Garacesh

Parrotting what others have said, yes, for a screen that size you absolutely want 1440p. I personally find 1440p, 144Hz, 1ms response time is the 'sweet spot' for me. Big enough resolution that big screens still look good, with a fast enough refresh rate to be good for gaming, but neither of those are too high to stress my GPU too much (still using a 1080, personally). One of the big things you're going to need to know is what kind of GPU they have. Most monitors now incorporate some kind of variable refresh rate, G-Sync for NVidia cards, Freesync for AMD cards. This eliminates annoying screen tearing and reduces noticeable framerate tanks (older versions of V-Sync used to limit your FPS to 1/x of your refresh rate, so a 60Hz monitor would do 60, 30 or 15 fps.. Those were dark times...) Generally speaking, AMD cards want a Freesync monitor, and NVidia cards want a G-Sync monitor, but G-Sync comes with a pretty hefty price tax, and NVidia have released an official list of Freesync monitors that are G-Sync compatible. A list of G-Sync and compatible monitors can be found here.

Hmm, well it didn't work in testing yesterday (typing things into MS Word) Dropping the detection sensitivity down to 70% (the lowest it can go) has made it catch it with 'myself' as two words. However, my test user isn't getting phrase matches when typing into a google docs document. Google searches on the same user/chromebook/session pop results, but typing things into google docs doesn't flag anything. Which is a bummer, as we know kids have used the collaborative editing features as a pseudo-chatroom in the past. Edit: getting a looot of matches that really aren't matches, though.. Will definitely need some further tweaking, if we go with this, but if I had to call it either way, it looks like we'll be sticking with Senso, if NS-DNA doesn't/can't watch Google docs. Smoothwall's offering is waay too expensive, and management think re-educating users to effectively replace CPOMS as Impero's solution is supposed to do would cause too many problems.

I don't suppose there are safeguarding phrase lists floating around the internet, are there? Management seem quite keen on the look and functionality of NetSupport, but in testing, Senso seems to be picking up far more stuff (specific examples being 'gun', 'knife' and 'kill my self') A cursory Google doesn't find me much. Edit: I know I can (and have) added custom phrases, but seems pretty whack-a-mole-y. I guess phrase matching always will be, but still, I'm sure there are better organisations than I, probably with more than one dude working there vs me, myself and I, who have been able to curate something significantly more in-depth. Edit2: The IWF say they have a keyword list, but allegedly NetSupport already uses that.

As always, your input is appreciated I would absolutely be interested, even though I'm not very involved with safeguarding. Indeed. For the most part, off-site monitoring seems to be available no matter who you go with (even if NetSupport's offering is delayed or a bit kludgy, due to the server element). It's a conversation I'm going to leave to the safeguarding bods, as I know I don't know enough about this to come to a decision myself (and also it's outside of my remit, so I wouldn't want to be the guy making the decision anyway). I just wondered what other schools were doing as the question has been asked here.

RED 2 wasn't awful, but I remember watching Hard Kill on Netflix 'cause the title card had him on it, and that was just... terrible (and his role in it was fairly pointless, anyway!) Real shame, there've been some absolute cracking Willis movies of days gone by.

I'd thought about that, but in testing, I dropped a chromebook onto my own data and googled a naughty, got no email about it as was to be expected, but 5 mins later when I connected the device back to work wifi, even after a reboot, I still got an email. Not sure which trumps 'worse', pay £8 a month and don't have the remote control option, or get delayed alerts for off-site devices. Guess that's up to safeguarding to decide. On the plus side, email back and forth with Impero, and they've agreed to let me trial the software so we can get a true side-by-side comparison, so that's nice.

Yup, the 'official' way to upgrade from 10 S to full-10 is via a download from the Microsoft Store, which requires an account to be associated with the user. Total garbo. Stay away from 10S.

Well, I've confirmed that AB Tutor is indeed pretty much just classroom management. Shame. Emailed Impero asking for a trial of well:being. Let's see where that ends up. Smoothwall are also offering every school a free 90-day trial of Monitor, so I've sent an email about that. Thank you @Rob_D

Dunno about you, but I always avoid folks in high-vis. Usually they have clipboards and want to talk to me. Sod that nonsense

I appreciate what you're saying, but there's not really an 'on when on-site, off when off-site' option. It's on or it isn't - Senso sends all of its data over the internet. Plus our loan devices don't really toggle between. They're either at home until they get returned, or here until they're loaned out. Currently the agreement they sign does state that the device is monitored and Chromebooks do have Senso force-installed on them via G Suite. Part of my concern is that this monitoring could A) give parents a false sense of security through misunderstanding exactly what that means, B) open the school up to liability for things beyond our control, and/or C) potentially capture information it really shouldn't (since it takes screenshots), such as if they're using the device's webcam. The current agreement does stipulate the device is only to be used by the named pupil(s) and only for school work, but we all know folks abiding by that is about as likely as I am to win an olympic gold. I guess the question is how far does our duty to safeguard the children extend? We have some leeway for now because most of the loaned devices are DfE Windows devices, so they're as-provided with the DfE's settings/filtering/whatever they come with. But the chromebooks we got are enrolled into our domain, so they do run Senso offsite at the moment.

Currently we're using Senso, but I'd be lying if I said I was 100% enthused by the software. I'm not keen on being able to remote control any PC from anywhere on earth as long as it's internet connected, as far as I see it, that makes Senso a reasonable-sized hole in our defences. Should it (or an admin) ever be compromised, all of our end-user devices would be compromised, including IT Support PC's. Plus I don't think the school should be monitoring devices sent home. As far as I'm concerned, if we give little Johnny a laptop and he's going on stuff he shouldn't be doing at home, that's an issue for the parent to be fixing. By us monitoring the device off-site, that could be seen as us accepting liability for its use on a network we have no control over. That being said, do we not already do that by providing the device with certain restrictions (eg no admin account)? What're people's thoughts on this one? So far I've looked at NetSupport DNA and I have to admit I'm reasonably impressed. Customisable severity levels, email alerts, screenshots and an easy to read UI are all a big plus. I can see Impero offer similar with their well:being software, but with no trial I'm not sure I could properly vouch for it. I may look into their demo though. ABTutor looks to just be classroom management, and not much in the way of behind the scenes safeguarding. What else is out there that people can recommend? Realistically, our needs are: Keyword logging, with a customisable list Customisable email alerts (such as if certain websites or keywords are used) Automated end-of-week reporting is a bonus Cloud-accessible portal, so the safeguarding team can check alerts from outside school Relatively easy to get an overview of what's going on Capability for multiple users

A lot of the rules are like that, at the moment. I suspect the government are scared of the new random flavours we've got? Used to be you could take a PCR and stop isolating after coming back from abroad, now you have to take a PCR but isolate for the full duration regardless of the result

Same here. I didn't so much as 'book it' as 'there's your jab, and here's a business-size card with your next date on it'

PM'd before we end up croaking

Way ahead of you

Counterpoint: I've been cycling to work for over a year now and I'm still a choncc

Darn, I thought that looked quite interesting, though I did spot from the previews that the language would cause a bit of dissonance. I did watch Season 3 of Paradise PD recently. I have no idea why, as I wasn't particularly enthused by the first 2 seasons, given that 50% of the 'jokes' were just "oh boy, I'm so glad X didn't happen!" X immediately happens ... but I was pleasantly surprised. The writers actually seem to have learned what a joke is! It's still the same low-brow offensive potty humour, so it won't be to everybody's tastes, but it's certainly better.

Well, looks like I'm going down this rabbit hole, too! We've got OnlyFans, many phone games, social networks (mostly TikTok, but also Facebook, Instagram and Reddit). Going to be doing some more digging into the services I don't recognise, and writing an email to our DSL, methinks.

Now that you mention it, there *was* a suspiciously empty golden-ticket-shaped space in my box.. Hmmm.. Congrats to those that do get them

The MECM woes continue! So I've had PXE booting in Legacy mode by setting options 66/67 in DHCP but we have some devices that, so far as I can see anyway, don't actually have a BIOS/Legacy mode. I've removed option 66/67, and added an ip helper-address on the core switch, but devices still don't PXE boot. Core switch IP Helper table looks like this: The 2 entries for the DC/DHCP server were added by the previous IT support, but Google tells me there's no problem with having multiple ip helper addresses. I've checked the firewall on the server, UDP 67, 68, 69 and 4011 are enabled (which are allegedly used by PXE?), as well as UDP 64001 to 65000 (multicast), TCP 1433 and 4022 (SQL), and TCP 80, 443, 8530 and 8531 (WSUS) although even with the firewall disabled it doesn't boot. I've tried plugging the laptop I want to image directly into the core switch, as is the Hyper-V host the MECM server runs on. Still nada. The distribution point has Enable unknown computer support ticked (as well as Allow this distribution point to respond to incoming PXE requests and Enable PXE support for clients), and Respond to PXE requests on all network interfaces enabled. The task sequence is deployed to my custom All end-user computers collection, as well as the All Unknown Computers collection, so it should be seeing the advertisement.

We do not, though I should probably get onto the council and get the boss to sign the taking-ownership-form-thing

They look gross! Those yellow pussy strands from the first model genuinely got a bit of an "eww" reaction from me even though I knew it was just a model. You did good!

I really need to get me some thinner and practice layering. This is my latest, but I know if I practised some layering, the Agoniser, cloth and hair could be so much better. Edit: stupid sideways photo bug.

I've stashed the cappuccino sachet, the teabag, and the biscoff inside the VeryPC safety mug. It's now our sooperdooperemergency brew

Calling the old SCCM and the new MECM, just for clarity. I've gotten to the point now where the MECM box has all the software, drivers, task sequences etc set up that SCCM had, and I've got it listing windows updates with ADR's configured. How do I tell my endpoints to make the switch? At first I thought, easy, just remove all the devices from the SCCM server, disable device discovery, then deploy the Configuration Manager Client Package package from MECM to the endpoints. MECM has device discovery running just fine and can see all the devices, after all. Except, deploy isn't an option. It is for the Piloting Package, and the USMT, but not for the default one.. I've found some chatter about creating a script that essentially says "join this site code" (e.g. here and ) and deploying that from the old server. Is that considered the best way?