There’s a saying online: if you see something you want to buy but you’re hesitating because it’s too expensive, just buy it. If you see something really cheap but you’re not sure whether you’ll actually use it right away, don’t buy it.

Thinking back on it, that’s pretty much how it goes. Something you urgently need, no matter how expensive, you’ll be holding it every day once it arrives. Cheap impulse buys aren’t things you actually need, so they end up gathering dust.

But as a spendthrift, buying a 9.9-yuan dust-gatherer is still forgivable, right?

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Over in the hardware section of S1stage, the recent meme is calling Logitech “poop.” The origin is actually kind of funny — one day a guy stormed in demanding mouse recommendations, laid out a whole pile of requirements, and then tacked on:

“Don’t recommend Logitech to me. Logitech is poop.”

And the entire thread immediately derailed, with all the poop users chiming in to congratulate him. Honestly, as a diehard poop loyalist, I still quite appreciate poop’s… after-sales service.

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I’m an uncultured guy — before I ever heard the term “dark nursery rhyme,” I didn’t know the thing existed. My first encounter was The Monster Without a Name (名前のない怪物), and I only noticed it because of some anime ED. Honestly, reading it creeped me out a bit. The “monster” in there can stand in for all kinds of horrible things — desire, sin, filth. Plug those in and the rhyme gets a whole lot scarier.

“As expected of a dark nursery rhyme — the more you think about it, the more terrified you get.” A few lines, that much recoil. Dark nursery rhymes don’t mess around.

But one day I remembered the rhymes I chanted as a kid, and something felt off.

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I wanted to use a NAS to store all my organized music. Stuff I sort on the desktop can sync over to the NAS, and when I get home the laptop can sync with the NAS too, so I went with btsync.

So I added the client and let it index. It told me my 500+ GB music library had indexed to 80 GB. Took a closer look — everything with Chinese or Japanese filenames had been skipped entirely.

After checking, this is a bug specific to version 1.4. Report is here.

The fix is simple: upgrade to the latest 1.4.99. On Linux, if you’re like me and using that PPA with the indicator, it’s still on 1.4.83 — but the whole program is just a single executable, so you can replace it.

After that the files kept syncing and the problem was gone.

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Got the Sony ZX1 fixed, so naturally it came back empty and I started loading songs onto it. I used to naively assume Linux just couldn’t handle a Walkman, but then I thought about it — it’s a USB mass storage device, why wouldn’t it work? Reality, of course, was harsh: plugging it in didn’t get it recognized the way my flashed iPod did. So I poked around and found the method is stupidly simple.

Create a file called .is_audio_player in the root of the Walkman. Contents as follows

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I’d been meaning to get a router to flash OpenWRT on for a while, mainly to mess around with proxy routing. But the Linksys E4200 at home was more stable on stock firmware, so I never bothered and just hung a Raspberry Pi off it as a gateway instead. That worked fine, but then I saw a router for 19 yuan with free shipping, and I couldn’t resist. Twenty bucks — come on, that’s like one meal.

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Buying stuff usually needs a justification. Way back when I first learned label printers existed, I instantly felt I needed one. I mean, look at all the jars and storage boxes at home—how can you not want a fully automated label generator?

Then I happened to see the CASIO MEP-T10 label printer on SMZDM for 258 yuan with free shipping.

That cheap, and it’s got a touchscreen, you can handwrite on it, and it connects to a PC—what was I waiting for? I ordered on the spot. Then Amazon (the bastards) told me the order was delayed and I wouldn’t get it until after the National Day holiday. Fine, whatever. But then things took a turn—on October 4th at noon I got a call saying the printer had arrived…

So I dragged myself out of bed mid-holiday, went to the office to pick up the package, and brought this thing home.

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Sleep earbuds are kind of a contradiction in the first place — what you should be putting in your ears at night is plain sound-isolating earplugs, not music earbuds. But I’m constantly fiddling with a tablet in bed, so I need something that’s comfortable to wear while lying on my side and doesn’t sound like garbage.

So today I picked up a package downstairs, opened it, and there it was.

AKG K314P

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Yesterday — no, wait, today — Microsoft dropped the Windows 10 developer preview. Being a halfway Microsoft loyalist, my hands got itchy and I figured I’d give it a shot.

First I messed around with it in a VM, and it just didn’t do it for me. Not satisfying, not happy. So I wanted it on real hardware. Commercial OS dev builds are at least sort of reliable — more reliable than the beta of plenty of Linux distros, honestly (no offense). So on this nice breezy afternoon, I upgraded my own Surface Pro 3 to Windows 10.

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I don’t know when wearables became a thing, but somehow they crept up on us. Lots of people pin huge hopes on these little gadgets strapped to their heads, wrists, or necks—as if just carrying one around could log every meal, every trip, every twist and turn, every flight through the sky and swim across the river, and with a single button press instantly display your HP, MP, STR, INT, AGI, STA, SPR, Haste, Crit, Mastery, Tenacity, and every other stat.

The reality is cruel. You’re dreaming…

The first wave of bands that got people’s attention were products led by Jawbone. They weren’t exactly cheap, the practicality wasn’t exactly a pleasant surprise, and the durability wasn’t exactly great either (remember that product with the “dead in three months” curse?). The result: they became toys for a handful of geeks with spare cash to burn, and most people just watched from afar (me included).

As a spendthrift, it’s not that I didn’t want to buy, buy, buy—but a purchase needs a sufficient and necessary condition for cutting off one’s hand, an absolute reason like “I’m doing this for my health” to ease the guilt of wasting money. Back then, the ones with good features were too expensive, and the cheap ones didn’t work well. In the end I held back.

Then in July this year I saw the pre-order news for the Bong II. I’d actually been following the first generation too—never used it, but it looked decent enough, at least by the standards of the domestic scene. So I curiously checked the pre-order price for the second gen————99 yuan.

What? 99 yuan? The first gen was over 600, right? I checked and yep, it was 99. I also saw what it looked like, and instantly understood why it was 99.

Honestly? It’s ugly.

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