Caffine-indicator is a good thing — good enough that it makes using Linux noticeably happier.

But after upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04.3 it refuses to start and throws an error.

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Ubuntu 14.04 is an LTS release, but you still have to do a thing or two when upgrading. I wrote about it here before — except this time, upgrading when 14.04.3 dropped ran into problems…

The command given in the official wiki throws a conflict after you enter it:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack

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The Surface Pro 3 is Microsoft’s own hardware, and also the handheld gaming platform Microsoft has been pushing, so upgrading it to Windows 10 should obviously be no big deal.

I bought the standard Surface Pro 3, then picked up a key on eBay to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 Pro, so the Windows 10 upgrade I got was the Pro version too.

The upgrade went smoothly, same as everyone else’s — reserve your Windows 10 copy, download it in advance, upgrade directly. The process itself was fast, and then I ran into a few problems:

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I know a very straight guy who is extremely gay.

He’s obsessed with otome and even BL stuff, and after finishing it he’ll happily preach about it to me, looking for any opening to turn me gay.

But you know how it is. If there were only one straight guy left in the world, it’d be me. So I turned down all his invitations and dodged every trap in the videos he sent me.

Still, back two years ago when I was being an idiot chasing after a fujoshi, I figured this little gay dude was actually pretty reliable. As a fudanshi, he had a deep understanding of fujoshi.

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Honestly, some of Microsoft’s peripherals are actually pretty good — the Bluetooth mouse, the Bluetooth keyboards, all of it.

The Microsoft 5000 Bluetooth keyboard is an old product, so old that you can get brand-new clearance stock on eBay for like 80-90 bucks. Clearance stock, sure, but still a hell of a deal. The reason it’s clearance is that a newer model replaced it — and I really don’t recommend that so-called newer model, because its F1-F12 keys are now multimedia buttons by default and you have to hold FN to get the actual function keys back. Incredibly annoying.

There isn’t much to say about this keyboard. The one thing worth mentioning is the layout. They call it ergonomic — this fan-shaped thing does look pretty scientific on paper, since your hands naturally rest at that angle. But we’ve all been typing on rectangular key grids for so long that the muscle memory is baked in, so expect an adjustment period.

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I think the Honda Vezel’s car key has to be the ugliest car key in the world… and it’s not even close.

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Everyone loves to flex, but almost nobody enjoys watching someone else flex right in their face.

There’s a very fitting phrase for this: “the flex of real skill.” Sure, it’s said more as a joke than anything, but it gets the point across — when it comes to flexing, if you’ve got enough real capital behind you, nobody can really do anything about it.

Speaking of “skill,” I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a friend about cooking.

Back then I was being a total idiot, convinced that “a great chef must only make fancy, flashy dishes to be impressive.” My friend didn’t buy it at all.

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One thing that annoys me about the PHA-2: you can’t charge it and use it at the same time. Most of the time I’m actually using it as a laptop DAC, and the thing always running out of juice really pisses me off.

So whether the PHA-2 can run off USB power became a big question for me. Some people say it can, but the unit I have can’t, so I had no choice but to send an email and ask…

Well then, time to buy a spare…

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First, let me confirm: Twinkle Crusaders (ティンクル☆くるせいだ) is indeed a visual novel. (Serious face.)

Visual novels have always been treated as electronic picture books, and a few companies have tried to do something with the systems to make us feel like it’s a ゲーム, but most of them failed…

Twinkle Crusaders is the first game that changed my mind about that…

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In my life I’ve read exactly two power-fantasy web novels.

The first one I actually finished: Rice Wu’s I’m a Hooligan, all the way to its finale I’m a Hooligan: Dragon War Starfield. The other one is the also-pretty-famous How the Bad Guy Was Forged, and I did not finish that one.

To put it in terms an ACG person would get: the first is SAO, the second is Log Horizon. And I’m the kind of guy who prefers things that are snappy, so I finished I’m a Hooligan and dropped the other one.

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