As an Ubuntu Linux user, one day I saw someone on Reddit stick an Xubuntu sticker on their laptop. Looked pretty good, so I checked it out — turns out it was bought from a site overseas called unixstickers…
I looked around on eBay and found nothing for sale, only custom orders, and my communication skills are way too shit to rope anyone into a custom order, so I just decided to try buying from unixstickers once and see how it went.
Six days later it arrived.
The fingerprint reader in the ThinkPad X250 has the same hardware ID as the X240:
138a:0017
Shame is, that ID still doesn’t seem to be supported in the stock libfprint. Good thing someone forked it and added drivers for newer devices.
Before that we need fingerprint-gui installed, without it there’s no fingerprint login or any of that:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fingerprint/fingerprint-gui
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libbsapi policykit-1-fingerprint-gui fingerprint-gui
After picking up the ThinkPad X250 I grabbed a dock for it. The dock was an engineering sample — cheap, but it has issues. Most of them I can live with. No triple-monitor output, for instance, which I don’t need anyway. The real problem: when the machine isn’t plugged into power, external audio picks up a nasty hum.
People reported this on the official site and on YouTube, and it turned out to be a hardware fault on Lenovo’s end. They only fixed it with a recall.
Of course, I already said this was a cheap engineering sample, so no recall for me. That doesn’t mean there’s no fix — just get an external sound card…
I use my own laptop for work. It’s not that the machines the office provides are bad — desktop towers are just a hassle to deal with. Over a year ago I bought a ThinkPad X230, and by now I’ve come to really appreciate ThinkPads: if something breaks, I can just source the parts myself and fix it. Honestly, you could smash the thing and I’d order a few bits on eBay and piece it back together.
Over that year I swapped the screen, messed with the cooling, and the machine has run fine. But a couple of things still bugged me. One, the screen was the cursed 1366 x 768. Two, battery life was poor — even with the 9-cell I could only push idle draw down to 11W, and it would spike to 20W at the drop of a hat…
So when I heard the ThinkPad X250 was out and had brought back the proper touchpad, I just bought one.
Why not a Mac? Because I don’t use OSX, and I think putting Ubuntu on an RMBP is a pain in the ass.
If there was ever a time I got genuinely infected by music, it was probably my senior year of college.
Back then my daily IEMs were the Audio-Technica CKM55, and I was listening to a song by Alan (阿兰). The punchy drum pattern paired with her sweet, slightly sorrowful voice hit me with this wave of melancholy. I remember thinking: how is this singer’s voice so clear, how is it so sweet — it’s like the sound itself carries emotion, and it got to me.
Later the CKM55 that had been with me for ages had its cable snap, and then I found out the thing was discontinued. I went through a bunch of earphones after that, but it’s rare to find a set that separates bass from vocals while still keeping the highs clear. More importantly, that feeling of passion was gone. Even with thumping bass, sweet mids, and crystal highs, there was always something missing — that one bit of passion.
I’m no good at audiophile mysticism. That “passion” should theoretically show up in a frequency response curve, and how exactly you tune for it I couldn’t tell you. But thankfully, the Grado SR225 headphones gave me what I wanted.
The HP Stream 7 is a 7-inch Windows 8 tablet, shipped with Windows 8 with Bing preinstalled. Nothing really wrong with that, but when a new Windows 10 build drops, the hands get itchy.
Verdict up front: the HP Stream 7 can run Windows 10, and you can painlessly restore it to the factory state afterwards.
So let’s get started.
Mysticism is mysticism because it’s full of stuff you can only intuit, can’t put into words, or can’t even express accurately.
The vocabulary of mysticism grows with the years. Back when I was in high school, the terms were mostly “bass reaches decently deep, highs are transparent, mids are sweet, good resolution.” Now it’s “wide soundstage, loose vs. tight bass, forward vs. distant mids.” I don’t know about the rest, but “reaches deep”—I haven’t seen that one in ages.
Another trait of mysticism is that it can’t be expressed precisely, no unified standard. Plenty of mysticism grandmasters like to measure frequency response curves with pro gear, but nobody tells you what kind of curve counts as “female poison,” what counts as “wide soundstage,” what counts as “pop tuning.” And the funniest part: even if you show them the curve, someone will tell you music isn’t for looking at, it’s for listening—what matters is the listening experience…
I don’t get it. Really don’t.
Mysticism also has plenty of weird, inexplicable terms you can’t even make sense of.
Recently I heard two of them: “musical flavor” and “monitor mode.” Someone said the Sony D100 voice recorder isn’t suited for music, and gave a reason.
“Sure, this thing crushes the ZX1 in every way, but the sound is too cold, too dry, too monitor-flat, too compressed, no musical flavor. Not as smooth as the ZX1 and PHA-2.”
I didn’t know sound could be “smooth,” or that it could have flavor… And apparently even when it crushes in every way, the flavor still isn’t good enough…
What exactly is musical flavor? What’s monitor mode? How does the D100 actually sound for music, as a voice recorder? After reading a bunch of guru talk and getting nothing conclusive, I had to listen for myself.
I don’t have a very high opinion of most of what’s in the Japanese light novel market. Never mind the plot—just the narrative flow is a big problem. Works that are actually tolerable to read are few and far between; most have middle-school-level storytelling ability, blunt developments, boring one-sided infatuation, and vaguely pretentious rambling about being “allies of justice.” Honestly, not much of it feels fresh to me. In this regard I prefer domestic stuff.
Of course that’s expected—light novels as a product rose alongside their illustrations, so there’s this saying for works with bad plots and good art:
“Buy the illustrations, get the toilet paper free.”
The most disgusting thing isn’t someone who’s ugly—it’s someone who’s ugly and thinks they’re good-looking. The most idiotic thing isn’t someone who looks like an idiot—it’s someone who is an idiot and keeps flexing everywhere.
That’s how I look at most light novels, though there are exceptions. The “Hentai” Prince and the Stony Cat is one.
Every adult who’s never been in a relationship has gone through some phase of wallowing in 2D delusions. More or less.
Don’t rush to deny it. Either you’ve dated, or you’re just not admitting it. Otherwise—why would a total winner be reading my blog?
I had that phase too. Back then I thought way too highly of myself, carried a bit of distance and aloofness, and was full of imagination about the world.
Seeing other people in relationships always made my chest tighten: why does that guy get to escape singledom? Why do couples always look kind of dopey?
There are so many girls in this world—why has none of them noticed me? Is my “her” just not here yet?
I firmly believed: I ought to have a childhood friend who’d been by my side since we were kids and messaged me every day; in school, I’d run into a girl or two in my club who’d blush when we talked; or maybe, by some chance, I’d learn a mysterious girl’s secret and we’d forge a bond all our own…
Just like girls get hooked on romance novels and YA love stories, the harem-flavored stuff guys consume builds us a dreamlike ideal world too.
“Why don’t these stories ever happen to me? Why isn’t there a girl like that around me?”
They say you grow by gradually understanding yourself. When you look in the mirror one day and think “who even is this, who’d want to get close to that,” you probably get why the so-called protagonist halo never once shined on you.
Growing up teaches you that without enough resources and charm, no miracle is going to fall out of the sky. Those old dreams, looking back, feel more like the real world’s way of needling you. Fiction is fiction; no matter how pretty the unrealistic stuff is, it can’t stand in reality. The deeper you sink into it, the bigger the gap and the more tired you get.
I eventually climbed out. But there are always people still sunk in that rose-colored dream, unwilling to wake. Reality’s frustrations need some fantasy as a buffer—and the brief high those dreams give might just be the start of another addiction.
So today’s subject is exactly that kind of fantasy-projection work—
My feelings about the existence of ghosts have gone through several phases…
In elementary school, when I heard ghosts might exist, I was terrified. I couldn’t even sleep after watching the shoddily made Hong Kong/Taiwan ghost movies, and hearing the local lame haunted-house rumors made me afraid of the dark. Then I saw the behind-the-scenes footage of those Hong Kong/Taiwan horror films, and I spread a few haunted rumors myself, and after that I was never scared again.
Humans only fear the unknown and things they can’t control. That’s how I understand it. As for ghosts, humans can’t catch them, yet can’t deny them either — some even say ghosts have magic, have superpowers, can control humans, control wind and rain, which makes people even more uneasy.
Later I developed a new understanding of whether ghosts exist or not: if people become ghosts after death and can run wild all over the world…
Wouldn’t the world be full of ghosts by now?! Humans would’ve been wiped out by ghosts long ago!
So after Hatsuyuki Sakura, I played another ghost game:
Kimi e Okuru, Sora no Hana (キミへ贈る、ソラの花) is Cabbit’s second game — yeah, the same folks behind Midori no Umi last time. This time they dropped the artist from last game whose art reeked of nukige, and had Yukie, whose character designs for Chisa’s creator self-identifies as female, handle the art solo. From the outside it looks like a thoroughly heartwarming work.
So is the story actually heartwarming? Trust me — if it isn’t, come punch me!