As someone who slacks off at work, going without music is not an option. I used to listen to stuff on my JVC SR500 headphones, but my desk is way too close to the door — the boss walks by constantly and keeps nagging me that wearing headphones at work looks bad. Fine, so I figured I’d switch to something low-key, an earbud. I’ve been listening to a ton of fripside lately and I’m really into that thumping “dondonga-don” bass, so I went looking for a tiny thing with monster low end. Skipped the Beats that everyone buys to flex, and ended up with the KOSS Spark Plug — the legendary “spark plug.”

Of course, all that above is bullshit. I just wanted to buy stuff, plain and simple. Life itself has no meaning. Only buying things lets you understand the true meaning of life.

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Cardboard is the little freebie Google handed out at its developer conference. A handful of demo apps give you a pretty basic VR experience — basic, but supposedly mind-blowing.

Supposedly. That’s me going off what people said on forums, where the crowd was unanimous: it blew their minds, it was insane, it was the best thing ever.

So I got curious… I mean curious, so I picked one up. Mine was 20 yuan off Taobao. You can also grab the PDF template and DIY it out of a cardboard box yourself — the box is cheap, it’s the convex lenses that are a pain to find.

When it arrived, the knockoff factor turned out to be pretty high. No NFC, but everything else that should be there is there.

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WORLD END ECONOMiCA is a digital novel (call it a visual novel if you want) with a script by Isuna Hasekura, the author of Spice and Wolf. The project seems pretty active online — it’s on Steam, it ran a Kickstarter to fund translations into various languages, and there’s even an official Chinese patch for the Taiwan market. Only episode.01 for now. Since this is a story about finance and stocks written by an actual novelist, I went in expecting good things from the plot.

The playtime isn’t exactly long, but it’s not short either. After finishing it, I felt the game has quite a few problems.

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I picked up this ThinkPad X230 a year ago, and I’ve been tinkering with it on and off since. Swapped the SSD, swapped in a bigger drive, even swapped the screen. This time it was the cooling system’s turn.

The machine itself doesn’t actually run that hot, and I can’t feel the heat or hear the fan, but the monitoring told another story. 55°C the moment it boots, fan spinning non-stop, and it shoots up to 60–70°C within minutes of hooking up an external monitor. The fan alone was pulling 10W, which was murdering my battery life. So I decided to tear it down, repaste, and clean out the dust.

There are plenty of teardown guides out there; I followed this one. Disassembly went smoothly. Then I found the problem… there’s a huge gap between the southbridge chip and the heatpipe. It was originally bridged with a thermal pad, which I idiotically wiped off, and the thing was dried out anyway. Which means unless I slather on 0.4mm worth of thermal paste, there’s no way to guarantee proper contact between the heatpipe and the southbridge.

The fix: thick paste, a thermal pad, or a copper shim. I went with the copper shim.

Lucky for me there’s a decent shop here in Zhengzhou that does cooling and mod work. Grabbed a shim and some paste from them and got back to it.

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Back in high school, when I’d scrounged together every last penny to buy a Sennheiser MX500 and plugged it into an iPAQ hx2412 to listen to Tony Ooki with total bliss, I’d already heard of Audio-Technica and it stuck in my head. Not because of sound quality or anything like that — purely because of the name. Whenever I heard it, the first thing that popped into my head was the triangle we used to bang on in elementary school music class.

Later, as I sank deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit of audiophile mysticism, the idea that “Audio-Technica = female poison” gradually dissolved into my brain. Honestly, I’d always wanted to find out just how poisonous the legendary Audio-Technica sound really was for female vocals. Eventually I bought a CKM55. First listen, no real impression. But after listening for a while — especially after I switched to other IEMs — I finally got what was good about it. That feeling of having both the female vocals and the bass at the same time really was nice.

After that I kept wanting to pick up an Audio-Technica around the thousand-yuan mark, but the good stuff, CK100pro included, doesn’t come cheap at a thousand. Too expensive, couldn’t afford it. Then one day my brain short-circuited and I bought Audio-Technica’s new ATH-IM03, and my long-held wish to “finally hear a high-end Audio-Technica” was fulfilled.

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My HP N40L kicked the bucket, and of course it was just past warranty. The case is some bizarre proprietary thing too, so there’s no repairing it. Nothing to do but sigh at the 10 hard drives left behind. Figured I’d just build one myself. Bought an absurdly cheap H61 board off eBay, an equally cheap Celeron 1610, and a cheap industrial-style full tower — 400 yuan total. Along with the sketchy SSD and HBA card I already had, plus a leftover OC3 Red Sea cooler and a pile of random case fans, that was basically everything.

I’ll skip the assembly. The industrial case gives you 10 drive bays and room for more. It POSTed on the first try, naturally — and of course after it booted I found two of the 10 drives were dead. That left four 500GB WD Blue drives and four 1TB Seagate 7200 drives.

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Old post, reposted. Originally written 2012/07/22

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This is an old post being re-uploaded. Originally written 2011/06/25

After The Founding of a Republic, the people making these films seem to have gotten a taste for the all-star cast gimmick, so this year being the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of China, The Founding of a Party was born. A lot of angry young men fixate on that word “great” and go: “Sure, founding a country is a great undertaking, but now founding a party is a great cause?” Personally I’m willing to be lenient about it. Everyone knows last year’s coldest joke: “Have you seen Uncle Jian hand-job?” I figure the director definitely didn’t want to see the upgraded 2011 version, “Have you seen Uncle Jian hand-job yet?” Right?

For such a magnificent domestic epic, I didn’t go to the cinema… because your humble narrator is genuinely broke right now. What I watched came from the almighty internet, the file’s source was the evil Baidu, the download route went through the shameless leech that is Xunlei, and the player was the classless Windows Media Player. I did not uphold the film’s copyright. I watched a pirated copy. First of all I owe myself a deep self-criticism for this vulgar behavior that seriously damages domestic cinema.

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This is a backfill of an old post, originally written 2011/06/24

Yesterday I was restless, bored, wanted to cuss someone out but couldn’t, wanted to write something but couldn’t, wanted to chat with someone but nobody was online. So I dug out that copy of The King’s Speech that had been sitting on my hard drive for nearly six months and started watching. Honestly, the only reason I downloaded it was because I heard Inception got completely crushed by it at the Oscars, so I grabbed it to pay my respects to a masterpiece. But life is unpredictable, and every time I wanted to watch it afterward, something or other got in the way. So yesterday, that lonely night, I finally finished the film with a lonely mindset, a lonely mood, and lonely eyes glued to a lonely monitor. Two hours later, my feelings were exactly the same as before I watched it — just as lonely, just as restless. Plus one more feeling: “That’s it?” Oh sorry, that was too polite. What I meant was: “This piece of shit wasted two hours of my life and then ended without explaining a goddamn thing?”

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This is a repost of an old article, originally written on 2011/07/28

Honestly, I’m kind of a coward.

When I was a kid — elementary school, I think — we had a VCD player at home, and of course plenty of pirated VCDs to watch. I saw a Hong Kong horror film called Ling Qi Bi Ren back then. That was my first real brush with horror movies, and frankly I didn’t even understand it, but it scared the hell out of me. Later in elementary school I heard classmates talk about ghostly stuff — dead relatives appearing in dreams, that sort of thing. What do you call it now, urban legends? Anyway, that kept me up at night too. Then came middle school, and I got lucky enough to read some horror fiction — doujin stuff, really. I remember reading it in Popular Software magazine, a novel based on Silent Hill. By then it didn’t faze me at all. In high school, a girl sitting in front of me kept buying horror story collections, and I borrowed them constantly — and the more I read, the more I enjoyed it… By college I was actively hunting down horror novels, and I’d gotten picky about them too: I wanted suspense, I wanted something to think about — not the cheap crap where the protagonist suddenly turns into a Maoshan Taoist priest, chants ji ji ru lü ling, and the final boss just keels over. I read Na Duo, Cai Jun, and all sorts of web writers — including Ma Qinwang before he got famous.

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