Computers – Page 4 – mercuryvapour.co.uk

Well, that lasted long. (Days 5-8)

Tsk. There I was, planning to do a detailed description of every single day in lockdown, and I got bored after about 4 days. Actually, I tell a lie. I wrote the posts. I just couldn’t bring myself to post them, because they were just too dull for even this blog….

Of course, nothing’s TOO boring for this blog. In fact, here’s what I wrote for Day 5…

It’s bloody beautiful out here at the moment. Sat in the back garden while my dinner cooks, and it really is spring like. The sun is warm and bright. Today’s the type of day that I’d have gone for a walk on my dinner hour. Instead, I’m sat in the back garden, watching the birds peck away at some leftover bread

Leftovers. That’s a phrase you don’t hear much of these days. Especially bread.

I was never a big bread eater anyway, so all of this bread shortage stuff isn’t affecting me anyway. Now, a pot noodle shortage, that’d be terrible.

The weather really is nice today. I’m sat in the back darden as the remainder of the sun disappears behind the houses. There’s the sound of the birds tweeting, against the low rumble of the dual carriageway. Hardly anything compared to its normal noise.

I’ve not long returned of having my foot checked. It’s looking great, apparently. I think this period of rest is really helping matters. It’s strange how I’m now starting to see positives in all of this.

That was was the Wednesday.

Day 6, the Thursday, consisted of this….

In contrast to the almost summer-like day we had yesterday, today has been pretty dull and cold. It didn’t start off to bad, with a nice sunny morning, but as the day has gone on, the mist has rolled in, and it’s got pretty chilly, which is a bit of a shame.

It’s one of those days where it looks like it could be nice and warm if it wasn’t for the mist sticking about.

I’m so bored. While I was 9n my lunch break, I wondered if Julian Pettifer is still with us. He is. You may remember him from hundreds of news reports from the 60s, and also presented Busman’s Holiday before Sarah Kennedy and Elton welsby.

He’s written a few books and has an OBE now.

That alleviated the boredom for a few seconds

Yeah. So, there wasn’t much happening on the afore-mentioned days. Friday rolled around, and I didn’t type anything. This so far has been the most interesting of the days, as I actually left the house, so I thought I might as well type out that. For you see, us plebs are allowed out of the house to shop for essentials such as food, and to do a minimal amount of excersise. Well, I clearly wasn’t going outside to do the excersise, so off I went to Lidl. Despite it only being a short walk, I got Daddykins to take me in the car, and shortly noticed that I shouldn’t have bothered. For you see, seeing as us humans are such filthy, disease ridden rcreatures, we’re now only allowed within two metres of one another, and to keep our spread of disgusting microbiorganisms (is that a word?) to a minimum, they were only allowing a few people in the store at any one time. It was quite a surprise to see the queue going around the car park, ending near the edge of the car park where Grayfields is. ABANDONED.

I quickly jumped back in the car, and we headed off to Iceland. There was a queue, and once again, our unclean hearts and minds were not permitted to be within two metres of one another. There were only five other people in the queue, and it quickly went down. I was finally able to get some essentials. Bog roll, bread, eggs and Monster Munch. All things that had been sadly lacking. Well, we still had a few bog rolls left , but it always pays to get some more I suppose when the opportunity is there. No, it’s not panic buying, it’s just covering for all eventualities. The shops have finally took the approach of restricting the amount of things you can buy like that anyway, which hasn’t came a moment too soon. Honestly, the mentality / greed of some people astounded me.

It’s funny that I mentioned not really eating bread on Wednesday. I can report that this, for some unknown reason, is the softest, most delicious loaf of bread I’ve had for some time, and I’ve nearly eaten it all by myself. I’m one of those complete weirdos that completely flatten the bread with my hands (yes, I washed them beforehand!), roll it up, then flatten it again. I know of only one other person that does this.

Anyhoooo, enough about that. The front door closed, and I’m now on full lockdown. I’ve became acquainted with an old friend called Euro Truck Simulator again, and I’ve had… some time playing it. Here’s my current “ride”.

Yes, I’ll admit it. I paid 39p to have the Chinese / Year of the Rat paint pack….

Worth every penny (It wasn’t though, was it? Ed).

One game feature is that you can have live music from online radio stations playing, basically acting like the stereo in your cab. Since I discovered this feature, I’ve been listening to Clyde 2. It was one of the only English ones I could find at the time, and I’ve been using this in the game ever since. Last night, it really got on my wick. I’m obviously playing this game to escape the fact that we’re in lockdown for the foreseeable. Unfortunately, the radio station liked reminding us, the listener, of this every five seconds. After a song finished, it was either a mention that we should stay in, or an advert telling us that we should wash our hands at every given opportunity. One slice of good fortune is that the news bulletins for this particular night didn’t play properly, leaving the radio silent, thankfully.

Saturday came, eventually. I didn’t actually go to bed until 3. There’s not much point sleeping at a particular time, as I’ve got nothing to get up for. I think it was about 10 when I finally surfaced. Again, computer on, and Euro Truck similator got loaded back up. Of course, this time, I gave the English stations a miss. If I’m going to have some escapism, I’m going to do it without getting reminded of the thing I was escaping from every 2 bloody minutes. This time, I just happened to put one on called Mint FM, and to pardon the pun, it was mint. Some really good songs, some I hadn’t even heard before. Even better was the fact that it was all automated, and without adverts too. Not a single mention of that bloody C word…. you can make your own minds up which word I’m referring to… 11 letters, or 4 letters…

I even tried my hand at “broadcasting” – streaming your game to anybody who wants to watch it. Apparently, it’s something that the cool kids do, but I had no idea if anyone was watching, so it was all a bit pointless really. Maybe it’s something I’ll experiment more with in the future, but more than likely it’ll be something I forget entirely about.

So, as I’m typing this, we’ve broken into Sunday. Officially the shortest day of the year, as I’m sure that by the time I get this typed, edited and published, the time will have jumped from 1AM to 2AM, and we’ll be officially in British Summer Time. Not that we can actually do anything with it. Sigh.

Synology DS218+ RAM upgrade

Recently I had the chance to aquire a Synology DS218+ NAS drive. I’ve had a DS216j for quite a few years – this beast has not missed a beat in over three years, constantly spinning its 3Tb drives for 24 hours a day.It’s been a web server, SFTP server,email server… download / torrent box. It’s been a very good servant. but recently, it’s been showing its age, especially when trying to use some of the built-in apps on it, such as the gallery, so I decided to get an updated model.

I could have went with another make, but when this beast has been so good to me, it felt wrong to stray away, so I went for a DS218+ with a 12tb Seagate Ironwolf drive.

It arrived a couple of weeks ago, and it’s currently spinning away next to the old DS216j.

One thing that drove me towards that model is that it was upgradeable – or at least the RAM is. It comes with 2Gb built in, but the blurb on the website said you could get a memory expansion for it. It could go up to 6Gb. Cor! I had a feeling this would be a custom memory module, and probably more expensive than normal RAM, so I thought I’d just update it if and when I needed it.

After it arrived, and while fitting the drive, I noticed the RAM expansion looked particularly “normal”, just like a standard laptop DIMM socket. I did a bit of digging around and yep, it takes normal DIMMs. Hurrah! In fact the article I was reading suggested you could get a larger memory module such as an 8Gb one, and it’ll work fine. So, I got it.

It arrived at Mercuryvapour Towers just a few moments ago. So, how easy is it to fit? Oh, very. For some reason, I thought this would be a little more involved but it really isn’t.

The memory I opted for is… “Crucial CT102464BF160B 8 GB (DDR3L, 1600 MT/s, PC3L-12800, SODIMM, 204-Pin) Memory”. It set me back just under £30, but looking at the prices on amazon today, it’s gone up to £34.

Anyway, shut down the device. Slip off the front cover, and remove the right drive bay. Under this, you will see a white DIMM socket. Slide in the memory module (with the notch on the left hand side), and youll hear the levers click. Just the same as any other RAM module really.

I booted it back up, and confirmed it did indeed read 10Gb. It was all a lot easier than it sounded in my head.

Finally, the last step is to perform a memory test on the device This isn’t something you can do from inside the NAS operating system – instead, you have to download the Synology Assistant software. Download, install and run it. Select your NAS drive, click the cog button in the top right, and click “Perform Memory Test”. Go back out to the device list, and you’ll now see a “Memory Test” button. Press this, and it’ll warn you that this will take time to perform the memory test, and that’s going to reboot the machine…

The software will report that the device is “Performing Memory Test”, and the power light on the NAS drive will constantly flash orange. Unfortunately, there’s no progress monitor, so I have no idea how long will be left. At the time of typing, it’s up to about 90 minutes. If you’re going to do this, I’d recommend doing it when you’re not planning to use the device. (EDIT: It took just under 4 hours to complete the memory test)

No doubt some of you are wondering if you can update the 2Gb that’s already built into the device? Apparently, yes, you can. It’s just another memory module. Unfortunately, it’s inaccessible without fully dismantling the device, so you have to question whether it’s even worth doing at all. 10gb should be enough for a NAS drive under any circumstance… it’s more than what’s in most perfectly serviceable PCs.

EDIT: I was doing some thinking about what the whole point of 10Gb would be, and I think I’ve found it. Virtual machines. I’m actually typing this right now on a virtual machine that’s running of the NAS drive. I’m currently running a bare, yet serviceable Linux Mint installation from it. Something which I don’t think would be possible with my previous NAS drive. This could be fun!

Das ist a nice keyboard!

OK, well I know that the last proper blog post (ignore the Facebook one) was about keyboards. Well, you’ll be excited to know that this one is too. Of course, you only have to scroll down slightly to find the “absolute bargain” with that Dell keyboards.. a little bit of spit and polish (rather, a load of Cillit Bang, and even more of those disposable blue cloths), and it was back up and running.

Anyway, Thursday, is of course, market day. I’ve mentioned this many times. Sometimes, I weep when I find a badly treated CD that I’ve been after, sometimes I laugh at the prices that some of the stall holders charge, and sometimes, I swear in disbelief at the bargains that can be had, when the person just doesn’t know what they’re selling.

So, I was on an early shift at work. It was sunny, and all of those two things combined mean that I headed off to the flea market. You gathered that, otherwise I wouldn’t be typing this now. The first stall is always a hive of miscellany. My eyes were immediately drawn to a box of records. No surprise there, but the next box along stopped me dead in my tracks. The records no longer had any significance. There were keyboards. and there was one that stood out in particular. A huge one. A single keypress immediate;y informed me that this was no ordinary keyboard, it was mechanical. The satisfying clack of the key. The overall look of the beast. The fact that it looked practically brand new.. There just had to be a catch somewhere.

I grabbed it instantly, and went over to the guy selling them. £2 each. What? Money exchanged hands, and I walked away with a keyboard. I had no idea if it worked. I walked through the town clutching this keyboard, I must have looked a complete wally., but I don’t care. A mechanical keyboard for less than the price of a pint.

It’s actually perfect timing. Some of you have noticed when I’m typing something that there are double characters especially Cs and Ys. It appears that those two switches are possibly on the way out. They might just need cleaning, or they might need replacing entirely. One thing I know is that it’s not easy to do, so I was sort-of hesitating over getting a different keyboard. I suppose this will have to do for now!

Right, so far, I’ve raved about my purchase. I do have a couple of reservations about it. It’s a touch-type keyboard, meaning that none of the keys have marks. It’s completely blank. One thing is though, I’m typing using it now, and the words are flowing like beer from a keg. There are obviously the odd mistakes, but they creep into my typing anyway. Using this might actually improve my already fantastic typing abilities. Ahem.

Another thing is that… I’m not sure it’s a genuine product. It’s by Das Keyboards. A name I’ve actually heard of. This one is apparently the MX3000. There is a Cherry keyboard of very, very similar design, though checking out the Youtube videos on it, It looks better made, I’ve had Cherry keyboards in the past that have had different branding on them, so it might just be a case of that.

Just look at how plain the logo is though.

I’m not going to rip it apart to find out to see if there’s anything more identifiable on the parts inside,, but I do know that the switches are Cherry branded

There’s also the fact that it’s an ANSI keyboard (American), as opposed to the ISO (UK) standard. It’s not much of a problem, but the smaller return key, and you can only get to the backslash by pressing AltGR and # as there’s no dedicated key for it. Seeing as I use the backslash key a lot MIGHT prove an annoyance, but I’ll wait and see.

I’ve been using this as my main keyboard since Thursday now, and I’ve had absolutely no other issues with it. I’m surprised how quickly I got used to not having letters on the keys. As I said, maybe this will improve my typing, maybe I’ll get sick of it and fling it in the cupboard with the other 5,000 keyboards that I own.

But yeah, no letters!

Car boots, football, obscure tapes and manky keyboards

hmmm. It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update. I’ve had a bit of writers’ block. Well, I wrote a couple of things, but they just ended in vitriolic rants about certain people. Thankfully, however, last week was a week off work, so I’ve had time to catch up with things that I love. Record collecting, for example.

The last couple of weeks have certainly been part of a record collecting binge. This is the first time since I was a kid that I remember having such a long, hot summer, and since the weathermen have guaranteed long, hot weekends, I’ve been able to arrange trips to car boot sales with Chris. Last week, it was Seaham, and the week before was Sedgefield.

Now, I’m sure I started typing about the Sedgefield one, but I can’t find any trace of it, so I mught have dreamt it, but basically, I bought lots and lots of CDs and records. £2 entry fee, which wasn’t too bad. I just remember knocking out some crap jokes. A guy selling plants, and I said to Chris “they’re mint, them”. Of course, it was an actual mind plant. Shris laughed. the guy behind the stall said he must have been easily amused. I was just happy that someone else heard the joke. On another stall, I commented that one of the CDs he was selling was Absolute Garbage I had to spell it out to the store owner, who seemed to be slightly offended that I happened to be slagging off one of his CDs. No mate, just a crap pun.

It seemed to close early, as most of the people were packing up to go see England play. By the time I’d got home, they’d scored 5 goals. Turned out to be a great day overall.

Another week passed, and it was time flr the first Middlesbrough record fair. This was the first one for two years, and it was nice to have it back! Unfortunately, the day ended in absolute disaster… hanging around for three hours for a lift, only for my lift’s battery to run flat, and having to get the bus home anyway. I was fuming, and my foot went up like a pudding because of it. Great times.

I did bump into Glen – a fellow blogger and ex-work colleague whom I’ve not mentioned on here for what must be a decade, vut we had a bloody good catchup for about an hour. Preally nice to see him again.

Sunday arrived, and another visit to a car boot sale was arranged. Chris wanted some “tat” for “something” – saying what he wanted, and what for might actually spoil a surprise for someone, so I won’t say what. Of course, there’s absolutely no chance that the person involved will ever read this blog, but you never know. Stranger things have happened.

Anyway, we turned up, nice and early at the car boot. Roughly 9AM. There were a queue of cars waiting to get in and set up, but not many buyers. Had we got there too early? Well. Turns out that if you’re a buyer, it costs you £5 to get in before 11:30. the doors then close between 11:30 and 12:30, meaning if you want to get in early, you pay an inflated price. If you want to pay the cheap price, you’ve got to then queue for an hour, and miss out on potential bargains. Crafty.

Seeing as there were very few stalls set up, and it didn’t look that big anyway, myself and Chris went to Sunderland. Honestly, you’ve heard of ghost towns. You’ve never seen a ghost town until you’ve walked around Sunderland city centre at 9:30. My word. Even the pigeons were hobbling about, looking like they had hangovers.

I couldn’t bear the thought of being in Sunderland for any time longer than I needed to, so I quickly abandoned the idea of hanging around there for two hours, then queuing in the baking sun. Instead, I bit the bullet, paid myself and Chris into the car boot at the inflated price. Damn them. their cunning plan worked.

Unfortunately, there seemed to be more stalls selling absolute garbage than music, which, to me was a little saddening, although I did come home with quite a few CDs, a Zodion SS6 photocell for a streetlight, and a cassette tape for a format I don’t actually own…

Ah yes, the humble DCC. I remember, as a kid, I picked up a copy of Q magazine from 1993, that had a huge article on DCC. I mainly got it because it had a free CD on the front. As I’d only picked up my first CD player the Christmas before, any type of cheap CD to expand my music library was always welcome. Though, as a snotty teenager, the articles went more in-depth than what I liked. I think I’d only stopped getting comics at that point. Still, I was interested to see if this format ever made it into the wild. It didn’t, DCC sank without a trace (at least in your everyday consumer spectrum anyway) and I never ever saw one for sale.

That is, until I bought the one above. the guy had three for sale, one unwrapped. He’d clearly, at the time, bought these by accident, thinking they were just standard cassette tapes. I like to think he’s been carrying these to boot sales every weekend since the 90s and this is the first time he’s sold one. Probably not though.

Fast forward a week. If I haven’t bored you already, the weekend was quiet. I didn’t actually go anywhere. Mainly because I couldn’t. My guts were in absolute tatters for 4 days. No idea what caused it, It was a slightly toned down version or what happened to me when I was about 17. I’ll not go into it, but trust me, if I needed to go to a fancy dress party, I could have swallowed some gravel and went as a shotgun. Not nice at all.

Tuesday was the day when I finally mustered up the courage to leave the house safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t be splattering my jeans. I’d made it my resolution to visit every charity shop in Hartlepool. The first stop was The YMCA shop, where I picked up probably my 2nd best purchase of the day… “No Sound Without Silence” by The Script. Not the type of album I’d normally see myself go for, but when I was in Amsterdam a few years ago, it was the only CD that was played on the coach, and I ended up liking it. Not enough to pay any decent money for, but for 50p, I couldn’t go wrong. It also has the theme to “Mrs Brown’s Boys Da Movie” on it… Terible film, great theme. Sorry.

I travelled from one end of the town to the other. While I was waiting for the bus, I heard a young chav lass shout “Fuck off” to her child. The child was below full speaking age, and was happily gibbering away to his mother Her response… “Oh, yeah, yeah. I had one of those, but the wheels fell off”. I had to laugh.

Towards the end of the day, I headed to the town. In one of the charity shops that shall remain nameless. A lad was looking at some CDs, went to the counter with 3 CDs, but the manager saw he was holding 4 just a minute earlier. Unknown to her, he’d put one back, but it was too late. She’d asked to check in the bag he was carrying. Well. You should have heard it. Not from him, but his mother, who was elsewhere in the store.

“Are you the manager? What’s your head office number? I’ll be reporting this! Do you know how much I spend in here? You didn’t apologise for looking in there”

There were so many things wrong with her argument. Now I know a little about customer services, after being in a role like this, but at the end of a telephone.

Point number 1. You can report staff all you want to a head office. If they’re double checking to make sure that stock hasn’t been stolen, then they’re always going to side with the member of staff. That’s your job. Point number 2. Shops are shops. If you’re offended by someone doing their job, then fuck off. Don’t come back. Don’t buy products from them ever again. If you dropped down dead tomorrow, the charity won’t fold. They won’t be looking out for you, as they stand underneath a big “TO LET” sign with a key in the shutters. No, ther people will buy stuff.

I did feel sorry for the manager behind the counter. I just rolled my eyes, as the complaints echoed out of the store and down the street. It’s probably water off a ducks’ back, but still.

Sorry, I went off on more of a ran than I intended there. I just hate rude people. Anyway you’ll notice that the Script CD was only the 2nd best purchase of the day. I’m sure you’re dying to know the best….

A keyboard. Yes, one of those things that you type into. One of the stores had a plethora of keyboards dumped under the CDs. Now, these were dusty old things. It was clear to see that there was a nice Dell keyboard underneath all of the tat. It looked practically brand new, but with the dust, and a very small amount of key wear.

Now, some places state that keyboards have more bacteria on them than toilet seats. I’ve not looked into that statement in any great detail, but it’s always had me a little wary over 2nd hand keyboards, but at £1.75, this was too good to miss. the knife didn’t come with it, by the way, it was just a make-shift key puller.

It had occurred to me, while approacting the wrought iron gates and gravel driveway or Mercuryvapour Towers, that this keyboard was probably hiding something. Why was it practically unused? Off came the keys, aaaaand….

Oh holy Christ! What the fuck is that? My god, I’d just gotten over a stomach infection, it looked very much like I was on course for another one. I have no idea what this stuff was. These Dell keyboards have drain holes, so thankfully, whatever it was only got caught under the F keys. Out came the Cillit Bang. The smell coming from the muck was ungodly. At a guess, from the colour and the smell, I’d have to say it was vomit, but I’ll never know. After an hour of scrubbing / spraying / wiping down with antibacterial stuff., it came up looking absolutely brilliant, and I can confirm that it actually fully works, because I’ve been typing on it for the entirety of this post!

My Amiga’s gooey feet…

I’m sure you’re all wondering what progress I’ve made on getting my Amigas back up and running. Well, I can’t find the power supplies, so that’s not happening at the moment.

Something I’ve found very strange though is that the little rubber feet on the A600 have literally turned to a sticky white liquid, leaving a residue on everything they touch (oh, grow up!).

Take this really rare and expensive “Sandpiper’s Greatest Hits” record for example.

That’s not paint. That’s actual;ly the result of leaving the A600 on it for a small amount of time. So, is this a common thing with these feet? Due to their now squishy and incredibly sticky nature, it’s not possible to remove them cleanly. I don’t think the A1200 is affected.

Anybody know if replacements are available? And the best way to remove them without getting sticky white stuff everywhere? (I knew a lady who wanted a book on double entendres, so I gave her one.)

Amiganuts! POWER!

Today, I saved the life of my Amiga 1200. And I’m slightly relieved.

I’ve typed on here several times about my love of the Amiga 1200, the computer I received on Xmas Day 1993. But what do I mean about saving its life? I removed the battery. Yep, that’s it. I took the battery out. “Hang on”, says both of the Amiga aficionados reading this, “The Amiga didn’t have a battery”. Well, mine did, because I bought a memory expansion which also shipped with a real-time clock, and obviously, a battery backup for it.

Back in 2007, I dragged my Amiga out for a quick play, to see if a problem with the video circuitry had fixed itself in the 10 years it had been in storage. Unsurprisingly, it hadn’t and my screen was still just a jumbled mess. OH WELL. Back in the cupboard it went.

Years went by, and that cupboard fell pretty much out of action. Certain room reorganisations, and knowing there wasn’t much stuff in that particular cupboard meant it wasn’t really accessible anymore. But my Amiga was safe in storage.

Fast forward to 2013. Dave Jones, aka EEVBlog, posted a video about an old Archimedes computer he’d been sent. The video was going great, until he’d opened it up and found that the RTC battery had leaked, completely eating away at most of the circuitry, including the ROM sockets and keyboard connections, turning the machine into a beautiful, yet pricey paperweight. My heart sank. I knew my Amiga had what looked like the same battery, and although that machine was older, it wasn’t MUCH older, and the clock battery in my Amiga hadn’t been changed since I installed the expansion board in 1995, pushing it up to 22 years. That thing must have been a goner.

I spoke to Daddykins about something random, and I mentioned about my Amiga and leaking batteries. I was surprised to find the cupboard now slightly more accessible. Enough to squeeze an arm in, and pull out an Amiga, anyway. Maybe he’d realised I was right, and the little Miggy was worth saving!

I precariously opened the underside door on the machine to see what grotty state the board was in…. Aaand.

Not a speck of corrosion. And yes, I’d taken the battery out before I’d taken this, but it was still in there, and came out perfectly shiny.

So, my Amiga might live to fight another day. If I can get that graphics issue fixed.

I have much more to say about this fantastic machine, so stay tuned for some more inane rambling shortly… Bet you can’t wait.

Goodbye Micro Mart, I shall remember you fondly.

Ah, so 2017 starts off with the first sad death of the year… my favourite little magazine… “Micro Mart”.

Well, OK, technically, it died last year, as this last issue is dated 29th December – 31st Never, but still, I didn’t find out until I was browsing a local WH smith.

I must start by saying , I wasn’t a prolific reader, and instead decided to just pick up an occasional issue, either when looking for a new PC (or parts for an existing PC). In fact, it was waay back in 1996, when one of my old college lecturers told me about it, and especially one of their advertisers, called something like “Page 72”, who, you guessed it, always ran their adverts on Page 72. I’m probably wrong with the page number there, but I always thought it was a nifty little martketing tool. You’d always know where to find them!

In fact, I bought my very first computer from out of a Micro Mart advert, around that same time, possibly from that very first issue I bought. Of course, way back in 1996, the internet barely existed. For me, it had only just started existing, and I certainly didn’t have the ability to shop for a new PC. I relied on the pages of Micro Mart to tell me what I was looking for. And it didn’t disappoint.

My very first PC was a Pentium 166Mhz (With MMX no less!), 16Mb RAM, 2Gb hard drive, and a 1Mb graphics card. Eventually, I outgrew this little machine, and the next one I bought also came from the hallowed pages of Micro Mart.

Time gre on, the internet became plentiful, and I didn’t really rely on Micro Mart for anything after that, but my love for it didn’t die. In the back of my mind, I’d be in a service station somewhere, or an airport, and I’d think to myself “Well, I’ll need something to fill the journey time”, and I’d walk out with a copy of MM under my arm. Sometimes I’d even pay for it!

Ho ho, I jest. In all seriousness, print medium when it comes to computer magazines is shrinking all of the time. Although there’s roughly 100 feet of shelf space in every large WH Smith, the computer section is dwindling rapidly. The vast majority of what’s left, taken up with “special” publications which seem to hang around for months, and the old established monthlies (and in MM’s case, even more frequent) are going to the great paper pulper in the sky. And I, for one, will miss them.

RIP Micro Mart.