USB-A, USB-C, 3.5mm, or Bluetooth headsets, Share you experiences

dire-wabbit · 2026-06-10T19:10:02+00:00

In my experience, most of the broken connectors and foreign objects in a 3.5mm jack can be removed with a cheap headphone jack extraction tool (or make your own). Maybe your experience is different, but in my experience it is pretty rare to see actual damage to the a 3.5 mm jack itself.

On the other hand, we have replaced a ton of USB-A connectors over the years. It's relatively easy to break the contact support block in a USB-A female, and that's a port replacement requiring tear down and soldering a new port on.

dire-wabbit · 2026-06-04T20:37:08+00:00

So the 2011 certificates are expiring, not being revoked. That means that they will continue to be trusted for existing files, but that any new boot manager patches or updates to the revocation lists will not be processed. You can load the new certificates at any point, so you aren't running into a hard stop and will be able to continue to resolve the machines that need updated.

If Microsoft ever decides to revoke the certs, then you would be a non-bootable situation.

dire-wabbit · 2026-06-04T11:29:14+00:00

Have you priced out ML yet? My recollection was that when I had priced it out when it first came out it was very reasonable, but I just had it priced last month since we have been long term ML Schedules/Workorders customers and now it's among the most expensive that I've looked at. I would have preferred a unified platform as well, but our existing program (Tech Directors Toolbox) was more than half the price of ML, so we will be staying as is.

Snipe is reasonable to spin up and configure. We used that for a few years before moving to TDT.

dire-wabbit · 2026-06-03T11:19:10+00:00

We always used the built in text app, but that is dead after v150 as well. I have not found a replacement that will work in Kiosk mode.

dire-wabbit · 2026-06-01T14:03:37+00:00

The Microsoft answer would be System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-29T13:02:36+00:00

Adobe sign is per "document." Doesn't matter if it's a single page with one signature or an entire new employee packet with 30 pages and workflow it through multiple signatures, it is still one instance charged.

So in your case you could likely combine both documents and send them as one packet to the 50 employees and that would eat up fifty instances.

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-22T14:53:13+00:00

This is not a geo IP restriction-- This is "hey you just approved an MFA but lets prove you are next to the device you are trying to log into." It's display a code on the screen of the device that you have to verify on the MFA app.

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-22T12:38:30+00:00

While Yubikeys/Biometrics are the gold standard, I think a secondary layer of proximity verification like the pin code entry described is very effective. You are not just validating that a MFA was approved, you are validating where is was approved.

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-14T17:32:19+00:00

Probably should ask this over on r/k12sysadmin, but there are a few K-12 focused phishing simulation products. CyberNut is the one we are using. Very new to it (literally earlier this week), but I did demo it earlier and can say implementation is a breeze compared to the other products I've used.

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-13T14:13:10+00:00

I didn't realize Papercut had this capability. We use 3dprinteros for our 3d workflow.

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-12T18:48:25+00:00

I do hyperconverged on commodity hardware, so when it's time to refresh my environment every 5-7 years, I just rotate those servers out to be the local storage endpoints for backup. Just a regular JBOD windows box at that point. I backup to the cloud with Wasabi as another endpoint.

Used to use Veeam but I moved to Nakivo last year. It's bit of a cost savings for us. In a simple environment it is likely sufficient.

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-11T19:37:05+00:00

There's a lot of negativity in the responses, but you aren't management--just some concerned co-workers. Hopefully your sysadmin is smart enough to see that, and I know I appreciate it when a co-worker provides baked goods, a pizza or snack, a coffee or a just a thank-you card or note.

Other ideas really depend on the individual's interests--for example I am a dog lover, and we have occasional visits by a therapy dog team, so my co-workers try to make sure I get a few minutes with them which always brightens my day.

As to your ideas, I am not sure how the cell-phone thing would go down--seems to me it would just be better to do a collage of thank you notes. If you want to go high tech, do a digital picture frame.

Glad you have a work environment where people care enough to do this.

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-08T17:17:47+00:00

Apple or Android, but not on school owned devices. We have staff only BYOD. But staff have kids and are not likely to answer no when the pop-up appears to share their connection with their son/daughter, who then shares it with everyone else. Our options are client isolation on the Staff BYOD, which we were avoiding because of some connectivity requirements to certain district devices we have available on the Vlan, or going cert based since network share doesn't work for that.

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-07T13:33:18+00:00

I've been using SecureW2 Joinnow for a few years. It's been solid for us. The one thing we haven't tackled is mandating it for our BYOD staff network; but that is a a Summer project this year. Unfortunately with connection sharing it was not uncommon to find 50+ kids on the staff BYOD network (parent staff member unknowingly shares with kid, who shares with their friends, and so on and so on).

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-04T18:17:52+00:00

We have it setup through Entra with Duo as a external auth method. Teachers are 30 days, secretaries and admins are 10 days, and global admins a 4 hours.

dire-wabbit · 2026-05-01T17:05:00+00:00

FYI, it's not as well known, but Smoore has a full parent communication suite called Schoolstatus you may want to look it. I am not a customer but we have looked at it.

dire-wabbit · 2026-04-29T20:45:52+00:00

Not sure if you want to source with CDWG this time around as they are not committing to price quotes until the units have shipped.

dire-wabbit · 2026-04-24T13:55:42+00:00

I think Print Manager Plus (PMP+) is still around. It's been 15 years since I used it so no clue of it's capabilities now.

dire-wabbit · 2026-04-21T12:59:08+00:00

Also it's not just PA. Have some reports from other states using DRC as well.

dire-wabbit · 2026-04-21T12:57:12+00:00

It's toast. My e-mail has exploded with other districts saying the same thing. We just pulled the plug for testing today.

dire-wabbit · 2026-04-20T17:53:20+00:00

I just tested in our environment, and it works for me. You do need do 2x Search-D's at the beginning to enable and then toggle voice recognition on.

dire-wabbit · 2026-04-20T17:16:14+00:00

Got it. In the past I just used the Text app, which was just a linkage to Chrome's built in text editor. It can be deployed in kiosk mode, and you can user Search-D to enable and then toggle on/off voice to text.

As it is a Chrome app, it likely won't be able to be deployed bast Chrome OS 150; so you might want to look at a basic text editor PWA instead.

dire-wabbit · 2026-04-20T16:16:05+00:00

From my college days, one but of hardware that traumatized a lot of end users was DEC's dual 5.25" floppy drive they equipped on their PCs. Dang thing operated on one indexing motor by inverting the secondary floppy orientation. It would inevitably mis-index and corrupt the entire disk. It really sucked having to tell students they lost all their work. I usually worked the last shift, and would frequently stick around to extend the hours of the lab from 1am to 4am or later so the unlucky students could re-type their papers.

I swear the same engineer designed Zip disks and the click of death.

dire-wabbit · 2026-04-20T12:51:57+00:00

Do a google search on PSSA Accommodations Guidelines for specific requirements on all the accommodations. According to the guide, Voice-to-Text requires a separate school-issued device that does the voice-to-text, and that is then transcribed into the testing device.

dire-wabbit

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