mats

I'd suggest you play with the UI before you buy. Turn it off and on, see how long before you get a program guide. How many button presses before it tells you what it's showing? It the UI (and the remote) fiddly or non-intuitive to use? These are the things that would likely have made me buy something other than our current Phillips. Nice enough screen & audio (not that I'm an expert), crap UI. The smart stuff is so awful I bought a Roku streaming stick which I have no complaints with - except that it was effectively another £50 on top of the cost of the TV.

Go and stand outside a hospital. Before long, a pregnant woman will come out for a smoke.

Well, we have some progress at last. Evidence points to one of the RM user GPOs still lurking around. That'll learn me for not tidying them up. The machines have been re-imaged but it's not a new domain - not the way I'd have done it but I didn't get to choose (long story). Thanks for the testing & suggestions everybody. Just the tedious job of isolating the offending gpo now. Mat

Thanks for the replies everybody. I've updated flash player from 16.0.0.235 (from 14.0.0.176) - didn't sort it. The javascript error - SCRIPT5007: Object expected media.js, line 1 character 401 Can anybody get this vid to play in IE?

This is a problem which has been irritating me for some time now. A teacher wants to use the video BBC - KS1 English - Writing the letters of vowel sounds Our (ex RM - don't ask) domain machines (running IE9 but IE10 is the same) refuse to play it - they show the page but do nothing when the play button is pressed. If I turn on script debugging / error messages I get a javascript error - I think execution is just stopping here rather than playing the vid. I've played endlessly with privileged users, advanced settings, blocking all user and machine gpos, all to no avail. Just to make it more irritating, my non-domain-joined laptop plays the ruddy video in IE10. I've compared all the internet settings between the two and can't find the crucial setting. Any ideas / suggestions welcome - I don't want to have to distribute firefox (which I suspect will work fine) just to view one web page. Thanks, Mat

People using Pi's for minecraft - are you using the Pi as a client or a server? I've just done some python with year 5 - got them to ssh into an old desktop running ubuntu, worked quite well. We were doing caesar cyphers and scratch isn't great for that. Glad I'm not the only one with an eye on the old Vailant turtles..

Win 10 - I'll believe that when I see it. I know RT runs on Arm but the one in the RP2 isn't very current. Also, it's only got a gig of ram and would need a massive SD card or a usb(2) drive to store the os - not ideal I suspect. That's all assuming the gpu works ok with W10. Is somebody at MS panicking?

If the school is trying to save money, they should look at the really big power uses. Like heating (space and water), old lighting systems, insulation and draught proofing. There's little point spending time and money to save a quid or two per pc when the boiler is on all night for instance. When all that's done it's time to start turning printers off at night. IMO.

Ta for the tip, I'd not seen that mag before. Downloadable PDFs too! @Tesla - PS3 Eye USB cameras work with the Pi and are about £6 each. Just saying.

Primary or secondary? There are loads of fun, err, educational pi projects out there. Webcam stuff, controlling things through web interfaces, robotic vehicles, (remote) sensing, control stuff. I'm looking at internet of things stuff for one of my primaries.

Alan Duncan's constituency is Rutland, which is leafy Niceville-on-the-Water territory. Maybe that's the most urgent issue there. That or he's just after some easy headlines ahead of the election.

But Google are covered by Safe Harbor - Self Regulatory Frameworks ? Privacy & Terms ? Google . Please clarify.

Saying H: makes me wonder if you have CC4. If so, you can copy stuff to user folders through the management console. Also - do you really want x copies of the same file on your drives? You could just distribute a link to one copy.

I got one of the RTL usb sticks going on a linux machine. Interesting enough but I never found an application for it - and the stuff I could tune in to wasn't all that interesting.

We bought FTTC through RM. Only took about 6 months from order to completed - mostly due to Talktalk and Openreach having a complete inability to communicate or honour appointments. And the telcos don't understand the difference between "minimum" and "maximum".

Ride to work bike : 1989 Raleigh Chiltern in black and mud. Whitewall delta cruisers for the looks, bright lights, air zound horn for things that can't / won't hear the bell. Chrome rims = scary lack of brakes in the wet - ally dyno wheel waiting in the garage. Maintainance - almost zero. Hub gears rock, even when there's only 3 of them.

I do it when riding bikes with a 9-speed cassette on the road, the ratios are so close there's often no point changing a gear at a time. I'd gladly swap them for 6 or 7 speeds. Different story on the mountain bike and the old sturmey 3-speed, all their gears have a purpose.

I guess it depends what you're trying to do, but aren't there any parental controls which can control what hours the internet is accessible for? Failing that, is that something opendns could do?

Ta for the replies. It was sold as "up to x, indicative y" which I appreciate isn't the same as "it'll run at z". However, it's running at y and never gets any higher (y is over twice x) so have an uncomfortable feeling that there's wriggle room which is about to be utilised.

I thought so.

One of my schools has recently had an upgrade to FTTC from a TalkTalk / OpenReach via a well known educational supplier whose name consists of just two letters. It was sold to us as having a minimum speed of X Mb/s. Sadly, they or their supplier seem to have confused the words "minimum" and "maximum", and instead of running for most of the time at around twice X Mb/s as we were promised, the connection only manages X Mb/s. During the install process, the engineers assured me that it was because of other people using the connection and that this was temporary. To test this theory, I decided to run regular speed tests. Here's how it's done (minimal Linux experience required). Requirements - a linux machine. Any old debian derivative should do, other distros are likely to work. I used ubuntu server on a minimally resourced vmware VM. It'll need python 2.7 but that's likely to be pre-installed. - speedtest_cli.py from https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli . Extract it from the "Download zip" link if you can't be bothered with git. (wget https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/archive/master.zip) Method In your home dir, create a directory called speedtest. Put speedtest_ci.py in there. Create batch file /home/[YOUR USERNAME]/speedtest/test.sh containing - #!/bin/bash DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M") echo `date` >> /home/[YOUR USERNAME]/speedtest/speedtest.log http_proxy="http://proxy.rmplc.co.uk:8080" https_proxy="https://proxy.rmplc.co.uk:8080" /home/[YOUR USERNAME]/speedtest/speedtest_cli.py --simple >> /home/[YOUR USERNAME]/speedtest/speedtest.log Edit [YOUR USERNAME] appropriately. Drop / edit the proxy setting. Make it executable - chmod +x /home/[YOUR USERNAME]/speedtest/test.sh Test it out. It should create a file called speedtest.log and write the results of each speed test to the end of it. (I suspect the ping time is in uS). Mon Dec 1 10:12:18 GMT 2014 Ping: 1800000.0 ms Download: 24.05 Mbits/s Upload: 7.27 Mbits/s Cron is a utility which can run commands at regular times. Each user can edit their cron entries with the crontab command. Make a crontab entry with crontab -e Add this line 0 */4 * * * export http_proxy="http://proxy.rmplc.co.uk:8080"; /home/[YOUR USERNAME]/speedtest/test.sh > /dev/null 2>&1 This will run your speed test at midnight then every 4 hours past (or 4, 8 am, midday, 4pm, 8pm, midnight). When this has run for a day or two, your speedtest.log file will have a number of entries. To just see the speeds - egrep Down speedtest/speedtest.log This shows just the lines containing the word "Down". Download: 24.93 Mbits/s Download: 25.05 Mbits/s Download: 25.21 Mbits/s Download: 25.10 Mbits/s Download: 25.21 Mbits/s To get speeds and times, egrep 'GMT|Down' /home/[YOUR USERNAME]/speedtest/speedtest.log | perl -p -e 's/2014\n/ /' This finds lines containing GMT or Down , passes them to Perl which finds "2014" followed by newline and strips out the newline. egrep 'GMT|Down' /home/[YOUR USERNAME]/speedtest/speedtest.log | perl -p -e 's/2014\n/2014 /' Thu Nov 27 16:02:01 GMT 2014 Download: 22.21 Mbits/s Thu Nov 27 20:02:01 GMT 2014 Download: 25.17 Mbits/s Fri Nov 28 00:02:01 GMT 2014 Download: 24.08 Mbits/s To stop it running, edit crontab again crontab -e and remove the line previously inserted. Putting a hash in front of the line comments it out. So, there we have it. Proof that our "minimum X Mb/s" line isn't what we were sold. Now for the fun part.

Somebody might pop in soon to suggest Policy Central. If they do, kick them. Hard. It's awful.

We ordered FTTC with RM in June. They contract it out to Talktalk and Openreach who have been a complete shower throughout the process. We still don't have fttc - they have just told us that they can't guarantee a minimum speed of more than 6.5Mb/s which is hopeless. The people at RM are fine - it's the eejits at Talktalk / Openreach who have loused it up at every opportunity. YMMV.

I tried contacting smart. My suspicion is that it's a simple GPO setting and doesn't require redeployment of a new version of smart. See if you can spot any useful content in their response. ------------------------------ Dear Mat, Thank you for contacting SMART Technologies. I understand you are having problems opening links in version 10.8 of the SMART Notebook® collaborative learning software.. I am happy to direct your inquiry. Our records indicate that software maintenance period for this version ended on February 20, 2013 and is no longer eligible for phone and email support. On September 23, 2013 we announced the SMART Notebook® Advantage program. SMART Notebook Advantage software maintenance is an annual paid subscription program to cover upgrades, add-ons and technical support for the SMART Notebook® collaborative learning software. Most importantly, SMART Notebook Advantage includes access to extended features and enhanced functionality, previously provided through the purchase of individual plug-ins and add-ons. For more information about SMART Notebook Advantage including Frequently Asked Questions, visit our online resources here: Notebook Advantage maintenance plan - SMART Technologies Please contact your local authorized SMART reseller for purchasing options: SMART resellers: where to buy SMART products - SMART Technologies If you do not wish to renew your SMART Notebook Advantage subscription maintenance you can continue to access SMART’s Online Support Center and Knowledge Base articles to help obtain answers and information for your product. SMART's Online Support Center: Support center - SMART Technologies Knowledge Base: KnowledgeBase - Home

Python is a nice language. Easy to get started in (and not too weird to get kids into) but with really powerful OO and libraries. Cross platform, free with a good active community too. Recommended book : Think Python from Green Tea Press (no connection). Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist