Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Featured articles

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum! A series of articles exploring a modern development environment for the classic 8-bit 1980s home computer

Back to the floppy: A musing on the passing of a once-common physical storage medium

Review of the Apollo Vampire 1200 v2 accelerator add-on card for the classic Amiga 1200 computer

Recent Posts

DevOps for the Sinclair Spectrum - Part 1

Intro When I was around 8-9 years old, I received a Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer for my birthday. One of my earliest memories I remember is sitting with my Dad, reading the manual to work out the magic commands to load the games from cassette tape. Whilst the games (Manic Miner and Starstrike II were the two I remember trying out first) were cutting-edge for a 1980s computer system and I spent many hours playing them, I was always more interested in the manual. Lik...

Apollo Vampire V1200 Review

After months of being on the waiting list, I recently recieved my Apollo Vampire V1200V2 accelerator! Since then, my Amiga has had a new lease of life so I thought I’d write an update covering all the stuff I would have wanted to know while I was waiting for the package to arrive. What follows is a review/retrospective on my first month or so of usage of this card - I’ll cover the ordering experience, hardware, installation, updates and software and wrap up with my thought...

Gig

Just looking through some old videos and found this footage of me going off on one at our gig in February earlier this year, before the pandemic had really hit in the UK.

Back To The Floppy

A few months ago, reading the news about Linux dropping support for floppy disks set off a whole bunch of memories and emotions around this long obsolete and “dead” data storage format. I hadn’t thought about or used floppy disks for around 20 odd years now, at some point I must have copied my last disk but I honestly can’t remember what it was or when. The floppy disk was one of those rare things that became part of my everyday life like my keys or school pencil-case. It...