You may have noticed new flat panel screens of all sizes popping up around Thayer School. Computing Services is currently working on three separate, but related, projects.
We plan doing a test trial by adding screens containing room schedules to M001, M101, and M201. We’ve already installed an early prototype screen on M101. The concept is to show exactly when a conference room is in use so that it can also be used for quick ad-hoc meetings and studying without scheduling conflicts.
The new datalogger and weather station is now installed on the roof of Murdough. We are now working on making the data available for public viewing. Here’s a quick video of the setup on the roof:
In between keeping all things computing running at Thayer, we always have several projects in the works. Here’s a quick overview of projects we’re currently working on or planning. In no particular order…
Email and collaboration tools
Dartmouth’s Council on Computing has constituted a task force to determine Dartmouth’s requirements for future email and collaboration tools. Thayer School’s Director of Computing Services is on the task force and seeks your thoughts on the subject.
Hard drive based back up server
We are a “belt and suspenders” computing staff. To [snip...]
Most, if not all, of the Thayer-based readers of this blog will have used one of the print release stations spread through our building. Each release station requires a computer to run the release software on. The computers at the release stations are not new, but still quite beefy (and power hungry at ~70 watts) for the job they have to do.
Enter the DecTOP. The DecTOP is relatively old technology, designed by AMD years ago, with a 366 MHz AMD [snip...]
When I left you in my last post on saving energy in the computer labs, I had four machines suspending in the M210 computer lab. There were mixed results during the test run. The older, Dell Dimension 4600 computers went to sleep and woke back up without a problem, however the newer Dell Optiplex 745 computers failed to come out of suspend approximately 30% of the time. Try as I might, updating drivers and playing with BIOS and power settings, I was unable to [snip...]
