Anyone who’s seen me complain every day probably knows my mental state hasn’t been great lately. The kind where you can’t fall asleep at night and wake up early in the morning, so much so that when I should be sleeping I have to go on YouTube and find some uncle and auntie counting sheep before I can drift off. And at this critical moment, my bedside earphones, the Earpod, died… The K314P was actually the backup, but when I saw that the K314P I bought for 90 yuan had gone up to 1000 yuan, I decided to put it away for now and get something cheap instead. That’s when I came across the 39-yuan model in the Diving Expert series.

I’ve been using the Moto 360 for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve swapped the strap. The stock one isn’t bad, supposedly genuine leather, but I wanted to mess with it anyway, and the matching band wasn’t expensive. The Moto 360 theoretically supports most mainstream watch straps, though I don’t know those markets — I’d never worn a watch before the Moto 360.

In my second year of high school I got 500 yuan of New Year’s money, and I wanted to spend it on something. While poking around TomPDA I came across a Sony Walkman E505. Seller said it was an OEM pack, bare unit, just over 500. 50 hours of battery life, and it looked good enough. So I bought it without a second thought. To be honest, at first I didn’t care much about the specs or the sound quality. I just thought it looked nice, and that 50-hour claim was tempting. I had an iPAQ Hx2410 at the time, but its battery life was a tragic 5 hours. This was 50 hours. Even with 320Kbps MP3s stuffed in it I could still get 20 hours. That meant I basically never had to think about the battery. One charge and I could mess around with it for a week. High school was miserable every day, so getting to listen to more music was heaven. To use a phrase people use now, it was a “massive happiness upgrade” kind of gadget.

Key Smart is a crowdfunding project from the evil empire of America. What it does is use a two-steel-plate module to conveniently organize your keyring. When I bought it, the official site still had a 30% OFF discount, but there are a few things I need to tell anyone who comes after me: This thing ships from the US by surface mail, which means it’ll probably take 20–30 days to reach China. You absolutely must write the address in pinyin, not Chinese characters. If you write it in Chinese, it won’t arrive — at least, there’s no precedent of anyone receiving one that way. If too many of your keys have plastic heads, this thing probably isn’t for you. For official accessories, I’d suggest buying just one of the hanging clips. The rest are a rip-off. That USB drive — Kingston on JD has cheaper ones. So what arrived was this envelope:

Blue Ever Blue, BEB for short — I’d never heard of this company’s earphones. I was just curious and bored, saw they were running a demo listening program on Hi-PDA, so I grabbed a pair to check out. The model I got is the BEB X1001. The packaging feels a bit cheap — just a carrying case and the earphones inside, with spare rubber tips in the case. Honestly, for earphones, packaging doesn’t tell you much. I’ve seen worse. What matters is the sound, so I couldn’t wait to plug the BEB into a Sony D100 and start listening. Two minutes later I put them down and shook my head. How to put it. Muddy, muffled, boomy. Those are the three words I can use for these earphones. I’ve never bought into the whole earphone burn-in thing, but considering these were sent out for demo purposes, surely they wouldn’t be this bad out of the box, so I figured I’d do what people say and plugged them into the D100 to burn in… After nearly 48 hours, I listened again…

These days there’s a standard term for the bag you carry around every day — EDC, short for Every Day Carry or whatever. Point is, it’s the stuff you haul around daily. By that definition I’ve got an EDC bag too, usually with a work ThinkPad and some accessories inside, plus a portable pair of headphones so I can plug into the laptop. The first pick was the AKG K420, until a family member took it. Then I switched to the JVC SR500. Honestly the JVC isn’t as good as the K420 — portability alone is a problem. Folded up it feels loose and floppy, and the sound has no real highlight; the highs aren’t transparent enough. So after a year and a half of service, the JVC SR500 finally broke! (Why do I say “finally”?) Thus the hunt for a successor began. Requirements: 1) portable; 2) decent sound; 3) comfortable; 4) under 200 yuan; 5) closed-back. So I bought the Edifier H690.

So after the Surface Pro 3 came back from repair, besides noticing the fan was a bit loud, I also found my stylus could no longer launch OneNote quickly by pressing the purple button on top. Honestly this feature isn’t all that useful to me—I rarely use this thing for notes—but it’s still a feature, and having a feature not work properly is just uncomfortable to look at. That’s a normal psychological need, not perfectionism.

Stumbled onto a sale at a ThinkPad shop on Taobao — both the ThinkPad TrackPoint Bluetooth Keyboard and the 6-cell battery (72Wh) for the X250 were going for good prices. I’d just returned a bunch of stuff I bought for Spring Festival and had some money sitting in Alipay, so I bought them. Both shipped from Beijing, and fast enough… First, the keyboard:

Back when I bought my first pair of balanced-armature IEMs, the UE TF10, I had this weird sense of superiority. Because everywhere online said BAs were the new tech, wiping the floor with dynamic drivers in every way — superior resolution, badass multi-driver setups, vocals so poisonous it hurt, etc., etc. Looking back now, BAs aren’t all that. Not that those strengths are bad, I’m just saying that when I listen to music with BAs, something always feels missing. Sure, the Focal (Phonak) female vocals were poisonous, sure the ER4P’s treble was transparent, sure the UE900 had strong instrumental expression — but it never quite had that flavor. A while back I was eating with a friend. The restaurant had a small stage, and a resident singer was up there performing “Love Like a Tide.” After that song, I think I understood what BAs lack. What’s missing is that sense of atmosphere, like sitting in a tiny bar and feeling the music reverberate through the space. BAs are too cold and clinical — that’s when the dynamic driver needs to step up. The Sennheiser IE 80 is probably a pretty good dynamic.

The last time I put together a model kit was in elementary school. I remember it was a ship, and it looked hideously ugly. The rest of the time I was playing with Mini 4WD cars, and those are so modular I don’t think they really count as models — you can knock one together in a few simple steps. Guro is something a small toy merchant makes himself, and apparently there’s intellectual property involved and all that. I saw it was a limited sale at the time, so I put in a preorder. It arrived last November, and when I got my hands on it and took a look… Holy crap, over 200 tiny parts, detailed down to every joint. Then I looked at the assembly instructions and my whole body got drunk. So it got shelved. Today I finally finished The Witch’s Dinner Party and felt sick to my stomach, so the only thing left was to assemble a model. I saw someone on X bragging that they finished assembly in 15 minutes. I can tell you that guy is absolutely full of it. It took me almost 3 hours…