The BBC are reporting that Computer systems generate up to 20% of all carbon produced by government, and that the UK government is going to have a carbon neutral IT system within 4 years. I wonder if they have considered cutting their electricity usage by using open source? I noted sometime ago from Alan Lord (when [...]

We believe that it was in 1952 when the first ever barcode label was produced, however it was not until the 1980s that barcode labels became popular to the public. When they were first produced they were only really used for one reason and that was for identifying railroad cars. This was a while ago [...]

If you are a really small volume user of labels, you may be wondering if it is best to have your own A4 sheet label printer at home to print labels, or pay for a professional to print their labels for them. At Mercian Labels , we have want what is best for you. If you [...]

Many of our customers enquire about what adhesives could or should their labels use. There is never a straight forward answer to this question, as there is a wide selection of adhesives, and it all depends on what use the label is going to be put to. This is because all adhesives are formulated for [...]

At Mercian Labels our customers constantly design their own custom personalised labels, which allows them to create their own designs before we print them. You may want to design your own labels for many different reasons, whether it is a one off design to mark a specific event, or for company use in marketing a [...]

Asset identification labels are useful for so many different organisations, and here at Mercian Labels we have many people contact us asking for such labels. Asset labels have so many different uses, but they are commonly used to help organisations track their assets and deter theft of their property.  One common area of confusion we [...]

Well we did a full dry run last Friday with the new PHP driven labels CRM system (yet to be named - any ideas?) and it didnt go as well as we hoped.  So much so that we have a list of bugs to work on before its good enough to go “live”, hopefully next [...]

The BIG migration of our mission critical MIS system from MS Access to POSTGRES PHP is due to happen this weekend.  OK, its taken 18 months, not 6 months to write, but I’m sure it will be worth it. Duplicate dry run on Friday, so watch this space…

Yesterday we just completed a change of business bankers.  This is not an activity to be undertaken lightly, but given that Mercian Labels has doubled in size in recent years and moved into the “commercial” banking sector of £1M-£25M turnover businesses we had really outgrown our previous banking arranagment. For those company owners and company directors [...]

Jake over at Senokian ran an auction for his emergency cat5 dog lead as reported on The Register I won it.  One of the most bizzare purchases I’ve ever made, but all proceeds went to a good cause and we were pleased to support Jake and battle Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Anybody have anything else weird to sell us??