I had a bad habit: charge my stuff overnight, take it out the next day, and only plug it in again when I got home the following evening.

Day after day, over and over.

Because of this dumb habit, my only requirement for battery life when buying anything is “lasts a single day.”

The Nexus 6 has a decent-sized battery, but its endurance isn’t great — probably the price of that 2K screen.

It used to be that the Nexus 6 lasted me exactly one day, including the evening run on the way home. But lately, the Moto 360 and a string of Android Wear updates have been eating more and more of my phone’s battery. Staring at the respectable Bluetooth drain in Batterystatus, I felt kind of helpless. At that point you’d get home with 20% left, barely enough for the run afterward. Which meant I had to find something at work to charge the phone with — and for someone with a “one charge a day” OCD thing, that’s a real itch.

So I wondered: does everyone else just leave their phone plugged in whenever there’s a charger around? Asked on G+ and turns out most people do. Since the Nexus 6 has always been on wireless charging at home — I’ve got a Lumia QI pad there — I figured I’d just get another wireless charging pad.

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Today I found out I got played.

TRIM Enabled By Default For SSDs On Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr

I was pretty stoked when I saw that news, since it meant I wouldn’t have to tweak anything myself, so after moving to 14.04 I never bothered turning on TRIM manually.

Then today I noticed both my laptop and desktop had disk speed problems. The desktop was slow to boot, and the laptop would randomly hitch. Both machines had been running their installs for a while.

So I figured I’d check whether TRIM was even on…

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Idol Magical Girl Chiru Chiru Michiru (アイドル魔法少女ちるちるみちる) is a spin-off of The Fruit of Grisaia and The Labyrinth and Eden of Grisaia. The title says it all — it’s just a magical-girl moe-fest set in the same world with the same characters.

If you still don’t get it, think of the relationship between Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya and the main Fate series.

Online, this game doesn’t get much love. The complaints roughly fall into a few camps:

1. The plot is too clichéd, the déjà vu is severe, and you can’t fuck anyone.
2. The game is too short, split into two parts, and you can’t fuck anyone.
3. The OP and ED repeat way too many times — obvious cost-cutting — and you can’t fuck anyone.
4. It’s sold in two parts and it’s too expensive, and you can’t fuck anyone.
5. You can’t fuck anyone.

So let me clarify: this game is good. It’s fun. As for wanting to fuck someone, please turn right to Professor Dave’s masturbation channel.

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I picked this thing up purely by accident. It’s not for me — it’s for some old ThinkPad X61s and the like at work.

Nothing to do with my own setup, but since I’m the one who sourced it, I figured I might as well give it a spin.

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Koisou Relation (恋想リレーション) is the latest game from Lump of Sugar — wait, Lamp of Sugar. Anyway, I already shit on their last one, φ on the Fate Line, because the scenario was flat-out stupid.

And what about Ren’ai Relation (恋想リレーション)? Is the story any better? The answer is, of course, no—still dumb as rocks. Only this time, they gave you a built-in excuse for the stupidity by way of the setting.

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So one day I accidentally dumped a bottle of Oriental Leaf tea right onto the touchpad area of my ThinkPad X250…

After that the buttons started acting up for no discernible reason, and after thinking it over I decided to replace the touchpad.

They sell them on eBay, though most buyers are probably X240 owners. When I went to buy one as an X250 user the seller was actually surprised — he thought I had an X240 and kept stressing that the screw positions on this thing are slightly off from the X240’s.

There aren’t many guides online for swapping this thing, and most of the ones that exist are long-winded and unclear. After doing it myself, I found it’s stupidly simple…

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Honestly, Natsuiro Recipe wasn’t the game I was most hyped for this month. I was planning to play Pure X Connect and Sumire first, but Natsuiro Recipe’s files leaked early, so I had no choice but to start with it. And it turned out to be a massive surprise…

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At work I use a laptop plus an external monitor. Before, I had two monitors: one was a Lenovo LCD, 22 inches, a big white TN panel that I absolutely couldn’t stand. Later, the radiology department retired a CRT, a Philips, and using it was surprisingly good. Then a few days ago, that Philips also kicked the bucket.

I debated for a long time whether to buy a screen for work with my own money. Considering the idiot director makes me write stuff every day and I spend a lot of time staring at a computer, at least not having a blinding white screen seemed necessary. So I gritted my teeth and got the ASUS VS239HR, 23-inch IPS with VGA/HDMI/DVI.

The monitor arrived quickly, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a perfect panel with no serious backlight bleed—way better than expected. Here are some quick impressions.

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It’s been years since I played Love, Election and Chocolate (恋愛と選挙とチョコレート). I actually got into it through the anime—which, personally, I thought was just okay. Passable, nothing special. What I do have to mention is that when the anime aired, it went all out to promote a certain game, and that game was Ima Sugu Oniichan ni Imouto da tte Iitai (いますぐお兄ちゃんに妹だっていいたい, “I Want to Tell My Brother I’m His Little Sister Right Now”).

I’d had my eye on this one for a long time. From not knowing any Japanese to knowing a little, all I knew was: it’s all-ages, the CV cast is stacked, the music is good, and the visuals are… decent enough. So now, before starting Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm, I remembered this game and thought… “Eh, might as well finish this one first. At least it’s got Ai-chan.”

Honestly, I didn’t finish it. I cleared the main sister route and Ai’s Mao route, but the rest I just couldn’t push through…

Not for any other reason—the story is just too… bland…

The plot can be summed up in one sentence: after the protagonist’s mother dies and his father remarries, he falls in love with his stepmother’s daughter, who’s been pretending to be a boy. And the whole game reeks of a full-price all-ages visual novel’s inferiority complex.

Everyone knows the 18+ market is the big money in galge. Plenty of companies have tried all-ages and died horribly; at best, most just port an 18+ version to consoles and call it all-ages to make a quick buck. So as a game trying to sell copies in the 18+ space with an all-ages galge, Ima Sugu Oniichan ni Imouto da tte Iitai had to show its sincerity elsewhere.

In a nutshell: if you can’t fuck, you’d better bring something that can compete with fucking.

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There’s a certain writing style I’ve always hated, but it’s hard for me to put into words what that style actually is.

Simply put, it’s when someone never says anything straight. They always have to wrap up whatever they’re saying so you have to squint at it for a second—like the cafeteria lady serving your rice. She doesn’t just scoop it onto your plate. She has to lift it with the big ladle, do a little fairy-tale flourish in front of your face, and then fling it into your bowl.

Now, if that lady happened to look younger than you and was wearing a sexy black-stocking ensemble, or if the rice were free and came with three big pork chops, fine. Otherwise you can only conclude the lady in front of you is sick in the head, and after a while you’ll even find her disgusting…

…Even if she gives you five pork chops.

So when a story is being told, dressing up the wording or the process a little is fine—if the payoff turns out to be worth the dressing. But when some trivial bullshit gets wrapped up like it’s a world-ending blood feud… that’s what I can’t stand.

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