I have a fleet of about 200 HP Chromebook 14 G5’s that I manage at my job (among other models of machines) and I’ve been having this common fault with the trackpads where they will stop working or stutter around. I thought it was an interesting problem so I’ve decided to document it a bit more in detail here.
Laptops tend to get dirty as you use them, but some parts are pretty sensitive so you need to be careful when cleaning them.
A Phishing email is an email that’s designed to trick you into handing over information such as bank or login details so they can either send out spam to other people (using your email), identity theft or stealing money from you.
They’re designed to look as close as they can to an official email, so here’s a few tricks on how to work out if they’re actually legitimate emails or not.
This guide is written assuming you’re using Mail.app on a Mac, but it the process is very similar in any other email program.
Some websites will bring up pop up ads that stop you from using your computer. They usually try to convince you to download a program or call a phone number (where they ask you for money to fix the imaginary problem).
They will also try to convince you that there’s something wrong with your computer. Don’t believe them!
Facebook has a tool that lets you check on your privacy settings to make sure your profile is locked down. You should check it out (it will take about 30seconds to do).
My school got loaned a 3D Printer to borrow for a few weeks, now we’ve got a minecraft club. I figured I could combine the two!
The cool thing with being able to export Minecraft to a 3D Printer is that children can do it really easily without having to learn a 3D Design program.
I’ve done a bit with 3D Printing before, I bought myself a PrintrBot Plus when the Kickstarter for it was on, however I could never get my prints to work very well. I ended up giving the printer to some friends and decided that 3D Printing wasn’t for me. That was until my school got loaned an UP Mini 3D Printer. I did a test print and it just worked. Glorious.
The version of Minecraft we’re using at school here is called MinecraftEdu. It’s built for schools and gives you greater control over students (and cheaper licences).
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To download a torrent you need a client (ie. uTorrent) and a tracker (ie. thepiratebay.org). The tracker is simply a website that contains links to .torrent files (or the newer magnet links), these are very small files that tell your torrent client where to get the pieces of the file from.
Torrents are known as Peer to Peer (P2P), this means that you are downloading the files off other users (and not off one big server). The tracker serves to link all the users together and doesn’t actually contain any of the files.
Something to note: If a movie has only just hit the cinemas, you won’t always be able to find a good quality version of it (it will probably be mainly CAM/TS rips which aren’t worth downloading).
When searching for a torrent to download, you need to keep in mind a number of things such as how many seeders/leechers there are, comments about the torrent, whether the torrent has been uploaded by a VIP or Trusted Uploader and also the name of the torrent will give you a lot of clues as to what is in it.
This differs depending on what tracker you’re using, some torrent sites only allow Trusted Users to upload (these are generally private ones) and other sites can have a lot of untrusted users uploading things like viruses and fakes. If a file has been uploaded by a Trusted User, you can safely assume that the torrent is a good one (though you should still check the other things as well such as the name of the torrent).
To see if a torrent has been uploaded by a trusted user, you will see a marker on the torrent, for example with thepiratebay.org, you will see a little skull icon.
Torrent names are made up the name of the thing you’re downloading as well as a bunch of words to indicate the quality and the group that released it.
These examples are for movies or TV shows, but most other downloads will be similar.
They start with the name of the show, followed by the Season or Episode if it’s a TV show, or the Year if it’s a movie. The season is usually in the format S01E02 (aka. Season 1, Episode 2).
After this they will have the Source of the video, here are a few common ones:
HDTV/PDTV = Ripped straight from the TV, you may notice a TV logo in the corner and sometimes the silly popover ads that you get when you’re normally watching TV.
DVDRip = Ripped straight off a DVD, generally average to good quality.
BDRip = Ripped off a BluRay, very good quality.
WebRip = Ripped off a website, ie. Downloaded from iTunes or another video streaming service.
CAM/TS = Recorded in the Cinema with a camera, avoid these, they’re usually really horrible.
R5/R6 = These are DVD’s obtained by the movie company converting the film from the source onto a DVD, it is generally before any sort of processing is put on it, so quality is comparable to a Screener and a bit less than a DVDRip.
After the source is the format it is in here some of the common ones:
720p/1080p = These are high definition, usually the size of these will be greater and normally only comes from a BDRip or a WebRip.
x264 = A video codec, this is usually used for high definition footage.
XVid = An older video codec, a lot of non-high definition footage uses this.
At the end of the file name will be the release group. For the most case this doesn’t matter, though if you’re getting a series, it’s usually good to get the whole series by the same release group so the quality is the same throughout the whole lot (but really, it doesn’t matter).
Here are a few examples:
Packed To The Rafters S06E07 PDTV x264-FUtV
So you can see that this is Packed to the Rafters, Season 6, Episode 7. It has been ripped off PDTV (Pure Digital TV, aka it’s a rip straight off the TV), it is in x264 format and the group that released it is FUtV (for most people, this doesn’t matter, however some release groups you may see around often and know that they’re a good copy).
Kath And Kimderella 2012 1080p BluRay x264-PFa
Kath and Kimderella, the movie was released in 2012, it is a 1080p high definition copy taken from a BluRay and it is in x264 format. It was released by the group PFa.
When downloading a file from BitTorrent, you connect yourself to a swarm of people who either have the file you want, or are currently downloading the file you want. The people who have the file downloaded 100% are called Seeds, and people who are still downloading the file are called Leechers. For torrents to work properly, you need seeders.
The torrent download is split into chunks, as you download chunks that make up the file, you will also seed (upload) them to the other Leechers. Even when you have finished downloading the file, it will continue to do this (so you become a Seeder instead of a Leecher). Common curtesy says you should seed the files you download to a ratio of 1 (this means you have uploaded as much as you have downloaded). Some torrent trackers (websites) will enforce a minimum ratio for your downloads, so you must seed them to a particular ratio or risk being banned from the site.
You should keep in mind how big the file is before you download it, a full 1-2 hour movie can be anywhere from 300mb (really poor quality) to 10-20gb (really high quality). Typically an xvid/DVD Rip will be 700mb to 1.2gb, a 720p will will be 3-8gb and a 1080p rip will be 7-20gb.
Still not sure about a torrent? Go have a look at the comments with it, if it’s a fake, there *should* be a bunch of comments stating this.
If a torrent has been nuked, it means that there was something wrong with it. The problem can vary from major problems like missing footage or audio out of sync to simple things like being named incorrectly, glitching out for 1/2 second or so. Usually when a torrent gets nuked, there’s what’s called a repack or a proper. A repack is a fixed version of the torrent and will usually have REPACK or PROPER in the title.
We’ve deployed 6 iPads in our school as a trial run, I used these 6 to work out how we can handle and manage many iOS devices in a primarily Windows based school. Here are my findings.
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Welcome to my Tech Blog.
I’m a School Support Officer at a School in Australia, basically I’m the IT guy.
My job involves things like teaching the teachers how to use the computers, computer maintenance and really anything that involves IT.
The purpose of this blog is to document issues that come arise in my School as well as how to guides for undocumented things, interesting news that’s related to IT in schools as well as a bit on “Hey, check out what we’re doing!”
If I accidently break a copyright or something, or you wish to get in contact with me regarding something on this website, or if there’s something you think would be interesting, please feel free to send me an email at: techblog@duklabs.com
Ducky.
