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As said elsewhere, the book has more background details and the process of harvesting Astrophage. It's a book a keep going back to, though I list to it as an audio book read by Ray Porter who does a great performance out of reading it (Rocky is really well done). Really loved the movie and am waiting for it to come out on DVD so I can watch it again (I know it's going to be on streaming but I don't want to have to keep paying for it). My wife watched it and enjoyed it but I had to explain some of the bits that were missed from the book.

I will pass this over to the Exams office team. They won't want to change this year as they have only just moved to Access by Examscreen due to the huge price increase in Exam WritePad.

I've just had a response from the developer and they tested it overnight and found that the behaviour spotted here is a bug. He has fixed it for the next version which is due out in a couple of weeks.

Yes, it does not seem to matter if multiple line breaks are used. If you put a full stop on the line then the spacing is correct, but that is not practical and the exams office staff are concerned that the examiners would not be happy about it. I have raised the issue through the contact page on the website.

We have just started using Access by Examscreen and have a problem with printing. In Access by Examscreen if a line break is added between paragraphs it does not print. See the screen shots. I was wondering if anyone else has seen this and resolved it? This is from Access by Examscreen. There is an extra line break between Paragraph 2 and 3. This is from a PDF, printing to Konica Minolta, Samsung, or HP printers results in the same on paper. Thanks

CoPilot is working for me at the moment. I asked it "is this working?" and "What was the problem that stopped copilot from working?" and got this back. I don't know if this is the real cause or something made up to make me go away. Earlier today, Microsoft Copilot experienced a major outage affecting users in the UK and parts of Europe. Here’s what happened: Root Cause: Microsoft reported that an unexpected surge in traffic caused a capacity scaling issue. The autoscaling system couldn’t keep up with demand, so engineers had to manually increase capacity and adjust load balancing rules to stabilize the service. [bleepingcomputer.com], [sharecast.com], [windowsforum.com] Impact: Many users were unable to access Copilot or experienced degraded functionality across Microsoft 365 apps (Word, Excel, Teams, etc.). Some saw generic fallback messages like “Sorry, I wasn’t able to respond to that” or had timeouts and incomplete responses. [windowsforum.com] Timeline: Reports started spiking around 9:00 AM UK time, and Microsoft acknowledged the issue shortly after. They posted updates under incident code CP1193544 in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and on their official status account. [community....gntaxi.com] Current Status: Microsoft has been manually scaling capacity and adjusting load balancing. Service availability has improved, but they are still monitoring closely to ensure stability. [sharecast.com] If you want to check live status or confirm if everything is back to normal, you can visit:

I just saw this tweet on Microsoft 365 Status. I don't see this in the admin centre.

I am getting the same message in two different M365 tenants. Service health is reporting it as health. I am raising it as a service request to see what comes back.

My school has had similar problems with students, particularly, not receiving password reset emails. We noticed that most of the ones suffering this had two email addresses, a usually personal one (often the parents) and a school one. If we removed the personal one then password reset emails came through. I raised this with Arbor and the support person tested with and found that if someone has two email addresses with the one marked as default in second then the password resets emails did not get sent. I've not been told (yet) if there is a fix for this or if we just have to go through and find/remove non-default email addresses that appear before the default address. If I get told how to fix it and it's something we need to do then I will try to remember to come back and update this thread.

Same here. It's not been a great start as we have had problems with student and parents not getting the password reset emails they need to get their accounts going. So our parents are already a little grumpy about having had to move to a new system. I don't think they have seen the benefits yet. I am going to put a feature request into Arbor to ask them make the app/website report that there is maintenance occurring and that it is unavailable. It may reduce the number of "why's it not working" emails that are received.

The Head of Computer Science at my school has just asked if I can think of places or exhibitions that he could take a group of year 11 students to visit. He wants something that will enthuse them into taking A-Level Computer Science and head them into some form of technology related job. We are about 30 minutes south of Manchester right on the M6, so something in the North West would be ideal. Does anyone have any ideas as where to go. We did think of BETT but it's not quite the right event.

I hope there is along with post event recordings. I'm double booked for the afternoon so I would not be able to watch live.

https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/senior-ict-technician-cheshire-east-1791052 We are seeking to appoint a Senior ICT Technician to support IT provision across Knutsford Academy, Cheshire Studio School, and Egerton Primary School in Knutsford. This is an exciting opportunity for an ambitious technician to join our team as we expand and strengthen IT provision across the growing trust.

We have a vacancy for a Senior ICT technician. Salary: GBP £22,129 - £24,921 per year (Grade 6 (actual salary: £20,472 - £23,055)) Despite what it says on the TES site this is a term time + 3 week contract. Details are on the TES website: https://www.tes.com/jobs/vacancy/senior-ict-technician-cheshire-east-1673379 School website: https://www.knutsfordacademy.org.uk/

We have a complete AM radio station setup that we would like to see go to a good home rather than be scrapped. You would need to come and collect from Cheshire East. The cost of shipping it would be prohibitive. The equipment has not been used in several years, but does power up. If you were to use it as a real AM transmitter then you would need to look at the necessary licencing, etc. but it could be used as an internet radio station instead. 2x Sonifex S2. Both are different. See the pictures for the installed modules. 2x Denon DN-C635 CD Player 1x Denon amplifier 1x Sonifex telephone hybrid HY03 1x Tascam MD350 Mini Disc player 1x Denon DRM595 cassette player 1x Denon SCM51 speakers + table stand (pair) 3x Audio Technica Microphones MB2k 2x Desk arm microphone stands 1x ART 405 5 zone distribution mixer 1x Behringer Ultragain Pro 1x Radica Broadcast Systems AM50 AM transmitter (was tuned for 1350AM) 1x U shaped desk with mounting for the audio equipment and mixers. There is also our transmitter antenna, but it has been outdoors for years, so I do not know what condition it is in.

White chocolate and raspberries for me.

You also need to watch out for the KB0022325 bug. This says that do not give permission to Options Online before a user has registered otherwise it does not work. If you do then they go to Options and get an error message. We tried it again this year and found it was a very frustrating process for the timetabler, students, staff and parents. We gave up and used MS Forms. I did raise the problem with our accounts manager at ESS about this and some other issues with Options Online and they now have Paul Featherstone looking into it with a view to fixing the problems if they can. All without any promises or timescales of course. I suspect, unless there are some guarantees, that we will not be using it again. It would be much better if we could simply say to SIMS Online Services, that specific students will be signing in with their M365 account and that they are essentially pre-registered. Adobe managed to do it with Creative Cloud!

We tried Options Online this year, though we do have, but do not use SIMS Student,, but gave up part way through. I cannot give you a definitive answer to where a student who signs up lands. I think in our case it was SIMS Student. We came across a number of issues and ended up giving up and using MS Forms. The work flow we had to go with was. Send invitations out. Very easy. Students register. Tricky for students as it involved following instructions. By default when they create the SIMS ID they are now defaulted to creating username / password login, they can register against their M365 account, but it is slightly hidden. We preferred them to set up the M365 account because, they have one, there is a little less chance of forgetting the password, there is a little less chance they will use monkey123 as the password. We cannot force a default or require a specific sign-in method. We ended up unregistering and registering many students because they forgot the password. There is no way to bulk register them so they just go in using their M365 credentials. We wait for confirmation that they have registered successfully, so we give them permission to Options Online. Clicking on each student, one at a time. This is because of KB0022325. Students sign in again to complete the options process. If we also wanted parents to approve the choice, so we needed to give them Options permission, one click at a time. Also, there is no easy way to filter for parents with children in a particular year group! So it's all parents (one click at a time) or get a list from SIMS and then search and select them manually. Also, because of KB0022325 we should really check to see if the parent has successfully registered for it to work properly. You would think of course that you should be able to give permission to Options Online as soon as an invitation is sent, the permissions page lets you do that. No, of course not, KB0022325 says that we must wait for the user to be registered for SIMS Online Services first. Except there is no way to filter the list to show only registered users, all users with an invitation are listed. To do it properly we had to have a list of registered users on one screen and manually search and select them in the permissions. Repeating the process frequently as new users registered. You would also think that to set permissions for Options that you could filter on year group. Again, no. We, as I am sure many do, prefix the students username with the year the cohort entered year 7 (or something similar), so we can filter on that. Then you have to tick each one of the (200+ in our case) students individually as there is not bulk select process. I checked this with ESS to make sure I was not missing something! I raised these points with our ESS account manager and Paul Featherstone is apparently looking into them to see if they can be resolved (all with no promises!). How long that will take is of course not being revealed. I'm not holding my breath and I suspect we will not use the process again next year if we do not have guarantees of the process being made better.

Whilst looking for some great (bad!) jokes to cheer up (annoy) my daughter who is isolating with COVID I came across this. I remembered seeing this sign on a garage door in Aberystwyth. I do hope the didn't mix up the cars! And for the sceptical: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.4131207,-4.0836251,3a,90y,84.35h,78.23t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssXtnLbbneFBPwz5vBfWUxw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

The problem with the ntuser.dat file's date is down to Windows updates changing it. I noticed that the date stamp on older ntuser.dat files was always the same to within a few minutes. I found a PowerShell script on this page which changes the date stamp on it to match that of the user folder. It's not perfect as I found some profile folders with a date much older than the last logon. Running it does set a more realistic date stamp for most ntuser.dat files which means delprof2 works more reliably. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-deployment/issue-with-date-modified-for-ntuser-dat/m-p/102438 Having said that, when I started investigating the user folder on some of the DfE laptops with 64GB drives I noticed that I had not applied the Delete Profiles GPO. When I did apply it I then realised that the old user folders were vanishing at the wrong time, they did not delete during shutdown but instead shortly after startup. I realised it had two settings in the GPO, one was to run delprof2 at shutdown, but the batch file had that line commented out and the other was to enabled Delete user profiles older than (days). Computer Configuration > Policies > Adminstrative Templates > System/User Profiles > Delete user profiles older than (days) - I had it set to 14. The documentation says it takes effect the next reboot after being set. I have spotted some user profile folders left behind that are empty. Until I find they are causing problems I am not going to worry about them as they are not actually taking up any space.

Not long after COVID started in 2020 I started taking magnesium, zinc, vitamin B complex and high dose vitamin D. Whether it's helping or not I don't know.

Salamander can do this for those using it to sync the MIS to AD/M365. Just contact support and they will set it up for you.

Q. Who is the patron saint of emails? A. St. Francis of a-CC Courtesy of Dr Mom on Twitter.

I just went to upvote this as well and spotted this comment. It looks like it's being sorted already.

AZ for 1 & 2. Booster was Moderna. They had Pfizer for those getting their first or second doses. There wasn't a choice behind offered. You took what you were given. Not that I asked as I was just pleased to be getting the booster. The side effects were fairly minor. Mostly just a sore arm. I was exhausted over the weekend, but I've had what I think is a mild long COVID, so that's been normal for most of the last 2 years.