southhamster

Replaced both the fridge and freezer seals on our old Electrolux that we inherited when we moved into our house . I got the seals from cpc.co.uk who weren't the cheapest but did supply decent quality parts. I've got other stuff (cooker elements etc) from espares.co.uk who have great videos on how to fit the parts. The instructions (for our model) were to cut off the old seal with a sharp knife (scalpel) and fit the replacement over the lip that was left. The fridge worked fine until the motor went after about 8 years, but that's another story...

@billybob Learnpad have done exactly this! It works pretty well as long as the staff get proper training Ipads are a good product but a pain to manage. So glad we only have a few for SLT to use!

I always wondered what happened to Alice. Sounds like she had a midlife crisis. We use MLS junior librarian but stopped paying for support a few years ago.the old version works fine, but I've seen terrible reoprts on the web based one, hopefully its better now!

April 1st comes early this year.

I use depicus wake on lan. The only pain is creating the .bat file but i use angry ip scanner to capture the mac addresses. This is for a small school, it might be a pig to manage with loads of machines. I also ru psshudown scripts which work nicely

Yeah, a pint of the other "IPA" would give you a terrible hangover. ...

Very pleased with Stone, partly because they seem to understand how schools work. Just had server delivered today for one of my schools and never had any major problems with their service.

Mm warm socks. Email sent

Yikes, that does seem a lot! The average UK annual KWh is 3,200 which is around 8-9 KWh per day - you are getting through 23 KWh which is not far off what energy wasting Americans use! You could get an Owl electric monitor Home | The OWL which lets you see how much juice you are using - you can go round and turn things off until you find what is wasting so much. Your meter could be faulty - the Owl is not exact but it will give you a close enough figure. You can also get plug in energy monitors which will measure how much say your fridge is using each day. Don't forget a 100 watt load left on all day will use 2.4 KWh per day - 3 or 4 idling devices like PC's TV's, sky box, router etc, etc could add up to that at least. I binned a mains clock radio which was wasting 25 watts just to tell me the time (badly). Yes, you may well have some vampire appliance sucking far too much power - some older crappy TV's or fridges waste an awful lot of electricity, even supposedly on "standby" However, heating anything with electricity is expensive, so it may be that is about right if you are doing that. What are you using for water heating, cooking and space heating because those will easily use that amount of electricity? If you don't use gas, you're just transferring the cost of heating to electricity which is more. On the other no boiler, rads and cooker means no leaks, breakdowns, annual service and expensive replacement costs. Do you know anyone with the same setup nearby to see what their costs are? Good luck!

Ok here on firefox with home internet

Huh. In Devon there are plenty of village schools that are lucky to get 2mb even with DSL aggregation. And when it rains the lines often go down anyway. Same story with mobile reception.4G? Ha we're lucky to get 2G! On the other hand we do get to live in beautiful place.

@Galway +1 that. I was a repair tech in a past life too. Textronix and Hameg were my favourites. Don't know if older scopes are around on ebay but the crt type wont like being yodelled for delivery... Ive used pico electronics gear and its ok

Southhamster -I'm a Thursday kind of guy...you have been warned.

Yes! Upgraded my main school to cc4.5 last half term, 3 other smaller schools being done staggered in half term and easter. Farewell 2003 I reckon you were pretty good, especially with SR2

Don't know what the answer is but we have this too.

Looking to harangue a couple of suppliers who shall remain nameless. Cool handouts, pens, desk calendars, projectors, LED touch screens and anything else interesting. Might even fight my way through the massed ranks of fellow geeks and attempt to find nirvarna - the edugeek stand.... Actually that could be a pretty nifty computer game pacman style. BETT 2015, attempt to collect as many eduhobnobs as possible while avoiding the snake oil salespeople. Lose 10 points if you see a government minister....

Hi arreks. We use these avery tough labels and the kids havent peeled them off 'yet' http://www.avery.co.uk/avery/en_gb/Products/Labels/Labels-for-Protection-%26-Security/Power-TripleBond-Labels/TripleBond-Labels_L6140_20.htm The avery web label site things lets you import pics csv barcodes etc save as pdf. Print on a laser, job done. We also have anice brother label printer and there are some extra stong tapes but we havent tried them yet. PS we are only a primary, I'm sure secondary kids will remove anything given the challenge. ..

Hurrah! Big box of quality street via the head for both of us IT bods. Result

If you have a QNAP NAS there is a free digital signage app (webpage) which looks interesting - we are looking to give it a go next year with a raspberry Pi showing the webpage on a TV or 2.

Hi JJ, i do exactly this. Worked for the LA for 8 years supporting school ICT as a field based tech. Left about 4 years ago and had 4 local schools approach me for curriculum support. I also work part time 1 1/2 days week for a largeish primary academy and also support 4 small businesses. I aim to work about 3/4 days a week roughly. Make sure you have appropriate public liability insurance - a common amount is £5m. You may(should?) need to get a CRB check depending on the schools policy. Do a clear document saying what you will and won't do, your charges (including mileage/travel time) Decide who is responsible for admin and backups and keep clear recored of what you've done. Spiceworks and logmein remote are excellent for finding out/resolving issues. Think about what spares/tools etc you are able/willing to carry eg spare server, 48 port gigabit managed switch (ebay finds), fibre and MAC's cables, spare HDU's,PSU's. etc. The more you can fix quickly and cheaply the more the schools appreciate the service. I always keep as local as I can and don't overstretch myself. The HMRC run useful seminars about tax/NI etc which I found useful. Register with HMRC as self employed for tax returns - you may need an accountant to help with tax returns. Try and get the school to buy parts - partly for the hassle of invoicing etc, but also if it goes wrong it's the school's stuff to deal with. Life can be bit precarious and a bit lonely at times (Thank Deity for edugeek....) but having the regular day and a half a week at the academy is great. Whatever you decide good luck - it can be fun as well, but don't think you'll get rich on it, unless you really work at it, and then get overstretched..

I'm in!

+1 for Unifi. One thing to look out for is that the AC units are strictly speaking 803.3at (higher current), but we have got away with using our test one on 803.3af with no problems so far, although using a Cisco POE switch probably helps.

Can you access other devices via IP? I sometimes need to add the local ip range to the proxy exclusions eg 10.123.123.*

Nice spread spuffmonkey - you could have your own harvest festival! Just had a small glass of last year's damson gin this evening - excellent stuff. I reckon damsons make the best jam and crumble too - not too sweet. Down 'ere in darkest Devon plenty of free windfall apples just lying around for collection.

Wow, I have that CD! Feeling a bit old now. ...