This week has mostly been spent up the church’s tower, moving equipment and planning for upcoming events.
Bong
In readiness for the YACR Open Day, we’ve been up the tower to plan ways to get video from our belfry and ringing room to other places in the building. We’ll have a full write-up of this when we’ve installed it, but we’re having to install some temporary power, lighting, networking and screens in various places, with plenty of climbing up and down a narrow spiral staircase.
Moving the wireless bridge. Again.
Although we moved our wireless bridge in April, we were never quite happy with its positioning. The signal was great, but it was potentially in the way for people climbing to our belfry. With an open day coming up where more people would be using this space, and with plants to regularly ring the bells, we decided to move it again.
The new location keeps the improved signal quality (and even improves it very slightly), but means that both the wireless bridge and the cabling are now well out of the way. The only downside is that if you know where to look you can now see the bridge from the outside of the building.
Offsetting our carbon
Our Energy Footprint Report highlighted that we could do better with offsetting our emissions, so along with the Church as a whole looking at offsetting our day-to-day usage the Tech Team are trying to offset all our equipment purchases. Because we’ve bought some new equipment for the YACR Open Day, we’ve offset our emissions and planted some more trees.
Because we also like clever uses of technology, our Green Whitkirk page also automatically updates the number of trees we’ve planted and the amount of carbon we’ve offset.
Debugging some software problems
We’re currently experiencing a problem with the software controller for our video mixer, which means we can’t easily access some of the features we normally use. We’re still in the process of getting to the bottom of this.