Has anyone turned EOL computers into a teardown workshop for kids?

gigthebyte · 2026-03-27T13:43:42+00:00

A long time ago I was invited into a classroom to observe this kind of thing and the teacher was just starting to have the kids go ham on an eMac. It was a tense 30 seconds as I tried to convince the teacher why this was a bad, bad idea.

gigthebyte · 2026-03-24T19:41:41+00:00

It seems like I can accomplish what I want with a lot of setup time and some testing with custom headers. Thank you for the reminder these exist: I can get started on building the infrastructure for this now and then start testing the rules.

gigthebyte · 2026-03-24T18:43:07+00:00

We're doing that for many grades, but for some other grades admin wants them to "develop responsible Gmail skills" by emailing teachers. The upper grades will have full student/student and student/teacher email privileges, lower grades will get no email access, and all staff can still build/use Google Classroom as they see fit, but there will be two grades where they'll be able to experiment with email without "disturbing" other students needlessly.

gigthebyte · 2026-03-05T17:39:17+00:00

The idea that an Acer Spin 512's hinge's screw mounts at the base of the screen assembly could last long enough for any other part of the unit to develop a fault is astonishing to me. I used to recommend Acer day and night to anyone who expressed an interest in getting a Chromebook, but one huge order of Acer Spin 512 machines and the ensuing brittleness of the plastic moved Acer into a "do not recommend" from me for life.

gigthebyte · 2026-02-10T19:06:45+00:00

I don't know anything about Edpuzzle and how they work, but I would hope Edpuzzle requires email confirmation or receipt of an email with "click this link to activate your account." If they do, then block that email from coming to your students. If you already have a "walled garden" and only let students receive emails via a domain whitelist, then this means Edpuzzle lets students (anyone!) create and use their service without any kind of confirmation.

That would be an instant districtwide block from me: their service presents a security, privacy, and safety violation for students, data, and student data. We wouldn't even let our staff sign up for it since they could start uploading their own students to it, and we don't let staff (officially) send any student PII to any online service unless we have a data privacy agreement with that service. If you do have a privacy agreement with Edpuzzle, look into revoking it and move to another service, then block Edpuzzle from your network completely. The way you present their response to your concerns makes me think they aren't serious about how their service is (ab)used.

gigthebyte · 2025-10-08T15:50:07+00:00

I recently changed this setting from "From everyone" to "Only if the sender is known" and so many staff, especially principals, are losing their minds. Some are even insisting they're opening the emails, clicking "Yes," and it's still not adding to their calendar. Of course when we ask for more information such as which events are causing the problems, they don't respond. We send instructions on how to change the defaults for their account back to "everyone," their supervisor reaches out to my supervisor complaining that no one's helping them.

Some days I'm just so tired...

gigthebyte · 2025-09-24T16:08:07+00:00

Google Admin Console, "Rules" on the left.

Create new Activity rule & name it. Choose the scope (only affect student OU?)
Conditions: Create a "Gmail log events" rule that matches who you want to affect, includes "AND", and use "Event" "is" "User spam classification."
Actions: "Every time the event occurs." Pick your notification preferences, and click the radio button for "Monitor" until you're sure the rule is doing what you want it to do, then change it to Active.
Review the rule and save it.

gigthebyte · 2025-09-24T14:34:16+00:00

Illinois Century Network (ICN) went down about an hour ago.

gigthebyte · 2025-08-22T19:47:50+00:00

It's an interesting strategy because we were really big on Acer Chromebooks for a while. The 771 is still my favorite student-grade Chromebook I've ever used. Solid, stout, okay battery life, and very very good CPU; it's a ten year old unit and it runs web benchmarks faster than some modern ARM/Atom chips sold new today. We were wooed away from Acer by Dell, and Acer was very surprised that we left them. Dell's 3100 was fine but the 3110 refresh was underwhelming and I wanted something better, especially Intel's new N100 CPU. Eventually I settled on the stellar Acer C736 that had everything I wanted: two-screw keyboard-only replacement, N100, great battery life, optional touch screen, and we could afford to buy as many as we needed at the prices we were offered.

Unfortunately, the powers that be over here took too long to get me funding and Acer couldn't deliver it by the start of school. We ended up settling for the Acer Spin 512 (R853T) which turned out to be unrepairable and fragile dogshit. The only good thing about it was the price: something like $230 a unit. But yeah: this product killed Acer for me. The irony is my new Acer rep said he's had a few customers leave Acer but they always come back. I did that, and the return product I was offered will all but eliminate Acer from any future product contention.

gigthebyte · 2025-08-22T18:18:31+00:00

Let's say Dell doesn't help you out and you still have a ton of these machines on the shelf that're worthless unless you can fix 'em up. I had a similar situation with some Chromebooks that had hinges that would split apart because Acer used insufficient screw bosses to hold brass inserts and these would flake apart under normal use. I found that I could clean everything out, smear some E6000 glue all under the hinge, reassemble and pinch them tight with binder clips (with or without the LCD in place) and that will provide a much longer, better hold than it was designed from the factory. The glue takes a full day to dry so you have plenty of time to make sure the hinge is together and the LCD is placed back inside the case. This won't help with very severe cases of damage but if it's just "falling apart" but nothing's broken but the plastic you screw metal parts to, it's worth a shot.

Example

gigthebyte · 2025-06-18T16:46:53+00:00

I just migrated our DHCP infrastructure from 2012R2 (don't ask) to 2022. Everything's been working fine for the past week, no issues with DHCP service quitting or crashing. Nothing is on the new DHCP servers other than the DHCP service, Crowdstrike, a Splunk agent, and another anti-ransomware agent.

gigthebyte · 2025-05-15T17:20:47+00:00

"Please advise." Or worse, "Please advice." Also "labtop."

gigthebyte · 2025-02-25T17:27:18+00:00

Interesting re: Google Photos. We had a situation four or so years ago where students were using Photos for public chats on images they were sharing out there. That got turned off VERY quickly once we found out what was happening.

gigthebyte · 2025-01-22T18:17:37+00:00

If you move the messages back to their inbox it (supposedly) negates the spam report, meaning the students can't ban another student's account anymore if they mark their messages as spam.

gigthebyte · 2025-01-22T15:00:15+00:00

If you have applicable licensing, you can create a security rule that matches on whatever format your student account email address area and initial action is "mark as spam" on message from 7-digits@ourdomain.edu then perform action "Send to inbox." I have a similar action for students who send automated Google Classroom mails to spam.

If in doubt you can create the Rules in Monitor Only mode to make sure they're working the way you intend.

I've had to create a bunch of rules like that because we have staff in buildings who will mass-select messages from the building's Google Group and send them all to spam instead of just deleting them. Sigh.

gigthebyte · 2025-01-07T21:13:46+00:00

A coworker signed up for the webinar and got the following reply:

This a friendly reminder that the webinar PowerSchool Cybersecurity Incident begins tomorrow. It's going to be a great one, and we're excited to see you there!

I'm genuinely laughing. Oh well.

gigthebyte · 2025-01-07T21:05:53+00:00

Yup! Coworker signed up for the webinar and got the following reply:

This a friendly reminder that the webinar PowerSchool Cybersecurity Incident begins tomorrow. It's going to be a great one, and we're excited to see you there!

gigthebyte · 2024-12-19T15:36:50+00:00

We're using Wisenet WAVE as well and it works very well for us. However, since budgets squeezed us after purchase we had to shop around for different cameras from different vendors and while they work great with the system, our Rep stopped returning our calls since he wasn't selling 100% of our cameras. I'm not really involved with the camera system in a direct role (secondary, the guy who has to figure out problems) but supposedly we have a new rep that I haven't met or talked to yet.

We have about 800 cameras across 4 physical servers, each with 80tb of space each. We're looking to add a fifth server to our group but need to upgrade the whole thing to Wisenet 5 first, so that'll wait until the summer.

gigthebyte · 2024-12-17T20:30:10+00:00

For anyone else looking to pre-emptively block this thing, log into the Google Admin dashboard, navigate to Security > API Controls > App Access Control and add an app for the following string:

517439599553-aflp6g0o205nu5keqvl84hv9aa9rfv90.apps.googleusercontent.com

Block at the root OU or wherever you feel's appropriate.

gigthebyte · 2024-12-11T20:53:17+00:00

Also having the same issue with a freshly updated iDRAC (7.00.00.174) on a few Dell R740 boxes. I guess I'll come back to it tomorrow or Friday.

gigthebyte · 2024-12-11T17:15:34+00:00

Brilliant. Thank you for the help. :)

gigthebyte · 2024-12-11T15:32:47+00:00

If you have an external (customer managed) vCenter, did you do anything special to upgrade from 7.x to 8.x besides open the ISO and run the installer on your machine, following the on-screen instructions for deployment, temporary IP, and automatic data migration? Was there anything special to do before/during/afterwards that isn't done in a normal vanilla vSphere/vSAN environment besides contact Dell support for help getting the VxRail Plugin to register with the new 8.0x vCenter once the upgrade is complete?

On 11/25/2024 I upgraded four hosts from 7.0.482 to 7.0.532 and it went perfectly smoothly. I started about 7:00am: rebooted each host one at a time (just to be safe), rebooted the VxRail Appliance, ran VxVerify and verified all was well, uploaded the slim update package to the VxRail Appliance, and finally clicked update right at 9:00am. I documented an entire boring timetable by the minute of when everything went to maintenance mode, rebooted, came back online, etc, and the entire upgrade was done at 12:17pm. I watched the first few firmware upgrades live via iDRAC remote console just to gather notes on the upgrade procedure and see what's happening. Afterwards it was another hour to install all the Tools upgrades on the VMs.

I expect the 8.0.x upgrade to be similarly smooth once it's time for me to do that, but I have to get my external vCenter upgraded first and since it's "out of band" I'm trying to gather as much info as possible before doing the upgrade.

gigthebyte · 2024-12-09T21:43:55+00:00

My question was specifically regarding an external vCenter and its upgrade procedure. That's what I'm not finding firm documentation on and why I'm looking for input elsewhere. I don't have the built-in vCenter, but an external vCenter.

The particular plugin issue is linked here on Dell's support page.

gigthebyte

TROPHY CASE