Cycle gear
In the past, I never owned a bike or any of the associated kit long enough for it to wear out or for something better to come on the market - my bikes always used to get stolen when I lived in central Oxford (and skimped on locking them up properly).
However, the world has moved on, and so have I - and given that I commute between 2,000 and 3,000 miles a year (!) on my trusty steed, I've been making some improvements with winter closing in...
Lights
I've had a fairly nice set of CatEye lights since I got the bike in 2012. They take six AA batteries between them (four front and two back), and the speed with which they chew through them was starting to annoy me. Inevitably, they run out half way through my eight mile cycle home in the dark. I carry a full set of spares, and they're all rechargable, but finding somewhere safe to stop and swap can be tricky and the cold weather really seems to affect how long they can hold a charge. Getting four batteries the right way up while wearing gloves, in the dark, is also not fun.
So I bought myself some new ones which charge over USB. I stuck with CatEye in the hope that they would fit on the existing brackets (they do!) and so far I'm impressed. This front light seems to punch out at least as good a cone of light on full power as its predecessor, despite being a third of the volume and half the weight. And I can charge it from the USB power brick I have in the shed, as well as from my computer at work. It also has a nice push button system for on/off which is not susceptible to the accidental activation of the sliding switch on the old one.
Best of all, it has a low battery warning light, but still manages to run at full brightness until the battery is completely exhausted.
Still waiting for delivery of the new back light from an Amazon seller in China...
Camera
My previous cycle camera gave up the ghost, and I went halves with a friend on a two-for-one offer on new ones from Chilli Technology. They took quite a while to ship, but the result is what I was hoping for: a slight evolution on the original, with weak spots like the on/off button fixed, swappable batteries and charging over micro USB.
Pannier
My pannier has never been the same since I put it through the washing machine after some food leaked inside it. Unfortunately the back plate ended up deforming into the shape of the edge of the washing machine drum, and so the pannier has been curved for about six years now. I replaced it with the nearest thing still made by the same manufacturer, which should do the job. One of the tricks I've (eventually) worked out is that if one cycles four days out of five and drives on the other one, then it makes sense to transport clean shirts and towels in by car on the fifth day to minimise the weight cycled with.