One thing that annoys me about the PHA-2: you can’t charge it and use it at the same time. Most of the time I’m actually using it as a laptop DAC, and the thing always running out of juice really pisses me off. So whether the PHA-2 can run off USB power became a big question for me. Some people say it can, but the unit I have can’t, so I had no choice but to send an email and ask… Well then, time to buy a spare…

I’d heard about noise-cancelling headphones ages ago… back on Sony Walkmans… Way back, Sony Walkmans came with noise cancelling as standard. According to my classmate, the tech works by using a mic to pick up the sound waves around you, then firing out inverse waves to cancel them. Anyway, it worked okay-ish, but I distinctly remember it not being all that great. Years later, I’m in the market for noise-cancelling earphones again. No profound reason—the AC at work is too loud, and my place is right on the road, also loud, and I seem to have developed a touch of nervous exhaustion. When it comes to noise-cancelling headphones, the only real choice is Bose, and since I don’t want big over-ears, the QC20 was the only option.

Months ago I sold my iPod Classic to someone local in Zhengzhou. The guy who came to buy it was also a headphone nut. We listened to each other’s earphones during the meetup and talked a lot. I really liked his old jazz, and he preferred my Phonak female-vocal poison. While chatting, we got onto the topic of how people around us don’t understand why we buy earphones. I said most people who listen to my Audio-Technica im03 say it’s trash and the bass is completely weak, and he said a lot of people think good bass equals good sound quality, which is exactly why that garbage earphone on Hi-PDA got so many people saying it was great. “Good listening habits are important. Bass isn’t everything.” I totally agreed with that guy.

The reason mysticism gets called mysticism is that it has too much that’s uncertain and unprovable. Headphone forums like to use all kinds of precision instruments to keep things objective, to determine whether an earphone is really Hi-Fi — after all, Hi-Fi was originally defined as high fidelity. High fidelity means absolutely reproducing the original recording the way it was meant to be heard… So an audio device that boosts the bass, boosts the treble, boosts this and boosts that is, in theory, violating that original Hi-Fi vision. On this point, the various instrument measurements posted on headphone forums aren’t wrong in their direction. But there’s a concept called “listening impression.” That’s where the mysticism starts. An earbud might have monstrous playback quality on an audio oscilloscope, but that doesn’t beat a bunch of people listening and saying it “sounds bad.” One line of “sounds bad” can slam a high-end earphone into the ground.

The internet situation at my workplace is… special. In theory — I mean, in theory, according to the management regulations — every internet user in every department should be rate-limited, with video and downloads throttled, and stock trading and remote connections banned. Even our department is supposedly no exception. Except I’m the one who wrote most of those rules… so my own IP sits outside them. Sure, that violates the regulations, but I’m the type who doesn’t give a damn about the higher-ups, and plenty of the hospital leadership have their own IPs in the unrestricted group anyway. The thing is, the other guys and gals in the department are total bootlickers — the kind who look like they want to kneel the moment a boss walks by, then want to tear that same boss apart the second he leaves. Face to face one thing, behind the back another. They want to secretly watch videos and trade stocks at work, but when I offer to put their IPs in the unrestricted group, they shake their heads and say they don’t dare.

Getting a car is just the beginning… beginning of what? The beginning of buy-buy-buy! Since the Honda Vezel wasn’t easy to get and discounts were scarce, just being able to buy one with a small discount was good enough — can’t expect freebies thrown in, so things like seat cushions and whatnot I had to buy myself. Good thing Taobao is pretty much omnipotent, so I got all that stuff together quickly. Of course, as an otaku who likes tinkering with computers, what I cared about more was other stuff.

I bought a Cardboard a while back, but that was the first gen. And yeah, the first gen had plenty of rough edges — no big-phone support (even though my phone at the time was a Sony Z1), too few apps (aside from a few demos there was basically nothing to play). Then recently I stumbled onto the fact that YouTube now has a proper 360° VR video channel, and that’s when it hit me: the second version of that box from Google I/O was already dirt cheap on eBay.

Not long after I got my driver’s license, people kept asking me: “When are you buying a car?” Honestly, I hadn’t even thought about it. For one, I know jack shit about cars. For two, every car that looks decent to me has a price tag that makes me kneel. Then my parents started asking too, and eventually they just said, “Tell us how much you’re short and we’ll cover it, just go buy a car already.” That’s when I figured I should probably buy one—and I really didn’t want to take their money for it. So the goal became: “Buy a car I’m comfortable driving, within my own budget.” Which raises the question: what the hell do I buy?

I had a bad habit: charge my stuff overnight, take it out the next day, and only plug it in again when I got home the following evening. Day after day, over and over. Because of this dumb habit, my only requirement for battery life when buying anything is “lasts a single day.” The Nexus 6 has a decent-sized battery, but its endurance isn’t great — probably the price of that 2K screen. It used to be that the Nexus 6 lasted me exactly one day, including the evening run on the way home. But lately, the Moto 360 and a string of Android Wear updates have been eating more and more of my phone’s battery. Staring at the respectable Bluetooth drain in Batterystatus, I felt kind of helpless. At that point you’d get home with 20% left, barely enough for the run afterward. Which meant I had to find something at work to charge the phone with — and for someone with a “one charge a day” OCD thing, that’s a real itch. So I wondered: does everyone else just leave their phone plugged in whenever there’s a charger around? Asked on G+ and turns out most people do. Since the Nexus 6 has always been on wireless charging at home — I’ve got a Lumia QI pad there — I figured I’d just get another wireless charging pad.

At work I use a laptop plus an external monitor. Before, I had two monitors: one was a Lenovo LCD, 22 inches, a big white TN panel that I absolutely couldn’t stand. Later, the radiology department retired a CRT, a Philips, and using it was surprisingly good. Then a few days ago, that Philips also kicked the bucket. I debated for a long time whether to buy a screen for work with my own money. Considering the idiot director makes me write stuff every day and I spend a lot of time staring at a computer, at least not having a blinding white screen seemed necessary. So I gritted my teeth and got the ASUS VS239HR, 23-inch IPS with VGA/HDMI/DVI. The monitor arrived quickly, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a perfect panel with no serious backlight bleed—way better than expected. Here are some quick impressions.