TechMonkey

There was a big push from Intel a couple of years ago and I had a demo of what it could do. All looked nice but it added extra cost to the machines, pretty sure there was a cost for the software to interface with it and we found it was hit or miss if it was offered. So overall never had a critical mass of devices to play with it properly. In my head it is one of those things if you get 1000s of devices and they are spread out across the country or internationally it may be a nice thing to have and worth the extra uplift. For our purposes it just didn't add up. But maybe it is one of those things that once you use you never want to go back?

If I remember from last time, this may not be a Securely issue but a Disney+ blocking you, issue. The ToS do not allow schools to play its content, so it was found that some Schools IPs had been blocked. The easy answer is to tell the staff that they cannot play Disney+ content at school, and move on with your technical day.

Thanks @CSmith. Looks like it fixed our issue too.

This matches what we are seeing too. The device is fine, it is just web traffic, and only on these certain devices. Disable or remove Cloud Filter and it is fine. I have a ticket open and it was escalated to 2nd line straight away.

What devices is this happening on? We have had a similar issue but only on our latest batch of staff Lenovo devices. It is definitely Cloud Filter but is not happening on older Lenovos or Dells. We have also noted it is intermittent, but when it hits internet is unusable.

@tom_newton Would the same be happening to Microsoft? Having issues with Teams today, statics.teams.cdn.office.net is red in the logs, but in all the correct categories.

Look nice phones but not sure about the price! We are looking at TCL phones. Cheap phones for just under £50 that aren't awful, then mid phones for £75. We make sure they have cases and screen protectors on when they go out the door and keep our fingers crossed. The cheapy ones are not being used as daily drivers but we are using them for specific purposes, more a handheld than a phone.

Yes, that appears to be the official story, blame it on WfH. Totally annecdotally, the NCP car parks around me always seem moderately full, if not packed.

Having read around the subject it appears to be the usual Private Equity company bought NCP, sold all the properties they had and then leased them back for short term profit. Leases turned out to be expensive and when some properties went financially unviable, they couldn't be got rid of due to the fixed leases. Brilliant strategy. I wonder if anyone has done a study on the percentage of PE bought companies that thrived or went bust. It seems to be a recurring theme.

NCP gone to the wall, which just seems shocking to me. Car park firm NCP collapses with nearly 700 jobs at risk

Yep, VS Code was a lot easier. Visual Studio Community we would inevitably end up having to manually add something and was a bit picky. That may have just been the python plugin, but something like if you ran it one way it would generate errors but ran it another it would run fine.

Does it have to be Visual Studio or could it be VS Code? Very different beasts.

Does Arbor not have a built-in option? I'm pretty sure we had that and had the same issues you do. We moved over to the built-in parts of iSAMS. Not perfect but at least there were a hell of a lot less issues and less double entry going on.

Interestingly there seems to be conflicting advice about backups and SAR. My understanding was that backups were not covered by SAR but ICO says they are. Other advice seems to be that as long as the data is not used for active processing and only for restoring then it is OK. I think the confusion is from ICO using the term backup systems to cover not only backups but also hot sites and other replicated systems. It wasn't my intention to say there has to be a magic shibboleth to be allowed to get data, but there is a difference between a request for data and someone off hand asking if you still have it and a difference in how they can be approached. And yes, I am totally aware that the response will be that there should be no difference they should all be approached exactly the same and I know this will start an "Akshully" debate which I am not trying to start. What I am saying is that in reality there is a difference.

Is this an official request (SAR) or just a "Hey, do you still have my work?" kind of request? Will it cost you, monetarily, to retrieve the work and will it be a ball ache? My first response would be do you have a policy about this, as you need to be seen to be consistent, not just doing it for the kids that are nice. I would say this isn't a DP issue as long as you have done your due diligence to check it is the right pupil. Ultimately though if you have it and it isn't going to be a pain to get, then is there a reason not to do it?

Interesting after the news the US government is looking to setup a VPN to allow UK citizens the chance to bypass our crazy censorship. I honestly do not know how a VPN ban is going to work considering at our small scale it is a constant daily, if not hourly, whack a mole of IP addresses, which is based mostly on 365 reports of geo-locations or quick travel hacks. Even then I don't think we are getting them all. Add in the legitimate uses for business traffic, then it just seems like an uneducated knee jerk.

I think my issue here is they have failed to enforce their own rules for 10 years, so it appears they want you to be the big bad and enforce it for them. To turn the question round a bit, what about any system will work better if staff don't have to do it? No system will survive being ignored. I would be pushing back and find out how any solution is going to be enforced as you could spend a lot of time, effort and capital on this for them to just keep accepting a pile of receipts and it all be for naught.

Yeah, if you let someone get away with not doing something, why would they do it? Needs backing from SLT and as machy says, no form no expense. Our finance system can do expenses, I think taking a photo of the receipt and it works out the details for you, but the finance team hasn't turned it on yet so we are still using a spreadsheet.

Excel spreadsheet and a camera?

Bare with me here, this is a bit out there. I have been asked to organise a bird cam that can be displayed on our digital signage. So far, every cam we have trialled or looked into is linked to an app or a web service that doesn't allow easy showing on a big screen. Does anyone have experience of a birdbox solution that would fit the bill? We want it to be minimal effort on our or any staff, so suggestions of getting footage from an SD card that we have had so far are not going to work. We can probably cable to it if needed but WiFi would be best. Happy to set up something on server if we need to rebroadcast. Our Digital Signage can take a webpage or happy to connect ONIV or something similar. I don't really want to fiddle with youtube broadcasting, but if that is the only option we may have to do that. Other issue we have found is that most solutions are consumer or pro(ish)sumer. But I don't hold out much hope for an enterprise birdbox cam! Any ideas?

Would an IT Queue work to direct the calls to? We have a queue that the techs are signed into and I can sign into if needed. That way all their phones ring if a call comes in, no single number is blocked by a call that has come in and we can direct calls, or turn them all off, when ever needed.

Bit of a janky solution but you could hide the number from address book and then only let certain people have the extension to dial. But if someone receives a call from them and notes the ext down they could dial it. You could look at the Boss-Secretary function, this directs all calls to a certain number, but you can put some exceptions in. No experience of this though so I don't know if this is exactly what you want.

Take a look at Limesurvey. A proper survey system, free if you can host it internally. It has the ability to send out tokens that will mark if a user has filled out the survey but does not link the answer to the token.

I was going to ask if anyone knew how to bet against them. I don't think I have enough money to ride them out though

I'm waiting for the sequel to The Big Short, The AI Short.