Having finally given up on my Hoover which needed its filters cleaning after every room (seriously!) I found a cheap (relatively) Dyson online at Comet (the animal at £200 is way below Dyson’s own price). I have just been to www.dyson.co.uk to register it and from there drifted across to http://www.jamesdysonfoundation.com/ to have a look at ways they are encouraging engineers. They seem to do stuff with schools and all sorts so if you have young (potential) engineers around you may wish to take a look.

One thing that was a bit depressing was that the downloadable diagram for making your own cyclone was a JPG in a ZIP file. What kind of engineering example is it to put a lossy compression like JPG inside a lossless compressed container (ZIP)? Hardware guys, what do they know?  Once you have downloaded (and unziped!) the diagram you can make your own cyclone but it still doesn’t explain how it extracts the dust. Wikipedia it is then… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclonic_separation

If you’ve not come across this guy check out

In these days of (stories of) obese students, classroom thuggery and global warming comes a story of good news on all fronts:

http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/184326/york-school-virtualises-desktops.html

This seems to be an ideal solution. Talking to teachers about IT I always hear stories of support and administration nightmares and talking to kids about IT in schools I hear of slow boots, crashes, sneaky ways of getting to play games & competitions to see who can make the machine most unbootable. Thin clients should make the support and admin easier (once the initial learning curve is mounted), be less nickable, cheaper to install & gloriously quiet & fast to boot to boot (do you see what I did there?).

One extra thing I would sugest is to use optical mice - teachers who have glued the mice shut to stop kids nicking the balls tend to find them hard to clean!