rsmck

privacy

EV Privacy : More than just your salary sacrificed?

I'll preface this with saying I do not have a salary sacrifice car (my employer doesn't offer it yet), but many friends and family do. Also, this has a focus on Tesla as this is what I'm most familiar with, but I expect a

consumer rights

Registered Keepers (Or Not?)

I'll preface this with saying I do not have a salary sacrifice car (my employer doesn't offer it yet) or lease car, but many friends and family do. In the UK, the keeper of a vehicle is not necessarily the owner. This is long

theatre

Community Theatre Gatekeeping

Another day, another rant.... what is it about community theatre and 'gatekeeping' - if people want to learn, help them do so!

theatre

A Theatre Wedding

I've been meaning to document this somewhere for over a year but, as in most of my life, 'we get around to it eventually' I got married! (a little over a year ago, as I said, it took a while to write this), in

customer service

WeatherFlow..oh no, that's not included.

WeatherFlow make decent weather stations, but their customer service is appalling!

techbodgery

BOCA IMAGE (sort of)

The BOCA MiniMB (Now Lemur) printer has become a de facto standard in theatres and other entertainment venues for ticket printing. Unlike Zebra (which has numerous excellent online tools like Labelary's Free Online Editor for their ZPL language), tooling for the BOCA FGL (Friendly

techbodgery

WLED and ETC Eos

TL;DR - At the time of writing this there is no official profile for the WLED ESP-based LED controller, so I've put this one here so I can find it again (and for anyone else who needs one)  https://rmlx.co.uk/eos_

aviation

NATS AFPEx Mac

This page is probably only useful to GA pilots in the UK, if you don't know what NATS or AFPEx is then you're in the wrong place! AFPEx is the UK service offered by NATS as a gateway into the AFTN for filing flight

customer service

time4stress?

Avoid time4sleep (or at least certain products!) unless you have time4stress and time2waste when it goes wrong. Quality control is non-existent and the customer service wasn't much better sadly.

techbodgery

ThermoBeacon - Low Cost Multi-Zone Temperature Monitoring

Well, that title was longer than I'd expected. I've recently become responsible for the tech and facility management at a small, 70 capacity, village theatre. One of our biggest problems is heating (it's 28kW of electric fans... hardly efficient in the modern world!) but

pids

Digital Signage iPhones

The perfect device for low-cost Digital Signage might just be a broken iPhone.

techbodgery

Simple Pi Signage

I've done a lot of quite complex digital signage projects in the past, mainly using Raspberry Pis but also some other platforms, talking to box office systems, scheduling systems, providing dynamic wayfinding etc but a recent project called for something simple. We need a

theatre

What a bunch of amateurs.

"We're not «insert big theatre name here»" or, why shouldn't amateur theatre strive to be as good technically as the pros?

theatre

The Safety of a Theatre

Донецький академічний обласний драматичний театр (Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater)Theatres, whatever their size, are special places to me. Not only because I happen to like theatre, and some have fantastic architecture, but also for what they represent. Many are akin to grand cathedrals

covid-19

Arts vs Religion

The Scottish Government have, again, decreed that gatherings of over 200 people indoors are prohibited, supposedly because of the need to protect us all from COVID-19. An admirable aim, perhaps. However, the guidance (the Regulations haven't been published yet, but that's a different rant)

customer service

BMW - Get a handle on this!

BMW are ignoring a safety-critical issue in the F10/F11 5 Series cars caused by... a door handle.

security

Glacial DNS

The original working title for this was Ice Cube DNS, however given the glacial pace with which Namecheap move, taking an average of 47 hours to disable malicious websites [Source: NCSC], I decided it was a more apt name. The idea is simple, providing

namecheap

"Submit a ticket"

Now, let me start by saying I love ticket systems. They are the order amongst the chaos in the IT support world, and when supporting customers often the correct approach is to ask them to raise a ticket. However, when a member of the

rants

I need some DIY done.

Today's pet peeve... and I've seen it in many places; "I need some DIY done..."No you don't. You need some WORK done. The whole point of DIY is you Do It Yourself, it's literally what the initialism represents. Everyone's DIY skills are different;

streaming

Adaptive HLS Streaming with Nginx

This is a follow up to my Simple(ish) Self-Hosted Streaming with Nginx guide. If you haven't read that, read it first, this will make a lot more sense. That basic guide illustrates how to make your own 'streaming platform' independant of services like

streaming

Simple(ish) Self-Hosted Streaming with Nginx

Most of the more technical posts on here serve two purposes; to share with a specific group of people, and to remind myself when I need to do it again in a few years time. This one is no exception! The background behind this

scam

HMRC Callback Scam

I've ranted about CLI and CLI Spoofing on many, many, occasions but more and more often scammers are using it as an extra step in their scam to "prove" they're genuine. In the example below the scammer directs the victim to the HMRC website,

security

MutationObserver and Refund Bank Scammers

A significant number of refund scammers rely on remotely accessing the victim's computer, having them log into their online banking, and then surreptitiously editing the content of the displayed web page to make it look like they have a higher balance (due to their

aviation

Living Aviation Art, the METARchart

The chart is illuminated by individual LEDs at each airport that change colour to reflect the weather at each airfield in near real-time much like the map on popular EFB applications. See the weather locally, and further afield, at a glance.

qlab

QLab HTTP Trigger

This is a quick (and rather dirty!) hack to trigger cues in QLab by an HTTP request, I wouldn't recommend using it in a production environment.