IT Ideas

We have had a lot of HP G6A EE touch's (UK keyboard) with a few keys that have stopped working. After a lot of fiddling around the fix appears to be to unfold the keyboard cable and flatten it out. See the before and after picts: Before with folded cable: Note the fold in the cable. The fix: Not sure why they are folded in the first place. Hopefully, this simple fix will help people out.

I've previously blogged about how to make Google Classrooms and sync them from Capita SIMS using GAM - you can see that post here . However, that post required groups made by Hapara Teacher Dashboard to work. What if you don't want or cannot afford a paid-for solution? Well, a couple of scripts will allow you to to do this. I've gone through the process in this video: Script to clean out "s from SIMS output (run in the path oif the script): $Path = "c:\gam\hapara\students.csv"  (Import-CSV -Path $Path) | Select-Object -Property 'Email', 'Class Code', 'UID'| Export-CSV -Path C:\gam\hapara\classroom\students.csv -notype (gc C:\GAM\hapara\classroom\students.csv) | % {$_ -replace '"', ""} | out-file C:\GAM\hapara\classroom\students.csv -Fo -En ascii py classes.py  Change the file names and paths to suit yourself. The Python code def readStudents(infile):     students = []     try:         student...

I remember when the Intel Haswell based ChromeOS devices can out how impressed I was with the performance. They still hold up very well today and we have many of these devices still inactive service - Acer C720's, Asus CN60 Chromeboxes, Acer Chromeboxes and LG Chromebases to name a few.  These devices all work fine and still offer decent performance. However, ChromeOS v76 is the last version they are getting. If you have one of these devices, take a look at the ChromeOS update part of settings and you will be told this is the last version and its time to buy a new device. I object to being told that my device(es) are obsolete and I have to buy a new one. If they work fine, why should I buy a new one and should not Google think a bit more environmentally and try to keep devices going as long as possible? Some devices, the Samsung 303 (the Silver one), have kept getting updates well beyond their listed end of support. However, in my experience, when you get the message not more u...

After seeing the X360 14" at BETT 2019 it seemed like a worthy successor to my Pixel 2013 (which I still have running Cloudready). The X360 14 has an i3-8130U processor at 2.2Ghz (Turbo to 3.4 Ghz), 8Gb DDR4, 64Gb storage, and full touch-flip 1080p IPS display. Performance figures: Octane 2.0: 33990 Speedometer 1.0: 93.8 Android apps work out of the box. The only issue I've had with them is the voice notes don't work with the Keep App as it requires the Google App that appears as incompatible in the PlayStore. Hopefully, this will be worked out in due course. Linux Apps (assuming your devices is not enterprise enrolled) also work well. I've got LibreOffice, GIMP, VLC, Putty and Gnome notepad installed: The only issue with Linux apps at the moment is the lack of audio - however, this is coming in v74 and already present on my Pixel which is on the dev channel of Cloudready. This is a brief video of the device side-by-side with my Pixel. In about five yea...

If you want an overview of all of your Google Classroom Assignments across your domain, you can do this for free using GAMADV-XTD . There are paid for options to do this - but its pretty easy using GAM - in fact, a lot easier than I thought it would be! Prerequisites GAMADV-XTD setup on machine somewhere (I have a Virtual Machine just for GAM). Optional - a list of all the classes you want to grab data for. You can do all your classes or just the active ones - but you may want to be selective. The command gam print courses todrive  will export a list of all your domains classes to a Google Sheet.  A target Google Sheet to receive the data. To pull Classroom data into the sheet run the following command: gam print course-work course "comma-separated list of classes"  creatoremail todrive tdfileid "idofsheet" tdsheet "Raw Data" "comma-separated list of classes" = 1590000591,15942000091,15942120091 .... etc "idofsheet" = the...

Fancy a new Chromebook? There were lots on offer at BETT this year. If you are after touch-flip devices, the main manufacturers were all sporting new Gemini Lake Celeron based devices. All based on the N4000 chip - this gives them all an Octane score of around 16000. Much better than we have seen from entry-level  devices before. The first one - the Dell 3100 2-in-1 I liked this one - seemed pretty rugged. However, Dells support has been pretty poor in the past.... The next - HP X360 G2   Other than being blue - it looks much like the current X360. This model had 8Gb of RAM. My favorite of the 4 new 11" flip devices.  And from Acer - an updated Spin 511 Pretty similar to the current Spin - just faster with the N4000 chip. Acer was making a big thing about their new reliability pledge. If it fails in warranty - they fix it and refund you the cost of the device. They have some ground to make up on the reliability ...

I had a chance to have a brief spin with one of the first AMD based Chromebooks the other day (thanks to Ian Nairm and C-Learning) at BETT, the HP 11A G6 EE. This device uses the AMD A4-9120C APU and the quick benchmarks I managed run set this Chromebook a bit above the current G5 and G6 EE's from HP and perform better than the HP 360 G1 and Acer Spin.  In terms of physical appearance and connectivity - it much the same as current gen HP 11's and similar "clam-shell" Chromebooks. The model I looked at was touch screen and the screen folded 180 degrees. It's not as good a performer as the new Gemini Lake Celeron based Intel devices. They seem to be hitting around 16000 on a quick Octane Benchmark (all I had time to run). However, they are more expensive. However, the graphics performance did seem good - webcam was responsive and high-resolution video was smooth - the Radeon R4 Graphics clearly helping here. It's good to see lower-end Chromebook ...

This is a brief demo of how to make a sign in system using Chrome Sign Builder, Google Forms and a Kiosk mode Chromebook.