I’m flat broke lately, so I’ve been surviving on whatever’s cheap enough to keep me full.

Military rations, for instance…

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For a long time I had no idea who Luo Yonghao was, yet plenty of my classmates were obsessed with him.

They all thought he was hot shit, so I went and watched his lectures about idealistic entrepreneurship and such. Guy’s legit, I figured — at least he isn’t the profit-at-all-costs type, and that alone is worth something.

Then he announced he was making phones and started running his mouth online every day. It annoyed me, but I could sort of see what he was going for.

All he wanted was marketing and eyeballs. He just picked a pretty low way of going about it. I wrote about this a long time ago.

I was a little tempted by the Smartisan T1, but no — I hate physical buttons, so I never pulled the trigger.

This time it was the Nut. I thought it over… figured worst case I could just replace my old Meizu M1 Note, and went for it.

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For the longest time I didn’t like Chinese DAPs. They were ugly, and the battery life was garbage.

Eventually the battery life crawled up to at least double digits, but they were still ugly.

So now we’ve reached the point where Chinese DAPs finally look not-terrible and have passable battery life — but the software experience is still a hard weak point.

And it’s a fundamental gap. While the world-class portable players have you comfortably zipping around, our Chinese DAPs are still way behind on the basic function of “searching for a song.” All they can do is pull out the “but our sound quality is better” card to console themselves. Problem is, very few audiophiles are willing to give up usability, and self-anesthesia inside a tiny circle just keeps you stuck in place.

Good thing someone finally decided to break out of that rut: Fiio.

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Let me tell you a true story first. It’s long.

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“Every smartphone has a nice feel in the hand when it’s designed — right up until you put a case on it.”

I only figured this out recently. The case I’d been using on my Nexus 6, the one with the lanyard hole, bit the dust a while back — cracked, I think — so I had to take it off. Holding the naked Nexus 6, I was honestly a little impressed.

“Huh, this thing is actually this thin?”

Yeah, the phone feels great as-is. The mistake was putting a case on it in the first place.

So I wanted to go caseless, but going completely bare felt like leaving something on the table. That’s when I remembered back skins exist.

Word on the internet is that the bamboo backs on the Moto X and Moto X Pro are just skins. No idea if that’s true. All I know is you can buy wood-grain and even bamboo-grain skins for the Nexus 6 — which, in China, is the Moto X Pro.

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I don’t watch porn anymore, but back in high school I watched it every day.

Watch enough and you start thinking about it—even debating with fellow enthusiasts about what makes a good scene. The standard, of course, is whether it gets you off. Maybe I’m a bit extreme, but while everyone else chased beautiful actresses with big tits and good bodies, I was looking for specific scenarios: humiliation, getting gangbanged by black guys, being dumped in the middle of nowhere for all kinds of play, being raped on the street, etc.

But over time I realized I was being an idiot. The stuff I liked was too unrealistic—either not enough struggling, or the acting was completely unconvincing. It looked worse than the rape scenes in domestic TV dramas. After a while it just got annoying. It’s still porn, after all; if it were realistic it’d be a crime. So I figured I’d rather watch those older-woman-takes-your-virgin plots—at least that’s not too fake, right…

Speaking of getting me into porn, I have to bring up Wu Lao’er.

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For the longest time—no, actually, just recently—I’ve been mulling over a question:

So what exactly is it that keeps me from getting a girlfriend, and why do I keep striking out at matchmaking meetups?

After thinking it over, there’s only one answer: I’m just not good at picking up girls.

With the mindset of getting to the bottom of things, it’s worth digging further: why am I bad at picking up girls, and what exactly do I need to do to get good at it?

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I bought a Microsoft Designer Bluetooth Mouse a while back, but as I said, it won’t connect on Ubuntu 14.04 — it doesn’t support Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy.

Actually the thing is supported in BlueZ 5.0, but Ubuntu 14.04 still ships BlueZ 4.X.

So here’s a way to enable BlueZ 5 and Bluetooth 4.0 / LE support. There are sacrifices.

After the upgrade GNOME’s Bluetooth management is completely dead and you have to let Blueman take over.

If you don’t care, keep reading.

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I only use Ubuntu and Windows 10, so getting DNSCrypt configured on those two is all I need.

On Ubuntu you can add a PPA and install dnscrypt

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:anton+/dnscrypt
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dnscrypt-proxy

Once it’s installed, edit the config first — the default isn’t OpenDNS’s server.

sudo vim /etc/default/dnscrypt-proxy

Comment out the original DNS server in there and uncomment the OpenDNS server above it. You don’t have to do this, it’s just that speed might be a bit slow otherwise.

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First, check whether your Firefox is even showing acceleration.

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