do you plan a larger storage array for the footage itself? We have 8 2TB drives in RAID 6, so around 12TB in total, which is letting us keep (I think, must check usage) 3 months or so of footage (old footage is automatically removed). Are you planning to use hardware RAID or Linux's software RAID?

I'd have gone with Neverware CloudReady, as suggested above. We tried it on our EeePCs, but they were just a bit too old. Note that it's not just a Chrome-OS like install, it's actually a proper "approved" system that you can install and add a Chrome OS management license to (around £15 per device, I think), making for a proper managed ChromeOS device.

The "2 bedroom house" bit is probably a bit theoretical, going simply by volume. Unless you have a very drafty house, not all of your de-humidified air will circulate around your whole house. We have a dehumidifier similar to the one above, and it does a good job of keeping our lounge / kitchen area free of moisture, but we're going to add another device in the bedroom to keep the windows clear of damp.

GoPro's own bundled software is actually pretty good for editing - it's actually free to download and use, even if you don't have a GoPro: http://shop.gopro.com/EMEA/softwareandapp/gopro-studio/GoPro-Studio.html#/start=1 We use Adobe Premier CC for video editing at the school, although I use Premier Elements at home as it's rather cheaper. I try and avoid having to burn DVDs for parents / pupils, instead we place videos on our VLE. Those were orignally hosted directly on the VLE, but now we're hosting on a Vimeo Pro account, which is proving very capable. Since Spetember we've had a dedicated member of staff to do video / camera work, so I haven't done much since the last set of end-of-term plays over the summer.

The effect is noticable for objects at close range, but it's not too bad for things a bit further away. Also, Go Pros do come with their own software which will remove the fisheye effect from footage if you want, although it will sacrifice some field-of-view for that. I have a Go Pro Hero 4 Black capable of 4k - I've filmed stage productions with it, but it isn't great indoors. I also have a third-party lense on it - it turns out to be difficult to get good-quality 4k-capable lenses. It does also heat up rather when running in 4k mode - for a 2 hour show it got almost too hot to touch in one spot.

If it's any help, the Enttec USB DMX Pro MK2 USB-to-DMX interface has an embeded Python-based web server (based on CherryPy), and is capable of acting as an interface for simple Ajax calls from a simple, static web page using JQuery. You can simply add your own HTML / JS / image files to CherryPy's static files store and create your own web-based lighting interface application.

I'd be interested to find out how true that is these days. A DSLR capable of outputting an uncompressed HDMI signal with an external video recorder (and, generally, a hot-shoe mounted mic and a shoulder-mount rig) seems to be the device of choice for "budget" film makers these days ("budget" meaning "under £5,000" here). Do DSLR sensors still overheat? It could well be that most filmmakers aren't doing longer than 20 minute takes, hence they simply aren't coming accross the problem. I've read that somewhere, too - I'm unsure as to whether this is a Japanese export tax, a UK/EU import tax, whether US cameras don't have this limitation, or whether this is something simply made up by manufacturers to sell more devices. For a £2,000+ DSLR you'd think the difference in import tax would be a fairly small proportion of the total cost.

We've used Wizard Video in the past, too - they do good quality work, and school drama / dance performances is what they specialise in. For performances, they do a service where they video for free and charge the parents for DVDs. You have to be able to garuntee a minimum order of DVDs, and they seem a bit pricy at first, but when you consider they take care of all the videoing and the editing and production / shipping of DVDs to invidiaul parents it's not bad at all. You could get a DSLR, if your school can jusify the expense for taking still photos and so forth as well. For video, as pointed out above most DSLRs are limited to around 20 minutes recording time. You can get external recorders that record straight on to SSD drives, though, to solve that problem. If you want to just set the camera up and leave it, get a decent prime lense, probably quite wide-angle, with no depth-of-field to avoid having any issues with focus. That kind of equipment will cost you around £2,000 upwards - it's equipment that's worth having if you're going to use it, for both video and still images, but it might be beyond your budget. If you have a smaller budget, we've found the just-above-entry-level Panasonic camcorders to be good value for money: Panasonic HC-V270EB-K Full HD Camcorder: Amazon.co.uk: Camera & Photo For capturing performances, in particular, we did also consider the Canon Legria Mini X: Canon LEGRIA mini X - Digital Creative Camcorder - Canon UK A bit odd-looking, with a wide-angle lense, and not great video quality but good sound, should be good for capturing a performance for exams. I'm still waiting for the new Kodak SP360 4k to come out - all-round video capture, so you don't have to worry about where the camera is pointing.

It rather depends on the type / level of job you are applying for. I'm currently sifting through around 100 applications for our entry level IT technician job, most of whom, on paper, seem to be over-qualified, with degrees in various IT subjects. However, I'm getting the impression there's a smart-enough-not-to-go-to-University kind of person - someone who knows that academic studies aren't for them and is bright enough to realise that spending 3 years getting into debt isn't going to help them in any way.