unixman_again

The meter says power is being returned to the grid. When you turn the lights on, it says she is drawing power from the grid.

My mother's system (she's in Australia) works on bright moonlit nights. Over there, they have a system where-by power that you give back to the grid, is deducted from your bill. There was a bit in todays Metro, that Ben & Jerry's have a similar bio-mass generating plant at their factory in Holland. They have named it The Chunkinator

Me too, I think they will just use a GP setting to set the default doc type M$ Office saves as to ODF.

I got home from last night and switched on the TV, an 18 month old Blaupunkt, only to find that it wouldn't power on. It looks as though the rocker switch is faulty. Resigning myself to no TV, I decided to check my emails. My computer wouldn't connect to the internet. I restart my router, still no action, although I could ping it. I thought it might be my ISP, so I phones their help line and the nice man tells me their service is working fine. OK, so it must be my router. When I tried to login to it, it wouldn't let me in, with a password failure. It's a Technicolor 582, which is known to have problems sometimes, so out of desperation, I tried the default password. I managed to login. For what ever reason, my router had decided to reset itself to factory defaults. After setting it up again, I'm online. Horray! What to do about the TV? According to the manual, it has a 36 month warranty, so I phones them up, and explain what is going on. Him: "When did you purchase the set?" Me: "21st May, 2013" Him: "Where did you purchase it from?" Me: "Sainsburys, Oldbury" Him: "I'm sorry Sir, it's out of warranty, so we can't help you." Me: "But it says in the manual, it has a 36 month warranty." Him: "mmmmm. Take a scan of that page in the manual and your purchase receipt and email it to us. The customer care people will then contact you by email, and arrange collection." Me: "OK, that's fine." Him: "Do you still have the original packaging?" Me: "No." Him: "Sorry, without the original packaging, we can't guarantee a safe collection by the courier." This set me thinking. Since there is nobody home during the day, collecting it would be a big problem. I can't very well take a 32" TV on the train to work, and have them collect it from there, even if I had the original box. I decided to call the local repair man. "Sure, we can pick it up at 6:00pm tonight and have a look." Always support your local trader! Anyway, I'm off for an eduginger nut. (I don't like hob nobs sorry!)

You could buy one of these Syma S107C 3 Channel RC Helicopter With Camera! and Gyroscope Stability Control: Amazon.co.uk: Toys & Games Bargain price. I read about them being used to check the gutters on houses.

Why not simply remove the password with Offline Windows Password & Registry Editor ?

We get that in college and it is always because the mouse/keyboard stops working, so the student unplugs it and plugs it into another USB port, which is on the front. We don't see it as much of a problem, except in one room where the machines are under the desks. If the cable is in the front, there is a good chance it will get run over by the chair and damaged. We move them back when we notice. I think is also depends on the school. Here in college, cables rarely get moved. Older kids I guess. At my last school, which was in special measures a year before I joined, we would get odd bouts of complete rooms being unplugged but it was rare. At my first school, a grammar school, it happened all the time, and zip ties weren't enough to stop mice and keyboards being stolen, or mice swapped between machines. We screwed the mice/keyboards to the desk with a P clip around the cable. The students then started to bring in screwdrivers, so we used security screws, which put a stop to that.

I found this UK supermarket will be the first to disconnect from the grid, use electricity generated entirely by its own rotten food on a US website today and wondered why the local press hadn't covered it. Seemed they had Express & Star and I missed it. I think this is a very cool idea and hopefully more will follow.

We display our twitter feed on the college website using the advice given here https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tfw

Depending on the teacher, for some we give access to their student home directories, for others we setup a shared dumping ground, while others insist all student work is submitted using Moodle. We in IT like and encourage this latter option, 'cus we have nothing to do to administer it.

The release of Windows wasn't the piccacle, it is when development in IT stagnated, by there basically being only one o/s and only one type of hardware available. The release of Windows completely stiffled the desktop environment for 95% of users.

Just wait until you spent 35 years in IT. The first 10 were really exciting, with hardware and o/s's changing frequently, but since 1990 (May 22nd to be precise) it has all stagnated.

My incredibly cool Bradley watch arrived today and was waiting safely in my letterbox when I got home from work. I absolutely love it! It's such a shame that I can't get a decent photo, as it really is amazing. If you want to see one in all it's glory check their website Eone - Designed for everyone It will take a bit of getting used to, seeing as it doesn't have hands. I hope to be able to master the art of checking the time by feel.

We had an app, but it was quietly abandoned. It cost us a huge amount of money and all it did was pull some stuff off our website and display the local bus and train timetables. I am looking at developing a mobile version of our website, which will basically do the same thing. We have another app which comes from the MIS system, and somehow accesses a students timetable, results, etc. I haven't seen it work but I guess it might be useful. We email a news letter to parents a couple of times a term. Actually, we only email a link to it on our website. We have a couple of digital displays, one in reception which gets used extensively, and the other in a remote part of the campus. They aren't on the network; the remote one has no wireless and there isn't a network point within cooee of it. I used to update it with the same news that goes on the one in reception, but the dept decided they wanted to use it exclusively, which is fine by me as it saves me a walk. It hasn't been switched on in months. I'm campaigning to get it moved to the library, where it would be used. We are having a new block built and we've ordered another digital sign for it. I think that will suffer a similar fate. In my last school, they were scattered around the campus and all networked. The first job of the morning was to update them with the latest news, which was supplied to us. We send out tweets occasionally, maybe once a week, when I can think of what to tweet. Sometimes staff ask me to tweet something but this is quite rare. Several depts have their own twitter accounts, but I don't know how often they are used. The website is being overhauled and moved to a decent CMS. We have been ready to go live for months, but nobody will make a decision as to the final design. The intranet is running on the new CMS (Joomla!) and is working very well, with the staff page being updated by several people (daily and weekly briefings, college events and staff social news).

We use Crot, one of the free ones and we've never experienced a crash with it. Turnitin and VeriCite are supposed to be very good but I don't know how much they cost.

Rather than re-imaging, perhaps consider DeepFreeze which returns the Mac to a known state when the user logs off. Basically it wipes any changes the user has made. We looked at using it, but it doesn't handle the situation where the users home dir is on a remote server, so it was no use to us, but it certainly works. DeployStudio can be made to run at specified times, so you could use that to re-image.

Our older readers will probably remember "The Little Red School Book" which was published around 1971/2 and subsequently banned. It was banned in Australia too (which is where I'm from) although there was a censored reprint called "The Big Red School Book", which was magazine sized. I never knew exactly what was omitted, but certainly the entire sections about sex and drugs. In Blighty, the book has just been republished, supposedly in it's original, uncensored version, except it isn't. STRANGE THINGS ARE HAPPENING: NEWS - THE ONCE BANNED LITTLE RED SCHOOLBOOK RETURNS - AND IT'S STILL CENSORED Links: 'The Little Red School Book': Sex Book Banned In 1969 Has Been Republished Amazon I was given a copy by my then girlfriend in 1981 (I don't know what she was trying to tell me!) and I still have it. I just checked, and the offending section is in mine.

Here's a really off the wall suggestion, but it has helped me in the past. Install Apache and use that rather than IIS. You might see something of use in the error log. I had to do this when IIS was reporting a 500 error but not logging any more than that.

Can you connect to the database using the cmd prompt? Something like c:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\bin\mysql.exe -D moodle -u moodleuser -p Also connect as root, and look at the users & db tables, making sure all of the grants are correct.

You can probably do what you want using this https://clippingmagic.com/

Amazon launches cut-price Dropbox competitor Zocalo, takes a page from Microsoft’s monopolistic playbook | ExtremeTech Which school will be the first to sign up? I've had a quick look, but you need an Amazon Web Services account to sign up, and since I don't have one, or indeed want one, I didn't get very far.

We have several science staff who refuse to give up We where given a load of IWB a couple of years ago and most have only been used as projector screens (both kinds of projector).

I came across this DIY version, which I think looks way cooler than the cardboard version Google Polycarbonate - page 2 of the article is interesting

I was watching this video last night - must be a very sharp plane (mind you the Japanese are the masters of sharp blades) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3Ad6tBdLbM

When I was in Australia, these Smart Dialler were advertised on the TV. I'm sure these is something similar in the UK. A quick google came up with Emergency Phones - see the Viking E-1600