Pete10141748

Oxenfree currently free for Gold on XboxOne, really enjoyed it over the 5ish hours it took and will replay for additional options/endings etc. If you like low-pressure exploration and character interaction/narration give it a go. Wanted to get Destiny 2 on release but didn't had the cash. From what my workmate has told me it is an epic grind for gear... not so sure I want to bother now tbh, much as I enjoyed the first one. Maybe once the DLC comes out and there's more stories to play.

Deadpool and Triple9. Deadpool was off-the-wall fantastic. See it! Triple9 was a "The Departed" wannabe with no charm. Avoid.

I watched "John Carter" on Netflix last night. Horrible, horrible movie. Badly paced, awful acting, costumes looked cheap, CGI all over the place, doesn't stick to it's own internal rules, and almost every scene was a ripoff of another movie. Eurgh.

How about banning staff from charging their own mobile phones at school? Bet that would save a fortune

I've got around 100 staff, most of them at 40Gb or less, a few at close to 100Gb after 7+ years of working here and accumulating stuff. My server is shortly to run out of space, so I've grabbed a couple of 10Tb NAS boxes that I am going to archive everything onto as soon as I get them. Each person will then be told that from now on their Home drive is for the current year's work only, and the everything else will be found in their new Archive area; if they want something from their Archive to be available at home they can put a copy back into their Home drive, but if they reach their storage limit then it'll be up to them to trim it down, not more expansions for anyone (there just isn't the disk space). When it comes to non-work related files I'd say some good advice would be to check, update & enforce your AUP with management's help. There should be NO personal data on a school computer (that's made very clear to everyone here). I don't care if you don't have a laptop at home and just bought the newest iPhone and need to sync it, the laptop is NOT your own personal device, it's the property of the school as is the server disk space, and the backup disk space, and I'm not letting you take away Gb's of space from other staff&students for your (frankly, awful) music collection. Putting quota's on disk space is a good idea as well. Here they are set at 40Gb (going to reduce to 20Gb once the NAS is in place), if they go over their laptop forces them to come and see me. To date all I've done is up them another 10Gb's or so each time, but from this point on I'm going to have to be stricter and get them to sort out what isn't needed anymore!

We've got Clevertouch here, and are about to get more. Everyone loves them, they all want one for their classroom over the summer (good luck with that one! lol)

Plus the afore-mentioned built-in right thumbstick (thumbstub?), faster wireless connectivity, better battery life, and for some games (Monster Hunter 4 being one of them) better graphics due to the newer hardware.

I plan on getting a N3DSXL asap for that very reason! 30th birthday on Friday, let's see what happens...

MH is definately not a game I'd like to play on a small-sized DS. After putting in 110+ hours on it via my 3DS XL I can say it works great on the larger screen. Whatever you are playing on I highly recommend getting the CirclePadPro attachment that adds the right thumb-stick, it makes working the camera SO much easier.

It sounds like the picture file for the background is not being picked up from the AppData folder. By default in windows 7 the picture for the background image goes in C:\users\[[username]]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows Photo Viewer\ so I'd guess that is not being transferred to the server with the profile info on logoff. Do you redirect the AppData folder to somewhere on the server? Maybe try doing that and see what happens?

Each member of staff has a folder on my file server called [[username]]. They then have a mapped drive U:\ mapped to \\servername\staffwork\[[username]] Their Documents folder is redirected to the drive U:\, similarly folders like Music are redirected to U:\My Music, Pictures to U:\My Pictures and so on. On their own laptop the U:\ drive is set to be available offline so they can use it ouside of school. If they log on to another machine, they get access to their work but it doesn't have to be downloaded or sycn'd to the machine first.

Most days I try and bring things that won't get demolished in the first 2 minutes. Today I have a pack of Trebor XXX Spearmint mints. They are way too strong to eat one after another, so they'll last the day and keep my breath feeling fresh too! We're a "Healthy Eating" school so we have fruit freely available to us, problem is with 120+ staff members odds are good that a couple of times a week it's someone's birthday and the staffroom is filled with cakes!

Last game purchased; Destinty (PS4) Last game completed; Probably Tomb Raider, most of the games I'm playing lately don't have an "end" really (Destiny, Smash Bros. 3DS, Monster Hunter 4 3DS)

Hi all, If this is in the wrong place, apologies! I have 4 users who all on Windows 7, all connecting to our Windows 2008 R2 Print Server for our "Finance Printer". Thing is, I can only get TWO of them printing to it at any given time - as soon as I add/update driver/remove&readd the printer to a 3rd user, one of the other 2 machines stops printing to it! It's driving them (and me!) insane... any thoughts on this? I've looked for options like "number of concurrent users connected" and so forth but can't see anything that could be causing this... HELP!

Testing of new ideas that would otherwise impact users during term-time. Updates to servers and server-run software such as MIS which would cause downtime in term time. Archiving of last years' work, creating new profiles, setting up new machines for September's new staff. Physical cleaning of all equipment (depending on how much you have this can be a few hours, or in my case, a few days!). Virtual cleaning of equipment (either re-imaging, re-installing, updating, defragging etc.). Any maintenance or upgrades requires to office-based PC's, again so it doesn't cause downtime for those users. Being pro-active and actually going around and testing existing things, pre-empting faults. Updating the Hardware Audit, what's gone, what's new, is everything asset tagged / watermarked / etc. Research and personally-conducted CPD - a lot of people forget and/or don't realise that we work in a fast-moving industry and have to keep ourselves updated, sometimes we need a few hours to pour through online manuals, or on occasion we need to teach ourselves how to do something (*gasp* am I suggesting we don't already know EVERYthing! )

Not so much "learned" as "realised" that thanks to Remote Desktop Connection I can service all of the PC's around my second school all from my own desk rather than having to crouch/kneel/sit on tiny chairs to do it. Much better!

As far as profile/homedrive data goes I don't think I've ever deleted any leavers' off of our Archive area, so at least 9 years in our case! While I've got plenty of storage space I don't see the need, and there's nothing I'm aware of that says you have to delete it after a certain time, and anything created by an employee while employed is considered property of the school that employs them. MIS data your Personnel staff should know the answer (if they don't, maybe they should find out?).

The fact that a room full of expensive and valuable equipment doesn't have some form of security-based entry is asking for trouble in general, from wider sources than just the children. If it were my school I'd be pushing for keyfob-style electronic entry to the room. That way only the classes that have booked the room can get in, and that all but eliminates the "crime of opportunity" from students walking past an open and empty room. Personally I think CCTV is overkill, it's trying to use technology to solve a non-technological problem (classroom/behaviour management and expectation). I don't have a static ICT room in my main school, it's all mobile learning (laptops and tablets in trolleys) so monitoring has become something I've had to drill into the adults in the school, especially when it comes to putting equipment away correctly. How about assigning each pupil to a specific machine? That way if they abuse it, they'll be the one who has to use it again next time "warts and all", might help deter them espeically if the broken things don't get replaced straight away. Do you have your pupils sign an AUP? I do, even at Primary school age, it helps reinforce the taking care of equipment and with things like Facebook and other signup-required sites being so popular signing something akin to Terms and Conditions isn't as foriegn or offputting to a child as we might think it would be. Ultimately its about the children's respect, for the equipment and for the other children who will be using the equipment next. Close monitoring, CCTV, assigning blame and demanding parents/budgets pay is not a way to foster respect. Just FYI, I've had 2 trolleys of 60 laptops in place for over 2 years, with a Pupil AUP signed at the start of each year and my team encouraging teachers to talk to pupils about respect for the equipment and each others' use of it I haven't lost so much as a single laptop key from any of them and that's with over 700 pupils having used them regularly during that time.

Have you removed all of Microsoft Office and reinstalled it? Just incase something has gone funky with it somewhere.

Wow, so may of you have completely non-geeky jobs! I, however, am 95% Gaming Nerd Board games (mainly Risk Legacy and Firefly). Magic: The Gathering (attempting to get more Pro). PS4/WiiU/3DS with Monster Hunter 4 (3DS) being the favourite time-waster currently. Luckily I married a lady who is also a gamer! I also swim, play guitar, am learning to play my newly-acquied 12-hole Ocarina (replica of the Ocarina of Time, of course!), spend time with the wife when our work schedules allow us more than a fleeting hour in an evening, and spend time with my bearded dragon Shenron who despite his scales is far more affectionate and cuddle-loving than he looks!

Super Mario Bros. for the Gameboy. Level 1. Run to the right, miss-time the jump, get killed by the Goomba 2 seconds into the level. Depressing to hear the "Death" music for longer than you heard the level music

I just make the user a Local Administrator on his/her laptop, and then switch them back off of it again the next day.

I had this happen yesterday to 2 machines in our finance department, it was crashing from within our MIS as well as Word and other things too. I found this solved it; delete the printer from the user account, log off, log on as administrator, delete the printers in this account (if any), re-add the pritners to the administrator account, log off, log on as user, re-add the printers under the user account. This solved the problem on both machines for me yesterday, no idea why, no driver update or anything needed, but it made them work again so I'm just accepting it!

Threads like this one make me realise, yet again, that I very much lucked out with a) the school I'm in, and b) the people I work with, as my take on the Pro's and Con's of my role is very different to a lot of what's posted above! Pro's; I've gotten a very decent budget per financial year for projects and the furthering of ICT for Educational purposes, quite often topped up further for improvements to things like CCTV at the request of Head/SLT. I run my department, and I don't have anyone over my shoulder asking for reports, proof of work, etc. My 2 techie's work well and we get along great (1-2 times a week we get together outside of work). The entire SLT is very appreciative of the work we do, understands it's importance and that filters down to the other staff too. Jobs we do get "thank you"'s and that usually comes with cards and gifts at the end of each term! Hardly ever do I feel stressed, and if I do it's usually because of something out of our control. School trips, events, discos, the after-school ICT clubs I run... so much to keep the day interesting and never boring. Con's; There is too much of a separation of IT skills between teaching staff which leads to the minority of staff taking the majority of time for "little" problems and leaving less time for the "real" problems. Since taking on more additional non-ICT related roles I don't get into lessons or help with other activities as much as I used to be able to, which I sometimes miss. Low salary compared to other opportunities - yes, there's no getting away from that one, we all feel it working in the education support sector.

We are a large Primary with around 800 pupils. My server room/office (I love the cold ) is shown below; Apologies for the last picture being a bit iffy, there's no way to photo it all properly as it's too narow to get any good shots! I have 6 servers overall, some rack some tower, plus my workstation. Aircon unit to keep it all running cool. I also have an office for my 2 Techie's where most of our spare equipment / parts etc. are actually kept.