My daily driver already supports wireless charging, but my old backup phone, the OnePlus 5, still charges the old-fashioned way. In other words, it doesn’t support wireless charging, which just feels wrong. By chance I spotted this thing on eBay:

I decided to buy a Pinebook at least a year ago, back when all the Linux news sites started covering it. Most of them called it “the $99 Linux laptop,” and sure enough it really does cost $99. But there’s nothing especially novel about it, because the so-called Pinebook is just the Pine64 dev board that was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, shoved into a laptop shell. There are already plenty of similar products out there, mostly “Raspberry Pi laptops”—a Pi stuffed into a laptop case, or a 3D-printed shell with a battery and so on. Let’s look at the main specs of the Pinebook first. 11-inch or 14-inch 1366x768 screen (11-inch is IPS, 14-inch is TN) 2 GB RAM 16GB eMMC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MicroSD card reader USB port, headphone jack, HDMI output Nothing impressive there, and none of it is what got me interested in the Pinebook. The biggest selling point of the Pinebook—and its biggest appeal—isn’t performance. It’s that it looks good. Yes, compared to the whole flood of similar “Raspberry Pi laptops” on the market, the Pinebook is drop-dead gorgeous. Combined with the fact that it’s not expensive at all, I decided to buy one to play with. It’s cheap, and Pine64 claims to be a more advanced 64-bit ARM processor than the original Raspberry Pi (back when Pine64 was crowdfunding, the Pi was still on gen 1, if I remember right). At the very least it should make a decent toy. But I never expected that from deciding to buy it to actually holding it in my hands, it would take me a full year and more. Once the machine arrived I played with it for almost two weeks. There were pleasant surprises and disappointments. Picking up shells on the beach, sorting out my thoughts, let me sum up the sweet and the bitter for you.

A hot product a while back. It promised “small” “powerful” “multi-functional” all at once, and on top of that it actually looked good, so I bought one. Also, I’m a sucker for the ThinkPad red-and-black color scheme. Too tempting. Turns out I’d pre-ordered it ages ago, only to find out it was just a crowdfunding campaign. I don’t know why these idiots insist on crowdfunding everything. Call it a pre-order, slap a new name on it and call it crowdfunding — genuinely stupid. Anyway, I got the thing in early December, and the packaging was the familiar ThinkPad style.

They say the Huawei Mate 20 Pro can reverse-charge an iPhone, but honestly, if you’re reverse-charging from a phone, you might as well just use a battery. In fact, “wireless power banks” like this already exist. I bought a Nanfu one — old brand, trustworthy. Looks like an ordinary power bank from any angle, except it has this wireless charging section.

My previous phone was a Sony Xperia Z Premium. I used it for over a year, close to two years, and Sony recently said it would push out Google’s Android Pie OTA update to that phone too—every version except the Hong Kong one got it. But in the end I decided to replace it, with Google’s flagship phone released this year, the Google Pixel 3 XL. Plenty of people aren’t optimistic about Google’s new flagship—its specs are behind, it looks ugly, and it isn’t exactly cheap either. After using it for a while since it arrived, it really does have quite a few problems, but I’m still fairly satisfied, so I’ll briefly go over my first impressions.

Haven’t done an impulse buy in a while. This time it’s because I saw this thing was cheap enough: A 99-yuan Bluetooth earphone with aptX support and killer battery life. So I bought one to check it out — my laptop supports aptX now too, after all.

I have a Logitech T650 touchpad, but I bought it 4 years ago. Recently I dug it out on a whim. It still works fine, honestly — but that’s exactly when you get cocky and drop the thing…

I wanted a phone to play games on. Originally I wanted a tablet, but it turns out tablets aren’t really an option anymore — Google went and released the Pixel Slate, so a big-screen phone was the only choice left. What I wanted from a gaming phone: Enough performance Strong battery life A large screen Decent feel in the hand No touch dropouts or connection drops As cheap as possible Xiaomi phones all seem to have that tradition of the touchscreen failing when it gets hot, Meizu phones all have connection drop issues, the Smartisan Pro 2’s build quality is a joke and the screen even lets water in, and there are plenty of MediaTek phones, but their performance is absolute garbage. Then I saw 360 phones were on special on JD. Took a look — the 360 N7, originally discounted by one yuan to 999 yuan, and paying with Baitiao knocked another yuan off, two yuan off total, so I got it for 998 yuan.

Whether or not you’re like me and couldn’t care less about the various works under Type Moon’s banner, you have to admit the same thing I do: The Fate series under Type Moon is the most successful visual novel ever made. What counts as success? It’s when a product’s fan effect is so strong that all they have to do is keep reheating leftovers to keep raking in money—where even some slapped-together spinoff with no real connection to anything is a cash-printing machine. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is. From 2004 to 2018, the Fate series has gone through two anime adaptations, a prequel novel adaptation, countless movie adaptations, and all sorts of spinoff games, spinoff manga, spinoff anime, and so on—all the way up to the current mobile game Fate/Grand Order, which still gets hordes of otaku throwing money at it by the fistful. Sure, the Fate brand has now spread into every corner imaginable, but I wonder how many people still remember that the Fate series started as a game—a visual novel, and an 18+ one at that. I know the thing was originally a novel by scenario writer Kinoko Nasu, and it got turned into a visual novel out of necessity to get it to market, but its debut was, in fact, in visual novel form. A whole world expanded out of a single visual novel, reaching the point it has now—if that’s not massive success, what is?

I was thinking about buying a phone to play games on lately. I’d been using a Xiaomi Mi Pad 4, and it’s not like it can’t run games, but that screen aspect ratio cuts off part of my view. When I play a turret-type mid-lane mage I just can’t keep track of everything, so I figured maybe I should just get a phone. At first I had my sights set on the Xiaomi Mi Max (first gen), since its specs are good enough, the screen is big enough, and the battery is ridiculous—it’s basically a handheld console. The second and third generations don’t even bear mentioning; the performance actually went backwards, even with bigger batteries and better build quality. But the Mi Max is obviously not something you can buy new. I found only eBay had them, so I went looking, and after digging around I couldn’t find a single one I was happy with. Ones in good condition were priced absurdly, and the reasonably priced ones were all crippled units. Then I thought I’d check out LeEco phones or Gree phones—hah, Gree phones are even more expensive, and LeEco phones are complete garbage… While I was hesitating, my good buddy, the Guo Degang of the medical world, a.k.a. Duan Ye, answered my prayers: “Master Li, there’s a Smartisan Nut Pro here that Luo Yonghao sold to idiots. Wanna take a look?” “If it’s sold to idiots, then how do you have one, Duan Ye? Don’t tell me…” “Cut the crap. Do you want it or not?” “Yes yes yes…” So I took the Nut Pro off Duan Ye’s hands and began my testing journey.