The Fiio EM3 is Fiio’s new pair of earbuds, and honestly my goodwill toward Fiio keeps growing. The accessories are sparse: just the buds themselves and a few foam covers. That’s it. Since it’s positioned under 100 yuan, the pros and cons are equally obvious.

Bought a Nexus 5X to use as car navigation. Plugged it into the USB port on the car charger, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a problem. I’m not asking for “charging rapidly,” but you went and gave me “charging slowly”… Thinking it over, it’s pretty simple. The car charger I was using was a gift from someone, so I figured I’d just buy a proper one. The thing is, the fast charging supported by the Nexus 6P / Nexus 5X / Pixel C is the 5V / 3A standard, not Qualcomm’s, so there’s currently no car charger that fully hits it. I settled for an Anker 5V / 2.4A one instead.

Bought this for my parents. My mom had been using the Sony Xperia Z1 I handed down, and my dad was on a first-gen Meizu M Note. Three things sold me on the Redmi Note 3: The new Full-Netcom processor, supposedly a beast. The massive 4000 mAh battery, supposedly a beast. MIUI, which for people my parents’ age is a system that’s user-friendly to the point of exploding.

A while back JD had a sale, and the Edifier S1000 was going for a good price. I’d been meaning to replace my old Edifier R1600TIII anyway, so I just bought it. At the same time, to make headphone swapping easier, I picked up the Aune X1S, a DAC/amp combo unit. So just getting these two things set up cost me a ridiculous amount of effort.

The Netgear R6300V2 is a solid router, and plenty of people say the first thing you should do after buying one is 1. I had no idea what the hell Merlin even was. I’ve always used Linksys and never touched Netgear’s higher-end stuff, but I finally grabbed an R6300V2 during a JD sale a while back. Not for home, though — it’s for the office, as a plain AP. The network situation at work is a bit of a mess. For starters, the office has around 20-something phones and tablets that need wireless, plus another 5–6 laptops, so the office Wi-Fi has some actual requirements. There are three ISPs coming into the building: one China Unicom, one China Mobile, one China Telecom. Telecom has the biggest pipe, Unicom the smallest, Mobile sits in the middle. But for reasons you can probably guess, the best route for circumventing the GFW is naturally Unicom, while Telecom is the fastest domestically, and the awkward one is Mobile — too big to ignore, too small to matter. The gateway router has an address table that decides which exit to use based on the ISP address ranges in it. That setup doesn’t satisfy me. I want to specify the network exit more brutally than that.

I’ve got a fair number of devices on hand, and the biggest headache after buying them is buying accessories for them… screen protectors, cases, and all kinds of attachments. I’ve wasted a decent chunk of money on this stuff front and back, so let me just run through what I’ve picked up recently and throw in a few lessons along the way.

Things have been busy lately for various reasons, so I’ll keep this short and to the point.

The FiiO X7 is a player I’ve grown to like more and more the longer I use it, but I still have to say this thing has one fatal flaw: the stock AM1 amp module it ships with is just crippled. When the X7 plays certain tracks, the highs get harsh and grating. But when I ran the X7’s LO output into my car stereo, those highs disappeared. After thinking it over, the only explanation is that crippled amp. Maybe FiiO did it on purpose, but at least they did release the official mid-tier amp module, the AM2. Swapping modules is easy — all you need is one hex screw.

I’ve been using the Google Pixel C for a good while now, but there are a few problems I need to mention… The touchscreen is really unresponsive. Western users have been complaining hard about this, and plenty of them got replacements over it, which didn’t help. The keyboard keeps double-clicking or multi-clicking. Some Western users ran into it; I didn’t. Bad Wi-Fi signal. Also didn’t happen to me. But an unresponsive touchscreen on its own is pretty fatal. Not only does it get in the way of using the thing, I couldn’t even use the Jot Dash stylus I bought for it..

Buying these earphones was an impulse purchase. I was ordering the Mi Band pulse edition for my mom and figured I’d toss in some Xiaomi batteries, except my finger slipped and I bought a pack of AAA size instead. I only noticed when the package showed up. Mind you, I’m not saying AAAs are useless to me. Thanks to that mistaken order, the beat-up TV in my room no longer requires me to get up and hunt for buttons on the thing itself, because its remote has been dead for ages and takes AAAs. So I went to order Xiaomi’s rainbow batteries again, the AA kind this time. Batteries are cheap, which means no free shipping — shipping alone costs more than a battery, so that’s just a bad deal. I figured I’d add something to the cart to hit the free-shipping threshold, and there it was: the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid earphones. I hadn’t really looked into what the market thought of the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid. Only caught bits and pieces, and naturally none of it was kind. “Take that money and go eat something nice.” “It’s literal garbage.” “I pulled them out after 30 seconds.” “Barely any sound quality to speak of.” “Boomy, can’t hear the vocals at all.” Anyone with even a passing knowledge of earphones says this about them. Honestly, I was willing to believe they were trash too, because at this price point unless you’re buying from a specialty manufacturer, everything sounds the same: boosted bass and nothing else. But these are hybrids, and I’d never heard a hybrid before. Also… I needed a filler item, and the power banks were out of stock! So somehow I ended up buying the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrids. Or, if you prefer, I bought batteries and threw in a 99 yuan hybrid as a filler. So the question is, how do they actually sound? I hate suspense, and like the title says, “they’re not as bad as you’d think.”