The Mercian Labels Group Blog – Security Labels International, Mercian Labels and AC Labels

Can anyone tell me what happened to the National Open Centre, and Open Advantage as well while I’m at it?  I thought the former took over the latter role when funding ceased, but the former’s website is down now.  Is any publically funded body in the UK solely promoting open source any more?

The last big task in our complete migration to open source has been moving our phone system from swyx to Trixbox, the free and open source package containing linux, astrix, free pbx and lots of other packages to make a it stand alone scalelable phone system.  We involved Senokian from early days to get it working, as like a lot of these things, linux without a good sys admin can be a lonely and unproductive life.

The process we used was such:

1. I attended an open advantage awareness/training course on trixbox to see what it could do.
2. I engaged senokian to buy a basic DELL PC and install Trixbox on it with an ISDN BRI card
3. I configured it using the great notes freepbx.org and  trixbox.org , copying the settings from our SWYX voip system
4. Dave from Senokian ironed out 2 bugs in the setup relating to our configuration of ISDN card and email settings for voicemail.
5. I tested it, opened some ports to enable remote SIP access on trixbox and tweaked it.
6. It works, and is ready for rollout.

In terms of SIP clients, I’ve settled on Ekiga / Hudlite for linux, and openwengo /hudlite for windows (all soon to be gone) anyway.

So, we have a working trixbox phone system ready to rollout.  Another milestone in our open source migration bites the dust.

As a specialist in short run labels for UK SMEs, we do a lot of digital labelling at Mercian Labels and are firmly committed to the Xeikon digitial process as it give us the best results for our customers.

Punch Graphix have launched the new Xeikon 3300 and 3000 digital label printers, and last week we attended its first open day at the manufacturing site in Lier, Belgium to meet other Xeikon label printers, exchange notes and listen to case studies, R&D progress and NPD ideas.

Here is me inspecting the press (Thanks Barry for the photo!)

I found it a really worthwhile event, and the new machine really pushes the Xeikon process back to the “top of the pile” in terms of digital label printing presses.  At the moment the race for supremacy in digital label printing is strictly between HP and Xeikon, and this new development is really going to upset the status quo.

Thanks & congratulations to the team at Punch Graphix for running such a well executed industry event.

We have been getting lots of interest in our new Labellock range of security labels from customers and distributors across the world.  Its taken a lot of R&D to get this product range to market, and its great to see the product being shipped out of the door.

We’ve invested heavily in the business in the last year, and its great to see the product being shipped across the workd for all sorts of weird and wonderful applications, and being stocked by new distributors and business partners we hope to build good long term relations with.

If you have not looked it up yet, then please pop over here.

We have had a long standing probelm with data storage in our business, as we generate or manage a huge number of graphic design files.  With the final stages of our migration coming together, we decided to move all our files to a dedicated network attached storage device (running on embedded linux of course!).

We picked a Buffalo Terastation Live 1TB device on the recommendation of Senokian, and its gone in just fine.  It configures easily using the web interface, and just works.  We have it setup in a RAID 10 array (which is basically mirrored RAID1 plus the frills) to give good data security.

I’d recommend it on the basis of what we have seen so far as a good value NAS for SMEs.

Readers of this blog who are involved in the UK labels industry may be interested to know that there is a new UK based and focussed event being planned for UK label companies.  With the dominance of LabelExpo in Brussells every 2 years, there has not been a UK event of any significance for years.  Through the BSRLA I’ve been approached to support this event, which the BSRLA is doing. More details to follow, but I like to concept behind the event and I hope its a success.

If you wish to participate, then please let me know.

Today I’ve been at the Recycling and Waste Management show at the NEC in Birmingham on my continual quest to find a waste management solution for our stripping waste at Mercian Labels.  The disposal of this type of waste is the largest waste disposal problem we have as an industry (apart from silicon liner, which is already well addressed for volume users).

I went looking for 1 of 3 solutions:

1. recycling of our self adhesive paper and plastic waste
2. finding a waste carrier who will collect our waste and collect it for industrial incineration to fuel a cement works, or similar huge user of combustible fuels
3. find an onsite incineration solution that would safely allow us to us a “waste to energy” route to turn our waste stream into energy for heat, electric or similar.

I didnt get anywhere significant with any of the options.  Despite attending the biggest waste recycling show in the UK, there was very little interest in our industries problem.  The key conclusions from today:

• There is a no current solution for recycling self adhesive paper waste, but somebody is working on it. There is a limited volume solution for self adhesive plastic (PP and PE) waste by merging it with pure plastic extrusions
• If you want to send your waste to an industrial incinerator, then you need 5,000 tonnes per year, or else the cement companies and other are not interested. Small volumes users need not apply…  And they will charge you £60 per tonne for it (verses £55 a tonne to lanfill it!)
• EU regulations effectively prevent us using a purpose built safe onsite incinerator to turn our waste into heat energy or energy generation as the cost of the chimney scrubbing plant needed exceeds £250,000.

The best advice I got today was “ship your waste to China, as they have less strict environmental laws there and they can burn it for energy”. How can it be a good idea to ship your waste across the planet to a poorer country?

So, at a time of soaring energy prices, we just cannt recycle, reuse, incinerate or do anything with our waste stream but send it to landfill.  Landfill is not sustainable in the very long term, and in the current political climate in the medium term as well.

So, we are depressingly stuck between a rock and a hard place.  A solution has to be found to this problem, but at current landfill prices, I’m out of ideas.  It would be nice if our suppleirs took responsibility for the “waste” they leave us with, which would make it a more concentrated problem or a few major suppliers, rather than a large number of small users.  Somehow, I cannt see this happening.

For anyone in the UK who values their privacy, Phorm is bad news.  Its just such a bad idea for users, the reputation of those companies taking part, and the regulators who approve it.  If my ISP Nildram subscribes to it, they will loose my business for sure.

Nuff’ said.

I have spent some time this afternoon working out why ubuntu 8.04 wont install on a brand new pc I bought today from Ginger6 , as it hung and reported

MP-BIOS bug 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
Kernel Panic – not syncing: IO-APIC + timer doesn’t work! Try using the ‘no-apic’ kernel parameter

I dont really understand why this happens, but the solution was to press f6 at the start of the live cd instalation and type in “noapic” at the end of the existing command.  It just runs and installs perfectly.

A useful tip for someone if they ever find this blog post!

This is a great fun presentation on how to run a profitable software business in the SME market. Its 30 minutes long, and really puts into the perspective the importance of the SME business model.  Not everybody can be the next facebook, but there is good, enjoyable business to be had out there in smaller businesses.

Enjoy.

At Mercian Labels we  do a lot of online marketing, and the new google browser “Chrome” looked of interest to me, as aI wanted to form an opinion as to whether or not it will take off and be as popular as IE or Firefox.

However useful and incredibly successful google is, sometimes they appear to overstep the mark.

Read this review of Chrome’s security features and decide – do you really want this level of data transparency to google?  I dont.  And despite the fact that its open source, I can think of many reasons why this wont be as popular as firefox (the default choice of those who even remotely care what browser they use) or IE (installed by default on the vast majority of PCs as they run Windows).  Plugins. Community support. Security. Brand. Freedom. Privacy.

Why would anyone choose Chrome over Firefox?

I rarely complain about companies on this blog, but this one just takes the biscuit.  I ordered 2 TVs from Ebuyer.com last week, only to find out that the remotes were faulty and not working.  I completed their returns system online, only to be told that to return that faulty goods I had to call a premium 0871 number, (and be placed on hold in a queue!) to speak to a call centre to get the return authorised!

Thats pretty poor customer service.  Ebuyer, you will loose business from otehrwise happy customers doing this.  Pleas go back to your online returns system – it worked, and customers were happy.