Trapper

Radio clocks at my school. Little embedded radios pick up the Greenwich time broadcast and change accordingly. Not very expensive either - £12/£15 per unit.

Hmmm will give that a try. Both are directly in sockets ... how the sockets are wired might be a choke point.

Please tell me I can get more out of this. The wiring in the house on all the ring mains is post 1987 (I checked the British Standard Mark on the cables!) - we do have an old distribution board from circa the 1970s with actual fuse wire. I have a Cat5e cable (16 years old, internal grade!) running up the external wall - it's done well and lasted over 8 years! But enough packets are dropped through it (it links my home office with PC/NAS down to the router) that I can't get more than 2Mbps on file transfers to my NAS on the same gigabit switch as my PC. The HomePlug solves this - I can copy at 50/60Mbps across PC to NAS but it is so bad at data transfers across the link. Can anything be done? This is why I avoided HomePlug for years. Amazon had an offer on a starter kit for £20. Couldn't say no to that.

So, Virgin are charging us too much money now for the TV we never ever watch and the phone we never ever use. Who has what these days? I moved to Virgin cable direct from ADSL2 so I have no real idea if the current FTTC connections are good, or not.

What do you folks use? Apart from the good old spending a day typing rude words into the disallowed list and sniggering like a 12 year old again! My LEA is offering the service, but it's at least several hundred pounds, with no fixed price nor release date. I've noticed our transport rules stopping more and more emails from external sources of late, so would like to get more proactive.

Ah! Inlay 3 and X-Filer. Top tools

As soon as I posted I became L337!!!! http://www.edugeek.net/forums/general-chat/155115-one-last-final-desperate-attempt.html#post1329864

Does anyone, in any school or comms room, or store room, or under school crawl space or their loft at home still have any working examples of either: 1) Acorn A3000 2) Acorn A3010 - with IDE mini podule like I had zomg! Just as an aside 2x A3010s went on eBay this week. One was a very early module before the ARM250 SoC was ready so they soldered an ARM2 with the MEMC, IODC and erm t'other one to a daughter card. This meant you could upgrade these select few A3010's to ARM3 machines. Why you ask? The A3k10 had SCART out! 3) Acorn A3020 - This is the one I really want. ARM250 with on board IDE controller, running RISC OS 3.11 so all my old gear will work 4) Acorn A5000 - Holy grail of pre-RISC PC Acorn. ARM3, extra FPE, could take a 486 with RAM on a podule and was just great. These are few and far between. 5) Failing all that an Acorn A4000 - Basically an A3020 in a monitor, box, keyboard arrangement. ARM250 SoC again, no expandability. Basically on eBay those dudes retiring (to be polite to the great Server Room in the Sky given their age) are flogging all remaining Archie kit. Either it's a pristine BBC Master with an SDHC set up on it, or someone has taken a basic RISC PC 600 single slice from 1994 and pimped it out to the max. Saw one last week - four slices! Very little ARM2/3 kit is appearing now, and when it does the cost is prohibitive. I just kick myself. When I left Sixth Form they were dumping Chris and Hermann's dreams into the skip. I begged them for an Arc. I got the single, arsest, cheeiest piece of *BLEEP* *BLOOP* they had in an A3000. I even had to remove a pencil from the floppy drive! Anyway young me left the kit to rot in the skip. Now what did I notice on eBay last month? An A5000 MMU (multimedia extension). Basically a box that sits under the A5000 and runs CDs, and full capure MPEG card. It's up for £1000!! In August 2001 I walked past that in a skip! Anyway long story short (sorry it's the Vallium!) does anyone have any sitting around they'd be willing to donate to a true Archie officinado? My RISC PC is sadly dead - battery melted in the loft, lost a capacitor from the 486 card, and the StrongARM card never really worked well (One of the weird SA233 cards). I love emulation. I've got many setups going using Arculator (Arthur, RISC OS 2 for a giggle, OS 3 old map for A3K, OS3.11 new map for A5K) and a pimped RISC PC on rpc_emu. But it's just not the same. Like when you play N64 or MegaDrive games with either the keyboard, or some wierd PC game pad. It's never enjoyable until you get an adapter for the real thing. - An aside in advice about this as I've done it this week. For anything with a D-PAD third party Chinese sweat shop parts are fine. My MegaDrive one with USB at one end, and some massive copyright infringement, but in white on the front is the dogs doohangles. Sadly my knock off USB SNES controller has problems with the LEFT-D button. No matter I just use the MegaDrive controller! Best buy though was a USB to N64 controller port. This means you can use offical N64 controllers. I've used both. The cheap knock off dead a quick death. The analogue stick is crap. The one I bought last week for TWO WHOLE POUNDS(!) an original grey N64 controller was covered in filfth, but after a clean the analogue stick just moves sweet. Great for Lylat Wars! Anyway ramble over I beg you. Any (in order of personal preference only) A3020, A5000, A3000, A3010, A4000 you may have to donate, or sell for a modest free I am very interested. If you only have an old Archie from the 3/10 or 4/40 series let me know. I saw one sell for a tonne'o'doah as it was still in the original box, still only had RISC OS 2 installed and.... the same 20MB ST-251 rust drive. (Click here for info on this beast I wait for replies. Please! I've had an awful few months, I need something retro to get my teeth into (/sob story!)

Theresa May has already confirmed the Data snooping act the Lib Dems blocked will become law.

Hackers make UK-wide website exposure threat after John Taylor High School incident | Burton Mail

AB Tutor Control does this and is fairly cheap.

I've found in Birmingham Bing is much less well filtered than Google. When I was seconded to another school the deputy head did a search on loving horses for an equestrian adoring student. Oh did she find photos of loving horses that the filter allowed through from Bing.

PS - Ignore the Windows XP in OS installed. All Windows 7 now - my lazy techie (who will read this in the morning!) hasn't changed them!

We record everything IT related - this includes VCRs/consoles etc as they interface with the IT infrastructure in the class room (TV/projector etc.) I use Spiceworks to auto scan for devices, this means I can quickly check a warranty status for example. My techie uses a custom list in O365 Sharepoint Online to store the information for audit purposes. This includes asset name, spec, warranty status, Windows PID etc. No costs though - although I should now. I also keep an annotated map with the e and paper version with annotated room numbers etc. I'm working on using AutoCAD to add layers to the map for data, power, VGA/HDMI runs, wireless points and coverage (copy and paste from UniFi) Each term we export this to Excel or Access strip out the irrelevant information such as spec, Windows PID etc. make it all fancy. I then sign it, so does my boss the Strategic Business Manager. He keeps a copy in his disaster recovery folder and I randomly throw mine into the highly unorganised filing cabinet.

After a whole afternoon sat in KwikFit - still not working. A hell of a to-do though. They changed the cam position sensor, didn't fire. Tried to change the crank position sensor, didn't have on in stock. Got their supply depot to drop one round - the box contained a single large nut! Someone had returned it and stolen the item. A third supplier drops the sensor off. Won't fit in the engine, it's 0.05mm thicker than the original. So they shave it down. Car still won't start - now left until Monday. What a ridiculous weekend!

Popped over last night from my home in Birmingham to my folks in South Derbyshire (~45 miles). Got there no problem at all, even at rush hour. End up annoying the neighbours as I kept setting my parents house alarm off, but I did sort it. Get back in my car, start it, doesn't move well, stalls. Won't start. Call rescue firm and it's the cam position sensor. He doesn't have one. So I'm them towed all the way back to Birmingham at 9pm at night, and to make matters worse the only garage around here who has the part before Tuesday is KwikFit! So that's £90 for the part, and another £30 to get the damn car towed 2 miles there. The towing firm will be here at "lunchtime" - nice and vague! You know when you have a feeling that it's a bad day, and what you are doing is a bad idea? I had that when I hit Spaghetti Junction on the outward journey. I really should have turned around.

I just pay EE £10 a month for 3GB of 4G. Works the same, and much easier than having a separate pipe coming in.

It's all a stunt. Either get the BBC to pay them more and back away from the tree hugging brigade or an excuse for Jezza to take the format of new Top Gear to a commercial broadcaster where he'd get much more money. If this does happen I wonder if Hammond and May will move? I can see May doing it, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Hammond being the main presenter on a revamped BBC TG.

One Man and his Prog is still a good show with less inane chatter. Same with Nights with Alice Cooper.

Radio 4 for my alarm and on the way to work for the Today Programme. When out during the day - Planet Rock, as I'm in the West Midlands it is broadcast on FM Going home - Either CD or Planet Rock. I do put Radio 4 on for Last Word on a Friday. No music in the office unless on headphones. Myself and my techie like different things, and Radio 1 is no longer a compromise station!

I've been banging my head over this. Does anyone know (on Win 8.1 Update 1 Ent) how to: 1) Change the Metro search from Bing! to Google. IE has Google search addin as default, and I've installed the Google Search Metro app. From PC Settings I can turn Bing on or off, but I can't see the option to replace it with Google. 2) Rename the email accounts in Metro Mail app. At the moment I have two: a) Gmail - which is fine b) Bham - which isn't (it's the domain for Birmingham schools). Any ideas? PS - Ignore #2 about Metro mail accounts - found the Mail settings the long way around.

Or he could actually be an over-entitled diva like idiot and be fired.

Bit of an emergency here! I've set my Heads email account to forward on to the deputies for a few days - I've created a new distribution group and added them. Emails forward on fine. I've unticked the box to retain a copy in the Heads OWA - however he still gets them. Any idea why?!

Hmm saying it doesn't mean it's right. Remember anyone with him could be prosecuted...

I do wonder whether he did take the assisted dying option