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I remember a time when upgrading my home computer was a thing. Technology was changing fast enough that there was a benefit to regularly upgrading hardware and software. That was twenty years ago, these days things are fine and just work for years…

Two weeks ago I upgraded my main home desktop, upgrading to a Ryzen 7 9700X in what I felt was a mid range system that would give me a decent upgrade for a reasonable amount of money. With a basic motherboard, 32GB of RAM (double the previous system) and a new 500GB NVMe boot drive I kept it under AUD1000. The case and other storage (mostly SSD) was reused from the previous system. So far it is mostly the same, but the place where I can tell a different is in how much more responsive Lightroom now is.

That previous system was put together in early 2019 based around an i7-8700 CPU, it was my first system with an NVMe boot drive which did make it feel quite snappy. Though the other storage was all still spinning rust so there were still noticable read delays in Lightroom just after importing images (I made sure to put the catalog and cache on the NVMe drive).

I had thought that this six and a half year gap was the longest I had gone between upgrades, but it turns out that this is the second gap of this duration with the previous upgrade to an i7-3770 being almost thirteen years ago.

This trend of long gaps has been going for a while, I need to step back another four and a half years to when I previously switched from a series of AMD CPUs over to Intel. I don’t recall what I did with that hardware, it is all long gone as I had no need to keep it around.

However that thirteen year old i7-3770 is still running fine as my parent’s computer, but it is about to be updated to the six an a half year old i7-8700. Partially because I have no other use for it, but mainly because it is supported by Windows 11. It will also be a good time to remove all the spinning rust which has been in that system for a loooong time…

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PS: Looking back through old posts I was reminded that at one point I did buy a dedicated GPU for Lightroom and did see a benefit from it, but these days I am happy with onboard graphics which support multiple monitors, it is a bonus if it might get used for Lightroom a bit. As I don’t play games I would need compelling evidence of a significant benefit before I would part with AUD500+ for a dedicated GPU.

Yesterday was the final day of the 2025 Melbourne International Comedy Festival and it is also ten years since I jumped in to going to live comedy.

In early 2015 I was six months in to working in the city and having to commute on the train. I was looking for things to listen to and I was put onto two Melbourne based comedy podcasts. Things escalated quickly as the host of one of those podcasts ran a Saturday afternoon comedy room, and then both of them had live podcast recordings on the Saturday and Sunday afternoon during the comedy festival. As I was now working in the city, it became easy to stay in and go to comedy shows.

Looking back at my calendar for 2015 I see that I went to 10 podcast recordings, 15 solo shows and 3 showcase shows.

Those weekend afternoon podcasts (more than the original two) became the foundation of my festival, also becoming a place to catch up with friends I had made because they also listened to the podcasts and you need something to do while waiting in line…

I won’t go through every year, but in 2019 that had grown to 19 podcasts and 45 solo shows.

A big difference for this year was that due to some podcasts ending and others not being available to do live shows I no longer had that foundation for my weekends. There was a single live podcast, but I made up for it with 52 solo shows. If I didn’t have to still go to work there were a number of late night shows that could have pushed that up above 60.

And now some miscellaneous observations:

• The weather was hot or warm, not the typical cold and rainy April in Melbourne
• I caught the train from my regular station 12 times and due to works I drove to a station on a different line 7 times.
• I drove in once because a late weeknight show finished after the last train.
• Last night was the only time I drove in because all the nearby train lines had works.

My sense of time is still broken as today marks five years since I started working from home. Broadly speaking my routine is still the same as it was a year ago.

Do I have any highlights of the last year?

• I got my first 3d printer and have incorporated that into my home automation projects
• I had solar and no gas for over a year, continuing to monitor my usage and keep an eye on what could change
• I liquidated the last of my computer collection, just keeping Apple IIgs related items
• I tackled some long overdue home maintenance projects such as building a new gate, painting the garage door, sanding back and oiling the deck, getting the garage door roof replaced and painting railings

I didn’t get out with my camera as much as I wanted, though I did spend a decent amount of time working through my backlog and putting up a few new albums on Flickr.

At the end of last year the decision was finally announced that the lease would be terminated on the Melbourne office, we would all be formally considered remote. In 2024 I only went in once to work (on a day we had an all office meeting with catered lunch) but I did use it a couple of other times, it was handy knowing I had access to somewhere in the city that was quiet and I knew would have a clean toilet… I still miss the random lunchtime conversations, but the opposite is true for the two hours taken up be the commute.

For a long time I have had a TV tuner in one of my computers so that I could record broadcast television to watch later. To handle the scheduling and recording I have been using a Java based program called DV Scheduler. I don’t recall if I ever knew the name of who wrote it, just that it was on a personal page of someone that worked/studied at the University of Sydney.

Today I uninstalled the program and removed the TV tuner from my computer. Not because of any problems I was having with it, but because it has been a full year since I have watched anything that it recorded.

As my recent lists of youtube channels and podcasts indirectly reveal, there is very little on broadcast television that I watch. When there are shows that I do want to watch I have been “watching” them on the relevant station’s “catch up” service.

I have a bit of regret in uninstalling DV Scheduler as it has been such a reliable program. Looking back I found that I first gave it a try fourteen years ago. I don’t know when it’s website was removed but the most recent capture of its website in the wayback machine is from 2016.

Oh well, time marches on…

After going through my Youtube RSS subscriptions I went through my podcast subscriptions as it had also been some time since I put out a list.

This was a much simpler task but also bittersweet as I decided it was finally time to remove a couple of podcasts that ended suddenly this year, plus some that petered out a long time ago…

• Book Cheat
• Ding Dong Club
• Do Go On
• Everyone Relax (TOFOP/FOFOP/Wilosophy)
• Four Burners with Josh Earl
• Geologic Podcast
• Go Fact Yourself
• Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It
• Lateral with Tom Scott
• No Such Thing As A Fish
• Penn’s Sunday School
• Probably Science
• Star Wars Spelt Out
• Taskmaster Podcast
• That Geek Pod Podcast
• The Dollop
• The Infinite Monkey Cage
• The Skeptics Guide to the Universe
• The Weekly Planet
• Who Knew It with Matt Stewart

This isn’t quite the full list as I didn’t include the feeds with bonus/premium episodes for the few podcasts that have those.