Rough Cuts Ltd Blog

People think 'techy' people are great with complicated processes and that we enjoy fixing problems. While that's pretty much 100% correct, we do prefer it when technology just does what it's supposed to. While the complicated problems do give us a challenge to overcome, on a day to day basis, when we're just trying to get work done, we prefer it when things are simple. Very simple. Where the skills come into their own is when we're looking for the easiest way to do something. Tomorrow I'll be working in a office which hasn't had a 'tech' visit or upgrade for a number of years. It's clearly been run on a budget, and at the time the best solution for 'sharing' might have been the Western Digital drive that they're using now. Sadly the network that they had has been decimated, and they're leaning on powerline adaptors for network access. Network access that is hampered by something electrical in the system which is causing one...

Many people, myself included, were both excited and fearful of contactless payment. On the one hand buying a few spuds by simply wafting your card close to a terminal, is convenient, on the other hand, worryingly easy. Indeed it wasn't long before the media cottoned onto our fears and started feeding us stories of 'skimmers'; people with erroneous card payment devices like Square and iZettle, and people got worried. Having said that, here's the latest story (at the time of writing) from 9 hours ago. So the fear is not without justification. Companies have been selling NFC secure wallets, bags and purses, for some time so the signal won't emanate too far. So advancing this technology into smartphones would surely be more risky? Not at all. Because the NFC chips in Android phones sit dormant until they've been enabled. They're only enabled when your phone is unlocked. So skimming isn't possible. If your phone is in your back pocket (far more likely than ...