FishCustard

The ability to have the best of both worlds with a Mac - running macOS and Windows on the same device - was the main attraction for me. If they stop doing that, I'll probably stop buying them. Get a regular PC and dual-boot Windows and Linux (sometimes you just need a *NIX OS...). I highly doubt there are many like me who would make such a choice, but there will be a few.

Google might, I doubt Apple would have a use for the data given their business model.

The right decision. Doing the right thing should almost always be commended, even if it is too late. Far better to have a working app for a second wave than push ahead with something that isn't fit for purpose (like they're doing Down Under). Endless debate can be had around whether they should've done this to start with (no comment personally as I also like my current anatomy), but at least they've seen the light.

IT prefects eh? Excellent idea. I'll definitely be asking for one of those at $newschool.

I would just write a script, because as far as I'm aware there's no way to merge individual attachments to a Word-driven mail merge.

Personally if they can't come in I'd just either send them home physically or email them to parents (Y7) or the students themselves (Y12).

Forgot about GiffGaff - you do need to buy a £10 data package with the phone, but nothing stops you just shoving whatever SIM you have in and forgetting about it if the total price is otherwise good.

Yeah, I'd write a script to "mail merge" the PDFs to the students. Shouldn't be hard - let me know if you want help, I can put something together.

CeX is a good bet, and there are loads of companies that sell them on the web (Laptops Direct comes to mind). Apple even sell their own refurbs if you want iFruit.

It's often cheaper to just buy a phone SIM-free (especially second hand) and then get a SIM-only contract. That way you can upgrade whenever you like.

@witch it should go down, but often mobile providers won't reduce it automatically, you'll have to call up and ask. Good thing is this is the perfect time to negotiate. Say "well, my contract is up, I'm thinking of moving to $otherCompany because they have cheap deals". They should offer you something halfway decent. Then you can keep pushing if you want, if they just say "okay, fine, I'll cancel", you can say you need to discuss it with your other half/your cat/whatever and will call back. I got a serious discount out of EE by doing this.

This is the key point - technology should make people's lives easier. No organisation should switch to Teams or OneDrive or anything "just because" or "because it's the new hotness" - if it can genuinely solve problems users are having, or make their lives easier, or make school business run more smoothly, or any number of reasons - fantastic, go for it. If it's being done for any other reason, users will rightfully resist.

Stealing that idea for my new school!

Just set PiHole up at long last - brilliant stuff. I'd recommend enabling the whitelist linked to from @mattmill 's linked site. (https://github.com/anudeepND/whitelist)

So violence, blowing stuff up, is totally fine, but a (fully clothed!) vaguely sensuous picture of a woman isn't?

They have the data from AD though?! FirstName has been an AD attribute since day dot.... why not use it?!

Corvids are probably the most intelligent birds, so I'm not surprised they're the lazy ones - they've figured out that if they can just get the humans to keep giving them food they'll have a nice life!

Note that the exam voucher is not included in this. Still a great freebie for the content however.

Isopropyl alcohol is the best option - zero chance of damage, good effectiveness against coronaviruses.

To be fair, the Apple-Google version doesn't send any data to either of them. It's all decentralised. Info: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/06/nhs-explores-feasibility-moving-contact-tracing-app-apple-google/

There was a standard out there (Apple-Google) that they could've just used! Why on Earth did they not? Their justification was something like "oh but if we centralise bits of it we can better integrate etc" - you don't need to! The system does everything for you. As others have said, another footnote in the history of NHS IT failures. The Civil Service are -so good- at so many IT things, the GOV.UK portal is literally world leading - why do they cock up anything involving the NHS?

I thought while it wasn't using the Apple-Google decentralised model, it was using the same underlying tech? If it requires foreground then I absolutely will not be installing it, and the people who designed it should be slapped with a fish.

Most warranties will not let you do any kind of home repair unfortunately. If I was going to buy + customise an off the shelf PC I'd probably run it for a few weeks stock to make sure it wasn't a lemon, then just do the work and forget the warranty (given that I could probably fix whatever went wrong myself, and am willing to do so). Of course, not everyone will necessarily want to take that risk.

Dell VRTXs are good, we have one and it serves us well. Fit whatever you get with SSDs if you can. If budgets are tight, @ICTDirect_Dave will have some good offers I'm sure. Ultimately what exactly you buy doesn't matter, what matters is that it has the power and reliability you need. Whether that's converged, hyperconverged or just a cluster of hosts, I'm sure it'll do just fine as long as you've specified it sensibly (give yourself a good headroom for expansion!).

No licensing for SAML2, it's all open source. Integration isn't too hard either, I've written SAML SSO modules for applications by myself in a week or two.