Everything relating to stuff that happens at school
My school recently bought a system called MultiScreen, it’s a system that connects up to multiple TV’s to play promotional material, it consists of a Server Box purchased directly from MultiScreen with multiple AV outputs and the TV units which were purchased through a local electrical supplier.
Continue reading →
Update: It still works! 29/1/17
This guide explains not only how to disable StickyKeys for one user, but it will disable it for every user on the computer which makes it perfect for System Administrators.
NOTE, SEE THE BOTTOM OF THE POST FOR A SINGLE CLICK VERSION OF THE WHOLE PROCESS.
This guide will first disable it for the local user and the .default user (the user who’s active when noone is logged in ie. the Login Screen) and then will explain how to disable it for the Default User which is the user that is called upon when a new user is created. This is limited in that it will only let you disable it for users who have not logged in on the computer before.
In my situation with a Novell Network, these steps should be done before the image of the computer is created or before the computer gets used by normal users.
This has been tested by me and appears to work fine on Windows XP Service Pack 2 machines, if it works for you please leave a comment saying so.
Here we go:
Part 1 – Disabling StickyKeys for the current user and when noone is logged in.
Open up Notepad and copy/paste this code into it, alternately you can download the file here: StickyKeys Fixer
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
; For the Current User (Usually Me)
;Disable Sticky Keys
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility\StickyKeys]
“Flags”=”506”;Disable Filter Keys
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility\Keyboard Response]
“Flags”=”122”;Disable Toggle Keys
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility\ToggleKeys]
“Flags”=”58”; For when noone is logged in
;Disable Sticky Keys
[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Accessibility\StickyKeys]
“Flags”=”506”;Disable Filter Keys
[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Accessibility\Keyboard Response]
“Flags”=”122”;Disable Toggle Keys
[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Accessibility\ToggleKeys]
“Flags”=”58”
Save this file as stickykeys.reg and place it anywhere. When saving it, under “Save as Type” in the save dialogue, change it to “All Files”, this way it will let you save it as .reg and not .reg.txt.
Double click the file and select Yes to add it to the registry.
If you’re the only user of the machine, you can stop here. If you wish to disable it for all other users too, please continue.
Part 2 – Disabling StickyKeys for all new users
Please note that this will only disable it for users who DO NOT CURRENTLY HAVE AN ACCOUNT YET ON THE MACHINE. If you wish to disable it for users who already have an account on the machine, you will need to run that reg file from part one as each user.
This solution is great for networks where a new user account is created on each machine as the user logs in through a server of some sort.
It’s important that you Unload the Hive when you’re done with it, failure to do so could cause issues later.
That’s it!
Every new user should now have StickyKeys disabled 😀
If you liked this guide, please comment and let me know how it went for you.
Ducky
EDIT: OK, this one I’m quite proud of. SUPER STICKY KEYS FIX <–Click there to download, then extract the archive, and double click StickyKeysUltimateFix.bat. It will disable Sticky Keys for the currently logged in user, the .DEFAULT user as well as “Default User”. This works on XP, and might just work on Windows Vista/7. If you use it, please leave a comment and let me know how it worked for you.
In a network environment, you should run this before you start getting users on, as it won’t affect users whose accounts are already created.
If you feel a bit sus about the files, you can open all of them in a text editor to see what it does.
Open Reg Edit (Windows Key + R -> regedit -> Enter)
Click on “HKEY_USERS”
Goto File -> Load Hive
Select: C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\NTUSER.DAT
For the key name enter anything (this guide will assume you called it “blah”)
Expand open “HKEY_USERS” and you will see the “hive” you added (“blah”).
Open up the hive: blah -> Control Panel -> Accessibility
Make the following changes:
StickyKeys -> Flags = 506
Keyboard Response -> Flags = 122
ToggleKeys -> Flags = 58
Select the Hive you added (“blah”) and go to File -> Unload Hive
Click OK to the dialogue.
The first thing we’ve been looking at, is replacing the library of CD’s we have in the library with the iPods.
A full CD can be ripped in MP3 format down to around 60mb (that’s at 160kbit VBR) (or, about 133 CD’s on an 8gig iPod).
The advantage of using these over using the listening post is that the kids can work along at their own pace, they can rewind and listen to the same bit again and you don’t have to have all the kids starting the book at the same time.
Another thing some of the year 6 classes have been using them for is for listening to educational pod casts. They’re currently doing Rainforests at the moment so we found a set of podcasts about rainforests, downloaded them and put them on the iPods. Here is the set of Podcasts.
Most important of all, the kids love using them.
As I come across more resources, I’ll post them on this blog.
Ducky
This is part one of a few parts, Part 1 is explaining the configuration of the iPods and issues that may arise when setting them up.
We have 30 iPod Nano 8gb. These have a little screen, enough space to fit more than we would ever need (we hope) and they’re small.
I arranged the deal to get these with Apple over the phone, on the back of every iPod we got Apple to Laser engrave (at no extra cost) the school name and an Asset Number.
As for finding content for the iPods, I had to tread carefully around copyright, this means asking for permission to use the music/audio, finding free music, pod casts or other sorts of stuff to put on there.
For converting CD’s to put on an iPod, there’s 2 ways you can do it. iTunes is great for when it’s a music CD, however in some cases we’ve got books that are on CD. In some cases they’re split across 30-40 tracks and putting them on the iPods is going to be a nightmare. For the Audiobooks like this, I used a free program called Exact Audio Copy (I’ve been told it’s used by the pirates to create very good rips of Music CD’s). This program lets me rip the entire CD into a .mp3 and a .cue file. The .cue file can be used to expand the CD out to its original form with all the tracks if needed.
Issues I’ve faced
One of the issues I’ve faced in implementing these iPods is a combination of the current network setup, Windows and iTunes. When I plug the iPods (or any USB Storage) in, Windows assigns it a drive letter. Letters AB are reserved, C is for the local drive, D is for the CD drive, the plugged in iPod chooses the letter E and then for F we have one of our network drives. So, plugging in one iPod isn’t an issue, it’s just when I try to plug in 2 at once. The second iPod will try to take the drive letter F, but it’s already taken by the network share. iTunes comes up with an error saying “iTunes has detected an iPod in Recovery mode. Use iTunes to restore”. Here is Apples page on the issue.
The solution: We need to tell the iPod to mount on a drive *after* F. To do this you:
Charging the iPods
For charging the iPods, I’ve requested quotes from a few different places to obtain some Powered USB Hubs. The idea of this is that they won’t need a computer to charge, but I can plug a computer in to the hub to sync 5 iPods at once.
I looked at getting a proper iPod Docking station, however they’re around $1000 each. A powered USB hub is somewhere closer to $10-$20.
Headphones
The problem with the headphones that come with the iPods is that they sit in your ear. This would help ear infections to spread so we decided against using them. Instead we’re still awaiting replies from a few different suppliers to see about getting some nice sturdy headphones that don’t actually touch the ear and instead they cup over the ear. Our aim is to spend no more than $20 per set.
Security
iPods are small, small enough to be easily stolen. We’ve distributed the iPods as 5 per teacher in Yr 6 and made them responsible for locking them up every night after school and keeping track of them. Hopefully this way none of them will go missing.
Part 2 of this guide will be about what we’re using the iPods for, a few educational resource links and other issues that have arisen with the iPods.
Update: 27/1/17 – This cleaning stuff is good, but I personally use now a mixture of ~10% isopropol alcohol and 90% water with a Microfibre cloth.
Part of my job at my school involves making sure the computers are clean.
Today I figure I’ll cover something that I get a lot of people asking me about: How do I clean LCD screens?
Now, I’ve heard people in the industry say “Use watered down Windex!”…. Don’t do this.
Windex contains Ammonia, Ammonia degrades the plastic coating on your screen.
(I also heard somewhere that it can also make your screen get a yellowy tint).
Of course, if you’re one of those people who has always been cleaning with Windex, it does take a while of cleaning before you’ve ruined the screen.
For cleaning LCD screens, I use a microfiber cloth, it won’t leave any bits of cloth on your screen like your standard rag would and as for the cleaning agent I use some special LCD/Plasma Screen Cleaning Spray.
LCD Cleaner
This stuff is great, it’s cheap, you can pick something similar up from BigW. Getting one that has a dispenser for the cloths is also good and with tricky folding you can clean up to 16 screens with one cloth. It leaves no streak marks and requires no hard rubbing and fingerprints just disappear.
Long as you get a decent size bottle of it (the one in the picture I would call a decent size bottle), it will last you for ages. I clean the 32 laptops here every 1-2 months and the bottle is still about 2/3 full.
Good Luck Cleaning 🙂
Ducky
Today I went shopping for video cameras to use in the school. I had been looking around for suitable ones for a little while. People were telling me Sony, others were telling me Panasonic or JVC.
We had a few requirements:
Movie Maker is the real deal breaker with all the cameras I got a look at.
I contacted the local Camera House shop with my set of requirements and got a reply back later that day with a set of recommended cameras and an invitation to come check them all out. I didn’t think to bring an SD card with me so I could take some footage back to check it with Movie Maker. Instead the sales guy loaned me a 2gig card with some footage on it so I could test it out with Movie Maker (what a nice chap).
Note, I tested the cameras with movie maker (standard install) then installed the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack and tried again (no camera worked straight out of the box with Windows Movie Maker).
Camera 1: Panasonic SDR-7
This camera felt really small and light. It focused pretty quickly, which is a good thing for kids and moving the camera about a lot. Very easy to use and deals with low light alright too.
The camera was recommended to me by the ICT support group for my school.
While it was great in terms of usage, it was an Standard Definition camera and that really showed on the test footage.
As you can see from this picture, there’s interlacing going on, it looks a lot worse when you pan too quickly too. Also note, to get my computer to even read the file, I had to rename it from .MOD to .MPEG, Windows Movie Maker accepted the file but wouldn’t display any video. After I installed the Codec Pack… Still no video 🙁
Panasonic SDR7
Camera 2: The Sanyo CG9 (See Edit)
This camera was nice, it has a nice feel to it, held more like a gun than a camera. Super easy to use, takes photos as well as video. The focus time was a bit slower, however that’s mainly because of the bigger lens, so it takes higher resolution shots with the downside that it takes a little longer to focus.
In terms of image quality, this camera is great. It records into MP4 format. I attempted to get it into Movie Maker and it wouldn’t accept the file at all. After installing codecs… No Change. There was a program that would let me change the file format to AVI (it wasn’t converting, merely changing the file container) and it worked, imported it into movie maker just fine. Is it an ideal solution? Well.. No. It’s a bit of a hassle to get kids to do that.
Sanyo CG9
So, my next step is to find appropriate video editing software, free would be great. The cameras come with a copy of Pinnacle Studio, so I’m downloading an evaluation copy of that to test out now. Of course, I could just get the school a Mac 😉
I’ll update this post as I do more testing.
Ducky
EDIT: After downloading the Pinnacle Studio Trial version and giving it a whirl, the process seems fairly simple, a little harder than iMovie, WAY more stable and more features than Windows Movie Maker. It accepted both movie files without a problem.
Has a great little button to grab the media off the inserted memory card (even if I could get it to work with Windows Movie Maker, I’d have to find the media on the card first).
Some buttons are a little hard to find.. I’d create a title, look at if for 20seconds going “Now what?” then I see this little button in the corner saying “OK”. It’s a tad slow, came up with “Not Responding” a few times (cleared up after 5-10seconds) and seems to like to render the video a lot (it re-rendered the same scene like 3 times for no reason).
On my gaming PC (2.2ghz Core2Duo with 4gigs of ram and a beefy video card) it did seem to take a little bit when swapping modes (Transitions to Video Clips to Titles for example). Hopefully it’s not too much slower on the HP550 Laptops…
EDIT2: The CG9 is actually the cost effective version of the CG10. The one I actually used was the CG10. The CG10 offers better video quality than the CG9 and only takes 10MP Photos compared to the CG9 that takes 9MP photos.
Laptop Storage
Vs
Revolution 8 Bay Wall Cage
What’s the difference? $900 and a padlock.
Because there isn’t many suppliers of products like this, a few companies have a monopoly on these laptop cages. Of course, the padlock is a good idea, though we keep all ours locked away anyway.
Here’s a link to the Revolution website
What about iPods then?
On the note of storage units like this, I’ve been looking at ones for iPods (I’ll explain about the iPods later). I found one that looked pretty nice, it’s a 15 iPod Charge/Sync Machine. I liked the look of it and contacted the seller of the item (They’re based in the US). They sent me a quote that said:
SC15A Sync/Charge/Organize Desktop Station
List Price – $899
Discount Price – $699 (I guess he’s giving me a bit of a discount.. for no reason..)
Here’s the catch: Shipping/Handling & Insurance: $175
… That’s a lot of postage for a very expensive product.
So, the total price, $874USD… That’s $1327 AUD….. for a device that lets me charge 15 iPods at once…. My planned solution: A $10 Powered USB Hub… with lots of flashing lights inside it (it seems, the more tacky it is, the cheaper it is).
15 Slot iPod Charge Station
Here’s a link to the Tribeam website with the iPod Charging Stations
Leave a comment if you know of any cheaper ways to do these things and I’ll check them out.
Ducky.
This post should be aptly subtitled “How to get applications to do what you want.”
There’s a program called Kindy Manager, it’s used for tracking child enrolments in After School Care stuff. This program also syncronises itself with the government CCMS, which is where we were having problems.
See, this program required use of the internet and offered no support for proxy servers.
I’ve heard the “horror” stories from the other schools, some schools paid for another phone line so they could get an extra internet connection that didn’t run through the proxy server (also, the other connection could not be linked up to the school network at all due to security reasons). Other schools had to move their Kindy Manager Database onto a laptop (that is, taking the database off the server and putting it on a workstation), taking that laptop home and running the connection through their home internet connection. The other way was to use one of those NextG cards for it (and sign up to a 12/24 month contract too).
So anyway, I figured I’d do something about it.
I sent off a friendly (but firm) email to the Kindy Manager guys explaining the situation and asked them what to do about it. Sure enough, I get a call later that day (awesome service) which started the ball rolling.
It’s less than 2 weeks since I started talking to them about the proxy issue (the first email was sent on the 5th Mar 09 and it’s now the 17th Mar 09) and the updated version will be available tomorrow from the Kindy Manager website.
Obviously, this method wouldn’t quite work with Microsoft, but when it comes to smaller software development companies, you could just trying asking nicely.
Here’s a few hints: When asking them about adding in a new feature, make sure you explain who you are and your role. Then explain what you (or other people) are doing to get around the problem and how much of a waste of time/pain it is to have to do the work around.
Don’t forget correct contact details and to be quite polite, software companies don’t want to have to deal with angry users.
Remember that software companies build their software for you, the user. Make sure you let them know exactly what would make their software a better thing to work with.
Ducky.
EDIT (18th March): So, we got the new beta copy to test out.. Looks like proxies are sort of working, but there’s a few more bugs to work out… Won’t be long now 😛
EDIT2 (20th March): Waiting on the bugs to be fixed 😛
This is my first real post 🙂
So, our school bought 30 HP550 notebooks, with the idea that we could use 5 of them in each Year 5 and 6 classroom. We ordered them Tuesday… they arrived Friday (don’t you just love speedy delivery?)
Here’s the HP website with the specs of the laptop: http://tinyurl.com/cwnqyc
Now, all the computers we have in our school run off an Image, and the image is the same as the other schools nearby with the exception of a few files, each laptop takes about 45minutes to image and set up to be working with our school (most of the time is spent in the imaging phase, copying the files over etc).
It was doing this image that I realised, they only come with a 10/100 Network card (a real bummer since we upgraded our school switches to gigabit last year). These laptops were destined for wireless anyway, so it’s not too much of an issue 😉
The build quality of the laptops is good, with one horrible fatal flaw. The mouse buttons are TERRIBLE. 1/3 of the clicks on the button just don’t make it to the computer. So you sit there hitting the button hard every time and that’s probably breaking it and making it even worse later down the track.
To fix this, we bought 30 mouses to go with them.
The “upgrade” from the HP530 to the HP550 would have been just perfect if they had kept the same buttons from the HP530.
I just hope that HP realise that the buttons are terrible and do something about it for the next model. I know I’m reccommending that we don’t buy any more HP550 laptops until they come out with a newer model.
As for some of the other parts, the Battery life is great. We stack them all up at the end of the day and plug them into the charger, they sit on the kids desks throughout the day. I haven’t heard of any issues of them running out of battery at all.
Speed wise they’re pretty snappy too, we got all ours with added memory, they’re all on 2gb of RAM.
Overall, they’re a very nice, well built laptop with the sole exception of the mouse button being terrible. If you’re looking at buying some for yourself/your school, make sure you get external mouses with them.
Ducky.
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.
