mats

That's another one for the 'investigate' list - many thanks.

That's *really* interesting. Cheap hardware (eg repurposed smartcache box!) + free sw + $70pa + some setup / admin time for filtering beats £££s for commercial offerings. Does much bad stuff get through that list?

Which lists would they be? I thought they were all closely guarded proprietry things.

RM Smartcache is relatively cheap but has been out of development for years and will be unsupported as of Sept 2015 iirc.

Nobody's mentioned Yumi yet - not just good for linux stuff, I installed W7 from it the other day.

I like that site. Similar to Rubular: a Ruby regular expression editor and tester

As an aside, the Android L keyboard is now available from the play store. A free swype keyboard without adverts - at last!

If you can cope with drop bars I'd suggest a cyclocross bike. Faster than mountain bikes (on road), tougher than hybrids. Quite fancy one meself.

No, can't see what is unsafe about that. Might want a coat if it rains.

If you looked at my faceache page you'd probably conclude that I died somewhere around 2006 but nobody noticed.

We're still using 1.4 but that's partly because of our weedy internet connection. You can convert programs for 2.x to run on 1.4 with Retro Converter

Gah, I hate stuff like this - just got it kinda-working on RM CC4. I had to - copy all 8 (yes, 8. Can't bear to run a duplicate file finder on that tree) CDs to RMPublic\network apps\switched on ict\year - create shortcuts which reference the UNC path (so "\\\RMPublicNetwork\Network Apps\Switched On ICT\Year\blah.exe") - allow each executable (6 year groups + KS2 control pack + FS) in the file rules because the path rules didn't work (not with P:\ or UNC path - WHY RM, WHY?) and still it won't open the pdfs from the silly interface. Ideas appreciated - it will save the pdfs, just not open them directly. Don't get me started on how easy it would be do dump the lot on an intranet server and just dole it up from there - 2 mins work, max.

@rickjames - Get a hub gear. No maintenance and you can ride over hills without ruining your knee joints - best of both worlds. Being able to change gear at standstill is just icing on top.

@mpe - it does have the feel of an old system ready for retirement (see also smartcache) so I'm not expecting updates any time soon. Devs too busy on Neon I reckon.

I think that you only get the email if your password is too weak - you might be lucky.

That sounds like the password is checked when it's created and a measure of it's security is stored at that point. The RM one is more like 'we have a problem with hackerz using our smtp servers. Oh, look, lots of our passwords are insecure.'. It's a fairly old system.

RM are enforcing a new password policy for schools unfortunate enough to still be using easymail. Today, they emailed all users whose passwords don't meet their minimum standard. That's all well and good (and sensible, given some of the passwords our users use), but how do RM know whose password doesn't meet their standard? They must either store passwords using a reversible encryption method, or be storing plaintext. I thought both were a bad idea - come on RM, it's not that hard to do it properly these days!

I'd echo the smart tv comments - bought a Phillips about a year ago. Great pic, dreadful smart tv software. The updates seem to have stopped too. I bought a roku.

Me too! Ta

Can a van der graaf generator kill a promethean board? Definately. It's very low current, but you are likely to have a few KV knocking around. Smartboards aren't build for that kind of abuse!

Moto G is a great phone. Quick, good looking and my screen stayed scratch free for 5 months. Until I dropped it off a table onto a hard floor and smashed the screen. Still works, looks awful and shed glass into your finger until I stuck a screen protector on it.

The database side sounds like a fairly trivial job for somebody handy with python & django. As for the data - contact details for schools are available from LAs but don't think there is a central register of level of ict support. If you're going to rely on schools updating their own data, there needs to be a reason for them to do so. Out of date data is likely to be a big problem.

I think a lot of the ks1 & ks2 programming stuff can be covered with beebots, scratch (a browser based version also exists - snap) and possibly python. The 'make an app' stuff ignores the fact that creating a graphical touch based program, cross compiling it and getting it onto a device is non-trivial to say the least. Doing it in a way that staff can teach & kids understand even more so - I'd be surprised to see a solution which a) works b) deploys easily on a windows network to run-of-the-mill hardware and c) doesn't cost £££.

I'd like to see that code. Is it on github?

name = raw_input("What is your name? ") print "Hi", name Excellent book link.