unixman_again

We purchased our sign from Digital Signage - by Lobby Sign but I can't remember how much they cost. We actually have two, one in reception and one in a remote block and we are supposed to be getting another for our new building.

We use a very low-tech solution, consisting of a ring binder, which contains some visitor logging forms and a plastic pocket of visitor stickers, which are professionally printed, so it's not as low tech as it could be!

If you have Moodle, you can do quizes in that.

One of these which we use to display text messages and jpg posters. The receptionists do the text messages (you can key them into the system) but I do the posters as converting an M$ Office file to a jpg is beyond them.

+1 for Joomla

How do you security mark your school iPads? We tried our chemical etch kit, but it won't touch the aluminium. We thought about taking them to Timpsons, but they want £10 a pop and the one in walking distance of the college can't get them in his machine, so we'll have to drive elsewhere. My hand isn't really steady enough for a Dremel engraver, but maybe I could use a stencil? My Dremel experience is zero.

We use Joomla for our intranet. The updates are done by people with different levels of IT experience, some that really shouldn't be let near a computer while others are very competent. I devised an LCD approach to deal with this. The updaters edit a series of M$ Word documents on a shard drive. They then save it as .doc and again as .html using the web page filtered option. These htmls are displayed on the Joomla page. We used to do the same thing when the intranet was on SP. This means the updaters don't have to contend with checking in/checking out, using an unfamiliar editor, etc. We moved to Joomla, because it allows us much more flexibility than SP. We have 4 intranets and the public facing website, all running on the same Joomla code base, and each has a unique url. SSO is handled by shibboleth, but I have no idea has to how it works as it was setup by an external company. In college, students and staff are granted automatic access to the appropriate intranets, so staff can see both staff and student pages, but students can't see the staff page. The IT services & library pages are open to both. (Here "page" refers to a Joomla site.) Outside of college, if you try to access these pages, you have to login. The public facing website is, or course, available to all.

For BYOD we're seeing 57% iOS and 29% Android, Win7 6%, Win8 4.5% and Mac OS X 1.2%. - M$ is on the way out

When we ran SP (now happily abandoned ) we embedded our twitter feed using the advice here https://dev.twitter.com/web/overview We used a CEWP and chucked the code in.

I run off and on, mostly in the summer. At the start of the summer, I'll run 1000m and add 100m each time I go out (usually 3 times a week) and before you know it, I'm up to 5k at which point, I decide that's enough. I used to run 15k but I gave up long distances like that about 7 years ago; that was my 50th birthday present to my knees. Luckily, I live in the Black Country, which has lots of canals. The tow paths are great places to run and cycle. Flat, quiet and soft.

The Australian model would be good. Federal , fully elected two houses - handles policies at the national level (eg foreign affairs, trade, agriculture, defence, employment, treasury, immigration, etc.) Compulsory voting. State, fully elected two houses - handles polices at the state level (police, education, sport, transport, utilities, etc.) Compulsory voting. Local, fully elected council, no political parties. Optional voting open to residents who own property in the area. Local infrastructure (libraries, bins, etc.) Income tax and GST is collected at the Federal level. There are some state taxes such as vehicle registration and local taxes (rates, business rates).

We use HESK and each department's help desk is on a different url. This isn't a problem as the various desks are liked from appropriate sections of the intranet.

I did ours in The Gimp I do most of our graphics work using The Gimp, so I'm very familiar with it.

We use PHP Directory Listing Script | PHP Directory List | Think Tank

An oldie but a goodie

We have many courses which were created on 1.9 of Moodle, and these were successfully upgraded, when we upgraded Moodle to vers 2.5. When the courses were created, several of the pages contained links to pdf files held on the moodle server, and it appears as though these links have been upgraded fine. When a teacher or sysadmin accesses the page with the course and clicks on the link, the pdf opens fine, however when a student clicks on the link, they see a message saying 'the course is currently unavailable to students'. This message is quite confusing, as the students have enrolled in the course, they just cannot access the files held as legacy files. Does anyone know how we can enable students to read legacy files? I tried the advice here https://docs.moodle.org/27/en/Capabilities/repository/coursefiles:view but it did not allow students to open the pdfs Moodle 2.7.1 (Build: 20140714) (cross-posted to moodle forum but I figure edugeekers are more knowledgeable!)

Adblock plus is available for Chrome.

We upload the document to the website and email a link to parents. We send emails to parents using https://www.ymlp.com/login.html I think is costs us £3 a month. Since only we in IT have access to this, we make sure that only links are emailed out, that is to say, anyone who wants to email parents comes to us.

Ah but if you extract the mbz with 7-Zip and look at the files.xml, it will show you the original file name and what it is called now. You can then rename it as you see fit. You could probably write a script to process the xml and do the renaming for you. Here's a sample from a quick test I ran in which the file camera_icon.gif is called b20cb217c9797a9e4443e665836969f403ca44f3 in the extracted tree b20cb217c9797a9e4443e665836969f403ca44f3 35552 course legacy 0 / camera_icon.gif 4669

Backup the course and look at the zip file created.

W7 here and that's what we'll be sticking with until W9 or maybe even 10. We see no advantage in 8x over 7. The users are familiar with 7 and our most of our hardware isn't due for replacement for 3 or 4 years.

It is entirely up to you how they are used. I typically use one for editing code and the other for running the code for testing. Suppose you have a several windows open. You can minimise windows to put them out of your way temporarily, but if you have several open, the taskbar or kicker can get crowded and confusing. M$ addresses this in a couple of ways, by allowing you just to display icons in the taskbar tabs and grouping the same application in to one tab. IMO grouping is really confusing; if grouped I can never find the window I want and I usually end up with many duplicate windows, especially of explorer. I actually never group under M$, just putting up with a full taskbar and thinking just how primative M$ windows is. (For example, can't keep windows on top without an add-on, still have to ctrl/c ctrl/p for copy and paste, rather than highlight and centre click like in Linux, etc.) When you enable multiple desktops, you get more workspaces just like the one you're see when you login. Rather than overcrowding one desktop with too many unrelated windows, distinctly different tasks can be put on different desktops, keeping things efficiently organised and instantly accessible. Most Linux windows managers allow multiple desktops, be it KDE, Gnome, IceWM (which I use), LXDE or whatever. Think of it as "super tabs".

We have a number of staff who insist on using Prezi (despite our advice not too). Prezi have apparently upgraded their player and staff are saying "I'm getting a serious lag when progressing through - it's taking ages to update the page" If they switch to the old version of the player, all is well, but I guess Prezi will remove this option eventually. As far as we can tell, it doesn't matter which browser you use, the lag still happens in the new player. Since the staff won't follow our advice by not using it, and to make matters worse, I think we are about to sign up for some external content which is developed on Prezi, we are going to have to deal with this lag. Have any other edugeekers been asked to deal with this? If so, did you managed to cure the lag? I will try and cross post the same question on the Prezi support forum. Thanks!

Here's what is says about using the database to handle sessions: "If enabled, this setting will use the database to store information about current sessions. Note that changing this setting now will log out all current users (including you). If you are using MySQL please make sure that 'max_allowed_packet' in my.cnf (or my.ini) is at least 4M. Other session drivers can be configured directly in config.php, see config-dist.php for more information. This option disappears if you specify session driver in config.php file." It appears as though dbsessions in the mdl_config table controls whether or not to use the database. 0 = use directory on disk (which is what we do). If it isn't 0, you could perhaps set it to 0 and it will use the session directory on disk (I think). Obviously YMMV and if it completely stuffs up should you try this, it isn't my fault!

If the sessions folder isn't there, it is almost certain that you are using the database for session handling (see Site administration / Server / Session handling). There are some notes there-in about MySQL config, which may not be correct.