I don’t want to spend too much ink on how these two things are, because it’s honestly hard to say much in detail.

Yeah, so I broke my sleep earphones again. My sleep earphones usually serve two purposes: one is hooking them up to the Surface Pro, and the other is listening to voice works on other tablets. At first I used an Earpod, then I got seduced by the princess and bought an Audio-Technica CX550. Later I lost that and did some searching, which led me to the strongest sleep earphone, the K314p. A year after getting it I found out the thing had actually gone up in price, so I quickly enshrined it. To have a replacement I bought the Diving Expert line, but the quality was honestly bad, so I had to get the new DP100 from Beyerdynamic, which broke soon after too. Then I bought M&G’s K314P reissue, and as you can imagine the cable snapped quick. So at my wit’s end, I bought this Edifier H293P killer earphone for 99 yuan. You can probably understand my helplessness by now. My requirements for a sleep earphone are simple: No heavy low end. I use them for visual novels and voice works, and I don’t like the boom-boom club sound. Comfortable to wear. That should be the basic requirement for a sleep earphone. Durable as hell. This is way too important, since I’ve wrecked every earphone before it. So how does the Edifier H293P killer earphone perform?

The Philips SHP 9500 has been blowing up lately — 什么值得买 (SMZDM) has pushed it so hard the recommendation is basically worn out. It’s cheap, and the word of mouth is good. I didn’t think much of it at first. The price point is what it is, and sure, people hype it as “this used to cost X back in the day,” but in the end it’s still budget gear, right? Then one day — I forget which bastard egged me on over on G+ — I somehow spaced out and placed an order. Newegg overseas, no less. After ordering I completely forgot about the thing, and only remembered a month later. Turns out the Newegg account I’d registered ages ago still had my old phone number on it, so the delivery address got flagged as undeliverable and the package was marked problematic. After a whole runaround I found out Newegg doesn’t have its own logistics and had handed it off to Tiantian Express, then another round of calls, and finally I got the thing in my hands…

I sold my Google Nexus 9 after a year of service and imported the latest Google Pixel C as its replacement. The real reason is that I wasn’t all that satisfied with the Nexus 9 — screen too small… build quality so-so… maybe that’s it. More than that, though, I think the Pixel C just appealed to me more. The import went smoothly, but Google still shipped the keyboard and the tablet separately, which meant I had to deal with two forwarding orders. The keyboard ended up getting taxed too — though I don’t think it should have been, the forwarder probably declared it proactively. Since they had an actual tax receipt, I let it slide. I’ve used the Google Pixel C for a fair amount of time now — not short, but not that long either. I’ve honestly written a lot of stuff on it: reports, plus every blog post from the last one of last year up to now. I figure that gives me the right to have an opinion on this thing.

I’ve got way too many spare laptop drives lying around. Up to now I’d been buying every random enclosure under the sun, so I got to wondering: do they make external enclosures with two drive bays? Turns out they do. One option costs way more and supports Thunderbolt and USB Type-C — clearly built for Mac people. The other is the one I bought: cheap, plain USB 3.0. The Taobao reviews looked decent enough, so I figured I’d take a chance and see for myself.

Honestly, this is probably the dumbest mouse I’ve ever used. Sure, Microsoft had good intentions when they designed it. It just doesn’t quite stick the landing.

After using the FiiO X7 for a while, a few problems showed up: When playing songs, it stalls once at intervals ranging from 30 seconds to a minute, and after stalling for about 20 seconds it resumes playback. Battery life feels like it should be around the officially claimed 9 hours, but standby is a real weak point, and there should be auto-shutdown. In the song titles on the device, the artist is all uppercase whenever it’s in English. Firmware updates on the device can only be done by copying to an SD card — it’s supposedly a smart device, yet no Wi-Fi updates. The breathing light stays on constantly, which is light pollution at night. The device formats cards as exfat, which doesn’t support long filenames. So I was grumbling about all this when I found out FiiO had released firmware 1.3. The update method is the same as on older devices, but 1.3 does fix a fair number of things. First, the breathing light can now be configured. Second, there’s now a mode to auto-shutdown after a set number of minutes in standby, so long standby sessions won’t drain much battery, and overall it should beat the ZX1. However, the most annoying problem — playback stopping — is still not fixed. I emailed FiiO and they suggested I try a different card.

As an X5K user, I don’t think the X7’s hardware upgrades are anything to get excited about. I never bothered reading up on which chips it swapped in or what tech it uses, because sound-wise the X5K already satisfies me. At the very least it has way more power than the ZX1, and the fundamentals are good enough. Tuning is a load of crap anyway; just fix it with your earbuds. But one thing about the X5K always pissed me off: the UI. FiiO already has the best UI among Chinese DAPs, but the X5K’s godawful dot-matrix font and lack of touch support were unbearable for someone used to Sony’s stuff. Digging for songs was a nightmare. Even worse: the X5K handles album art and metadata well enough, but in the file list songs still show up as filenames. So I’m stuck scrolling through piles of 1.XXXX-XXX.flac, and since a lot of them start with the album number, sorting is hopeless. I gave up on that idea entirely. You probably get what I’m saying by now. The big win for me with the X7 is the brand-new touch UI. When I first heard FiiO was making an Android player, I was worried about Chinese Android playback UIs — figured the best case was barely escaping the shanzhai stink. But after the product launched and I watched some overseas review videos, I was pleasantly surprised. No need to beat around the bush: this UI is genuinely great.

Recently I expanded two things: one was planning to buy a USB fast-charging socket at work that could satisfy the Nexus 6P, and the other was adding a Bluetooth module to my desktop. The Bluetooth module is easy. Generally you get a USB one, plug it in, and the system recognizes it—especially since my desktop runs Linux, where the odds of it just working are even higher. But that was too naive. I was originally going to just buy whatever, but I always want something fancier, so I bought a Dell Bluetooth dongle that can support entering the BIOS. Of course, entering the BIOS only works when paired with a Dell Bluetooth keyboard. The Dell Bluetooth keyboard works fine with this dongle, but plug this thing into a desktop and it isn’t recognized… and that’s not all—it doesn’t work under Windows 10 either.

I used to use a regular mount in the car. Nothing wrong with it, except it blocks the air vent. Blocking it in summer is whatever — you just let the AC blow on the device and call it cooling. In winter it’s a pain: the phone’s already warm, and blowing more air on it makes it completely useless. So I looked for a way to swap it out. One day I found this on Taobao…