A while back I saw someone on the HiPDA Discovery board recommending bootleg LEGO, saying this 78-yuan WALL-E was actually pretty good quality. So I went and bought it on impulse, thinking I’d never played with LEGO before, might as well start with a cheap knockoff and see how it feels. It arrived and I burst out laughing — theirs is LEGO, yours is Lepin. Though this “Lepin” is actually pretty famous in bootleg circles.

So I switched to a 4K monitor a while back, and the old Ice Dragon 770 4G just couldn’t keep up with Doto 2 or Overwatch at native 4K. Overwatch was still playable, but from what I could tell it was rendering at 2K and upscaling to 4K — not exactly the pure experience I wanted! So I figured it was time to sell it and get a new card.

So here’s what happened. A few days ago I went for a run, it started raining out of nowhere, and the next day I got home and found the bass gone from the right unit of my IE80… Thank god I bought the domestic version! Sent it in for repair. After that I started seriously thinking about whether I should get a waterproof pair of sports earbuds. I mean, you’re not really chasing sound quality when you work out. After looking around, the best recent option seemed to be the Meizu EP51, so I grabbed one on Taobao for 150.

The Phicomm K2 router is a fairly controversial product.

Honestly, the OnePlus 3 doesn’t interest me much, even though foreigners keep hyping it up overseas like it’s the best thing ever—to the point where I wonder if they’re all getting paid. Fortunately, there’s still one Korean who keeps trashing the OnePlus 3, saying it doesn’t deserve the flagship title at all, and that he wouldn’t recommend buying it unless your budget is really tight. That guy raised my opinion of Koreans quite a bit. But this isn’t about the OnePlus 3 phone—it’s about the OnePlus sling bag. Some of you might know that when the OnePlus 3 launched, they also released a OnePlus sling bag. It looked pretty nice, but the price was a bit steep. What’s even dumber is that the first batch apparently required an invite code. I heard the OnePlus backpack was impossible to buy before too… I wasn’t planning to buy this thing originally. It’s just that a classmate wanted one, said he was a OnePlus fan, had two codes, and asked if I wanted one… After much deliberation, I still ended up chopping off my hand.

Bought a Dell P2715Q monitor during JD’s 618 sale. This thing only has DP and HDMI. With my current setup, HDMI caps out at 4K 30 Hz, and 30 Hz is basically unusable, so a DP cable was mandatory. I had some UGREEN DP cables lying around from a previous JD order, so I plugged one in. Big mistake. The moment I connected it, the PC wouldn’t turn on. At first I thought the monitor was faulty, or that my GPU (an iChill 770 4G) couldn’t handle 4K. Then I tried a hot-plug and it worked fine, no problem at all. But once the cable was connected, the machine refused to shut down properly, and after shutting down it wouldn’t boot again. After a bunch of testing, I figured out that with this DP cable, the PC just won’t boot. And when it does come back, Gigabyte’s “Dual BIOS recovery” message pops up telling me one BIOS is dead and it restored from the backup.

I bought a 9-yuan VR headset.

I’ve bought plenty of cheap car mounts before, and they all died on me… So after a friend’s recommendation, I figured I’d buy something a bit nicer. He suggested the Logitech IS40. The Logitech IS40 mount looks pretty decent, but it still uses the same magnetic approach I’d tried before, so you need to pair it with a metal plate. Fortunately I mostly use it with a Nexus 5X, so a metal plate is fine, whatever. As for magnets messing with phones, the Pixel C and Apple iPad line both have magnets built in and nothing goes wrong, and Logitech’s manual says it’s fine too, so I’ll just take their word for it.

We’ve had an HP all-in-one printer at home forever, but it was bought around 2008 and has been used on and off since then—honestly, not that many times. Recently I tried to use it and it just wouldn’t work: the paper feed roller is fucked, and the thing isn’t worth repairing anyway. Might as well buy a new one. When buying, I had a few hard requirements: Good Linux support. Wireless connectivity—I don’t want cables, and there are several computers at home that all need to use it. Color printing, and the consumables issue needs to be solved. Buying ink cartridges for the old one was a massive pain in the ass. Budget around 1000. After thinking it over, I bought the HP DeskJet GT 5820. It comes with a built-in continuous ink supply system and meets all of the above. I also considered Epson and Canon—why HP? Because its Linux support is the best.

Picked up another Chromebook recently, off Taobao. Probably some factory leak or whatever. An Asus Chromebook Flip, the ARM CPU version. The upside is obvious: IPS screen, 1280x800, convertible, touch, long battery life. The last Chromebook I bought got sold off. Reason being I never actually used Chrome OS — I wiped it and installed Ubuntu the moment it arrived. It felt exactly like a ThinkPad, and a worse ThinkPad at that, so what was even the point. This time I decided to actually give Chrome OS a fair shake. Problem is, I’m in mainland China. For certain reasons this thing is obviously not going to be as smooth as in the US, there’ll be plenty of hurdles — though that was the story around 2014. How is it now? Answer: not bad.