rsmck

theatre

Music is not free...

... nor should it be. Because this has now come up no less than three times this week, I decided to rant about it in a (slightly) more durable medium (no pun intended) In theatre, professional or amateur, it is not acceptable to steal music

theatre

Lights and Music

One of the biggest challenges (or rather most time-consuming things) I have to deal with every musical, pantomime, or concert-type production is making effective lighting in time with music. The answer is, of course, time code and ETC Eos and QLab make this rather

theatre

Big Designs for a Little Theatre

Everyone is looking to reduce their energy consumption, either to reduce costs or their carbon footprint or both. And there are grants available from organisations like the Energy Saving Trust to achieve this. Working with a local community theatre, we knew we could benefit

techbodgery

Pi Prompt Corner Display

Another in the #techbodgery series on using technology (on a budget!) to deliver features typically usually found in big venues to smaller theatres and entertainment venues. Today, we visit Prompt Corner, and look at how to make our SM (Stage Manager)'s life a

techbodgery

House Lights

Simple 0-10v Theatre house light control system with ESP32 controllers and outstations.

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