‘Processing fees’ likely includes the cost of administering the CRM, creating tax receipts and reports, donor support, and all the other ‘processing’ tasks that come with running a large fundraising effort. It wouldn’t just be the credit card fees.
Technically DMX needs 110 ohm cable - the connector is less relevant. But most DMX devices are forgiving, and will accept whatever rubbish cable you throw its way.
Friendly reminder to anyone who installs or maintains PABXes: test your emergency calling whenever you make change.
In Australia, you can call 000, say you’re testing a phone system, read out the Caller ID you’re supposed to be calling from, and they’ll confirm the number and location. This happens with the 000 operator, not the police/fire/ambulance operator you get transferred to in a real emergency.
Other countries may have different testing procedures.
In the U.K. you should email 999testcalls@bt.com first, although strictly speaking for a one off test (typically by an end user rather than a professional) it’s ok to just call and explain.
I have seen tradies attempt to ‘disable’ smoke particle detectors by putting tape or a rubber glove over the sensor. This technique often triggers the alarm almost immediately.
Commercial fire sensors do have plastic caps which block airflow without triggering an alarm. They’re designed to be kept on during construction until each sensor is commissioned.
The official Gravity Forms post [0] indicates you were only compromised if you installed Gravity Forms via direct website download or Composer install.
From what I can see, Composer install methods use the same Gravity Forms API to fetch the install package as the auto-update feature within the plugin. Their WP-CLI plugin uses the same mechanism too.
It will be interesting to see if the Gravity Forms developers engage a third party security firm to investigate this incident. So far they have not mentioned it.
This is an interesting article. It’s worth mentioning open source software exists for the StreamDeck. Companion is very popular in the AV production industry. https://github.com/bitfocus/companion
Indeed, I am not the first, and I am sure not the last, to dig through Stream Deck internals. This article was mostly written to satisfy my own curiosity.
That Media Realm site is mine. Thanks for linking! RDS is one of those technologies that’s been around for decades and still amazes people. You can buy hardware encoders for about AU$500 these days, and I love introducing stations to it and getting their name and song data to show up on car radios.
Digital River emailed out of the blue a few months back saying we need to do new Know-Your-Customer paperwork. The forms are painful and I've had to resubmit a couple of times for minor mistakes - unsure if they'll ever actually accept it, and it seems to take a week or more for any response to a ticket.
Their new platform terms come into effect today, and they have absolutely buried the scale of their new monthly fee (US$100/month for me - unsure if it varies per customer). None of the emails mention the fee amounts. Customer support couldn't tell me the fee amounts. I checked the portal again today and the new contract finally has the new fees in it.
I setup a new merchant of record a few weeks ago, but that doesn't help the fact they're sitting on a few grand of my sales. My balance is above their new payout threshold (US$2500), but it wouldn't surprise me if they sit on the money and let the monthly fees eat into it until it's back below the threshold.
Thought I was doing the right thing by using a merchant of record to handle my international B2B sales since 2016. Apparently not. Fun times.
Using a merchant of record is a good idea in 2024, now that every little jurisdiction wants you to collect their sales tax for them, and to remit that sales tax to them. (That wasn't always true.)
Stripe recently acquired Lemon Squeezy, another merchant of record, so maybe look into that. (Stripe Tax will help you collect the right amount of sales tax, but that's only half the problem. You still have to remit it to all the relevant jurisdictions.)
Thanks. I ended up going with Lemon Squeezy a couple of weeks back. Had a lot of account verification problems (500 errors on various screens), but eventually got that sorted after their support realised there was an actual product problem. I like their product, but wish the product setup & cart was more flexible.
I saw a thread here a couple days ago about new product liability rules for software in the EU that would apply to importers/distributors where the manufacturer is overseas. I wonder if anyone will still be willing to provide this "merchant of record" service in the EU once that takes effect.
at the worst wouldn't it just mean that a lot of merchants of record will say we don't handle software, and maybe one or two big ones scoop up all the software business with some fancy insurance deals?
I believe this is what the theories of capitalism say would happen.
I agree. I personally leave my Decimator MD-HX’s in ‘Free Run’ scaling mode at my preferred resolution. The in-built ‘no signal colour’ of my choosing helps me troubleshoot the problem in a signal chain quickly.
Worth mentioning for the novices that SDI does not do HDCP, so you can’t pass copy-protected content via this setup without workarounds.
Of course, it really should be up to the conference AV suppliers to organise all this, not the presenters themselves.
> Worth mentioning for the novices that SDI does not do HDCP, so you can’t pass copy-protected content via this setup without workarounds.
Well, the workaround is a 10$ HDCP stripper from ebay. Easy enough. (And I think that both Decimators and BMD converters also strip HDCP, but don't quote me on that)
> Of course, it really should be up to the conference AV suppliers to organise all this, not the presenters themselves.
Well, conference setups tend to be a hit and miss IME. Some where the venue and the conference is run by dedicated professionals, you don't even have to tell them to place Decimators and SDI cable runs, they'll come in with these from the start in their offer... but a lot of smaller venues and conferences (especially those ran by volunteers / NGOs) don't have that knowledge and just place some random home cinema projector together with a 20 meter HDMI cable. Corporate offices are just as bad IME, I've never seen a corp conference room with anything but HDMI or, in the worst cases, VGA. Corporate just doesn't give a flying fuck unless they got a dedicated team and a proper budget working on conference room setups...
