This laptop isn’t mine — I bought it for someone else. Their budget wasn’t high, and the requirements were just these: A bigger screen, since they deal with Excel spreadsheets all day Decent performance — besides spreadsheets, the occasional game, roughly LOL and Overwatch level Looks nice, nothing too flashy Reliable after-sales service Honestly though, I think these days every laptop looks fine except those weirdly shaped gaming machines.

My workplace moved recently, and my old keyboard had developed double-press issues across half its keys. I soldered that one myself, so I figured it was time to buy a new one. But I’m too broke for a real budget, so I bought the cheapest thing I could find: this Dareu EK861 Bluetooth keyboard. 61 keys, Bluetooth 5.0, a big battery, PBT keycaps, under 300 yuan. What more could you ask for? I’ve been using it on and off for almost a month now, and I’ve got some pros and cons. Let me keep it short:

So-called “stress relief toys” are basically the kind of thing that… serves no real purpose in your hand, but always gives you something to do. The big stress relief toy before this was the fidget spinner. Its influence spread worldwide: foreigners hated it, China banned sales, teachers loathed it. Still, I thought it was pretty satisfying. Recently I bought another stress relief toy, this Flipo Flip.

The ODROID-GO Advance is the follow-up to that ODROID-GO handheld. Better performance, plus a stick and shoulder buttons. From what I gathered reading various foreign reviews, the performance is supposedly monstrous and it has a huge future ahead of it… So I bought one. It actually arrived a while ago; I just never had time to put it together, and only recently dug it out and got to work. Recording it here.

The place was getting too dusty — the bed and the sofa both had a layer of it — so my wife said we should buy a “mite remover”. I looked into it and, well, a “mite remover” is just a vacuum cleaner with a UV lamp bolted on… So we might as well buy an actual vacuum. A vacuum isn’t only good for handheld work; you can swap the head and use it on the floor too. That’s how I ended up with a Xiaomi vacuum. It happened to be on sale — 12 interest-free installments, a 50-yuan coupon, and a free Xiaomi desk lamp thrown in. So I bought it.

This isn’t my first 8BitDo controller, actually, but the one I bought before somehow went missing, so all I’ve got left is one with a bad feel. This time, in order to play some “poorly optimized garbage Unity game,” I had to buy a new 8BitDo controller. Times have changed, though—this thing has evolved. It’s got built-in rumble now, and supposedly a gyroscope too. I’ve used it for about two weeks, so let me share my impressions.

So I upgraded to a 2K HDR screen a while back, used it for a bit, and honestly the colors are a little too vivid, and even with 500 nits I never use the brightness. But the biggest thing: 2560 x 1440 is just stuck in an awkward middle ground. I’m a Linux user, and Linux has always been terrible at fractional scaling. People say Wayland supports it now, but one, my discrete GPU has no Wayland driver, and two, Wayland performance is a joke — the mouse stuttering in particular is absolutely maddening. Word is Wayland mouse handling goes through libinput, which shares a single thread with gnome-shell, so high system load equals stutter. Fucking stupid. In the end I couldn’t stand 2K’s nonsense scaling anymore and chose to “throw money at the problem” — went 4K.

As a ThinkPad X1C 5th user, there’s actually one problem that’s been bugging me. The laptop is so thin that the screen hits the keyboard when the lid is closed, leaving keyboard marks. That’s also why I recommend a screen protector. But a screen protector isn’t a real fix, and putting one on a laptop is honestly pretty dumb. So I thought of another solution.

I’m a Wear OS watch user, the stock Wear OS kind. The watch I’ve been using is still the LG Watch Sports, and I’ve had it for over two years now — I even replaced the battery. Its battery life is honestly fine, but I’m still not happy with it, for three reasons: You can’t swap the strap. I’ve been stuck with the default rubber one, which feels pretty dumb. Once it cracks there’s no fixing it — you can only go buy knockoff parts. Nobody’s in charge of system updates. Google says LG handles it, LG says Google handles it, and the two of them just kick it back and forth. By 2020 that legendary Wear OS H still hadn’t shown up. It’s way too bulky, and the SoC isn’t new either, so it stutters sometimes. So I couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to switch. Right around then Xiaomi announced its watch — big battery, decent RAM, plenty of features — and I got tempted.

Once again, my hands got itchy. This one was for use at the office, so obviously I couldn’t buy anything too nice, and the budget couldn’t be too high either. So I found this on Taobao. It claims to be an RHA CL750, some kind of “factory surplus stock,” but the price is obviously suspicious — only 150 yuan.