Pupdate

We’re now past the second cycle of Milo’s chemo, which is covered in a separate post – complications.

January brough a couple of cold but dry weeks, which has made it possible to go on longer walks without getting too muddy.

Skiing

A full report will follow. We’re now most of the way through a week in Val d’Isere, which has been excellent :)

Cross trainer repair

Shortly before Christmas my weekday workouts (or at least the TV watching during them) were being spoiled by a squeak. Previously a few drops of 3in1 oil have solved things, but not this time. After a bit of poking around the web I found ‘Elliptical Noise Troubleshooting‘, but that also didn’t fix it. Eventually I pinned the source of the noise down to the crank on my Horizon Fitness Andes 200. Thankfully it came off using a bicycle crank removal tool – something that’s been sat in my toolbox for decades unused.

A bit of rust cleanup, followed by reassembly and the squeak was gone. At least for a while, after a couple of weeks it was back. So this time I put a little silicone grease onto the parts, and got the torque wrench out for the securing bolt. My fingers are crossed that it will hum along for a few more years.

Home lab upgrade

I wrote in October about getting a Lenovo M720q as my main VMware machine, and I’ve been very happy with it. The one thing I’d change is that it doesn’t have any remote management. For that machine it doesn’t really matter, but for some other stuff I wanted to do it would be useful to have something like the ‘integrated lights out (iLO)’ capability that my old Gen8 HP Microservers came with.

I’ve now been able to pick up a (very reasonably priced) Lenovo M920q, which is pretty much identical to the M720q apart from having a chipset that supports Intel vPro. By enabling vPro and using Intel Manageability Commander I can now remotely control power, and get keyboard, video, mouse (KVM) access to the console. I’ve set it up to dual boot Windows 11 and Debian 12 so I now have a ‘bare metal’ system for testing various things.

Solar diary

The cold weeks did at least bring some sun. Though I’m not sure it will have made up for the extra electricity used running the heat pump in the evenings :/

Beating Beat Saber

Hardly any more Beat Saber this month, but (again) a lot of Gun Club VR. I completed all the achievements in the regular game, and I’ve now moved on to the S.W.A.T. DLC, which continues to serve up fresh fun.