My Pixel C’s screen shattered. I figured I’d find someone to repair it—maybe Google US could do a mail-in fix. So I contacted Google US support directly, went back and forth for ages, and they said it’s out of warranty, told me to find a technician in China Mainland myself. I said I don’t have the screen component, and they said “neither do we.” Fuck. What now? Guess I’ll buy a new one… Except there are basically no Android flagship tablets anymore! So in the end I bought this… Lenovo P8

A package from overseas showed up a few days ago. I was confused — what did I even buy? I haven’t ordered anything from outside Japan recently. Opened it up and it clicked. It was the Dbrand Grip I backed on crowdfunding half a year ago, finally here.

First I bought an iPhone 8, since Suning had a special deal a while back. You had to pay a deposit, but overall it was much cheaper than the Apple official site… After ordering you wait two days to pay, but once paid it arrives the same day — seems to be picked up from Suning’s local Zhengzhou warehouse. Got it in hand and it just feels small. Really small…

A while back Slickdeals pushed a deal — Sony’s noise canceling earbuds on eBay for just $69.9… Couldn’t resist. Bought one, and picked up two more for a coworker and Jipiss. In the end it arrived with no customs fee, but it was overweight, so shipping cost 10 extra yuan — which I magnanimously passed on to Jipiss and made him pay.

Yes, it’s me again with another filler post. Today it’s two kinds of Mi Home instant noodles and one drink. I actually bought these to pad out an order, and before I knew it I’d padded my way through a hundred yuan. Let’s start with Mi Home’s tomato egg noodles… the reviews online are pretty high.

A girl at work wanted to buy a Xiaomi power strip and dragged me along to hit the free-shipping minimum. I saw this thing, so I threw it in. 9.9 yuan.

Black Domain on Android is an app that kills rogue apps, aiming for “an Android experience just like iOS.” That’s a bit different from Greenify — Greenify feels more academic, while Black Domain is more practical. I paid for both. In the end I went with Black Domain. Black Domain works without root too. You just have to turn on USB debugging and type a command to start one of its processes. Calling it a hassle is fair, and calling it convenient is fair — basically, every time your phone reboots, you have to find a computer to activate it… So the author of Black Domain had an idea: make a “Black Domain Activator.” It’s a collaboration with some gamepad adapter, but using it is fine anyway, and it’s cheap.

I used to have a Kobo Aura HD. I bought it to read books, but I didn’t read many books—I ended up reading mostly manga. Recently I’ve found a few things about the Kobo that annoy me. First, manga isn’t great on it, since the screen is small. Then there’s the lack of marketplace apps—you can flash Android, but it’s an old version and the experience is poor. On top of that, Kobo’s official services are no longer available in China, for reasons you can guess. So I started thinking about switching. The requirements: a bigger screen, convenient app support, and a reasonable price. That’s when I saw Onyx had announced a new 10-inch e-ink device, the Boox Note. They said pre-orders would start around New Year’s, but January came and went without anything happening. Then they said pre-orders would start on February 4th, which got pushed to February 7th. Anyway, it still shipped before Chinese New Year, Tmall offered interest-free installments, and the first batch came with a free case. Pretty decent overall.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 suddenly got hit with a recall notice. The reason given was “a screw inside the machine may come loose, pressing on the battery and causing it to explode.” Fine, loose screws inside a laptop aren’t exactly news. Even if it were loose I’d have opened it up and tightened it myself. The recall and the screw aren’t what matter to me. What matters is that I finally have an excuse to register IWS global warranty for the ThinkPad I bought from Japan. Delightful!

Almost three years ago (damn, has it been that long?) I bought an ASUS Xonar U7 sound card to get audio output while my laptop was hooked up to a dock. And now, three years later, that sound card has started acting up. Roughly, the problem is it often doesn’t get enough power and won’t come up—plug it in and it isn’t recognized. After unplugging and replugging it a bunch of times it occasionally has a chance of working. Eventually I couldn’t stand spending ages plugging and unplugging every day when I brought the computer home, so I decided to replace it. I had three requirements: USB powered, I don’t want to plug in a power supply Has audio input The DAC chip can’t be too crappy Has a headphone output jack I looked through a whole pile of Chinese-made DACs and couldn’t find one I was happy with. The biggest pain is that they don’t have audio input, and they can’t be USB powered either—they all make you drag along a big power supply…