Gav's World : News : Last 10 Items

2025-07-05 : Another 3D Printer Upgrade

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!

2024-07-21 : New Server SSD Configuration

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So, my server started acting up - first sign was that the VMs fell off the network, and then I couldn't access the web GUI of the server, but strangely it was still serving files over NFS (I suspect because the core of TrueNAS was running in RAM).

After investigation, it looked like the carrier card for my 4x mSATA drives (Kalea Informatique, mSATA PCIe Controller Card) was at fault. All 4x mSATA SSDs appeared operational though.

So, purchase of a new SATA card and 4x mSATA to SATA enclosures to house all of the SSDs:

2024-04-05 : Website Template Updated : v2.23.3

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Enhancements

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New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

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Bug Fixes

Duplicate rss.php in "self" link for RSS feed, similar duiplicate of "atom.php" in "self" link for ATOM feed.

2024-04-04 : Not Another Raspberry Pi!

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Yes, another one (which is the now 19th Pi that I've bought - here's the full list!)

The Raspberry Pi 5 is quite easily powerful enough (especially with an NVMe drive) to be used as an Every Day Computer!

2024-02-29 : Faster Server Processor

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One evening (after the kids had said that Minecraft was a bit laggy when playing on my server from their Mum's house), I decided to see what was available in the Intel Xeon E3 v5 family of processors in the second hand market (well, it was launched in 2016, so not likely to still be available new), as that's what my server is compatible with.

Well, I found a Quad Core Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 (3.7GHz, 4.0GHz Turbo) for a very reasonable price to replace the Quad Core Intel Xeon E3-1225 v5 (3.3GHz, 3.7GHz Turbo) that it came with and had been purring away quite happily.

Luckily, from previous upgrades of the kids' PCs, I had a couple of spare graphics cards, as the E3-1280 doesn't have built-in graphics like the E3-1225 does. Anyway, the swap went without a hitch (apart from having to order heat-sink compound as I'd actually ran out!)

Unfortunately, the kids haven't tried Minecraft again yet to see if it made a difference, or if it was simply (as I suspect) network lag.

2024-02-13 : At Last - A Use For My Zero-W

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So obviously, when the Raspberry Pi Zero W was released, I bought one and "played" with it for a couple of days. However, it was sitting idle for years when I finally decided to do something with it! So, it's now my MPD Monitor!

2023-10-23 : (Another) New 3D Printer

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After a few years with my Vertex Delta 3D Printer, and one too many failed print attempts, I splashed out on a new printer: a Creality K1.

This is a massive step up in performance over the Vertex Delta - it's a CoreXY printer that is incredibly fast and accurate... and more importantly, isn't connected with magnets which can cause the head to crash (and fall off the magnets) if there is a shock during printing. As cool as the Vertex Delta was to watch printing, this was it's biggest problem.

As usual, there is a plethora of printable upgrades that people have already designed for this - so time to start printing!