After using the FiiO X7 for a while, a few problems showed up:

• When playing songs, it stalls once at intervals ranging from 30 seconds to a minute, and after stalling for about 20 seconds it resumes playback.
• Battery life feels like it should be around the officially claimed 9 hours, but standby is a real weak point, and there should be auto-shutdown.
• In the song titles on the device, the artist is all uppercase whenever it’s in English.
• Firmware updates on the device can only be done by copying to an SD card — it’s supposedly a smart device, yet no Wi-Fi updates.
• The breathing light stays on constantly, which is light pollution at night.
• The device formats cards as exfat, which doesn’t support long filenames.

So I was grumbling about all this when I found out FiiO had released firmware 1.3. The update method is the same as on older devices, but 1.3 does fix a fair number of things.

• First, the breathing light can now be configured.
• Second, there’s now a mode to auto-shutdown after a set number of minutes in standby, so long standby sessions won’t drain much battery, and overall it should beat the ZX1.

However, the most annoying problem — playback stopping — is still not fixed. I emailed FiiO and they suggested I try a different card.

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Let’s talk about Lump of Sugar first. Back when I didn’t know Japanese (still don’t, obviously), I thought this studio was hot shit — mostly because the name sounded nice, and everyone and their mom kept talking about them. And whenever I hear “Lump of Sugar,” I picture an elegant girl sitting on an afternoon street corner, watching the crowd drift under the eaves, delicately dropping a sugar cube into her coffee with pale fingers. Very aesthetic.

Aesthetic or not, Lump of Sugar is just a company that makes eroge. Yeah, the kind where otaku happily lap up giant tits in mosaic and flesh-colored straws spraying white goo. It’s like the elegant girl takes a sip of her coffee, then suddenly shudders, flushes red — because there’s a vibrator up her crotch controlled by the black guy running the shop next door.

Everything changes in an instant…

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When I first became a web editor, I thought it was a sacred job.

After all, so many people are reading what you write. You have a responsibility to them. No garbage content, no half-baked opinions, no wishy-washy wording.

I don’t remember what the story was about—probably browsers, let’s say Chrome. There was a foreign report that day saying some version of Chrome had worse security than IE9. So I compiled a news piece: “Chrome Version XX Less Secure Than IE9.”

It got pulled by the editor-in-chief pretty quick, followed by a special one-on-one talk.

“The news is fine, but there’s no hook. Your headline is too bland.”

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Last time I bought an iQunix USB drive, only I carelessly picked black and found out it wasn’t metal at all.

I figured black was fine, black it is. Then later I complained about it on X and the company got in touch, saying I could pay the 20 yuan difference and swap for the metal version.

Thought it over. Sure, why not.

So in the end the metal one arrived anyway.

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As an X5K user, I don’t think the X7’s hardware upgrades are anything to get excited about. I never bothered reading up on which chips it swapped in or what tech it uses, because sound-wise the X5K already satisfies me. At the very least it has way more power than the ZX1, and the fundamentals are good enough. Tuning is a load of crap anyway; just fix it with your earbuds.

But one thing about the X5K always pissed me off: the UI.

FiiO already has the best UI among Chinese DAPs, but the X5K’s godawful dot-matrix font and lack of touch support were unbearable for someone used to Sony’s stuff. Digging for songs was a nightmare. Even worse: the X5K handles album art and metadata well enough, but in the file list songs still show up as filenames. So I’m stuck scrolling through piles of 1.XXXX-XXX.flac, and since a lot of them start with the album number, sorting is hopeless. I gave up on that idea entirely.

You probably get what I’m saying by now. The big win for me with the X7 is the brand-new touch UI. When I first heard FiiO was making an Android player, I was worried about Chinese Android playback UIs — figured the best case was barely escaping the shanzhai stink. But after the product launched and I watched some overseas review videos, I was pleasantly surprised.

No need to beat around the bush: this UI is genuinely great.

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Recently I expanded two things: one was planning to buy a USB fast-charging socket at work that could satisfy the Nexus 6P, and the other was adding a Bluetooth module to my desktop.

The Bluetooth module is easy. Generally you get a USB one, plug it in, and the system recognizes it—especially since my desktop runs Linux, where the odds of it just working are even higher.

But that was too naive. I was originally going to just buy whatever, but I always want something fancier, so I bought a Dell Bluetooth dongle that can support entering the BIOS. Of course, entering the BIOS only works when paired with a Dell Bluetooth keyboard.

The Dell Bluetooth keyboard works fine with this dongle, but plug this thing into a desktop and it isn’t recognized… and that’s not all—it doesn’t work under Windows 10 either.

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I used to use a regular mount in the car. Nothing wrong with it, except it blocks the air vent.

Blocking it in summer is whatever — you just let the AC blow on the device and call it cooling. In winter it’s a pain: the phone’s already warm, and blowing more air on it makes it completely useless.

So I looked for a way to swap it out. One day I found this on Taobao…

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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.

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Play enough visual novels and you start noticing patterns.

For instance, most visual novel plots follow the same track when it comes to love: the girl likes the guy, keeps it bottled up, drops hints. Every time she wants to say something, the protagonist plays dumb, she stays reserved, he keeps stumbling around, until some specific event arrives and he realizes he’s actually in love with her — confession, dating, sex, End.

Honestly, that formula is pretty orthodox and there’s nothing wrong with it. But even if salty tofu pudding is delicious, even if five-nut mooncakes are tasty, eat them every year, every month, every day and you’ll get sick of them. So some visual novel studios started throwing in all sorts of weird stuff — the girl isn’t human but a god, the girl gets tortured to death, the setting is the future, the setting is the past, time travel this way~ changing the future that way~

Rinse and repeat, and eventually visual novel — short for Girl and Love Game — stopped living up to its own name. No wonder foreigners always call these things Visual Novels. Some stories have basically become novels already, and yet they still slap an 18+ sticker on the box, just to attract more people, awkwardly cramming in so-called “romance elements” that don’t fit, and while they’re at it throwing in some porn scenes, praying they can pull in a few more sales — at least from players who don’t care about story and just want to watch people fuck.

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I had a spare 128GB Plextor ngff SSD lying around after a swap, and selling it wouldn’t have gotten me much, so I figured I’d just grab a cheap KingSpec enclosure and mess around with it.

It’s pretty tiny once it arrives, just a little thing…

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