The reason I picked these up is pretty simple: I wanted a pair of TWS earbuds I could use at work. I’d been using over-ear headphones before, but they felt way too conspicuous. I didn’t like being noticed all the time, so I figured I’d get something a bit more low-key. Requirements: Type-C charging port Long battery life Sound that’s good enough Latency as low as possible The higher the quality of the supported codec, the better The cheaper the better I happened to see QCY was taking pre-orders for a new model, the T10, with a bunch of random new features. It basically fit the bill, so I got on board. Price was 120 yuan with free shipping, so I hopped on.

I used to run junk routers from overseas as APs at home. Nothing really wrong with that, but recently I noticed the AP at one of my places started losing signal—my guess is one of the antennas died. So with that, and the Double 11 sales landing at the same time, I decided to swap them out. My main router is a software router, so these were bought to be pure APs anyway; all they needed was good wireless specs. That’s how I ended up looking at two new Redmi models. So I bought both, one AX5 and one AX6, to replace the two junk ones.

The iPhone 12 is out. Sure, plenty of people are grumbling about the lack of a high refresh rate and the smaller battery, but given that the design went back to the sharp-edged look of the iPhone 4s era, it’s still worth a look. I picked up the iPhone 12 in green, 128G, and traded in an iPhone 8 64G for cash. When the iPhone 12 first launched you actually couldn’t reserve one — aside from the first batch of online orders, if you wanted a physical unit from a brick-and-mortar store you had to keep waiting. I went to the Apple Store at Zhengzhou MixC and found nothing but iPhone 11s inside. I asked the sales girl — one who looked like Inori Minase — and she said there were no units in store right now, and she couldn’t say when stock would arrive.

I’d been using the Sony Walkman ZX300a China version the whole time before this, and honestly I was pretty happy with it. In theory, two years later Sony puts out its upgraded Walkman ZX505, and I should be excited and upgrade ASAP. But I wasn’t. The upgrade points were too few: The system switched to Android (but it’s just a player — Android is useless here) The port switched to Type-C (a good thing, but not enough to drive an upgrade; I already have way too many Walkman cables) A bigger non-matte screen with higher resolution (who was it that hyped matte screens back then?) Some features that look nostalgic (who actually uses that Walkman cassette playback mode? Besides buying it to show off) More for the same price (slightly cheaper than the ZX300 preorder, but still not as good as the FiiO you’d compare it against)

On September 30, 2020, Google announced this year’s new phone, the Pixel 5. But a month before that event, I picked up Google’s previous-year flagship, a Pixel 4 XL 128GB. There was a reason for that: the Pixel 5 is just that bad. Hole-punch screen, downgraded processor, squeeze sensor gone, IR gone, radar gone — by any measure it’s a piece of junk at the level of a thousand-yuan phone, the kind that competes with Xiaomi’s Redmi over here. Google’s explanation is that this time they used a bigger battery and a 5G-capable chip, so the overall experience hasn’t been downgraded. Oh my god, don’t you know Redmi has supported 5G for ages? Big battery, you say? Hell, which domestic thousand-yuan phone has a smaller battery than yours? Google proudly announced a price of $699. Bear in mind that buying a domestic phone (one that can be bootloader-unlocked) only costs me around 2000 RMB. Only an idiot would buy your Pixel 5. It’s not a flagship at all.

Why did I even buy this thing… probably because I had such a good time with my last-gen Pixel Buds. I was actually pretty happy with the Pixel Buds, except the fit was beyond words. That dangling cord was just stupid. I mostly wore them running, and that damn cord kept swinging around, teaching me what “occlusion effect” really means. Now the Google Pixel Buds 2 finally exist, and the stupid cord is gone. But this thing Google built to pair with Pixel phones and fight Apple’s AirPods is still as unreliable as ever: No AptX support Only white at launch Various problems and complaints shortly after release But Google products are American-made after all, and plenty of American tech media started hyping it from day one, the same way they hype the Pixel line. If it’s Google, it can’t be too bad. And after the hype, they go home and keep using their iPhones…

The office got renovated and moved into new digs, so I got a new desk. My old busted monitor became unbearable to look at, so I decided to replace it. But this is still a workplace, after all. I didn’t want to buy anything too nice and look like a show-off. I wanted something cheap, with a resolution I could live with, and a screen big enough to get work done. After some thought, I set three targets for the monitor I needed: Under 1000 yuan, and the cheaper the better 27 inches is the floor, nothing smaller 4K would be ideal, 2K is acceptable I was initially worried that 2K on a 27-inch monitor would break scaling on my Linux setup, but after a rural schoolteacher on Twitter told me that 2K at 27 inches works perfectly fine at 100% scaling, I stopped worrying.

A lot of people want to buy “sleep plugs” — by which I mean earbuds that are comfortable when you lie on your side. Most people using them want to fall asleep to something: maybe a symphony, maybe rock, maybe Guo Degang, maybe a ghost story. In any case, it’s definitely not going to be ASMR. Of course, the two big requirements for sleep plugs are probably just these: The sound quality has to be passable, no noise Comfortable to wear — no matter how you lie on your side, it shouldn’t feel bad So recently a batch of “sleep plugs” showed up on Taobao, pretty cheap, with a full set of connectors — they support the usual 3.5 as well as Type-C. Really thoughtful. So, being the bored idiot I am, I bought a pair to check them out.

Preface: My workplace just moved to a new office, and during the move my old computer stopped turning on. It was an ancient AMD machine anyway, slower than today’s low-voltage Celerons, and I’d wanted to replace it for a while — so this was a good excuse to put together something new. But at work my desk space is limited, and there’s no room under the desk for a tower either, so the “new computer” had some requirements: It has to take up very little space Within that footprint, as much performance as possible It has to run Win10 without issues As cheap as possible — under 1000 ideally After looking around, the Lenovo M73 that was popular a while back turned out to be a pretty good choice. After a bunch of research I decided to jump in.

As everyone knows, one of the ThinkPad’s biggest draws is the TrackPoint, and newer ThinkPads have been caring less and less about it — not only has the height been cut way down, but it keeps getting shorter and harder to use, again and again. Maybe the TrackPoint just doesn’t fit with the mainstream Windows laptop push toward touchpads these days, but it’s still the last stubborn holdout for ThinkPad fans. The obvious fix is to swap the stock cap for a third-party one. I swapped mine out before — a 3D-printed piece by Mr. Saoto in Japan. My impression back then was that it felt great: it fit the finger nicely and was easy to use. The only downsides were that the color was a bit ugly and the material seemed pretty ordinary — not very durable. A while back I saw on Etsy that Mr. Saoto had released a new version of the 3D-printed TrackPoint, made with a composite material and with better colors, so I decided to grab one. Getting it, though, was a real ordeal.