Rough Cuts Ltd Blog

So for Christmas I bought my Mum a computer book from a very well known (slightly insultingly titled) series of books that allegedly make computing simple. Absolutely 100% up to date, with everything about how to make her Apple Mac do exactly what she wants. Initially the gift was well received, but from conversations I had, it appeared to be draining. Too much, and perhaps not written the way normal people read or talk. In the same way if someone bought me a ladybird book about gardening or er, ladybirds, regardless of how well it was written, I'd likely struggle after page 4. It lacked engagement. I am very privileged to teach and support in 2 schools in sunny North Wales. With groups of both 6-10 year old's starting out with computers for the first time, and more mature teachers, some of whom are totally stuck in their traditional ways of using a computer. Both groups of computer users, make  similar mistakes though, fall into the same pitfalls, or simply don't know, e...

So a couple of days ago, I posted about Zoom being a risk. For being 'zoombombed', to having your personal identity stolen, installing malware on your machine, passing your browsing habits on to facebook and other serious and legitimate concerns for users. On the back of that, today we tried our first Skype Meet now with 13 people. In a nutshell, and by comparison (to Zoom) it was very poor. While it only took people a few moments to grasp the interface and no one seemed to have too many issues getting onto the call. People also seemed to like the 'blur background' option. The chat window and the peculiar bubbles that people disappeared into were odd, but ok. Swapping people into the four visible windows worked ok. But not having full grid view was odd. (There is only the option to view 4 at a time, but streams should have been live in the bubbles). People's video feeds kept dropping out (although the sound seemed to be connected throughout), and it was differe...

Zoom has been getting a lot of stick recently and not all because of one fault. It seems that there are a number of problems facing the company and after investigating these issues, described below (with links to the source) I've uninstalled the software and will be urging my colleagues to do the same.  There are better alternatives available without the hassle and worry that comes with Zoom. So what are the problems? One group that has had a shock using Zoom is a Norwegian School class who's online lesson was interupted by a naked man . This happened because, by default, Zoom meetings aren't password protected and they're not encrypted. He guessed the meeting number and hey presto, he's naked in a class full of school children. Not good. If that isn't bad enough Zoom yesterday announced that they accidentally allowed their traffic to pass through chinese servers . China has a tempestuous relationship with internet freedom and because Zoom calls aren't ...

Do well (including Rough Cuts) are a band of professionals who collaborate on a multitude of varied projects. We have no office, so the Coronavirus simply won't affect the way we work as we're remote workers anyway. Here's an insight into how we operate. Organizational focus To keep our minds focused on our work, we start with Trello. We have one board, with cards for each of our clients on. These are organised into columns, depending on the client type, and each has a unique ID. This works in a similar way to a forum. Band members associated with a project are linked to the card (and get notifications about that work). Our project work For our collaboration and file storage, we use Google drive. Without a subscription Google will give you 15gb, per account. The folders here are labelled exactly the same way as our Trello cards. So it's easy to find work thats associated with a project. We're trying to move over to Google docs, Google slides and Google sheet...

2 weeks ago I went to a training session on 'Digital wellbeing' for schools. One of the things they discussed was how social media platforms get you hooked. Before that, I'd watched  'The Great Hack' on Netflix - well worth a watch and information from these two occasions got me thinking. First of all, there is a reason why we become hooked. It's designed that way. Your data is big business, Companies hold about 5000 data points about each and every individual using their services. So when a husband or wife searches for a new mattress, their partner is likely to see that sort of product appear in their ads. They literally know us better than we know ourselves. Our religion, our spending habits, our interests, our political and sexual persuasion, our family members, who our friends are and which ones we don't really like, everything, they know it all. Each share, each like, each angry face tells them something more about you, and it's all collated and u...

So while waiting for a meeting in a local school, I spotted a redundant TV on the wall. Sometimes my mind is it's own worse enemy and I started to think about how we could put all of the old videos we've made together on it, using a Raspberry PI. Obviously the start of this is Google. So I got studying. The simplest and most functional way, wasn't the first way I tried. Surprisingly the current release of Raspbian (Raspberry PI OS) is huge, it almost fills an 8Gb SD card. Although I could have used a USB to store the video files I wanted to have it all on the one device, and I didn't really want to use a bigger SD card. (Like I say, my mind is my own worse enemy). So I found a command line version of Raspbian and tried a command line player called OMXPLAYER, but I struggled to get it to work initially; which paid off in the long run. After installing the barebones version of Raspbian (buster-lite) using balenaetcher on Mac. I found I needed a GUI a graphical us...

I'm currently chatting with a good friend about their (new) phone options. They have an iPhone 7, but aren't happy with the picture quality of it. This means, there is something wrong. The first time photographers started taking smartphones seriously was around the time of the iPhone 4. Since then, cameras have only gotten better. So if your images aren't coming out the way you want, then perhaps the technique is wrong. So here are my top tips for getting much better images with your current handset. CLEAN YOUR CAMERA LENS. The first thing, with ANY smartphone, before you take a shot is to clean the lens. While the delicate optics will be behind a hardened glass cover, the glass will likely need a clean. This simple action in itself will produce sharper results, will cut down on glare or haze and allow the camera processor space to calculate the best exposure for the image. If you use a DSLR, then you will always want to ensure that the lens is immaculate, and your...