After I picked up the Nexus 6 last year, there were things I liked and things I didn’t, so when the Nexus 6P launched this year I kept going back and forth on whether to upgrade. The stuff I didn’t like: The screen was way too yellow. It’s an AMOLED panel, and supposedly not even a good Samsung one, and coming straight from an Xperia Z1 it took me ages to get used to it. Battery life was kind of a wreck. Throw in the Moto 360 sucking power over Bluetooth and I was barely making it through a day, sometimes having to top up around noon. No LED notification light. The Nexus 6 technically has one, but Android disables it by default, and even if you turn it on you still need a paid app to make it work. Absolutely ridiculous. The thing that had me hesitating most was that the 6P does fix all of these, just not in a way that inspires confidence.

The Surface Pro 3 spent a good long while as my handheld, but the newer Surface Pro 4 eventually came out. Not a huge upgrade, but since I spend more time on this thing than on my desktop, I figured I owed myself the nicer one and went for it. Overall there isn’t much difference between the two machines — mostly just better specs.

I’ve known about NFC for ages — my old Sony Xperia Z1 had it — but I never really used the feature. Okay, not never. I tapped a China Construction Bank card with it once and saw some card info through Alipay, and that was it. I’d seen NFC tags too, I think Sony made some, but at the time they seemed like a solution in search of a problem. Still, one of those useless things ended up in front of me as filler for a JD order. In for a penny, in for a pound — might as well try it.

For the longest time I ran TP-Link routers, until I got sick of rebooting them all the time and bought a Linksys E4200 in 2011, paired with an RE1000 to cover the house. Then came four-plus years of peace. Honestly, apart from power outages, I basically never touched either of them, and they almost never froze up — the only thing I ever did was reseat the WAN port a few times when it came loose. But a few days ago I found out the router was finally done for. First the ports wouldn’t come up, then the config wouldn’t save, and a reset didn’t fix it either. Flashing firmware threw an error. That’s when it hit me: this thing might be kaput. If it’s dead, it’s dead. Linksys hasn’t been part of Cisco for years now, but I still had a good impression of them, so I picked up a Linksys WRT1900AC + RE4000w combo to replace the E4200 + RE1000.

Last year I bought the first-gen Moto 360, swapped the band later, and it felt pretty good. I wore it for a solid year, and honestly this thing changed my life more than a little. Now the upgraded Moto 360 2nd is here, bringing redesigned lugs, better battery life, more customization options, and a mainland China release. I wasn’t really unhappy with my first-gen Moto 360. Battery life was enough. The 2nd gen’s “a bit over a day” is kind of neither here nor there — you’re charging it at night anyway… But my biggest reason for buying the Moto 360 2nd was… looks. I hated the black first-gen Moto 360. A lot of people said it looked like plastic. So while I was kicking myself for not buying the silver one, I kept refreshing the Google Store until the silver version came back in stock. Placed the order, used a forwarding service, and it arrived without a hitch.

My memory is bad in some ways. Lately I’ve been wanting to work on my foreign languages — English and Japanese — so I needed a notebook I could carry around and jot down the new words I run into. I’d been using an ordinary leather-bound notebook, wrote plenty in it, and then I lost the damn thing a while back… When I was about to get a new one, I happened to see on YouTube that Sharp makes this thing called an “electronic notebook” (電子ノート), that it’s already several generations in, and that the newest WG-30 was about to go on sale in mid-October. So I kept an eye on it. On release day I ordered from Amazon Japan, had Tenso forward it, and it came out to about 1000 RMB all told.

My first NAS was an HP N40L, so I’ve got a soft spot for that little chassis. Then the motherboard died on me… So I threw together my own case and stuffed some drives in as a NAS, installed OMV, and set up a janky storage layout — RAID 1 on garbage drives, then RAID 0 on top of that, then another RAID 0 on top of that. It ran for over a year without incident, but the pitiful 3 TB filled up fast, so I started looking at a new NAS. I like small cases like the HP N40L, and then I saw the HP MicroServer Gen 8 on sale again at some German site, so I figured I’d do the German import thing. After ordering I assumed it wouldn’t arrive until late November, but it showed up surprisingly fast — 12 days to my door, no customs duty.

We already had a NAS at home, but it was completely useless for the elderly folks in the family. Fine for me, but too much of a hassle for my parents. For them, a NAS is actually necessary—they need to save photos they take, whether on phone or camera. Importing photos from phone to PC is way too much trouble for them, and installing some domestic management app feels like a scam risk. Plus, dumping everything onto one computer seems unsafe—if the drive dies, that’s it. So I decided to go with Synology. Given data safety concerns, I picked the two-bay DS216se.

Recently I keep hearing this word, “light luxury.” No idea who cooked it up first, but it’s been trending for a while. “Luxury” I get. But what the hell is “light luxury”? “Luxury” mostly means: something you could get done for 50 bucks, you insist on doing in a way that costs 5000 — chasing that low cost-performance ratio on purpose. No question, luxury belongs to rich people, and “light luxury” sounds more like a different kind of “luxury” for the broke crowd. The broke also want luxury. Funny, right? No money, but still putting on the rich-person act — isn’t that just flexing? That said, it’s not wrong either. “Light luxury” does carry a bit of a flexing vibe.

I’ve been driving a ton these past few days—almost caught up to two months’ worth of mileage since buying the car. But a few days ago I noticed the car felt bumpy even on flat ground… I don’t drive much, but yeah, it was definitely bumpy on flat ground. Then during the late-September service, the 4S shop mechanic told me it was a tire pressure issue. They checked the tires themselves and found nothing wrong, just that the pressures were a bit uneven. After adjusting them, the bumpiness disappeared. The mechanic said I was lucky to catch it early, otherwise it would’ve caused a whole chain of damage to the tires. I asked the mechanic a bunch of questions during the service, tire stuff included. He explained the consequences of uneven tire pressure and blowouts, and then casually added… “Tires aren’t covered under warranty. If you blow one, you’ll be paying out of pocket whether you come to the 4S shop or some street tire place.” Bruh…