Another exam came up in the first half of the year, so I’ve been in study mode again lately. I’ve been wanting to try the “all-digital” paperless study thing — reading PDFs, books, and magazines on a tablet. I’d been using a Lenovo Chromebook Duet, but the stylus on that thing is godawful, and the screen aspect ratio isn’t 4:3 either, which feels like a waste. Then I remembered the very chicken-rib Surface Pro 4 I had lying around. It’s got a 3:2 screen and a 12-inch size — just right for reading books and magazines. Let’s look at the basic specs first: CPU: Skylake i5-6300u RAM: 4GB Storage: 128GB NVMe SSD As you can see, here in 2022 a Windows machine with 4GB of RAM is basically unusable. The CPU feels salvageable — ancient, sure, but it’s battle-tested 14nm at this point. The drive is too small and probably needs fixing too. And this thing has been used for who knows how many years, so the battery’s down to about 60% capacity and needs replacing.

Zhou Ge (Maxzhou) is one of those figures in the “open-source handheld” scene who gets both love and hate. The love is because he keeps cranking out new products, and the new products generally look pretty good. The hate is because they’re all expensive, the performance gains are minimal, and people roast him for “harvesting the leeks.” Honestly, though, while there’s profit in Zhou Ge’s machines, calling it leek-harvesting is a stretch. His machines just take open-source designs and pile on a lot of his own tweaks and optimizations—higher-quality metal shells, better-feeling conductive rubber pads and metal dome switches, and so on. You can argue this kind of handheld isn’t worth that much, but if you bought one and modded it yourself, the cost wouldn’t be much lower than buying straight from Zhou Ge. Think of it as buying a fully modded open-source handheld out of the box, saving you the hassle later. From that angle, it’s really not that expensive.

The reason for buying this is simple: to replace the old Surface Pro 4. That Surface Pro 4 would overheat badly the moment I opened DingTalk to teach a class, and on top of that the screen would start shaking. Turns out that screen shake is a known defect — “Zhang-chan” actually had to swap machines because of it, while I probably never hit it since I’d never thrown anything “heavy” at the tablet. Anyway, the Surface Pro 4 just couldn’t keep up anymore, so I bought a Surface Pro 8. Spec is i5 + 256GB + 16GB RAM, with the standard keyboard/pen/cover bundle. Double 12 sale, 9998 RMB for the lot. Not a bad price, eh.

Around early March 2021, I was broke enough to start thinking about making a little side cash — passive income, ideally. Mining was booming at the time, but I only had a 1070ti and wasn’t about to whore it out, so I never jumped into that pit. Then something called “Xunlei Zhuanqianbao” caught my eye. By then it had already been renamed “Wangxin Cloud,” and the pitch was that you just run a little router-like box at home and make 100+ RMB a month. You could run several, some people supposedly pulled in over 1000 a month. Pretty tempting, I have to admit. So I followed the project through 2021, used some idle hardware I had lying around, put in about 120 RMB, and ended up making over 1600. Honestly that’s way less than I expected, but at least it covered my internet “freedom” — all my broadband and phone bills, with a bit left over. There’s a lot of talk online about Wangxin Cloud. Some say it’s a scam, some say it’s a goldmine, some say it’s mining, some say it’s a pyramid scheme. So let me go through my own experience and take on it.

I remember once saying, angrily, that Android tablet productivity is all shit. And then I went to a Xiaomi store and tried one out, which only confirmed it. Even on the “Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro,” productivity is still a pile of shit. My biggest complaint is that the IME on Android still can’t do proper cursor-following; in a lot of cases you still get the idiotic “type up here, pick characters down there” setup. Not to mention the browser being unusable… In the end I decided to try the Chromebook Duet. I picked one up on eBay, plus a USI stylus. Bought before the price went up — the seller listed it at 50, realized the next day he’d undersold, and jacked the price up in a hurry. But I’d already bought mine.

I needed a keyboard, backed by various bullshit excuses. Requirements: Portable, small Bluetooth, multi-device support At least 84 keys; I’ve had enough of life without an F-row and arrow keys Good build quality In the end I settled on the Keychron K3 — which is also the 京造 K3 version. This keyboard stirs up a lot of controversy online: opinions are extremely polarized. Most KOLs give it the usual praise, and looking at it I couldn’t find any obvious problems; the specs are fine too. Sure, it’s low-profile, but I don’t see what’s wrong with low-profile switches. The funny thing is most negative reviews online just call it “garbage” without explaining where the garbage is. The positive reviews, on the other hand, are very detailed. That struck me as bizarre. Is the marketing just too strong, drowning out genuine impressions? Or is this thing really that good?

About two years ago I bought a China-market Fossil Gen 5 smartwatch. I already covered why I bought it and how it felt to use in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat that here. Today I’m just going to talk about my after-sales experience with this watch. First off, less than a year in, I accidentally scraped the bezel on one side, exposing the bare metal underneath the black finish. That bugged me for a while. I even tried some nail polish type stuff to cover it up, but it was no use—just a little mental scab I couldn’t pick off. Also, after a year or so of use, the battery life was nowhere near what it used to be. I remember in the beginning I could leave Always Display on and still get a day and a half. Later, even with Always Display off, it barely lasted a day. Pretty clear the battery health had declined. Then the watch started acting weird. The speaker would intermittently produce distorted sound. Whenever you got a message, the watch would make a sound, but it was this harsh, crackly noise—super annoying. The thing is, it wasn’t easy to reproduce. Sometimes it happened, sometimes not. I couldn’t figure out if it was a software issue or a hardware issue.

Why did I buy the Redmi Watch 2? Mainly because my Fossil watch went in for repair, and they said it’d be at least a month before it came back from the factory. For a month I’d have nothing on my wrist to check the time, so I had a fresh excuse to buy this thing. I got in on the first batch, paid around 299 yuan—retail was supposed to be 399. The packaging is nothing fancy. Open it up and there it is. Gotta say, even though it’s basically an oversized fitness band, the build quality is genuinely nice. From a distance it really looks like an Apple Watch. Up close it still looks like one. As long as you don’t swipe, you can pretend it’s an Apple Watch. I’ve used it for about two weeks now, and I’ve got some thoughts, so I figured I’d write them down.

I forget when Xiaomi put out these earphones. Launch price was 999, then all of a sudden I noticed they’d been cut in half to 499, and before long you could pick them up on eBay for 299… From 999 down to 299. These things lose value fast. And this is supposedly a kickass “dual dynamic” + “dual balanced armature” setup. Mine came from eBay, listed as brand new. What showed up was a plain box with the earphones, some spare silicone tips, and even a mysterious “Bluetooth adapter” of unknown provenance (turns out that was in the original package too, for phones without a headphone jack). The stock silicone tips are genuinely badly sized — way too big. They leak sound, which is why I kept thinking something was wrong with the sound at first. Switched to one size smaller and the problem went away.

I’ve been out of the audiophile game for years, but I talked to some young folks recently and they told me domestic Chinese “mysticism” products are nothing like they used to be. By “nothing like they used to be” they mean flagship prices have shot through the roof — I have zero interest in that — and the low end has gotten “even stronger.” “Moondrop” is the brand the kids keep bringing up. I’d heard of it, but other than noticing they’re pretty deep in the anime thing, I had no real impression. So by chance I got my hands on a Moondrop “Quarks,” supposedly their honest-to-goodness entry-level model. Say what you will, the packaging is actually decent, and it even comes with a card I have no idea what to do with. Some kind of coupon, I think. The earpieces are genuinely tiny. Tiny and nicely made — the material is plastic, but it doesn’t feel obviously cheap. What confuses me is I can’t tell which of the red and black ones is left and which is right. Conventionally red should be the right, right?