Norphy

You can still buy a US Robotics V92 modem if the fancy takes you. By god, they still use the same case designs they did in the 90s.

Buffalo

Lois .

They must have someone who handles IT stuff. Not having an IT department is fine for a small company where you're in one place and everyone knows everyone but once you get past a certain size it's just not practical and it's safe to assume that Octopus have long exceeded that size. Even if they are outsourcing the management of their ordering, billing and web services they still have endpoint devices which will need software installing, operating systems set up and suchlike. Even with systems like DEP on the Apple side and Autopilot on the Windows side, they need someone to set that up, manage it and get the devices into people's hands. It's possible that sort of thing again gets outsourced so saying "Oh, we have no IT department" might be technically correct (The best kind of correct!), in reality it just means you're paying someone else to do it for you.

American

Have you got SSL inspection enabled? You can't do keyword filtering if the Smoothwall can't decrypt the website.

The way I've done it is with a NDES server, which uses SCEP (Simple Certificate Enrolment Protocol) to acquire certificates. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/protect/certificates-scep-configure This works for iOS, Android and Windows

Out of the two, I'd get the Intel one. The CPU is by no means the best in the world but it is at least a "Comet Lake" CPU, i.e. one based around the same architecture as a Core i3/i5/i7/i9. It's not a glorified Atom like the Celerons that everyone's favourite laptop from the DfE has got. The AMD is based around their older CPU architecture and would perform similarly to an Atom.

'I wouldn't do that if I were you, I married me a powerful ugly creature'

Not sure whether to put this here or in the Amusing Headlines thread but whatever... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/19/florida-women-wear-granny-disguise-covid-vaccine I wonder how prevalent this sort of thing is going to be?

I don't care about backlit keyboards, personally. I don't look at my keyboard that often... My essential setup 1) Since getting them last week, decent noise cancelling headphones 2) At least one monitor with 2560x1440 resolution or better 3) Logitech MX Master mouse 4) A spare power adapter for my laptop 5) A copy of EpocCam or similar so I can use my phone as a webcam, I'm truly fed up with NoseCam™ on my laptop 6) A laptop stand, so that the top of my laptop screen is about at my eye level. 7) Various zany backgrounds for Teams meetings such as the bridge of the Enterprise, the café from 'Allo 'Allo and the Simpson's couch /edit 8) A decent wireless access point, instead of the built in crud that comes with the Virgin Media SuperHub 3.0

Scotch.

I’m using it.

Jumpjet

Errol.

Dog. .

Trousers

Agreed. Filtering and Safeguarding are not IT functions. It's up to us to implement it but it's up to your school's DSLs to make the policy for you. You (probably) don't have the training and expertise required to make these kind of decisions, so farm it off sharpish.

So I've bought myself a set of second hand WH-1000XM3 headphones from eBay. I've been using them for the past week. They're really bloody good. They don't block out everything but you wouldn't expect them to. They are however effective at blocking out the majority of ambient noise such as washing machines, computer fans, Mickey Mouse's clubhouse and suchlike. With these things I've been better able to concentrate on work because I can't hear the general sounds of the house. I also had to go into Central London last week for a hospital appointment and getting on the tube was just odd, at first you could hear the train then adaptive sound control kicked in and all I could hear was the rattling of the coaches, everything else was blocked out pretty well.

Wombling

They're not worried about the plug being damaged, they're worried about the plug doing damage to the rest of the contents of the box. A soft plastic cover is less likely to do damage than hard metal pins.

This XKCD is pretty cool - https://xkcd.com/2425/

That's my first jab done then. I had the Pfizer vaccine. Wonder when I'll get the second dose?

Tiktok can be forgiven for bringing this to my attention: https://www.tiktok.com/@amhband

See attached. This will need some adaptation, it's very much geared towards one of my schools. I've also done some anonymisation in the script that may well have broken it: create staff users - automated anonymised.txt Along with the script, you need a report in SIMS which looks like this: That script does staff. It should be a simple matter to adapt it for students as well.