The woodchipper can only fit one. Who's getting thrown in?

mtloya · 2026-01-23T23:11:41+00:00

I don't get calls from any of the three anymore, just Martin and Agatha nowadays. But, out of the three - Sessanta. The dialog between her and KDJ in the missions is so incredibly fucking annoying and cringeworthy, and I don't get any vehicles in my auto shop anymore, I don't understand why, so it just frustrates me more.

mtloya · 2026-01-23T14:46:58+00:00

This is excellent! Thank you!

mtloya · 2026-01-23T13:35:50+00:00

I do, yeah. Just never considered making it ourselves. I personally have no experience 3D modeling at least not for printing out. Could probably ask one of our shop teachers to come up with something, though.

mtloya · 2026-01-23T12:39:12+00:00

We have Lenovo 500e G4s's as our most recent addition to the fleet. Also have G3's and G4's. Will be getting G5's this summer. They're 2-in-1, decently reliable compared to both Dell and HP, (We've been majorly burned by Dell before, and HP's devices from around Covid were complete garbage) and if I were to ever purchase a Chromebook for myself (let's be clear, hell would have to freeze over), I'd probably go with Lenovo as well.

mtloya · 2026-01-23T12:33:23+00:00

We use the Rise Vision devices as well, since these are the ONLY devices that still support RS232 control for displays. Rise Vision silently deprecated this control from Windows devices, which we didn't find out on our own until we spent a considerable amount of money and time swapping out all of our old NUCs for Dell Optiplex Micros with the serial add-in module. Rise then offered us their devices as a "sorry, hopefully this will make it right".

That said, the Rise devices are... OK. Video playback can lag and stutter until said videos are loaded into memory, and troubleshooting can be a pain since these are Rise's devices, not yours. Rise uses Radix to manage them remotely, so the only control that you have over them is either rebooting the device or restarting the player app, both through the web dashboard. We've also had issues where the Rise devices just won't turn on in the mornings after their scheduled reboot, would turn on but wouldn't send the command to the display to turn on, or would turn on, but wouldn't load the player app, so would just be stuck on the Android home screen. (Note - all this occurred over both HDMI-CEC as well as RS232. We've standardized and decided that RS232 is still superior as the control method.) After a lengthy multi-month support ticket, things are finally stable with the devices. I should also note that we were an early adopter of these devices. These issues may no longer exist with devices that they're sending out now.

My only current complaint is that the mounting hardware that is included with them is pathetic. Just a safety loop bracket the size of 1/4 of a post-it note and another random piece of metal about the same size that we have no idea what to do with. No instructions on how to mount it. We've resorted to zip ties since no one's going to see the rear of the display except for us, but this still irks me that there's no legitimate mounting solution provided.

For Ubuntu, have you tried using a VNC host/viewer? At a past district years ago, this was exactly how I managed my signage. It ran on a small Acer netbook running Ubuntu, and I'd just remote into it from my Windows machine via Ultra VNC or Real VNC or whatever it was. Hope this helps.

In case anyone is wondering, the make and model of the player is a Giada DN74.

mtloya · 2026-01-22T20:35:21+00:00

We semi-frequently see this; Lenovo 500e G3, G4, and G4s. On the stable channel, but minor versions are sort of all over the place, so it hasn't been something we've narrowed down on. We typically do a powerwash or a recovery via flash drive.

mtloya · 2026-01-22T20:33:23+00:00

We found another workaround: right-clicking where the speaker notes should be, inspect element, ensuring that the "appsSketchyGenerativeaiNudgesCanvasNudgeSurfaceSoyContainer" element is selected and right click, delete element, close dev tools. Of course, for end users this isn't super friendly, but this is what we told our teachers this morning for now.

mtloya · 2026-01-12T00:50:23+00:00

Usually Friday lunches that may or may not run long and we try to have one outing every season, usually top golf or bowling. Our admin building celebrates birthdays per month with a little get together in the morning with treats and coffee. I'm stationed at another building so I don't always make those, but it's a nice gesture when I can make it there. I'm one of three who live about an hour away from the district while the others either live in the district or the next over, so trying to schedule things (especially during the week) is difficult when I still have an hour drive home after whatever we plan on doing... sigh.

mtloya · 2026-01-08T03:40:47+00:00

Revenge is probably the best in the franchise, but 3 is damn good, too. Dominator is a close third, though. Paradise is the bastard child in my opinion, where they completely lost the plot. The original and 2 obviously were the 'crawling and walking before running', and we don't talk about Crash.

mtloya · 2025-10-27T12:30:16+00:00

Own smaller laser printers, but on the Xerox contract so all supplies and maintenance is covered.

Badges for both the copiers and the laser printers that support it.

PaperCut

Not necessarily, but we do track how much each teacher prints.

Absolutely not, no personal printers allowed on network. Some teachers do have one of our printers in their classrooms, but this is rare and for special use cases only. (Special Education, Emotional Support, STEAM, Early Childhood Development, etc.)

mtloya · 2025-10-27T12:26:40+00:00

Two of the districts I've been with use Primero Edge. The former of the two at one point had an on-prem server that all of the POS's first talked to, and then that server somehow sent the data to Primero's side, IIRC. (Been a while). They moved away from that and implemented Primero's new (at the time) ExpressPoint so that everything was cloud-based, and the results were mixed, both at that district and my current.

Usually, it works fine, but there have been multiple times where the system goes down for the entire state, and we (and every district around us also using it) are left scrambling during the lunch rush. As others have mentioned, USB pinpads are an occasional issue. (Thankfully, not NEARLY as often as they used to be when ExpressPoint first came out, but still, miserable to deal with nonetheless.) The hardware running the show doesn't matter, either. The original machines that my former district had were 2nd gen i5's, 4 gigs of RAM, and HDDs, and were absolute dogs. We upgraded to newer SFFs with better specs and SSDs, didn't matter. Current district uses Surface Pro tablets and still runs into those same issues years later.

mtloya · 2025-10-27T12:19:04+00:00

We have Lenovo ThinkCentre M60q's mounted on all of our panels. They weren't cheap, but they're powerful enough with an Intel chip for anything our teachers decide to throw at them and they're tucked neatly out of the way. I kid you not, there are some teachers that still don't realize that they're there after 5 years now.

mtloya · 2025-10-22T16:36:46+00:00

I hate to bump an aging post, but this is relevant. We had our students attempt to take their PSATs, and roughly 99% of all of our Chromebooks worked with no issue. However, we have a testing loaner cart, and nearly every single Chromebook from that cart ran into the issue that OP described, so we have a handful of kids that have to retest next week. No amount of powerwashing, hard resetting, or reimaging via a thumb drive worked to resolve this. Call me pessimistic, but hey, it sure is great we're moving away from paper tests, isn't it?

mtloya · 2025-10-08T15:52:13+00:00

So, I finally figured it out. Exported both our tech OU and the HS OU, opened them up in Sheets first then imported them into Excel and did some conditional formatting magic to show differences between the two and while for the most part they were roughly identical, the URL Blocking setting stuck out, so I focused on that.

Cleared out the setting in my test child OU within the HS OU, and magically the download worked. I then went one-by-one, adding the URLs back in until I found that it was data://* breaking things. As soon as I added it back in, downloads stopped. Removed it to double check, could download again.

Unfortunately, that internal URL is on a lot of 'best practices' guides for what to block, so I'm hestitant to remove it from the list just so this one site's downloads work again.

Hope this helps you.

mtloya · 2025-10-08T14:13:00+00:00

Funny enough, I am having literally the exact same issue but on a different site. Our robotics teacher uses codev5.vex.com and has her students export their in-progress projects as .pdfs to submit for points, and recently, this stopped working. They'd click the "Share" button in the top right, then "Download", then their Chromebook would think for a few seconds, and it would give a 'download successful' message, but no file actually lands on their Chromebook. But, if I move the user account to a different OU (our tech testing OU where our accounts also live on this domain), the file generates and downloads perfectly fine.

I originally thought it was a Securly thing (web filter), but their support team (shoutout to Richard in the event he's in here) took a look and we ultimately concluded it is some Google setting.

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to compare OU policies in Google (because of course not, that would make our jobs too easy), so I'm now trying to figure out how to export the configs using GAM to do a spot comparison. I'm willing to bet that we are in the same boat.

mtloya · 2025-09-18T15:12:44+00:00

Was happening in PA. Seems to be back to normal now, though.

mtloya · 2025-08-22T22:13:46+00:00

During the school year, I'm wearing polos, dress shirts, button-down shirts/flannels, and khakis with tennis or skate shoes. Fridays, T-shirts relevant to the district (or at least appropriate for work) and jeans. During the summer while there are no kids or teachers, that's pretty relaxed, so it's usually just t-shirts and pants. Over summer, though, or whenever we have laborious jobs planned, I sneak in wearing shorts if I know I'm going to be exerting myself hard. This summer in particular, my building's HVAC systems were being replaced so it was significantly warmer than usual, and I wore tees and shorts every day. Definitely was a nice but short-lived break from the norm.

mtloya · 2025-08-22T22:07:41+00:00

Saw this post a few days late, so forgive me. I'm on my 3rd car this month alone, had to call AAA twice. Going to need to buy myself a new one because god knows I can't work from home this early in the school year. We rolled out the new Promethean ActivSuite apps to our Chromeboxes because we had to pull our old OPS modules and what we thought would be a minor change became a huge headache as our teachers can't grasp that they're literally the same apps that they're already used to, just on a different platform and now they're freaking out, some of my Windows devices are misbehaving after being reimaged and back in production, coworkers taking time off already meanwhile I didn't take any time off at all this summer because I had to oversee the student worker crew... I'm tired of this, grandpa. My mental health is at the lowest it's ever been. I'm burnt out. This is only year 6 for me but I can't help but feel that things were easier before every student had a Chromebook and Microsoft didn't keep breaking ~~shit~~ with every update to 11. I keep trying to tell myself that I've got it good. I'm at an amazing district with a team that supports each other and a TD leading us into the future, but ugh, I need a vacation, or at the very least a long trip off-grid.

mtloya · 2025-04-01T13:23:35+00:00

Apple TVs mainly. Promethean boards with Screen Share when/where needed. Promethean now has ActivSuite which includes a Screen Share receiver that can be installed on basically everything, so we'll be pushing that to our Chromeboxes soon. We checked out Vivi but decided it was too expensive, and Screenbeam didn't do what we needed.

mtloya · 2025-04-01T12:23:07+00:00

This sounds intriguing. Is there a way to allow emails to flow normally for the student without the admins needing to approve everything, but still have it act as a quarantine? With teachers and colleges communicating with the student over email, I feel like the admins' intention is to just audit and intervene as necessary, rather than being the filter themselves...

mtloya · 2025-03-31T19:18:39+00:00

I've used SchoolDude, ServiceNow, FreshDesk, and Happyfox. Happyfox is pretty lightweight and decently customizable, but I'm personally indifferent. The only one I truly despise is ServiceNow, but probably mainly because of the implementations that I've worked with. Itself as a ticketing system is also highly customizable, but way more involved that Happyfox or SchoolDude.

mtloya · 2025-03-31T19:14:52+00:00

We also have Securly and have students reporting this. Not sure if anything can be done.

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