Foxvideo Productions

Facebook began with a simple, brilliant idea, a local online directory for students. It let people build profiles, stay in touch, make friends, and share tips, recommendations, and experiences on campus.

The idea spread quickly. First to other universities, then to a wider audience, and eventually across the world. Once internet access became common, that growth was inevitable. As the platform grew, so did the costs. Advertising became the obvious way to cover them, and I’ve never had a problem with that. It’s business. We still have the choice to ignore adverts or engage with them.

What I do have a problem with is how easily an account can now disappear.

I was suddenly removed from Facebook. I appealed, but the appeal was rejected. Fifteen years of content, connections, friends, and photos vanished. So did the hours I spent administering five other pages.

I was ‘hacked’, Facebook knew at the time by sending me a code to use if I was trying to login and to ignore the code if it wasn’t me trying to login! I now have the logs to show it was done using a PC - I use a Mac.

The post that triggered it was either on my account or posted in my name. It was not reviewed by a person, but by an AI bot. And there is no real way to speak to anyone at Facebook. Even the new Verified badge appears to send users back to a bot when something goes wrong.

When I started looking for answers, I found thousands of others in the same position: disabled accounts, rejected appeals, and no human contact. One person I found had lost 20 years of content. I was never a prolific poster. It was mostly a bit of fun. But I did take my admin work seriously. For anyone running a business through Facebook, this kind of loss could be devastating.

I’ve now created a new account so I can regain admin access to a charity page. But I’ve locked down my personal profile so tightly it barely feels worth having. I’ll miss the comments, the interaction, the squirrel photos, the caravan trip updates, and the posts where I laughed at my own mistakes.

What worries me most is how far this could go. A friend who works in community care was surprised she had never heard of someone taking their own life after losing an account that had become their whole world, because of a decision by a bot, It sounds extreme, but for some people, it may not be far from reality.

The Gorsley Flower Festival was held each year up until 2012, this highlights video was from the last festival to be held.

5 days on from the Facebook disaster that looked as if I would have to cancel my trip to the Philippines. Thankfully I was able to create a new Facebook account which I'm now being extra cautious with! The next problem was getting on the same flight as the other team members, again thankfully that's now been done. So for the 2nd time (actually the third as I went in 1996) I'm off to The Philippines.

Thanks to Google, I've now got a website to document the trip - https://sites.google.com/view/sindangan2026/home

Facebook Disabled My Account, Fifteen Years Vanished in 2 hours.

I was working on a document when a strange window flashed up on my screen. I barely looked at it, assumed it was an email, closed it, and carried on. Two minutes later, an email from Facebook arrived with an 8‑digit login code. It said to ignore it if I didn’t request it, so I did. Another code arrived a couple of minutes later. Again, ignored.

Ninety minutes after that, I tried to log in to Facebook and was met with a blunt message: your account has been disabled. I submitted the appeal they offered, only to be told it was rejected and I couldn’t appeal again. Just like that, fifteen years of posts, photos, memories, and admin access to church pages, missionary pages, a narrowboat adventurer page and as an admin for a charity providing aid to Nicaragua, Romania and the Philippines were gone.

That was the moment I finally understood the phrase “sick to my stomach”. The panic was instant. I spent hours trying to find any way to reach a real human being at Facebook. Eventually, I found the option to download my data. Two hours later, I had a 600MB zip file containing everything Facebook had ever collected about me, every click, message, photo, and mention.

Buried in the login logs was the smoking gun. Around the time that pop‑up appeared, someone on a Windows PC using an AT&T connection accessed my account. I’m on a Mac, on EE/BT. They even added a “Jxxxxx Fxxxx” to my friends list.

Whatever they posted, either on my profile or somewhere else under my name triggered Facebook’s automated systems. A bot decided I’d broken the Guidelines and disabled the account instantly. No human review. No conversation. No second chance.

Fifteen years erased by automation. All it would take for a human, would be to look at 15 years of posts and comments to see 'It was not me' who posted whatever it was that decided my account should be 'Disabled'. I post squirrels, caravan holidays, birds on feeders and rain storms in summer!

And I’m far from alone. A quick search shows thousands of people in the same situation, with only a tiny percentage of around 3% ever getting their accounts restored.

My daughter did find one “solution”, buy a Meta VR headset, because apparently that’s the only way to speak to a real human at Meta. Make of that what you will.

PS. The following day, he / she / whoever tried to access my eBay account, by then I'd changed virtually all my passwords and where possible added Passkeys.

PPS. I was due to fly out to the Philippines in early July to video, photograph and document daily on Facebook the building of a kindergarten and for the distribution of aid for the charity I'm (was!) a Facebook admin for - That has now had to be cancelled - so thank you whoever you were, I hope it was worth it for you.

I set up to record a sermon at our Chapel using the same settings as last week, audio levels looked fine on the side screen. Ingesting the footage into Resolve 21 Beta 3, I noticed some audio had peaked. I thought I’d deal with it in the morning.

Next day I went to pull some one minute clips for TikTok and confirmed the worst with peaked, slightly distorted audio on the timeline. Time to try out the 32-bit float files stored on the transmitter. I downloaded Røde Connect, plugged the transmitter into my M4 Mac, found the saved file, and imported it into Resolve. Selected the original video and audio with the new audio, hit sync by waveform, done instantly. Deleted the old audio track.

Perfect audio. In sync. No distortion. Problem solved.

Resolve 21 Beta 3: A Smooth Start…?

I installed Resolve 21 Beta on my iMac for a quick look while keeping a couple of personal projects running in Resolve 20 on my M4 Mini. Thanks to the dongle license, swapping between machines is painless, so it was easy to compare both versions. I also kept an eye on the Resolve 21 Beta bug forum to see what others were running into.

When Beta 3 dropped, I rolled the iMac back to Resolve 20, moved my two small projects over as a backup, checked everything still worked, and then installed Resolve Beta 3 on the M4, my projects still opened and ran just fine.

A while back I bought RiotDQ, an EQ plugin. When the final version was released, I installed it in Resolve 20, then moved it over to 21 to test. The EQ worked, but the dial animation didn’t. The Inspector sliders still applied EQ, but the plugin’s UI wasn’t behaving. I sent the developer a video, and he replied saying it wasn’t something he’d seen before but would look into it.

About That New Photo Page…

I have to say, I don’t really see the point. Resolve is a video editing package. Every user, pro or amateur already has an established, preferred photo editor installed, whether that’s Photoshop, Lightroom, Affinity, or any of the many options out there. So why introduce what feels like a version 1.0 photo tool with limited features and bugs?

Final Cut seems to be slowing down in development and playing catch‑up to Resolve and Blackmagic are clearly gaining users from it. With that momentum, Resolve adding photo editing feels like a step sideways, maybe even backwards when users are still reporting bugs left over from v20.

OK, I’ll admit it, I’m impatient. I’m usually first in line for software updates. Most of the time it’s fine, and if it goes wrong, I just roll back to the previous version and move on.

Blackmagic recently released DaVinci Resolve 21 Beta at NAB with some big new features. I was tempted to jump in, but this time I held off. After reading the Beta 21 forum, it’s clear things are not quite there yet. Plenty of users have lost complete projects, and some can’t recover them. That’s despite the repeated advice: never install a beta on active projects. To their credit, Blackmagic has helped some users recover some of the damage. Still, you can imagine the frustration when people ignore the warning.

Beta releases matter, they help find bugs and improve the software. But the rule is simple: don’t install on systems with live projects!

(PS: I did download Beta 21 but only on my iMac, not my main M4 Mini.)

UPDATE - Beta 2 is now out and has addressed many of the earlier reported issues BUT advice still stands - DO NOT UPDATE ON LIVE PROJECTS!

On Facebook recently, I saw an AI generated image of a guy 'in his happy place' surrounded by things in his life that he thought were important to him, it was in the style of those saucy holiday postcards you see at the seaside.

He was absolutely pilloried for it with negative comments by many people with the comment "stop with the AI', I really felt sorry for the guy who obviously posted it poking fun at himself.

Just recently I've been seeing more and more Facebook and forum posts 'stop with the AI' and similar, even in conversations recently, people have said to me that AI is everywhere and getting out of hand. My own conclusion is that people either do not understand AI or, are actually scared of it.

Every big invention scared people at first. The printing press would “ruin” society. Electricity was “too dangerous.” Even the internet was initially dismissed as a gimmick or a toy. Yet today, we can’t live without those items. AI is going through the same cycle of fear before acceptance.

Yes, AI is powerful, and that’s exactly why it’s exciting. It can help doctors spot diseases early and has significantly cut down cancer diagnosis times, in some cases reducing the time to analyse scans from days to minutes, it gives businesses smart ways to cut waste. At work, it handles the boring stuff so we can focus on the creative and human side.

There have been issues with 'scraping' content or 'learning' from published content without any consideration for remuneration, but this is just the same as any copyright or scraping infringement that has been going on since the publication in any format of content, be it words, images or audio. The only winners in those circumstances are the £1000 per hour lawyers!

New tech always raises questions. But ignoring it out of fear would be like banning the light bulb because candles were good enough. We’ve learned to use new technology and tools wisely, and in time, AI will be no different.

Instead of worrying about AI taking over, we should regard it as a tool, like every other tool we have in everyday use, and ask how it can help. Just like the inventions before it, AI isn’t the end of anything, it’s the start of something great.

(and yes, it's an AI generated image, what else did you expect!)

Having used WorshipTools Presenter (free version) for several years, I recently found FreeShow. I tested it for a month before deciding to go live for the first time with a new Mac Air M4. It was all set up 20 minutes before the service, 15 minutes before the service, the screen went black, the audio cut out and then it all came back in less than 2 seconds! 10 mins before the service it happened again, so I switched to a backup 2018 Mac Mini and WorshipTools Presenter. Perplexity tells me it's probably a low spec HDMI cable or an HDMI switcher fault. A new Thunderbolt to HDMI has been ordered, so I"ll have time to test it before the next service.

UPDATE.

New HDMI cable seemed to work, I've now used FreeShow for 4 weeks without any issues (even stopped taking a backup Mac Mini along!). I'm probably only using 25% of the features but getting more used to it each week, it's a better program than WorshipTools Presenter (and being free, it's cheaper than ProPresenter!), I'm surprised more people are not using it.