I’ve said before that ChromeOS tablets might be the future of “productivity”. But the Duet’s performance and RAM were just too weak, so I eventually sold it. Not long after, I saw this new product: HP Chromebook X2 11 A 3:2 screen, 8GB of RAM, a Snapdragon 7c processor, a detachable keyboard, a magnetic charging stylus… This was exactly what perfect “productivity” looked like. Doesn’t that seem cool… I forgot the rest.

Last year I messed around and bought a FiiO Q7, barely listened to it, then sold it. Honestly I can’t be bothered with this portable DAC business anymore, but then I noticed the Chord Mojo 2 had come out, and the price had dropped quite a bit, so I got tempted again. I have a deep fondness for the Mojo series, mainly because I think it’s a DAC made from an FPGA design, fundamentally different from the traditional parts-stacking of domestic “DAC+AMP” units. After all, FPGA counts as “hardware simulation,” and in theory it has far more unlimited potential. Don’t you think that’s cool? As a loser guy, I think this is way too cool, perfectly in line with my imagination of future life, technology with a bit of fun.

A while back I was bored out of my mind, so on a whim I decided to play a roleplay game with ChatGPT. The kind where I have it play, you know… a little-sister type who keeps calling me “onii-chan,” hopelessly in love with me on the inside but acting all cold on the surface — a veteran tsundere, that push-and-pull, playing-hard-to-get kind of conversation. People online have already said you can chat about all sorts of lewd stuff with ChatGPT, as long as you feed it enough preconditions and declarations first. That’s obviously no obstacle for me, so I charged right in. Getting ChatGPT to accept the identity I gave it wasn’t hard, and soon we were deep in conversation. It’s just that the conversation felt… really weird.

I’m not from the Northeast, but I know plenty of Northeasterners. Back when World of Warcraft was huge, Zones 2 and 6 were the China Unicom servers, and they were basically northerners’ territory. And among northerners, Northeasterners made up a wildly high proportion of the player base. It was pretty much: join any random raid, hop on voice chat, and there’s a good chance the raid leader is speaking with a Northeastern accent. Combined with the old sitcom Northeast Family (东北一家人) being a hit, I’ve picked up the dialect by osmosis. The Northeastern dialect is a branch of Northern Mandarin, with a lot of Beijing influence in the pronunciation. Anyone who understands Standard Mandarin can follow it without much trouble, and it carries this weird mix of “comic” and “gangster” energy. A lot of people assume Northeastern guys are all hard cases, but honestly the Northeastern girls are worse. Fun fact: the only domestic violence shelter in all of China that protects men is in Shenyang, Northeast China. Meaning out there, the girls will chase the big Northeastern lads around and beat the crap out of them.

I started building websites back in middle school. I remember it clearly — the summer of eighth grade. I applied for a free forum and domain and threw together an extremely crude “class website.” I figured it was just for fun, but it somehow took off across the whole class, then the whole grade. It wasn’t just my own class. Kids from the neighboring classes signed up and started posting too, and all kinds of conversations got going. That chatter later moved to the school’s official forum, and after that to the class Discord group. I think I was the one who created and ran that Discord group, for the simple reason that I was one of the few users who had permission to create Discord groups at the time. So I made the group for the class, and I’m still listed as admin to this day, even though nobody’s said a word in it for years. Later I went to college and started making all kinds of websites and forums again, but honestly nothing ever took off the way it did, and I could never recapture that middle-school glory. In one of the forums I’d rebuilt God knows how many times, I once wrote this line: “Some dreams you only dream at eighteen, and some dreams you only understand once you’ve grown up…” There were a few more lines after that, I don’t remember them now — something with that whole “forcing yourself to feel sad for the sake of a poem” vibe. I didn’t really know what I was trying to say. I just thought it sounded cool, so I went with it. Sure enough, a classmate came along and criticized it right away, saying I’d taken the wrong medicine and that it was so pretentious it gave him goosebumps. I thought he had a point, so I made that line my Discord signature so he’d have to see it every day. Years later I thought of that line again, and I have to say, I now think it actually makes sense. Because there really are things you only do when you’re young, and dreams you only understand when you’re young at heart.

Last year, while I was replacing the battery in my Switch, my hand slipped and the screwdriver flew off and hit the screen, leaving a nice little pit right in the middle. That’s when I remembered that almost a year ago, I still had insurance on the screen — you can read the details here. So I thought, isn’t this the perfect time to get the screen replaced? While I was still hesitating, the next day the machine obligingly developed a new problem: the TrackPoint’s right-click button popped out, and it wouldn’t go back in. Looks like I had no choice but to go to the service center.

A while back I wanted to get my dad a computer so he could chat on Discord and check stocks. I originally planned to pick up a ThinkPad and upgrade it myself, but then I spotted something unexpected on Xianyu: DELL Latitude 7370 Intel Core M5-6Y57 8G RAM 256G SSD The seller said it was in 9/10 condition and wanted 900 yuan, shipping included. By any reasonable measure, 900 yuan is a bit much for this. But I looked closely at the screen and asked the seller what the resolution was. Turns out the seller didn’t even know how to check… So I tried a different angle: is the screen a touchscreen? The seller said yes, it’s touch. That’s when things got interesting. On the DELL Latitude 7370, a touchscreen version can only mean one thing: the same 3K wide-gamut touch panel as the top-spec XPS 13. If it really was that screen… then 900 yuan is a fair price, because the screen alone is worth more than 500.

When I got sent to the quarantine facility, I brought my Switch, and that’s where I wrecked the sticks on the thing… The clips that hold the left and right sticks in place also went bad — the sticks wouldn’t stay put, one push and they’d pop up. So I figured I’d just replace them, and in for a penny, in for a pound: the left and right stick clips, the console’s own battery, and the sticks themselves all got swapped. You can buy all of this on Taobao: Rail clips — there are metal versions now, and I strongly recommend the metal ones, they’re just sturdier Sticks — there are second-gen ones, plus the newly released GuliKit Hall effect ones. If you’ve got the money I’d go Hall, but remember: the point of a Hall stick is that it massively cuts the odds of drift, not that it feels good Battery — I couldn’t tell which was the real “official” one, so I just bought the highest-selling listing The screwdrivers for teardown usually come free

A while back, I got this sudden itch to buy a tablet, but my requirements were a bit unusual: Cheap enough Has a Type-C port Screen preferably 4:3 — I don’t game, just reading and videos Speakers have to sound good As few ads as possible, ideally none or stock Android 8 inches It’s not like tablets meeting these specs don’t exist. The Xiaomi Pad 2 and 3 series are all over Xianyu, for instance — but those are e-waste that’s been hacked to hell and back… Then I stumbled on something magical: the JD Tab, the tablet JD.com put out back in the day: 4:3 high-quality screen Flyme OS, no ads 8-inch size Harman Kardon speakers Type-C charging Going for just over 200 yuan on Xianyu, brand new Holy crap, brand new? That’s gotta beat all that e-waste, right? So I got carried away and bought one. Little did I know that was the start of a whole series of adventures.

Right after I sold my FiiO Q3S, I happened to see the announcement for the FiiO Q7, and there was a launch discount, so I got carried away and bought it. Then I barely listened to the thing before hastily selling it off. Maybe I just didn’t like it. Or maybe I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. I remember the Q7 arriving around October 14, 2022. As FiiO’s new-generation flagship DAC, the Q7’s packaging can only be described as “lavish,” and its spec sheet as “extravagant.” 3.5/4.4/2.5 balanced outputs Dual DAC chips Independent amp stage Large battery Supports bypassing the battery to run on wall power Works as a desktop unit or as a portable DAC/amp combo A display in the middle showing the current status It also came with a pile of accessories: a genuine leather case, a screen protector already applied, and even a cooling stand so you can use it as a desktop unit.