Rough Cuts Ltd Blog

First up, before I start my rant, as a gaming machine, the PS4 is totally competent. With the exception of the tiny controllers, which took me a good week to adjust to (I suffered a considerable amount of pain first though) the machine can game well. I appreciate that I've left it a long time before committing to either Xbox or Playstation, but after a months use. I can honestly say, I've made a mistake. First up, I didn't just buy it as a gaming console. It's 2018, (ok 2017 when I bought it) and a games console should be able to sit comfortably in the middle of your home and connect all your media together; simply. If a machine has a function, (for example the abolity to play Blu-Ray and other media), I'd expect it to be able to do it competently. As well as having the ability to play amazing games it should be able to access your Network attached storage to play your music and video files and it should also integrate with the rest of your equipment to play any o...

What do you look for when you're buying a new handset?  Good Camera? Screen quality? The more pixels the better? Battery life? Everyone hates poor battery don't they? Good Performance, so Processor speed and Ram? Many people look for these and also like their handsets to be well designed and good value for money. Which brings me on to a recent bargain I think I landed. In the black Friday sales a couple of weeks back. I nabbed myself a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge,  I'd always found Samsung flagship handsets to be a little overpriced. But I picked one of these up for £380. To say I'm happy with my phone is an understatement. I bought the gold one as I think it suits the premium design, but I appreciate beauty is within the eye of the beholder and many simply dote on the iPhone X design. Which is understandable. Anyway, I wondered in terms of specs, how does last years £380 flagship stack up against Apple's £1000 plus 2017 flagship? So I did a comparison and was s...

So today I got myself a shiny new Samsung S7 Edge. We'd decided that my wife would have my old Huawei P8 and I would help her set it up later on in the day. When I got my new machine, I took out the Micro SD card from my old P8 and Sim and put them in the new phone. I did a complete factory reset on the old P8 and put it on one side for later. Then I spent all day playing with the Edge. Later on my wife returned home from work and I removed her sim from her old phone and put it in my old P8. Now, we had toyed with the idea of selling the P8 but eventually she decided she would take it. But hold that thought, because it's really important. From the fresh reboot (again, to re-iterate, this was many hours after a FULL factory reset) I set her handset up. For clarity, I used NFC. I held her old phone with it's back facing my old phone (my S7 was on charge not in the same place - there's been no NFC confusion here). I did the same process with my phone and all 108 app...

I've just been directed to an excellent blog post entitled 'Superfly guy' from 2014 which strongly suggests that Drones will be the future of housing surveillance and surveying. From this, from the same author Tony Smith, recently tweets, asking .... #Drones were going to save the #socialhousing world, what happened to them? The tweet also contains a link to the original article, which is well worth a read here. http://tonysmiththathousingitguy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/superfly-guy.html Now, I'm not sure how drones alone could save the social housing world especially with the current state of underfunded affairs. Nevertheless, the idea that they could, or should, save housing companies significant amounts of money and time by simplifying seemingly costly and time consuming survey work at height, is a realistic assumption and one that really needs to be addressed. The article also mentions very briefly, one of the major obstacles that I believe is causing drone...

So, if you have a Retina display or a UHD display on your TV or your computer, you'll know just how amazing 4 and 5k can look. But if you've investigated UHD camcorders, you'll also have noticed how the market is divided. Cheap action camera's from China claim to record UHD content. But the results are lacklustre at best and downright ugly if we're being honest. Most struggle to process the data that's required fast enough, meaning blocky results and unsightly artefacts. At the other end of the market is the branded camcorders, and digital cameras. £300 seems to be the entry level, but the sky really is the limit. So what if you've got a standard iPhone or iPad? Something that might be a couple of years old, but only has 1080p or 720p options in the menu? Most apple devices have wonderful lenses on them, and significant processing power, which is whats required for recording 4k. Well, I may have some good news for you. Because of their processing capabil...

So, after a week of some pretty challenging weather and flying, I've come to the realisation that it may be time to upgrade the trusty Phantom 3 professional. But what a decision this has turned out to be. After some estate agent work mid week, I returned to the studio to find that the capture was suffering from vibrations coming from the gimbal. This isn't the first time I'd seen this, but I thought I'd resolved it. Since then, I've stripped the gimbal down, found a fan with a couple of loose screws on top, and a worn part that is still rubbing against the gimbal arm, which I've bent into a better shape that gives the arm a few microns of clearance. I've reassembled it and done a couple of test flights and it appears to have fixed the problem. The video footage I captured was so still, my wife thought it was a photo until she saw the trees moving. I was able to find many usable clips from the work and put together a video which the client was happy wit...

If your school has Chromebooks or anything that uses Google services, at some point, either as a head or an IT leader, you're going to realise you need to upload your entire school to Google Admin console. This can seem like an overwhelming task. You could input this information pupil by pupil (not advised) or you can upload a .csv ('comma separated value file' or 'spreadsheet').  Stay with me, it doesn't matter if you don't know what this means or not.  You also need to input every pupils email address, and create a unique password for them. Imagine trying to make 200-300 passwords up! Doing this manually is a wicked waste of any teacher or secretaries time. So I'm going to share my tips for simplifying this seemingly overwhelming task.  1 DOWNLOAD THE TEMPLATE Fig 1 Login to you google admin console. Click Add Multiple users. (see fig 1 - this option only shows up under USERS and the top level of the organisation).  Select add mul...