Gav's World : News : 2025

2025-10-28 : New Hybrid Bike Day!

At long last... my work eventually signed up for the Cycle to Work Scheme, so I though that it was time for a new commuting bike - well my Edinburgh Bike Cuillin 300 is now 25 years old now (still going well though)!

So, now I have a Boardman MTX 8.9 - I figured that I'd go for a hybrid with suspension fork, since my other "hybrid" is now a solid frame, and I've also got proper mountain bikes in both hardtail and full-suspension flavours!

This is a bit more of an upright ride than the Cuillin, so is a bit more comfortable during the commute with work clothes on. The Shimano Deore drive train (as suspected) is a joy to shift up and down with.

2025-07-05 : Another 3D Printer Upgrade

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Creality released the K1 (that I bought in 2023) and then the K1 Max (plus a few other variants) as single material printers (obviously if needed, manual swapping of material could be done after tweaking the gcode file), but when the K2 came along, it had a CFS (Creality Filament System).

Eventually, they released the K1 Series Upgrade Kit to bring the same functionality to all K-series printers!

Needless to say that after a lot of thinking - did I actually "need" this upgrade to my printer? ... well ... you can guess the answer!

However, since I had an OG K1, it didn't go quite as smoothly as was anticipated!

2025-04-19 : Major PC Upgrade

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The time has finally come to bring my Desktop PC forward at least a decade - but mainly due to the imminent end of life for Windows 10. I rarely actually boot into Windows, but considering it is like Swiss cheese when it comes to security, the lack of security updates after October this year mean that it'll be at even more at risk. So... a Windows 11 compatible PC is now required! Still no point in bleeding edge though, given my normal usage of the thing!

Anyway, a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and case (the latter was only because my old case from 2002 didn't have front USB 3 ports!) Everything else transplanted over from the old case.

2025-03-09 : New Gigabit Network

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After moving into my new house in August 2024, and adapting the CAT 6 wiring that was already installed (to the lounge and big bedroom), I've at last routed a cable through to my wee office (I'd previously used Netgear PLP1000 Powerline Extender and then a TP-Link TP-WA1201 AC1200 Access Point configured in client mode.

Neither of which were particularly fast (the Powerline only achieved 70Mbits/s which I attribute to all of my mains filtering on the PC and AV equipment) and reliable (the AC1200 had to be reset every now and then as throughput would drop into single digits).

So now, my whole house (or at least where I have computer equipment) has Gigabit Network installed!