I don’t feel like spending too many words on how these two things are, because it’s really hard to say much in detail.

So, I broke my sleep earphones again. My sleep earphones basically serve two purposes: plugging into the Surface Pro, and plugging into other tablets to listen to voice tracks. At first I used Earpods, then Princess talked me into buying an Audio-Technica CX550. Then I lost that pair, and after some searching I found out the strongest sleep earphones are the K314p. A year after I got them I learned they’d actually gone up in price, which scared me into putting them up on a shelf. To have a replacement I bought a bunch of Diving Expert models, but the quality was honestly terrible, so I had to pick up Beyerdynamic’s new DP100, which broke soon after too. Then I bought M&G’s K314P reissue, and as you’d expect, the cable snapped before long. So out of sheer desperation I bought this Edifier H293P Killer Earphone, 99 yuan. You can probably understand my helplessness by now. My requirements for sleep earphones are simple: Nothing with heavy bass. I use them for Galgame and voice tracks, I don’t want boom-boom-thump. Comfortable to wear. This should be the basic requirement for sleep earphones. Durable. This one matters a lot, since I’ve broken every pair before. So how does the Edifier H293P Killer Earphone perform?

The Philips SHP 9500 has been absurdly popular lately. That Smzdm thing kept pushing it until it was everywhere — it’s cheap, and the word of mouth is good. I wasn’t impressed at first. The price bracket is what it is, and yeah, people hype it as “this used to cost X back in the day,” but in the end it’s still a budget can, isn’t it. Then one day — I forget which bastard on G+ egged me on — I somehow ended up placing an order. Newegg international, no less. After ordering I completely forgot about it, and only remembered a month later. Turns out I’d registered on Newegg too early and the phone number on file was an old one, so the delivery address got flagged as undeliverable and the package was in limbo. After a whole runaround I found out Newegg doesn’t have its own logistics and had handed it to Tiantian Express, so more phone calls, and only then did I finally get the thing in my hands…

I sold my year-old Google Nexus 9 and, as a replacement, imported the latest Google Pixel C. The reason was honestly that I wasn’t all that satisfied with the Nexus 9—screen too small… build quality so-so… maybe that was it. More than that, though, I think the Pixel C just appealed to me more. The import went smoothly, but Google still shipped the keyboard and the tablet separately, which meant I had to deal with two forwarding orders. The keyboard ended up getting taxed too. I don’t think it should have been, but the forwarding company declared it proactively. They had a tax receipt, so I let it go. I’ve used the Google Pixel C for a fair amount of time—not short, but not long either. I’ve honestly written quite a bit on it: reports, and every blog post from the last one of last year up to now. I figure that gives me the right to have an opinion on this thing.

I’ve got a few too many laptop hard drives lying around. Up to now I’ve been using all sorts of different enclosures, so I got to wondering—do dual-bay external enclosures exist? Turns out they do. One is the much pricier kind with Thunderbolt and USB Type-C, clearly aimed at Mac people. The other is the one I bought: cheap, plain USB 3.0. The Taobao reviews looked decent enough, so I figured I’d grab one and see.