Rob_D

I can't speak to the Digital Me FOI. RE: the website info. Pretty much yes, you still have to respond telling them where on the website to find it. If you send them link to the specific web-page/document, then that's normally considered an acceptable response.

Really liking Paradise on D+. For a conspiracy/mystery show they've nailed the pacing so far.

Our seagulls have learned the timetable. They mob the school at break and lunchtime and then disappear the rest of the day.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danfitzpatrick/2025/02/03/new-copyright-ruling-just-made-ai-skills-the-biggest-advantage/ US seems to be doing similar things to the UK when it comes to AI copyright. I'm not sure if it makes that much difference in the grand scheme of things, but it feels like it could.

Ooh. I didn't think it started until tomorrow for some reason.

Are we going by official city status? Because we're well over 100k population but technically don't have city status.

Even the article itself, once you get past the headline, seems to be pretty pro restricting phone usage in schools.

When we did this we used a custom report with the "Individual User" section (found under Guardian). Under options you can put in the user name of the student you want to report against, and under the export tab we have Category, username, URL and Filter out Images java ect. selected. You can set the date range at runtime.

Don't forget that if you're looking at a "dump/copy the whole database" type solution, that you will probably need to be able to delete student records one/some at a time (ideally in bulk by year group) as and when they hit your retention period, so make sure you have a way of doing that.

Isn't that the same in any CCTV system.

I'm assuming a system as described by mikes, where to be able to automatically track someone, you would have to have a "face" pre-loaded and linked to a name in the system, and tracking was a case of pick from the pre-populated individual you want to track. That way anyone who's not staff/student or who has denied consent wouldn't be automatically trackable and for them it's just normal CCTV. But the whole thing is very theoretical and probably quite legally complicated right now.

I wouldn't have thought tracking would be illegal in a closed environment like a school as long as it only covered the school site and you had consent from all the parents and it complied with GDPR, etc, etc. There's probably a lot of legal and regulatory hoops to jump through.

I don't get the whole "I don't want to use my personal phone for work but need to be able to work from my home computer/laptop" people. Not wanting work stuff on personal devices I get. But why would you be okay with work stuff on your laptop but not your phone?

But is it necessarily about the biometric data as such? Both the source image and actual CCTV footage (which you'd have anyway) should fall under the same access control and retention polices anyway. It would be more about the ability to track or remotely ID someone.

When we first enabled conditional access we bought a couple of yubikeys for our "there's always one" who kicked up a fuss but still "needs to work from home". We also have a handful of others who haven't set up their MFA (for one reason or another) but don't work from home so it doesn't matter.

Probably because London makes for a good travel hub. Although Birmingham NEC would be a good alternative further north.

Are there more specific details, like job spec and where to send applications, available somewhere?

I'm sure you've already thought of this, but what happens if a student or staff member* leaves unexpectedly, or it just happens that they have a positive balance when the leave. Would the "parent" be able to get their money back and "zero out" the pot? And what if they didn't? What happens to that money? and how does the school get rid of the pot/account? *I assume there's nothing stopping staff using this to pay for their own lunches, although that does open up another can of worms, as some schools would want/need to be able to offer free "duty meals" to staff with lunch duty, but only on the days they have that duty.

It does feel like it's gotten smaller the last few years, and I definitely came away with less bumph than in previous years. But having a specific project I know will be going ahead, and that was well represented, made it feel more useful. (maybe less bumph is because I was more focused and less trying to see everything).

We've had a good experience with Interactive Schools. But they're quite expensive and they are all about social media integration, so if you're not on board with their whole social media "stories" thing, then it's probably not worth it.

I wonder if this is going to lead to a bit of a disconnect and potential animosity between reviewers and manufacturers, as manufacturers push more and more into DLSS and framegen type solutions to increase "performance" just to have people discount it and say there's not much "real" performance increase. Either way, I can see a lot of discission going forward around how to deal with "fake frames" in reviews. Do you lead with the raw performance (without DLSS/framegen) or DLSS/framegen performance? Which is farer when comparing cards with different feature sets? Which do the kind of people who watch tech reviews really want to see?

Sorry it's a bit late but... The most interesting AI stuff I saw were from smaller, start-up feeling companies that I wouldn't want to use right now, but it feels like they might be onto something. Deepgrade: Using AI to mark assignments including handwriting OCR for physical assignments. Looks interesting, although no Teams/classroom integration yet. Teacher liked the idea in concept. I was less keen when the sails guy said scanning in everyone's homeworks could be an admin job. Also it's predicated on the kids putting their UPN on their work for automatic identification. tapybl: Using AI to convert lesson plans into interactive video lessons. A cool looking system, but again its a separate platform that the kid would have to log into, and while they claim they have their own in-house model, the sales guy kept talking about GPT and Gemini.

When has any government or management group in the whole history of mankind ever done that?

Not used them myself, but a couple of people I know have had good experiences with Origin for pre-builds. If you're building yourself, then https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/ is a good place to start and amazon is never a bad place look. Of course if you're trying to get a RTX50-series at/around launch, the answer is always "wherever has stock". Hopefully it won't be as bad as the 30 series launch, but I'm expecting MSRP cards to be like gold dust for at least a couple of months after launch due to scalpers.

Change the batteries? I've seen devices do some really weird stuff when wireless peripherals are running low on battery.