Trapper

By George, it works! Ta.

It is definitely an ST connector. However the male plug barely goes in, and the locking sheath is about 2mm too far away to lock in. Have I bought an ST connector too large, or are these cheap crappy cables to blame?

*sigh* My Head has been sent this mailshot and he actually wants to spend the £175 to have this group write a report that'll basically say "Your website is missing this, this, that, that, this and that. Pay us another £300 and we will make it the best school website Ofsted have ever seen". Has anyone actually gone through with anything like this? OFSTED Website Health Check for Schools

Watching it now. Bought it via school, I'm tempted to show parts of this during Computer Club.

On this topic anyone who hasn't yet watched Micro Men I would highly suggest you do so. Watch out for a quick appearance from Sophie (Roger) Wilson the designer of the ARM processor and Nigel Searle (from Sinclair)

After sticking my new 500GB MSI X100 SSD in my home PC I gave an evil cackle as I found a way to avoid having to manually type in my MAK keys for Windows and Office. I know! I thought, I'll just connect via VPN and get our KMS server to activate them. I'm always connecting up via VPN anyway so the 180 day time limit is no problem. Office 2013 worked fine. But for some reason Windows just wouldn't activate. The KMS server just did not want to activate it. So I gave up, type in my MAK and off I went. Several hours later when building a new Windows 7 x86 VM to use exclusively to VPN to work I realised why. Our KMS is setup for Windows 7 only (or Server 2008 R2 KMS if you want to be picky). I'm running Windows 8.1 Update 1. How can I be so dumb?

*sigh* My father in law wants an external BluRay burner. What for? No idea. He is an ex-teacher (along with his wife, so my home life is just wonderful!) so will not listen to reason! He either wants to run it from from his ASUS Windows tablet. This has USB 3.0, but only has an Atom CPU. He'd never be able to render any movies/films and I assume the burn time would be long. Or he could run it from his old laptop. ~4/5 years old. Core2Duo, but only has USB 2.0. So the CPU can handle it, but burning a 25/50GB BluRay at USB 2.0 speeds would be painful. Has anyone seen a review from a trusted website/magazine listing minimum specs for burning BRs? He won't listen to me, but as it's a birthday present it'll be my money buying it, and my tech support spending weeks trying to perform a miracle.

I've been replacing our ancient Toshiba Sat Pro's spinning rust with SSDs. We do not have the money for new staff laptops at the moment (but we did for 20 new units for Post 16!) and these old Celeron single core beasts and some Core2Duo's with Sophos Safeguard installed are almost impossible to use. Think pasting a block of text in Word taking up to 10 seconds. Anyway, I know there are easier ways to secure SSDs but we've got years left to run on our SafeGuard contract, and it is very user friendly for the staff. The whole disc encryption on an SSD is practically un-noticeable. You really cannot tell that the SSD is software encrypted. The speed boost is ridiculous. I've been reading and apparently software encrypted hard drives can have a problem when Windows runs the TRIM command. You can find out which blocks of NAND have garbage data to be overwritten and this could be used for access? Has anyone really looked into this? Any recommendations?

If it's Outlook 2013 you need all the latest updates. I've also found if you connect via a proxy the following regedit is needed. I get it to apply via GPO: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\RPC] "EnableForceHttpProxy"=dword:00000001

This is a weird one and I'd like confirmation. I set our KMS up ages ago, but never got above a dozen or so Windows 7 clients at any one time until this summer. Sadly my techie decided to ignore my instructions to not manually activate Windows 7 and Office 2013 and allow our KMS to take over. Now it would appear even though all 50 odd machines had a VLK manually installed and activated online with Microsoft the clients also took a look at the KMS DNS record, deactivated the VLK and activated the KMS. I now have almost 70 Windows 7 clients activated via KMS and as soon as a new Windows 7 installs connects to the network it activates. That actually troubles me as it does not need to be a member of the domain, just sitting on the same network and querying the KMS DNS record is enough to activate it. So my question is this? Has the KMS en-mass removed the VLK Windows 7 key, de-activated them, and then activated them with the KMS key? As I wasn't expecting the KMS to be up and running how often do the clients need to report back to the server to stay activated? I know it works via VPN. I've literally just created a Windows 7 VM at home, not on the domain, but as soon as the VPN connected it activated. Weird man.

Has anyone come across this? Whatever SATA/USB adapter I use (cheapo USB 2.0 ones up to a USB 3.0 with separate USB plug for power) none of them will power and recognise an SSD. Am I doing something wrong?!

My local English Cafe does something like this. The Black Country Bereavement! https://www.facebook.com/fullenglishcafeathalesowen/posts/473425236112267

I have a tiny ex toilet. It is locked, and does have a free standing aircon unit venting outside. This will remain as the primary server room when we get our new secondary building (with purpose built server room off my office - yay!). It does the job. I've tried to have it moved into my office and wall off all the electric boxes and meters with it (as we can't use the space anyway), but to no avail. I have put a big monitor and a comfy chair in the server room. Turn the aircon off, and it's a very nice bolt hole to hide away in for a few hours.

My Dad was a milkman before he retired. Only job he could get after the pits closed. He went from a nice, decent round in a small area, to being spread out across the area. There are no milkmen back home now, and very few here in Brum.

Joomla good, as is Sharepoint 2013 on Office365

As has always been said those who want power and to become senior politicians are the last people who should get it. MPs like the trappings, the status and the patronage. Sadly so do a lot of local politicians. Volunteers like school Governors could be better. Still some governors do it just for the power and prestige!

The problem is, as always, once they've gotten to the top of the ladder (or the old greasy pole) are the really going to kick the ladder from underneath them and change the entire electoral system? No. Yes, Prime Minister did a very good episode on this - Power to the People (Yes, Prime Minister) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It'll be a narrow nay. Looks at Inverclyde - 86 votes difference

Hmmm we do most of the BECTA framework. Might be old, but I think it is still relevant.

The check (cheque) is still king in the land of the free. Current accounts are still called checking accounts.

The previous versions are fine - just not the latest. Even with that for school use it's still fine - it's more for people who have something to hide from the authorites. Core i5s with AES on chip work very well with Bitlocker. I have an i7 with AES and use Bitlocker to encrypt my second HDD on my laptop which is a 1TB spinning rust and it encrypted fast. For my staff I use Sophos Safeguard bought in via the LEA. On platter drives it is very slow. However stick a SSD in and encrypt with Safeguard and you can't tell it's encrypted it is lightning fast.

That is just lazy. I'm surprised we haven't reached the point that monitors or desks come with built in laser printers. Surely the technology is cheap enough now to stick a fuser a control card and an ethernet port in your desk.

Sure, which is why they emailed all schools on Monday about it!! Dear Colleagues, Please be aware, we are currently experiencing slow performance of the Internet Service. A major incident has been logged in Service Now (Ref No: 102025) and we are liaising with our supplier to provide a speedy resolution. Further updates to follow. Kindest regards, Link2ICT

A gem from the folks at /r/TalesFromTechSupport: A client's energy bill tripled for two months with no apparent cause : talesfromtechsupport

It is true they give all schools who sub through them exactly the same keys. I'm amazed it's taken this long to run out. What is worse is there is no traceability either. I have them from when I worked for a time at a Link2ICT EES school, I could be unscrupulous and use those MAK keys to activate machines for friends and there is no way to trace it as it could have been anyone who has a L2ICT EES account. It's also not just the techies, by default L2ICT set the enquiry@ email account as the administrator so the Office Manager/Receptionist could have access too!