XaiJu
Geektoolkit
Geektoolkit

patreon


Important update about billing, and the next release

I just was made aware of something that I just fixed which will change how billing is processed for this Patreon (in a good way!).  Also, we have the June release imminent, targeting 6/27 once the full image is tested.

Billing update

The way Patreon defaults for billing, charges are done on the 1st of the month.  I thought that was great and made sense, but the problem is if someone joines on say the 30th of the month, they get billed immediately, and then they get billed on the first...again!  So even though they were only part of the month for a day, they get billed for the entire thing.

I found this setting and have updated it to what I feel is much more reasonable and makes better sense....the day you join you'll be billed, and then on the anniversary of that date you'll be billed again.  So if you join the 30th, you'll be billed for the 30th, and then not again till the 30th of the following month. 


Release schedule and next release:

We will continue to work to release at the end or beginning of each month.  We strive to release at the end with that months updates, but if issues are found we'll slip to the beginning of the next month.  

We have some good updates coming in this next release, with HEIC, overlay fixes, further performance improvements and more.  Our rockstar beta tester, Jan, found some issues with the extension filter which we'll address early into the next release, but it's functional enough to include and release with.  


Note about video formats:
We spent a full month tracking down an issue with video playback which was crashing systems.  We believe it was the result of 60fps videos playing on the Pi.  If you're seeing issues where the software is crashing after an hour or a day with videos in the feed, PLEASE check the frame rate of the video to see if it's 60fps.  In the future we'll likely flag these in the log.  We've confirmed this is a pi specific issue, and are looking into what we can do about it (besides asking users to please transcode things to 30fps that ends up on the frames.

The investigation for that video playback issue took about a dev and a half offline for a month because we thought we had a very deep critical issue that was crashing us.  Now that it's understood we can get back to feature work for July!

Thanks as always for the support.  A big welcome to the new Patreons, we'll do a more formal welcome at the beginning of the month post once we wrap this release!


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