When it comes to buying earphones to listen to music, I’ve never considered myself an audiophile — just some poor bastard afflicted by OCD. In elementary school, I downloaded a song called 《爱就一个字》 from 商都信息港 at 33.6Kbps. It was only 3MB, 128Kbps if I recall correctly, and at the time I thought the sound quality was absolutely mind-blowing. Then in high school I bought Sony’s “perfume bottle” player and downloaded albums from Ukoo.net. 192kbps VBR was already considered good quality back then. I couldn’t really tell the difference, but one time I downloaded a 128Kbps song, gave it a listen, and something felt off. So I figured I’d buy a better pair of earphones. I saved up and got the Sennheiser MX500. Put them on and instantly felt I’d wasted my money: “This is no different from my old 10-yuan earphones!” I saw people online saying these had “good bass extension,” didn’t quite get what that meant, so I asked my classmate Lu Da. His answer: “Ah, that? It’s just the sub-bass effect, man. When it hits it’s not boom-boom-boom, it’s more like there’s a bit of echo and springiness to it — pong pong pong.” I sort of half-understood. Then one day one of the MX500’s drivers died, and I had to grab a stock earphone that came with a PDA. Maybe it was slightly better than the 10-yuan ones I’d used before. Put it on, turned on the music, and immediately something felt wrong. “How does this sound so different from my MX500?” And that’s how the tragedy began.

I bought the Nexus 6 the same way I bought the Nexus 9 last time — same channel, arrived at almost the same time too. There’s already plenty of info about this phone online, but I’ll still keep it brief.

Honestly, I’d heard of Vsonic’s earphones but never actually heard them. The reason is pretty childish: their boss spends every day bragging on Weibo, which came off a bit chuuni, so I couldn’t be bothered. But things always turn around. For instance, someone recently gave me a VSD1S.

There’s very little written about the HAVI B3 Pro 1, at least here in China. All I could find were a handful of impressions on the overseas Head-Fi, and they don’t exactly agree with each other — one guy even reported a quality issue. Domestically there’s even less; what I did find reads like sponsored fluff. HAVI itself doesn’t seem to care much and looks more interested in expanding overseas. Anyway, I bought one, and after listening I was pleasantly surprised. Quick write-up: There’s only one seller for the HAVI B3 Pro 1 on eBay, and it’s the official one. The owner was very friendly and even shipped it express. The packaging is nice and the build quality is solid — the back has a glass facet. Sure, it’s a bit of a knockoff of the Sennheiser IE80, but at least it doesn’t look ugly. According to the official site it’s a dual-dynamic design. I’ve heard plenty about multi-BA setups, but this is my first time with dual dynamic drivers.

Originally I just wanted a Nexus 6. After a year and change with a Sony, I’d decided Android is better off with something close to stock. But this time around they announced the Nexus 9 and Nexus 6 together, so I got carried away and bought both. The Nexus 6 is still on a plane; the Nexus 9 arrived a week ago. Here’s roughly how it went. I bought straight from the Google Play store. Lots of people say that if the credit card billing address you register with Google Wallet doesn’t match the forwarding company’s receiving address, Google will cancel your order — and that Google cancels orders like a maniac. From what I can tell, most of those people had never had a Google Wallet account, maybe not even a Google account. They rushed to sign up through some temporary proxy just to buy a Nexus, then rushed to place an order, so of course Google figured them for scalpers or a sketchy account. So basically: if you’ve bought things with Google Wallet before, or you’ve had a Google account for ages, Google will let the billing-address thing slide. Mine went through fine. Google Play doesn’t ship directly. You can buy the Nexus 9 from Amazon with direct shipping, but there’s $70 in tax, so forwarding is cheaper. I used Benniao (笨鸟海淘) as the forwarder — partly because I couldn’t get registered with 转运中国, and the other forwarders were either backed up or banned electronics. Benniao was just okay, honestly. Not what I’d call fast: 25 days from shipment to delivery. Four of those days were bad luck landing on a weekend when they’re closed, so I had to wait until Monday for shipping and customs to continue. I got the 32GB black version. Forwarding cost 70 RMB, and customs hit me for 200 RMB on the electronics. Work out the total yourself if you care.

It’s been nearly a month since I got the Moto 360, long enough that I figure I owe it some proper impressions. Photos of how this thing looks are all over the internet already, so I’ll just talk about the parts I think people overlook.

Over in the hardware section of S1stage, people have recently taken to calling Logitech “poop.” The origin of this meme is kind of funny—one day some guy stormed in demanding mouse recommendations, laid out a whole pile of requirements, and then tacked on: “Don’t recommend me Logitech. Logitech is poop.” And the whole thread derailed instantly, filling up with congratulatory messages from all sorts of poop users. Honestly, as a die-hard poop loyalist, I still quite appreciate poop’s……………after-sales service.

I’d been meaning to pick up a router to flash OpenWRT on, mainly to mess around with bypassing the GFW. But the Linksys E4200 at home ran more stably on stock firmware, so I never got around to it and just hung a Raspberry Pi off it as a gateway instead. That worked fine. Then a while back I saw a router going for 19 yuan with free shipping, and I couldn’t hold back. Twenty yuan — that’s nothing. How much does a meal cost anyway?

Buying stuff usually needs a reason. Way, way back I learned that label printers existed, and instantly felt like I definitely needed one of these things. I mean, look at all those jars, bottles, and storage boxes at home — how can you not have a fully automated label generator? Then I happened to spot the CASIO MEP-T10 label printer on 什么值得买, priced at 258 yuan with free shipping. So cheap, and it has a touchscreen, and you can handwrite on it, and you can connect it to a computer. When else am I going to buy this? So I ordered it on the spot. But then the damn Amazon told me the order was delayed and I wouldn’t get it until after the National Day holiday. Fine, whatever. Then things took a turn — at noon on October 4th I got a call saying the printer had arrived… So in the middle of the holiday I dragged myself out of bed and ran to the office to pick up the package, and brought this thing home.

Yesterday — no, actually today — Microsoft released the Windows 10 developer preview. As a half-hearted Microsoft supporter, I couldn’t resist giving it a shot. First I played around with it in a VM, but it felt off. Not satisfying, not happy. So I wanted to try it on real hardware. Commercial OS dev builds are usually somewhat reliable — more reliable than the betas of quite a few Linux distros (no offense) — so on this fine afternoon I upgraded my Surface Pro 3 to Windows 10.