30th June 2011: Hey everyone - It’s Mike here again. I’m typing this sat in the lounge of The Green Man, a first class pub in Swindon (near Dudley). I’m typing on my decrepit Lenovo R60 Thinkpad, a beast of a laptop and quite bullet proof although the battery isn’t really what it was. To my left is a pint of Ginger Beard, a medium-strength real-ale made with Ginger. The table has been cleared by Lynette the very nice landlady. I’m off on holiday to Devon for a few days tomorrow but en-route I’m visiting Mike Barker, an excellent chap, who’s going to respray my Murphy Acoustic Deluxe which was damaged by a courier company as it was being returned to Devon following its loan to North One television. (North One make The Gadget Show and always look after my odds-and-ends whenever they borrow them, but this time the couriers managed to take a couple of big chunks of white “veneer” from the front of the set.) My mate Tone has just turned up so I’d better close for now. Back shortly...

17th July 2011: Crikey, well that was a long “shortly”. Anyway, a couple of weeks have passed since the last entry and I dropped off my Murphy Acoustic Deluxe to Mike Barker in Devizes and had a look around Mike and Jim’s planned Murphy museum – It’s going to be huge and much bigger than my little museum down here. I think it will have some much more interesting relics than my museum too. Well done Mike and Jim – I hope I get invited to the opening ceremony. Anyway, I’m now back down in Devon again, having been down here and back in Solihull again once already since my last entry. On this trip I’ve been erecting tables for all the VTRs and VCRs, laying everything out and printing labels and putting them into some little plastic label-holders kindly donated from my mate Steve Farley’s old shop “Jollys” in Kingstanding. The carpets are now down in the TV-section downstairs and the VTR section upstairs, courtesy of “S and G Carpets” in Torrington, and everywhere has now got the look of a proper museum, if still pretty small. There is still one last bit that I need carpeting and organising but I’ll get that sorted out when I can afford it. All the aerial connections, mains sockets and CAT5e Ethernet sockets are now plumbed in and working, there is now wired and wireless Internet connectivity and 405 and 625 line video permanently available throughout both floors and the heating and shower / toilet facilities are also now live and working, so everything is well on its way for the grand opening sometime soon. Unfortunately the place isn’t half big enough to display most of the interesting colour sets so there will have to be some kind of rotation system, but this will mean carting stuff up and down between Devon and Solihull and that’s not going to be very good for the TVs. I might have to think of something else. (Does anyone have any dry storage in West / North Devon? A nice cheap barn I could buy perhaps?) In other news, a good pal of mine Rory Clark, with the help of another mate Dave Jeffries, have kindly made a second test card disc for the museum, chock full of interesting test cards, animations, idents and music - it’s really excellent. Thank you a huge amount Rory and Dave. I have also put together another test card disc without any of the fancy stuff in Rory’s disc, but it’s small enough to download and has all the useful test cards and several test patterns too. It’s freely downloadable from here:

http://www.oldtechnology.net/TestCardDisc/V0.12.iso

You just need to use your favourite ISO burning software to write the image to a DVD. Anyway, the pint of Stella I just drank is making me very tired, so I think I’m going to go to bed now and listen to John Shuttleworth on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Oh, wait, my phone is ringing... (30 mins later) It was my old mate Tas phoning from St Albrans in Hertfordshire. He was also drinking Stella and waffled semi-incoherently about all sorts of nonsense. Of course I humoured Tas until his battery ran out and he went. :-) Actually, I made all that up – Tas and I actually waffled on about his nice new Sobell TV with its strange frame-linearity problem and various other TV-related odds and ends and it was a very good natter. Thanks Tas. :-) Anyway, the rain is making a nice noise on my Velux window and there is smoke wafting in from my parents’ wood-burning stove and that is a nice soothing smell as well, so I think I’ll quickly upload this and go off to bed. Goodnight everyone. From your old pal Mike.

26th of November 2012: Evening all. I hope everyone is fine and well. As ever, it’s been a huge long time between entries and so much has happened that I won’t even attempt to chronicle the majority of it – perhaps just a few interesting (or not) points. First of all, 5 months after my last entry (in November 2011) I contracted prostatitis – that’s an inflammation of the prostate. I won’t say too much more about it but it does make sitting down quite painful and causes some other unpleasant things too. This means that I can’t always make the long journeys in the car to visit my pals or collect TVs that I used to. Unfortunately the problem can take years to go away and there’s not much they can do about it. I have another hospital appointment in a few weeks to see Mr Syed, a urologist at Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, so I hope he can help the problem out a bit. In TV news, my mate Tone came round at the weekend and helped me out fixing an old 1949 Bush TV12A TV for the museum in Beaford, Devon. To be honest it didn’t really need an awful lot doing to it other than the usual blanket-change of the nasty wax capacitors and the replacement of one of the smoothing cans – the most difficult one to get to in fact. Unfortunately a lot of the rubber wiring has perished and if any of it is disturbed the rubber sheathing flakes off in a pile of hard rubber “bits” to reveal the bare wire beneath. As for other TV stuff, I've just finished off fixing up a Decca CTV25 for a very nice lady called Lucy from Ealing in London. Lucy is very big in the world of test-cards and test-card music and is always much in demand for talks, after-dinner speeches, international peace-treaty summits etc. She also hosts an excellent monthly radio show with lots of test-card music and other related stuff. Anyway, this Decca has been a year in the fixing and has had a huge number of faults rectified as well as a whole lot of work to make the set more reliable so it can be used as an everyday set - on both 405 lines and 625 lines. I really didn't like the set to start with - it always looked a bit "home made" and scrappy to my eyes but it has grown on me over the period and now I like it a lot. I have to deliver the TV down to Lucy in a few weeks but I think she is quite demanding and I'm quite worried that it's not going to be up to her expectations. :-( I'll put a picture of the set up on the Colour section sometime in the next few weeks. In other news, I’ve just finished a book (an audio book anyway) called “Cold Vengeance” – the latest in a series by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child featuring an FBI agent called “Aloysius Pendergast” – It was fantastic and I can highly recommend the whole series, which starts off with a book called “Relic” and gets better and better as the series progresses. I’ve had a bit of a tidy up of the web site front page – it’s still terrible, old-fashioned and badly coded but I’m really too lazy to do anything else with it to be honest. I will upload a few new pictures of TVs etc. over the next few weeks and put the details on the front page. The diary and California travel-blog are still available in the “diary” section (see link at the bottom of the page). As always, please accept my sincere apologies if I don’t manage to answer your kind emails – I always feel very guilty. They are always much appreciated but I do get an awful lot of them and they do get overlooked sometimes. Anyway, I think that’s it for this time and I'm hungry (although actually I'm always hungry). Thanks everyone. From your old mate in Solihull (and Devon sometimes), Mike.

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Stay at the location of the forthcoming South West England Vintage TV Museum.
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If you would like to use any photos from this site, you are more than welcome. All I would ask is that you put a small mention of www.oldtechnology.net somewhere on the page or in a credit section somewhere. A link would be nice too. :-)

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Visitor number 5038 since 31st July 1998