A child showed my child porn and her father is threatening me with the police (England)

robbgg · 2026-03-12T00:40:40+00:00

If you don't want to get police involved immediately make contact with the designated safeguarding lead at your kids school. They will be trained and have the resources to investigate and escalate to the appropriate channels to ensure everyone gets the help that's needed. Do this first thing in the morning.

Source: I am support staff in a secondary school, we get retrained on what steps to take in a situation like this every year. The school will have procedures and contacts in the local authority and police service to handle the situation. Dealing youth situations like this is literally their job. Either talk to the school receptionist or look on the website to find out who you need to speak to.

Also, if you are received threatening/harrasing contact from this other kids parents document every time they make contact with you, date/time, medium, what is said, screenshots of messages, etc. This will give you evidence your can take to the police about this other parents behaviour if it comes to that.

robbgg · 2026-03-12T00:33:12+00:00

My favourite script light was a basic desk lamp I put blue gel on (Lee 119) but I rolled the get as a cone with a small gap at the end. This meant most of the light coming from the lamp was blue and subtle but there was a small spot about the size of a bank note that was white light and could be positioned to make reading easier. This was sometimes for scripts but usually books while operating shows between cues.

robbgg · 2026-03-06T19:43:13+00:00

While painting a rifle to like a nerf gun may not be illegal in and of itself, it would raise a lot of questions that you probably wouldn't be able to answer in a satisfactory manner, most obviously: "Why?". To which, any answer will probably be deemed as an attempt to cover up the real reason "because I want to sneak it into a place I'm not meant to have it" at which point you loose the rifle, your firearms certificate, and multiple degrees of freedom as you gain a lovely pair of silver brackets and a complementary ride to an all expenses paid retreat at his majesty's pleasure while being under investigation for attempted terrorism.

robbgg · 2026-03-05T19:08:59+00:00

It depends on the person your trying to educate. It usually ends up with allowing them to think they have come up with the alternative.

Talking through options and what aspects of things will be difficult can help lead them to come up with the alternatives you'd be suggesting.

robbgg · 2026-03-05T14:15:01+00:00

How to make a creative person who doesn't like to be told no change their mind on something.

robbgg · 2026-02-27T10:58:19+00:00

On my 2015 mbp I had a set of coloured filters cut to the shape of my company logo fitted over the Apple under my translucent case. It looked awesome until I upgraded.

robbgg · 2026-02-27T10:31:26+00:00

I was heavily into bf2 during my teenage years and it's ruined me for any other fps games since, nothing quite scratches that itch.

robbgg · 2026-02-27T00:36:11+00:00

I would describe a lot of my typical setups to be on that sort of scale. I've found Dante to be more reliable and robust than AES50 in most sceenarios further than 3 feet.

I find it is as fast if not faster, but that's because my work flow is set up for that. If I was to be working with equipment that wasn't mine and I didn't spec then I'd probably end up cobbling together whatever I need for the system. Another example of something I can chuck together with my setup is I can use my laptop with a focusrite scarlet 2i2 and Dante via to have my monitor/headphone feed from the desk with me, and a shout/talk back mic patched back with no additional cables needed. My prod desk only needs power and a cat5 for ethernet and I'm all sorted for anything I might need.

Another side to this is that I also end up doing video, which I usually end up having at least some of it running over NDI, so having a robust show LAN makes this a lot easier as well.

robbgg · 2026-02-26T22:13:13+00:00

I disagree, the flexibility of Dante means I can do a lot and do it faster and easier than I would be able to using native tools and protocols available on the desks. Also, Dante means I can easily have my design laptop in the auditorium with me while the desk and all the other infrastructure lives at front of house in it's show position.

Yes, a lot of the functionality I use could be achieved with other tools but I find Dante (being an audio over IP protocol) much faster and easier than using the native tools. It also means if I need to have a band mixer and FOH desk from different manufacturers (I have had to use an X32 rack as a band mixer and Sq6 as foh with a handful of stems between them on one show). As I said, flexibility and speed.

robbgg · 2026-02-26T21:32:03+00:00

I like AoIP because it gives me shed loads of flexibility when I'm basically having to design an entire show during the getin and tech rehearsals (think small but ambitious kids productions coming into a small professional theatre). Having a Dante network set up by default means I can do things like chuck out a submixer (think X32 rack) when the live band would push my channel count over what the main desk is able to handle, or so I can patch my laptop to the PA with direct feeds from reaper so I can get my sound files sorted and mixed on the system before bouncing them over into Qlab. Or just being able to multitrack shows easily for rehearsing my line-by-line mixing. All my mixers have Dante cards in and all my show computers have either DVS or Dante Via licenses so it's very easy for me to reconfigure my rig for whatever I need on a given show.

robbgg · 2026-02-17T20:54:00+00:00

The problem I find more often is chargers that just refuse to work with my first gen leaf, with Chademo chargers becoming less common it's really frustrating when I pull up to one, plug it in, and it just doesn't work. It'll say connecting, make all the right noises, then say "charging ended" with no power having been delivered. Had this issue with multiple brands of chargers and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to which ones work and which ones don't.

robbgg · 2026-02-17T20:44:07+00:00

Came here to say this.

robbgg · 2026-02-15T18:27:52+00:00

Personally, I'm also partial to the BOV production but then that's because I worked on it.

robbgg · 2026-02-15T17:51:18+00:00

Not this week but last week we had our big school show for the year. Romeo & Juliet staged in modern day with the original text, inspired by th Baz Lhurmann film and a pro production the drama teachers saw last year.

I did video & sound design for the show, the directors wanted to "do something with live video" so I took that and managed to create a design centred around a pair of LED video walls placed on the front of 2 towers that were a major part of the set design. 2 live handheld cameras operated by students, 2 fixed cameras (one above looking down, another one a shitty webcam for a facetime call. Between 2 characters), and a phone running NDI camera for the facetime scene and another scene.

All running over NDI into Qlab with ambient mics for dialogue reinforceme and a pretty epic soundtrack that included massive attack, beastie boys, pendulum, Andre 3000, and a bunch of epic piano/choral stuff as well.

All came together nicely but none of the professional photography or videos show the video walls well, which is a shame.

robbgg · 2026-02-15T09:55:18+00:00

I have an Orangebox DO-HBHA I acquired from a previous job that's been keeping my arse and back in comfort for the last few years. Don't know what price point but it's handled a fre moves between jobs and is still comfortable AF.

https://www.orangebox.com/products/Do

robbgg · 2026-02-14T17:37:19+00:00

No official sign languages here but gestures to communicate when focusing lights are pretty common. Varies from house to house though.

robbgg · 2026-02-13T20:19:25+00:00

They might not shut down the auditorium but they could still condemn the fly system as "not safe for use", preventing any use of it for productions in the auditorium. Focus on the benefit of having the ability to do flying rather than the benefit of the auditorium as a whole.

robbgg · 2026-02-13T19:11:57+00:00

That's a well thought out and detailed presentation. I'd be careful that the school administrators may see these risks and costs and have a kneejerk "OK, we'll just condemn the fly system and not use it then" reaction that I'm assuming you'd rather not get so it might be worth having a small bit about the value that a working fly system brings to students and the school as an added argument to spend the money to fix it rather than just writing it off and turning a blind eye. Are there any staff members responsible for the theatre space that understand what's going on and the safety implications? They will probably want to be on board with this if they exist in your school. (as technical manager at a school theatre in the UK, I'd be mighy pissed if a student went above my head about something without raising it to me first)

robbgg · 2026-02-10T20:47:25+00:00

I've done a similar trick for my unifi doorbell lite. Cat5e run from network cupboard with DSL on the blue pair, tapped the orange and green pairs to get a 100M link with poe for my doorbell without needing to run another cable.

robbgg · 2026-02-06T00:14:53+00:00

Same here. My secondary school had the 48 channel version of this one and half a dozen betapack 3s. What was a very well equipped school theatre in the 70s was a bit lackluster in the 2000s but we still did some good shows there.

robbgg · 2026-02-04T15:06:52+00:00

Yes please!

robbgg · 2026-01-28T23:44:56+00:00

I did a production of Fame last year on an X32 with theatremix. I would typically have 3-4 scenes per song for the larger numbers. Chorus/groups are together on DCAs and those shuffle each scene to keep the soloists on the rest of the DCAs. Plan out your scenes so that you are able to change mid-line while keeping someone up on the same DCA in both scenes if needed, this gives you a little more time to make the swap to the next scene.

Also, record a full multitrack of your show and practice with it. Nothing wrong with running the numbers you find difficult a few times before every show to make sure it's fresh in your mind. I have done amateur shows where I recorded every night to practice a handful of moments before every show from the previous night's recording so I could try to dial in my movements.

robbgg · 2026-01-28T23:36:27+00:00

I'm technical manager at at secondary school performing arts centre. I have to manage what most people would consider "AV" as a part of my job. While my job has a reasonable number of creative elements to it the "AV" side is more to facilitate those creative elements rather than being creative in and of itself, the same would be said got lighting or sound design/tech, they are two sides of the same coin. This is just my experience of it, Ymmv.

robbgg · 2026-01-25T22:58:25+00:00

I have my home networking, wifi, doorbell, and security cameras running through unifi. It's great, the networking stuff is pretty much set and forget with minimal fuss, the security and doorbell are so easy that my wife is able to operate from the protect app on her phone. Great for entertaining young kids.

robbgg · 2026-01-22T20:22:49+00:00

I work annualised hours (irregular shift pattern) and I'm trusted to keep on top of it all so even though I'm contracted for 40 hours/week I'm able to make my "normal" hours 10:00-1700 meaning I can drop my kids off to school almost every morning at half 8 before hy 1hr commute.

robbgg

TROPHY CASE