January 2026 – BenQuick.me

I’ve recently been reading Shareware Heros – It’s an interesting book, even though it’s not what I might have expected. It focuses more on the business side of the shareware approach rather than the actual development of the software or the problems that needed to be solved. There were some very large numbers mentioned when discussing the Apogee Model and the income some of the titles released under that model bought in

I’ve not quite finished the book yet, but I wanted more discussion about how problems were solved when computer resources were so limited – A couple of Mhz of clockspeed, some Kb or Mb of RAM, and probably some 10’s of Mb of harddisk

Looking back, it’s insane to me how much performance people were able to push from the hardware that was available at the time. How much time did you spend on tweaking autoexec.bat and config.sys to make sure you had enough resources available for your program to run as well as it could?

I appreciate this isn’t about shareware, but it’s the book that made me start thinking

As the previous year, my energy bill was minimal in 2025. I didn’t keep any good records of the actual costs for 2025. Roughly speaking, my fixed costs were £272 in standing charges and I figure I’ve paid £255 in energy costs on top of that

My total net energy bill for the year was around £255 – £21.25/month (£43.93/month if you include the standing charges)

In 2022, my monthly energy direct debit was £200/month. In 2023 I increased it to £250/month. This remained at £250/month in 2024 (first full year with solar) as I wasn’t sure what impact the solar panels would have on costs. In 2025, I reduced the direct debit to £100/month. For 2026, I have reduced it again to £50/month. Considering prices always seem to rise I’m quite happy that I’ve been able to reduce my outgoings

3 brief graphs:

Month: January 2026

I miss people understanding computers

Another year done, a brighter year