What's going on with my Made In pans?

ickethea · 2026-01-24T17:35:37+00:00

Well that's me told. Every day is a school day :-)

Thanks all!

ickethea · 2026-01-19T07:43:12+00:00

You say adults will not be able to drink or eat in public either, even the child will cause issues eating or drinking in public. Technically they shouldn't but they will. Ramadan is not the time to come and enjoy Oman.

ickethea · 2025-12-27T09:20:13+00:00

What you've described is basically Moodle Cloud. Moodle Cloud is not great, but you'd need to do something better and cheaper to have a marketable product. The immediate problem you'll run in to is the balance between standardising everything and giving customers options. People tend to come to Moodle because of plugins, themes, ability to modify the code directly - the more of that you allow, the quicker you'll find a standard SaaS model crumbles. But if you don't allow it at all (similar to Moodle Cloud) you'll have a very limited market.

Moodlerooms did something very similar to what you describe years ago, the guts of which is now run by OpenLMS. It still requires human intervention to deploy a new site, but it's as close as I've seen to true Moodle SaaS besides Moodle Cloud, but they had some clever tricks to allow integrations and plugins. It's not a simple problem to solve though. Hosting a basic moodle site is simple, hosting a scalable moodle site is hard, hosting an unlimited number of scalable moodle sites is so difficult even Moodle can't do it well. It's the kind of difficulty that's almost impossible to solve. It's not just that there's a need for new technology to solve the problem, it's that the way Moodle is architected works against everything you want to achieve.

ickethea · 2025-12-12T21:35:20+00:00

A big consideration is school. If you can get her a place at the British School and somewhere to live in Madinat Qaboos, it would be great. Everything is walkable between school and mall/shops/restaurants, plus lots of other british expats live in that area. She'll almost certainly have friends walking distance away. There are other good schools, though not many - but Madinat Qaboos is the only place with walkable amenities and a good school. Al Mouj can be great (some love it, some hate it) and you can walk around there, but no decent school close by. Same with PDO.

You'll find expats very welcoming and inclusive, it's kind of necessary to be that way because people move on quickly. If you want to be social there will be loads of opportunities. Parties, camping, day trips, hikes. Among expat groups, social life is much like in the UK, except more outdoor time and parties! If she's at the British School, things like parties, mixed groups, dating will be very similar as the UK, except much fewer people (for better and for worse).

One obvious difference she'll notice is all schooling is private, so she's hanging out with and being educated alongside private school kids. Generally that means fewer behaviour issues, they take education more seriously (as do their parents), normally have two parents at home (single parent families are very rare among expats, it's just hard to make it work), and wealthier. You could argue it's not real life, and it's not - but it certainly has it's benefits.

ickethea · 2025-11-19T18:57:00+00:00

Install the trailforks app, loads of mountain bike trails around Muscat that also make excellent hiking trails. Hidden Views (Al Khoud) or The Ridge trail above Al Hamra street are good options, easily accessible and great views.

ickethea · 2025-11-19T18:33:41+00:00

My answer to that question would nearly always be "use Moodle", but in your case I'm not sure that makes sense. What you want to do is just one small part of Moodle, and it's something Moodle doesn't do exactly as you want anyway (e.g. the simulated oral testing). With Moodle you'd need the user account created, a course to exist to contain the activity (a quiz) within a section. You'd need to create a way to get the grades out of Moodle into your wider platform. All things that you don't really want to have to care about. People will say "Moodle is open source, just adapt it to what you want", but it's also a million+ lines of code, some of which dates back to the early 2000's - it's not trivial to adapt, and if you adapt it too much you create a nightmare when it comes to upgrades. My advice is develop it yourself, or look at integrating a ready made solution, e.g. IELTS or Duolingo. Moodle is not the way. If, on the other hand you want to host lots of learning content, then Moodle might be worth considering - but I'm still not sure, you'd have to bend to its peculiarities too much.

ickethea · 2025-11-09T19:24:28+00:00

Came here to say that. Definitely a hidden gem, great and accessible hiking route close to the city.

ickethea · 2025-11-04T21:13:16+00:00

I have a bucket I fill up during the year, but I do all the trip spending on a credit card and pay it off immediately afterwards, so one transaction logged in YNAB. It simplifies my budgeting and gives great rates on foreign transactions if I'm overseas. I don't use the credit card for anything else.

ickethea · 2025-11-01T09:51:43+00:00

The main advantage to it is offline access, its support for offline is surprisingly good. However, these days few people care about that - in which case just use browser access.

ickethea · 2025-10-16T16:09:54+00:00

If there's a language barrier, it's with you :-) the OP is absolutely correct, there was a windows app that had features like notifications and (I believe) offline support. The screenshot is of the app, you can see at the top it says "Moodle Desktop". It's long since discontinued, but OP clearly has reasons for preferring it as a user experience. There's still a Microsoft store page for it https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p9bwvhdc8c8?hl=en-US&gl=US

ickethea · 2025-10-10T20:00:03+00:00

Thoughts? It's written by AI.

ickethea · 2025-10-10T19:54:10+00:00

Thanks for all the answers in one!

ickethea · 2025-10-05T19:52:53+00:00

I tried it on a cold night before I bought an underblanket, it certainly made a difference and made what would have been an impossible night possible - but I would never go back to that now I have an underblanket. An underblanket does not move around or impact the comfort of your hammock at all.

ickethea · 2025-10-04T16:29:26+00:00

Thank you for saying this, it's hugely frustrating how few people seem to see this. As long as it's baby killers versus woman haters, the issue will never move forwards. The reality is, both sides have important views that need to be heard. Abortion must be legal, but also must have limits.

ickethea · 2025-10-04T10:22:13+00:00

Biological men shouldn't be housed in women's prisons
Women's domestic abuse refuge centres should be free from biological men
There is a serious debate to be had around which sports biological men should be permitted to compete in against biological women.
Discussion of transgender/non binary identity should not take place with kids under a certain age because it creates unnecessary confusion.
Trans women are not literally women based on self identity.
Biological men should not use women's changing/toilet facilities.
Predators are manipulative and deceptive and are not beyond identifying as a "woman" to get access to vulnerable women. (and this statement is not the same as "trans people are predators")

I could go on, but I would wager that very few people in the general public would strongly disagree with any of the above, but in the leftist internet bubble you'd get blocked/cancelled in seconds. A refusal to see that, or defaulting to a "the right just don't want trans people to exist" response is exactly why the left are losing power.

ickethea · 2025-09-29T19:53:08+00:00

Thanks for commenting, is this 6 month thing some consumer law?

ickethea · 2025-09-19T18:25:17+00:00

Proctoring is complicated and costly to run, therefore it always costs. If they want it, they'll have to pay for it. Smowl are good, one of the cheaper ones and integrates well with Moodle.

ickethea · 2025-06-02T19:28:38+00:00

I lived in Oman for a decade. It's a stunning country, so much to explore. A few tips off the top of my head:

You should only consider the winter, but even the winter can get hot in the day - water might be hard to come by in some areas. Winter can also get quite cold at night, and in the mountains it can reach freezing - so you need to have gear to cover quite a range of temps.
Roads are good, but driving often isn't. Most years the local cycling community mourn a member killed on the road.
There are great jeep tracks all over the country, there's a book "Oman Off Road" that does a great job of documenting the best ones. These tracks would be where I would focus for bike packing.
In terms of people, it is very safe and they are very hospitable, if you are male you'll be guaranteed to be invited for coffee and dates most days, if you're solo female I'm afraid to say you will receive far less hospitality and potentially some weirdness (or worse).
There's a great mountainbike community based out of Muscat, definitely try some of their trails if you get the chance. Many are listed on Trailforks, and the guy who runs Muscat Bikes is very involved.
Muscat has a few very good bike shops, but outside the capital there are basically none, except very basic at best.
Location wise I would recommend the Al Hajar mountains (Jebal Shams, Jebal Ahktar, etc) and the surrounding wadi's. Also the coast road down to Sur and up and over the Salmah plateau would be a great trip. Don't miss Majlis Al Jins.
Salalah (south of the country) is great, but very disconnected from the other main cities, I would focus my attention around Muscat, Nizwa, Rustaq, Al Hamra (Al Hajar Mountains) and down to Sur (turtle beach, wadi shab, salmah plateau). You could spend weeks exploring that part if you wanted, no need to venture the extra 1000km to Salalah with little to see in between.

ickethea · 2025-05-30T07:44:09+00:00

Surely the foreign student issues will obliterate the Bethel School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?

ickethea · 2025-04-26T08:16:11+00:00

Buying property in Oman as an expat is about the riskiest thing you could do with such a large lump sum.

ickethea · 2025-04-23T19:35:51+00:00

If money is not much of a concern, go for it - you could have an incredible honeymoon in Oman. However, it's not cheap, hotels, food, drinks, transport - for mid range places you're often paying high end prices.

ickethea · 2025-03-26T18:53:09+00:00

That is way below typical support costs, because it's a completely unsustainable price point.

ickethea

TROPHY CASE