It’s a pretty silly move I suppose, so I tried to work out a way to bring the functionality back, first of all, here’s how Microsoft suggests you should do it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924462
Step 1: Use the software that was included with your scanner to scan and save the image to your computer.

… Yeah, no thanks.

Here’s two actual solutions to the problem:

Option 1: Using a Key Combo

Install your scanner drivers as per normal.
In Word, press the alt key and type ips (note: don’t hold them down or it won’t work, just type out ips).

Word will then pop up asking you what scanner you want to use. It didn’t bring up the scanner interface on the machine I was working with, it just went right ahead and scanned the whole document, so this may not be the best solution for some. Note that the next solution is more difficult and does exactly the same thing as this one.

Source: Comments on this page: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld/360373/how-to-scan-into-word-2010

Option 2: Creating a button on the Ribbon

This option is a lot more complicated, make sure you get all the steps right and in order! When you’re done you’ll have a button on your Insert tab of the Ribbon.

1. Open Word and go to the View Tab then click on Macros.
2. Give the macro a name (eg. Scan)
3. Enter the following text EXACTLY:  Application.WordBasic.InsertImagerScan
4. Save and Close the Window
5. Right click anywhere on the Ribbon and Select “Customise the Ribbon”
6. On the right hand pane, click on the Insert category and click New Group.
7. Rename the Group to anything you like (eg. Scan)
8. On the Left Hand Pane, Change the drop down box at the top to Macros then select the Macro you made in step 2-4 and click the Add button (so it appears underneath the scan group you made in Step 6.
9. Rename it to something better like “Scan Document” and pick a pretty picture for it.
10. Click Okay and you’re done!

Now you can just click the button to Scan a document. It’s exactly the same as the alt-ips option above though, but might be easier for people to remember so they can click the button.

Source: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/realworld/360373/how-to-scan-into-word-2010

If this helped you, please leave a comment to say thanks

Ducky

Basically: the Xerox printers are just rebranded Brother/Samsung printers, so you can go to the Brother/Samsung website and download the drivers to make it work.
The Xerox Phaser 3123 and 3124 are the same as the Samsung ML 2510.
If you’re using the network on the 3124, then it just works as a generic postscript printer.
http://www.samsung.com/ca/support/search/supportSearchModelResult.do?menu=SP01&searchWord=ml2510&default_searchInputBox_value=Enter+model+number+or+keywords&searchInputBox=ml2510&find_button=

The Xerox DocuPrint 203a/204a use the Brother HL-2040 driver.
http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/BSC/public/us/us/en/model_top/monolaserpri/hl2040_all.html?reg=us&c=us&lang=en&prod=hl2040_all

EDIT: If you’re looking for a qualified driver for the Xerox 204A, use the Brother HL-2040 driver linked above. The driver on the the Xerox site for the 204A is not a Windows Qualified driver and was having issues with iPrint for us.

Another Edit: If you’re having issues with the Xerox 204A printers, you can do a full factory reset on them by doing the following:

1. Turn the printer off
2. Hold down the Go button and turn the printer on. The lights will go solid after a few seconds with the Ready light off.
3. Let go of the go button, then press it 6 times. The printer will then start normally and be reset.

I got this info from the Brother HL-2040 tech manual here (this doubles as the Xerox 204A Tech Manual too): http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/BSC/Public/files/dlf/doc000360/HL2070N_NUG_ENG_1.pdf

If any of this has helped you, please leave a comment with how things worked out for you!

Ducky

Common Misconceptions about USB Sticks

You don’t need to Safely Remove (or Eject) a USB Stick.

False, technically…

When you go to Safely Remove a USB Stick, your computer will make sure that nothing is doing anything with the drive. If you’re copying data to the USB Stick, it could corrupt files that are transferring to it. But here’s the big one: USB Drives typically use a thing called FAT32 to store their data, this is so the drive will work on both Macs and PCs. 99% of the time when you don’t safely eject, everything is fine, but there’s a special part of the drive that stores where all the files on your drive are, if this gets corrupted (by unplugging it at just the wrong moment), all your data will be lost.

USB Sticks have no moving parts, so they can’t break.

False.
I’ve seen many USB Sticks fail, sometimes it’s quite sudden and your drive will simply just stop working. There’s nothing you can do to save the data. If you’re really lucky and have a lot of money, you could get a professional to try to recover the data (costing you upwards of $10,000).
If you notice your USB Stick doing something odd like not being recognised by the computer or suddenly dropping out and not working until you unplug/replug it in, stop using it and buy a new one.

USB Sticks can’t survive a trip through the washing machine

False
They totally can (usually). If yours ends up through the wash, let it dry out for at least a few days (don’t even dare plugging it in until it’s 100% dry, inside and out). If you’ve got some silica gel (those little anti moisture packets), put it in an air tight tupperware container with it. Rice works too.
You can also get waterproof USB Sticks.

Buying a USB Stick

There’s a lot of different USB Sticks you can buy. Try to steer clear of the novelty ones firstly, they’re pretty much the cheapest USB Stick whacked into a fancy case.

Speed

USB Sticks range from very slow (2-3MB/s transfer speed) to really quick (over 100MB/s). Most USB Drives on the market are USB2, this means they’ve got a theoretical maximum speed of about 60MB/s (480mbit USB2), but you’ll most likely never see any over 35MB/s. The latest USB sticks coming out now are USB3 sticks, these ones have speeds of over 100MB/s (in theory) but you must have USB3 on your computer to use it (not all new computers even have this yet, so it’s unlikely you would have USB3).
Does the speed really matter?   Yes.  Take one of the better Kingston USB Sticks for example, it has 20MB/s read and 10MB/s Write. To copy a 1gb Movie onto the drive, it will take you almost 2 minutes. On the other hand, the Patriot SuperSonic at 70MB/s Write speed: 15 seconds (or, at USB2 speeds: 31seconds).
Basically: There are a lot of really slow drives out there, ones that make you want to tear your eyes out as it trudges along at 2-3MB/s (yes, there are a lot of drives this slow out there).

Size (Memory)

At the moment (June 2011), USB Drives go up to 128GB, this is pretty cool, but really expensive at the same time. The sweet spot is around 16gb ($35) or if you need something a bit bigger, 32gb to 64gb ($100 and $200).

Size (Physical)

This one is more important than you think. The USB Drive has to fit with other USB devices plugged in next to it (this is really, really important). There’s nothing more annoying than having to unplug a bunch of other devices so you can plug in your USB Drive.
Keep an eye out for the USB3 drives, I’ve only seen one that has a small enough footprint to fit next to other drives (the Patriot Supersonic Drive – See Image on Right).

Design

There’s a whole heap of different ways they build these things, fancy caps on the end, flip out covers, cool clicky bits to make it click into place… Most of them suck though.
The ones that click (you push the end until the USB bit is clicked into place) seem fine at first, but if you’re trying to get it into a tight USB port, it’ll click back.

Caps can (and will) get lost.

The swivel USB sticks are good because you can’t lose the cap, but I’m yet to see a decent USB stick (according to other attributes) in this style.

The screw cap USB Sticks take FOREVER to unscrew.

One of the best ones I’ve got has a normal removable cap, but the lanyard bit for it goes through the cap as well as the USB, so they can’t get separated.

The other thing to look at is the physical toughness of the drive, most of them are plastic, but you can buy rubber ones that are more shock proof and waterproof and metal ones as well.

Encryption

You can get some USB Sticks that use Hardware Encryption to encrypt the data on the drive.
In short: Don’t bother, unless you’re a crazy encryption nuthead, the encryption will only slow the drive down and increase the cost. I would suggest getting any USB drive and using something like Truecrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) to encrypt the data on the drive.

Warranty

If you’re going to spend over $100 on a USB drive, check the warranty! Most come with 3-5 year warranties.

Special “Bonuses”

Some USB Sticks ship with a thing called the U3 System (or something else, there’s a couple different ones), supposedly trying to make your life easier. 95% of the time it slows you down and annoys the crap out of you. If you’ve got U3 installed on the drive, go here for instructions on how to remove it (http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2550/~/removing-u3-launchpad-on-a-pc). If it’s not U3 and something else, google something like: Remove <insert name of thing here>
There should be some results on how to get rid of it

Where to buy

I typically get my USB drives online from places like PC Case Gear (http://www.pccasegear.com/) or UMart (http://www.umart.com.au).
Avoid getting ones from eBay, especially if they’re strangely cheaper than the other ones. There has been a lot of scams where they will sell you a USB stick saying 128gb, when it’s actually a 128mb drive with 128gb written on it (and some crazy tricks to even make the computer think it’s 128gb). See this page for more details on the scam (http://reviews.ebay.com.au/BEWARE-of-FAKE-1GB-2GB-4GB-8GB-USB-Flash-Drives-on-eBay_W0QQugidZ10000000000706427)

Cool Tricks for USB Sticks

Contact Info!

USB Sticks are really easy to lose and very hard to work out who owns it. Make a text file called “If Lost Open Me!.txt” and leave it on the USB Drive, include your contact details and phone number so whoever finds the stick can return it to you!

Autorun File Trickery

On Windows Machines, they will read a file called autorun.inf when you plug a USB Stick in, inside this file you can include details like the default action (Windows XP only), the icon and the name of the USB Stick (this is separate from the name of the drive and lets you give it longer, case sensitive names).
Note that this doesn’t work on fully up to date machines as Microsoft have disabled the functionality (what a buzz kill).
This has the added bonus of working as an indication that a virus is on your USB Stick: If you notice that your fancy icon and all that is missing, it’s likely that a virus has replaced your autorun.inf file. Go check it and make sure it’s not trying to run something else!
Also: If you don’t use this trick and you see a file on your USB called autorun.inf, get rid of it. Alternately, a folder called “System” is also a part of a virus, delete that too!
To make an autorun file for yourself, download this file and edit the autorun.inf file in your favourite text editor (leave a comment if you need help!).

BACK UP YOUR USB STICK

Seriously, if your only copy of your thesis, photos or any other important documents is on your USB Stick BACK IT UP NOW.
Always Always Always keep multiple copies of your data.
Things will fail, you are not an exception to the rule. If you’ve never had a data failure before, that doesn’t make you immune to them later.

Think I missed something? Got something to share? Liked the Article?  Leave a Comment below!

Ducky

Management of the iPads

Configuring Settings

Apple make a program called the iPhone Configuration Utility (also works on any iOS device) which allows you to build a little script that loads across all the settings for the device. The settings we needed to set up are: Wifi, Proxy and Restrictions (Disabling the App Store and the ability to delete apps so the kids can’t mess anything up). The problem is, to get the profile from the Configuration Utility loaded on, you need to already be connected to the network. Also, it doesn’t allow you to sync a wifi password across (it only lets you do the enterprise level wifi connections like RADIUS and not the normal WPA2 encryption). Thus: It was easier to just quickly pop through and set the settings on each device manually. Sure it takes about 2 minutes to hit all the buttons and type things in, but it’s not too bad.
What I would really like to see is the ability to create an image for an iPad, where you set one up right and then each new iPad you just hit a button and it wipes it clean and loads everything/sets up all the settings the same as the first one. Apple don’t offer anything to do this and I can’t find anything that’ll do it on google either. (Leave a comment if you find something like this!)

Charging/Storage

iPads are small, so they don’t need much room to charge. We stack ours on top of each other and lock them away in a store room. In terms of charging we use a plain old power board and just whack all the chargers together.
Screen Protectors and Cases
You can go out and buy big fancy screen protectors and cases for upwards of $50 each… Or, you could go on ebay and pick up screen protectors for a few dollars each and cases for about $10 each. Sure, they’re cheap and nasty, but you’ll save a ton. Be careful when you’re putting on the screen protectors, clean the screen REALLY WELL first, then take your time getting the protector on. Do it right and you won’t even notice that there’s one on. Do it poorly and there’ll be bubbles and it’ll look pretty lame.

Theft

iPads are pretty easy to steal. You should look into setting up each iPad with the Find my iPad option. If it’s the Wifi+3G model, you’ll be able to GPS track it anywhere on a map so you can alert police to where it is. If it’s the Wifi only model, they say it does sort of work if it’s connected to a wifi network. I’m not quite sure how well this works though.
Which iPad to Buy
The two things to look into when buying an iPad is Size and 3G. 3G lets you use them on the internet anywhere you get phone signal, the non 3G model lets you us the Wifi of your school to connect.  As for size, we went for the 16gig ones and haven’t had any issues with space. Each app is maybe a few hundred mb at the most.

What they will and will not do

iPads will let you use them on the internet for surfing websites. It has issues with things like KnowledgeNet/Moodle and other online based learning platforms due to a bug in the Internet Browser (Safari) on the device. It has trouble with WYSIWYG editors. There’s not much you can do about it other than just wait and hope support for these things comes in an update.
iPads will NOT let you connect to your network drives and edit/view documents off your server.

Apps

Buying Apps

To buy apps (including free ones) for the iPad, you need to have an Apple ID. Create ONE account for your school and run everything through that one account. Ensure that the password never gets saved onto the devices (to prevent kids from buying apps on the account!). Now you’ve got an account, you need to pick one machine to be your iTunes machine. This is the machine that does all of your syncing. You should probably also only have one person in charge of handling the syncing/buying of apps (generally the IT person).
Buying Apps requires money, money requires finding some one to pay for it. The easiest way to buy apps with a school system is to buy an iTunes Gift Card, this way it’s like $50 worth of apps, you’ve got an easy receipt you can take to the office to get reimbursed. If you keep track of all the amounts spent, you could also have each department of the school that want to buy apps buy their own card on their own budget, then just add it to the account (and ensure that each department doesn’t spend more than what they’ve paid for).

App Licencing

The deal with Apple and the iOS devices:   You can have 5 computers linked to one iTunes account at one time (hence why it is suggested before that you only have one computer in charge of it all) and unlimited iOS devices (Apple do not state this anywhere on their website, when I emailed them and asked them what the deal was they responded that we can load an app onto as many iOS devices as we like, however they also stated that it may not be the case for everyone).

Custom Apps

If you want custom software, you need a developer account from Apple and someone skilled enough to program in Obj-C, Apples programming language of choice. A standard developer account costs $99 a year and lets you have up to 100 devices.

A much easier way of doing custom apps is to build them in your web development language of choice and make it a webpage. If you can do it in PHP/AJAX or whatever, it’ll be easier to code

Installing Apps

To install Apps on the iPad, you should download the apps onto your main iTunes computer first, then plug each iPad in one by one and sync the apps across.

Uses for the iPad in Schools

Library

Books! There’s loads of books on the App Store that are interactive read along stories, perfect for Primary School aged children. Careful about the heavy American accents though, as most apps are made by American companies.

Maths/Literacy

There’s plenty of Maths and Literacy apps out there to help kids learn maths and literacy (mainly at a primary school level). I haven’t really looked into high school level stuff as I work for a Primary school only.

Games

There’s so many games for the iPad. Remember they can be used for learning, be careful about loading games that don’t have much of a learning objective on there as you will find that they’ll never get used for learning.

As always, if there’s something I’ve forgotten, just leave a comment! Also comment and let me know what apps you like to use in school on your iPads.

Ducky

Also note that this information only applies to Mac computers and will not work on a Windows machine.

To run the commands, you go to the Applications Folder, then Terminal.
You will see a window come up with the text looking a bit like this (remembering that your computer name will be in place of “Adria” and username in place of “duck”:

Last login: Mon Nov 22 11:52:37 on ttys005
Adria:~ duck$

Now you can type in one of the following commands (or just copy/paste it):

ping pacific.net.au | tee pingtest.txt

This command will send a message to the server “pacific.net.au” and tell you how long it takes for the message to come back. The other half of it (the “tee pingtext.txt”) will save a file in your home folder called “pingtest.txt” which will also contain what you see in the terminal (useful for emailing to other people to look at).
The reason I suggest pacific.net.au is because it’s a server in Sydney that is (almost) always there. If this test works, then your internet should be working fine, you can change the pacific.net.au to something like google.com or any other address.
Run the test for as long as you like, when you’re done you press Control-C and it will stop.

Results to look for:
64 bytes from 61.8.0.22: icmp_seq=0 ttl=50 time=25.209 ms

This is a normal result. the icmp_seq bit is the number it’s up to (it does one every second). This should be counting up by 1 every time.
The other part to look at is the time bit. This is how long it takes for a message to get from you to the server and back.
If you’re on ADSL and no one is doing anything else on the internet on your network, then you should get between 20-70ms. Anything under 2000ms and your internet should still work, just slowly. If it’s over 2000ms, then there could be a problem somewhere in your network.
The one that really causes a problem is when you see this:
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2

This means that the information didn’t make it either to or back from the server. A good internet connection should get none of these at all, however occasionally they do happen, if you get one or two every now and then, it’s OK. But if you’re getting a lot of them (say, every 1 in 10 is missing, or you’re getting clumps of say 5 or more) then you’ve got a problem.
Remember that computers are designed to tolerate faults like this, so for example if you’re experiencing websites not loading, when bits like this don’t come back, your computer will just try again automatically.

If you’re experiencing intermittent problems, feel free to leave this running for days if you think it’s necessary (just hide the Terminal Program and continue using your computer as you normally would and check on it when you think there’s something going wrong).

When you think you’ve captured the data you like, you can then attach the pingtest.txt file to an email and send it to someone.

Thanks

Ducky

Changing the Login Screen

Boring old Normal Login Screen

To change the banner there, you need to first get a picture, the standard size is 452x113x16M but you can increase the height.
This picture should be in a BMP format.
Put the picture in a nice place, probably C:\WINDOWS\ would be a good idea (that’s where the rest of the Novell stuff is), you could also try something like C:\Novell\
Once the picture is there, fire up regedit (Windows Key + R -> regedit -> enter) and go to:

HKLM\Software\Novell\Login\Banner\Image
(HKLM is short for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE)
On the standard install, the banner part isn’t there, if this is the case, right click on the “Login” key, go to New -> Key and call it “Banner” then right click on the Banner you just created, go to New -> String Value then enter the path to the banner in there.

When you’re done, log out and admire your handy work!

Isn't it pretty?

Automatic Version

This can all be rolled into a batch script too.
In fact, here’s a nicely pre-built script that does it nice and easy like (built for Novell 4.91 SP5, but should work on other versions too).
Banner Changer

There’s also a version made by Novell, but I feel this is a little more complicated than is necessary (though check it out if you’re planning to roll it out to heaps of computers.)

http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/13538.html

I got my info for this article from the Novell Forums here: http://forums.novell.com/novell-product-support-forums/open-enterprise-server/oes-platform-independent/oes-client-windows/144131-title-logon-screen.html

Changing the “Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to Login” Screen

It’s the same process as before, I haven’t really tested it because we don’t use that welcome screen here, but here’s the two reg keys that specify it:
Welcome Screen Bitmap Filename
Registry Key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Novell\NWGINA\Welcome\Screen
Registry Value: [string] Bitmap
Default Value: NWELCOME.BMP
Range: N/A (Any valid string is allowed)
Client Version: Implemented in NT Client versions 4.3 and later
Description: Specifies the bitmap that appears on the welcome screen when you start Windows NT/2000. You can specify any bitmap located in the WINNT directory.

Welcome Screen Caption
Registry Key: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Novell\NWGINA\Welcome\Screen
Registry Value: [string] Header Message
Default Value: Begin Login
Range: N/A (Any valid string is allowed)
Client Version: Implemented in NT Client versions 4.3 and later
Description: Specifies the text that appears in the header on the welcome screen that appears when you start Windows NT/2000.

You could also just get sneaky and alter C:\WINDOWS\NWELCOME.BMP

Questions/Comments? Leave a comment below or send me an email!

Ducky

Installation

Installing the server part was quite easy, we bought a new machine for this task, it’s an i5 with 4gigs ram and a 1tb Hard Drive, pretty much overkill for what we need. Keep in mind, if you’re thinking of going with ClickView, make sure you get a machine with lots of hard drive space and a gigabit network card.
Installing the client was just as easy. ClickView provides an MSI based installer though which does make life MUCH easier though you need to install either DivX or XviD to allow the videos to play. I chose XviD as it keeps out of the way and doesn’t try to install the “DivX Video Player” and other useless crap.
It only took me an hour or so to build/test my “special installer” which (with the help of a batch file) installs ClickView, Xvid and sets it all up to talk to our server (big thanks to the ClickView people for allowing you to set the server with a registry key). If you’re after a copy of my installer, send me an email and I can either send it to you or show you how I made it.

Use

The ClickView software is very intuitive, there’s not much you need to do to get it to work. You can search for videos using key words or browse through the collection. To play a video you just double click on it (you can also skip to a particular chapter of a video).
While it is easy to use, it could be better. When you double click on a video to play it, it will load the first chapter before it starts playing. If you’re doing this on a wireless connection and the first chapter is long (over 10 minutes), it could take a couple minutes before the video even starts playing. This would be fixed if ClickView made a client that streams the video rather than downloads whole chapters at a time.
Another issue with it is that the interface locks up while it’s loading a chapter, while you’re watching a video it starts loading the next chapter, the video will keep playing, but you can no longer use the video controls to pause or control it while it’s loading.
The only other issue I’ve had with the interface is that it looks… average. Most other media players have nice looking bits that fade in and out, ClickView has an ugly green thing that hangs in the bottom corner being ugly.
The method it uses for displaying the video on screen is using a thing called an Overlay. The overlay means the video is sent straight to your video card to decode the video and display it on the screen for you. We use Interactive Whiteboards here so every machine has mirrored video with the projector. The problem we’re getting is that the video card will send the rendered video to the projector and not the monitor, leaving a blank window on the monitor. The fix for this is to tell the nvidia control panel to not provide any hardware decoding for the ClickView program (this setting adds about a minute to the time it takes to set up each machine). I wrote to the developers of ClickView asking about this and they suggested I turn off hardware acceleration for the entire machine (which will affect every other program and is generally a bad idea).

EDIT: There’s an updated version of the client that  has 2 different modes, one is the old way that plays it through the client (and has the issues I mentioned above) the other way though is a silverlight player, you can embed videos onto a Learning Management System through this method too, so it’s kinda like a locally stored youtube, so it causes no stress on your internet connection, just the server itself.

Videos

The primary school set of videos contains about 400 videos, the secondary school one comes with even more. The selection is good, I found a lot of the old VHS tapes we’ve got are already loaded onto ClickView for us.
They offer a set of extra free videos every term as well as an online store with more. The extra videos however are priced at around $90-$120 each, about 3-4x more than the cost of a DVD. On top of this, they’re always trying to up sell us to their extra services, such as a TV recorder, live streaming and the ability for kids to view videos from home.
This is a little bothering as you pay a heap of money per year for this service and they’re still trying to get more money out of you.

EDIT: We had a trainer come out from ClickView to teach us how to use the ClickView Exchange (it’s really easy), there’s thousands of videos on there on pretty much any topic and it’s all videos that are uploaded from teachers at other schools off Free to Air TV (seriously, there’s a video on *anything* there). The ClickView exchange pretty well moots the point I’ve made above.

Copyright

When we bought this for our school, the idea was that I would take our entire VHS and DVD collection, convert it for ClickView and then we can get rid of all the DVDs/Tapes and that ClickView would “worry about the copyright for us”.
This is not the case however, even if you own the media you can only convert it to ClickView in certain situations.
This website explains the rules for Format Shifting. http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/go/pid/529
Basically though, if you want to convert a video for ClickView you have to:
1.    Make sure you can’t purchase it for ClickView already (this essentially means, if it’s available on the ClickView store, you MUST purchase it from the ClickView store (which in turn will cost you 3-4x the cost of the DVD as mentioned above))
2.    It must be used for educational instruction in the near future (you can’t convert it just in case you’re planning on using it).
3.    It must not be copy protected. Most commercial DVD’s are copy protected which means in some cases, converting it to ClickView is impossible.
4.    You must own a legal copy of the media.

Other Technical Concerns

The codec they’ve chosen for ClickView is the DivX/Xvid codec, this used to be the “cool” codec to use, however these days it’s getting replaced with the h.264 codec (in the mkv container) which allows you to do proper High Definition videos, multiple subtitle tracks, multiple audio streams and gives you much better quality for the size.
That being said, the DivX codec is still pretty good, if they let the videos stream as they play rather than downloading a full chapter at a time it would be a lot better though.
Also when you’re importing videos, they have to a specific format. When importing VHS videos for example, my recorder records into .mov format (as an mpeg4 video), I trim it down to size using MPEG StreamClip and save it as an mp4 (if I try to save as an avi, ClickView won’t read it) and then I use HandBrake to convert it to x264 in an AVI Container (xvid works too).

EDIT: The latest version now supports High Definition, as far as I know they’ve moved to using WMV (but don’t quote me on it!)

Pricing

http://www.clickview.com.au/products/pricing.php

At the time of writing, it’s $700 for the server per year plus $2 per student per year for the video library.
For a school of about 500 students, that’s $1700 per year.
Now sure, it does make everything nice and easy, but $1700 per year just so you don’t have to carry DVD’s/TV’s/Videos around?
Paying $700 for the software is pretty steep
It would be nice to see the software licence be a one off cost of $100 and just charge for the video pack because it’s not really a very complex piece of software. They could also add in a yearly fee for support too.

All in all, it’s a great idea, the interface could use some work and the videos could be cheaper but for teaching it’s an invaluable tool.

If you think I missed something or you want to talk more about it, leave a comment or shoot me an email!

Ducky

To do this, you use a program called Plop. It’s an ISO of a CD which allows you to boot from a USB Stick.

Download Plop from here: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagerdl.html Just grab the first download link on that page.

Once you’ve downloaded and extracted that, go to VMWare and Click the button down the bottom of the VMWare Window for your CD Drive then Choose Disk Image. Select the plopbt.iso that you downloaded before.

Boot your VM and make sure you select to attach your USB Stick to the VM (from the buttons down the bottom).

If the boot CD doesn’t launch, look under “Advanced” in the settings for the machine and set it so it boots CD’s first.

Once the boot CD launches you can pick your USB stick, then away you go!

Also, here’s another quick hint for getting to the BIOS on VMWare.

It’s a little bit too fast to hit F2 to get into the BIOS, so you need to go to where your VM is (eg. ~/Documents/VMWare/Windows XP Pro.vmwarevm) and right click it and go to “Show Package Contents”. Right click on the .vmx file, Open With, Other and find Text Edit or your preferred text editor.

Then just add the line:

bios.forceSetupOnce = “TRUE”

This will change itself to false after every time that you boot it, so if you need to get in again, you go back and change that to true again.

If this has been useful, leave a comment!

Ducky

EDIT:  Here’s a crazy little update about PXE Booting with VMWare Fusion.

I set the Networking to Bridged (So the machine gets its own IP rather than doing NAT). I boot the machine which seems to go straight into PXE Booting.  When the Zenworks thing is trying to PXE Boot, it’s looking for the Ctrl-Alt keys to be pressed. If you hold them down however, it doesn’t work.

The Trick is to hold them down and press Space as well. How weird is that?  I got this tip from here: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/177309

Adium – Free (OpenSource)

Chatting

Adium is the best chat program out there for Mac. It does MSN/AIM/ICQ/Y!M/IRC and anything else you could possible want.  The great thing about it is that it looks pretty and sleek, runs fast and isn’t “cludgy” like the official MSN client for Mac is.

QuickSilver – Free

Workflow Improver

QuickSilver is an app that lets you open up any other application within a couple of key presses. It takes a few days to get it into your work flow, however once you do, you realise that any application on your Mac can be opened within seconds and your dock is super clean. It also lets you use key combinations for searching websites, sending emails and all sorts of other things.

NetNewsWire – Free

News Reader

Do you find you’re going to a heap of websites, bookmarking them and then going back checking for updates every week or so?  This app lets you add all the sites you use and you will get notified when there’s new news articles (as long as they have an RSS/Atom feed).  Most sites that update often have some sort of rss feed built in and can be used with this (this site has rss too!).

Firefox – Free (OpenSource)

Web Browser

Why would I say this instead of Safari?   The #1 reason is the add on called AdBlock. AdBlock disables almost all the ads you see on websites. This makes sites load faster (since they don’t need to load the ads). Also, for Australians, check out the Addon called Net Usage Item (http://netusage.iau5.com/), it shows you how much of your download quota you’ve used for the month, updated every 15minutes or so.

Alarm Clock 2 – Free

Alarm Clock

This is the neatest alarm clock I’ve found for Mac. Every Morning this will go to my iTunes, pick out a random song in my chilled out wake up music playlist and play it for me.
If something happens and it can’t find the song, it’ll play it’s default alarm, which is a beep that will make you want to kill any living thing (but gets you out of bed pretty quick).
It has an “easy wake” feature that slowly ramps up how loud it is, however this does not work via Optical Audio

PAID APPS

All the apps below cost money, they all have a free trial version so you can give them a go, but if you’re really going to use it you will need to pay. Infact, all the apps below are ones I’ve found good enough to pay for myself (and not pirate).

Transmit – $34USD

FTP Client

The BEST FTP Client available for Mac. It has more features than you can poke a stick at and, well, does FTP in the best possible way.

SubEthaEdit – $34USD

Text Editor

My preferred text editor, does code colouring perfectly, code folding and allows multiple people to work on the same document at once. I really like this program because it’s quick, uses little resources and everything just works.

1Password – $40USD

Password Management

I use lots of passwords, I use passwords for clients and need somewhere to store it where I know it’s safe. I did a bit of hunting around and found 1Password. The search function makes it easy to find the passwords and everything is heavily encrypted.
The only thing I didn’t like was the Browser Integration, it gets in the way every time you go to load a webpage with a password (and makes you unlock it to auto fill passwords). I turned this off and manually added passwords as I needed to.

iStat Menus – $16

Monitoring

If you like to keep track of how much you’re downloading, your CPU usage or temperatures, iStat Menus does it beautifully. You can even change the colours of all the menu items to go with your theme.

Steam – Free (games cost extra)

Game Distribution

Steam was only released a month or so ago and it’s already the number one way to get games for Mac. You download and install the Steam Client and browse their store looking for games. When you find one you want, you buy it, download it and then you can play. If you change computers you can install the game on the other machine. Though you’ll only be able to run it on one machine at a time.

When you’re looking for headphones to use in a school environment, there’s a lot of things you need to take into consideration, see below to find out what I’ve discovered from my investigations into headphones.

1. Cost

The headphones have to be cheap, you might think “Well, it’s only $15″, but when you’re buying 100 of them, that’s $1500 in just headphones.

2. Style

Ear Buds: We avoided getting any of the Ear Bud style headphones due to hygiene concerns, as they go in the child’s ear, which could cause the spread of ear infections etc.

Plain Basic Headphones: We opted for the Plain Basic headphones, however these weren’t without problems. The fluffy bits over the ears would either fall off or get destroyed and the cables would get chewed and pulled apart.

The cables seemed to get pulled hard enough to yank the wires out from inside the headphones, we also had a few cases a year of the earpiece snapping clean off (and requiring a good tape/glue job to get it back in place). The biggest problem was the 2 wire cable, with the two separate cables stuck together. Kids would pull at these until they split and that would cause them to get tangled up in everything. A little bit of tape wrapped around it every 4-5cm seems to neaten it up, but it’s not an ideal solution. From our School Suppliers, these headphones cost around $10 each.

Big Fancy Headphones: We found a near perfect set of headphones, call the TDK ST-200 Street Headphones, they were strong enough to withstand the children beating on them, they had a thicker, single cable that couldn’t split and would withstand a bit more chewing and were also really cheap (about $15 a pair).

The sound quality was pretty good (I heard a kid say it was the best pair he’d ever heard, but he hasn’t heard a good pair I guess), they also looked nice and blocked out a good amount of outside noise, though it’s debatable as to whether this is a good thing or not. After a long conversation with a teacher about it, we decided that this was a better thing, even though the kids are likely to miss instructions from the teacher, they were also less likely to be distracted by their peers.

One small issue with them is that the cable is quite long, and it feels weird if you wear it with a big head, it fits very snugly on a kids head though.

The TDK-ST150 headphones are still being made, are being sold at the same price and are almost as good (just a little smaller and flimsier).

If you had more money: The headphones I use at home that are more expensive but offer fantastic sound quality (it’s the style that Triple J uses in their studio) are the Sennheiser HD202′s, though they are $54 each. If you’re after something for doing video/sound work in a school, these would be the ones I’d go for (not to fill a whole classroom though (unless of course you’re a crazy rich private school with a money tree in the back yard)).

Things I’ve learned about Headphones working at a School

1. Kids chew headphone cables. You can tell them not to chew the cable, but 10 seconds later they’ll be doing it again. (If anyone knows of a way to stop them from doing it, perhaps a way to make it taste terrible, then please leave a comment).
2. Cheapest isn’t always the best. I estimate the TDK headphones will last 2-3 times longer than the cheap basic ones, and only cost an extra $5 a pair.
3. The headphones with the fluffy bits over the ears suck. The fluffy bits will fall to pieces and/or come off within a couple months of use.
4. If they give you a 3.5mm to 6.3mm headphone adaptor with them (big oldstyle plug to small headphone plug), keep it, if you know someone who’s a DJ, give them a hand full and they’ll thank you.
5. Kids will walk away and not realise they’re still on their head. Not a lot you can do about it, but the headphones should have a strong cable that won’t rip out (the cheaper ones won’t be so stuck in and thus break easier).