the_quick

Looking forward to not wearing shirts and ties. Lots to do, including moving my office to other building, on the other end of school ground. But hey, has to be done.

3 schools in our neighbourhood have closed because lots of cases amongst theirs population. We are still OK here, but I can see it is spreading really quickly and not just self isolation, but actual positive cases and some teaches in hospital. I heard some teachers saying that they will remove the app, as they don't want to be pinged - holidays booked and they don't want to miss it

Lambda variant is being looked at, not many cases in UK yet, but scientist are worried that it is able to escape the antibodies produced by the vaccines. Interesting article here: https://www.ft.com/content/b3ea5177-9312-418b-acb7-af16a3bdcd22 /worried

Same script as above, with GPO as startup script for all domain computers. Works great, nothing get missed

My technician had to go home to self isolate today, contact with someone that has covid. So far I think we had 34 staff self isolating in the last 2 weeks. And some pupils as well, yesterday around 50 were sent to self isolate. My second jab is this Friday, fingers crossed...

First 2 cases here, around 25 pupils have to isolate, so far all staff are OK and Covid free

Finished yesterday "The Looming Tower" - book about how Al-qaeda managed to carry out terrorist attack in US - quite interesting

We do the same way here, when we had cases (not since autumn) we send max 50 kids in one day - usually 5-10 kids from few classes. Never ever we sent home whole class or even year group. But we had a school in neighbourhood where they had 23 staff self isolating, so they closed most of the school.

Me please!

or find an alternative video that isn't blocked. Thankfully we have very understanding staff here and after explanation, they accepted we cannot do anything about it.

Awesome sander:

You can setup a shared folder on a NAS and direct in the AD this as user storage folder. The NAS you mentioned will not cut it imo. It all depends how many users will be accessing this at one time, if something like half of that, you will need 10gig network and really fast drives like enterprise SSDs. I would as well make sure it has redundant PSU and raid controller. This data needs to be available all the time during school day, so you will need to beef it up. We have similar amount of people in my school, around 800 people connected - last years we replaced our dedicated SAN with Dell VRTX (SSD drives in storage) - it works really well. We use vmware, file server VM disk is on SAN. Cloud storage is another option, as long as you have stable and fast connection.

Just finished Terry Pratchett's Nation - was slow to start but fascinating bit later on, really good and uplifting story Written loosely in a third-person perspective, the novel is set in an alternative history of our world, shortly after Charles Darwin has published On the Origin of Species. A recent pandemic has just killed the British king and his next 137 heirs. Except for the opening chapter, the novel's action entirely occurs in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean (the fictionalised South Pacific Ocean) on a particular island known by its indigenous inhabitants as "the Nation".

We had something similar installed in a brand new flat - exhaust air pump made by Nibe. It was very cheap to run, but insulation was very good, even light switches had silicon around them to stop leaking air. As long as we run just using it without additional heat element switched on, it was very economical. We usually had it around 21C, so not cold really, never had problem with hot water. We love most that it kept flat quite dry and air was filtered quite well. There were no parts outside, so possibly totally a different product.

Thanks guys, didn't know that papercut mobility was a free tool ! Fantastic

We had this issue suddenly appear after working for a long time. Not sure if it is something with Windows update. Anyway, replacing cable with and USB active cable (with a chip in the middle) sorted out the issue

That's a cracking price, any chance you can share exact model. Need to replace computers in one ict lab

So far I have used Lanschool and Impero. Lanschool used to be much cheaper but lacking some features that Impero has. 2 years ago Impero priced matched Lanschool fosr us and I have to admit it is much better. I don't think you can setup classes in that way you want - not available to teacher when they stop teaching given class. But you can easily divide classes in groups and name them as you want. Impero does do Lock/unlock screen, block internet, allow/block lists/ open url/app on students device, mute sound, broadcast teacher screen and of course live view of student screens. It does work really well and so far we didn't have any big problems. Most important is to train teachers well, so they know how to operate it well.

From one side, in bit more than 2 weeks we will loose Year 11s, so circa 250 kids gone - less people to spread. But as they will be told no need to wear masks at all, all staff is still required to wear them in communal area. Most of our staff is over 40 and at least had one jab so far. Most of the students are not ! Increase in cases in the last few days is worrying and apparently cases with the Indian variant tripled in the last week. Pubs, restaurants and cafes will reopen next week, so more indoor mixing, hotels will reopen as well - possibly inviting more touristic movement around the country. Yes, it is getting a bit warmer, so venues can keep their doors open to allow ventilation. I wonder if we are going to see a big raise in cases or because of vaccination, it will be kept quite low.

For years we now use Probooks for staff and students. I find earlier models to have better build quality and easier to repair. The new ones are bit harder, still they are quite good. Might look at Lenovo Thinkbook/ThinkPad series in the future.

We do it every time it happens. Sometimes we are able to claim money back from students, but mostly we can't I just got a Chromebook with not fully working keyboard. Can't replace keyboard on it's own, have to replace whole assembly - that is highly annoying

I had my first dose yesterday. So far, apart from sore arm, no side affects. Maybe it will stay that way...

If the budget can stretch, LG UltraGear 27GL850 are one of the best in that range. Amazing monitor for gaming, it has all you need, 1ms response time, 144Hz, 1440p, support from NVidia Gsync and AMD Freesync.

This is starting to cause issues for us. Video that was fine before now is age restricted, works on my private Gmail account, but not on the school one. And the video is about heart dissection, just weird

My wife had her Astra Zeneca last Saturday - she still feels side effects, tired, headache, feeling like she has a flu. Hope it will pass soon