The office got renovated and moved into new digs, so I got a new desk. My old busted monitor became unbearable to look at, so I decided to replace it.

But this is still a workplace, after all. I didn’t want to buy anything too nice and look like a show-off. I wanted something cheap, with a resolution I could live with, and a screen big enough to get work done. After some thought, I set three targets for the monitor I needed:

• Under 1000 yuan, and the cheaper the better
• 27 inches is the floor, nothing smaller
• 4K would be ideal, 2K is acceptable

I was initially worried that 2K on a 27-inch monitor would break scaling on my Linux setup, but after a rural schoolteacher on Twitter told me that 2K at 27 inches works perfectly fine at 100% scaling, I stopped worrying.

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That Lenovo M73 I put together a while back actually has an internal speaker — a little 2-pin thing, supposedly 1W or thereabouts. Which means it sounds like a mosquito whining, crackles on top of it, and can’t even do the one job it exists for: pinging me about a new Discord message.

So the obvious fix is to just replace the damn thing.

You can find M73 speakers on Taobao, and I tried one — genuine or not, the sound is equally pitiful. So go bigger: I found an 8-ohm 2W speaker for about 5 yuan. Cheap, and it shows up decently chunky.

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A lot of people want to buy “sleep plugs” — by which I mean earbuds that are comfortable when you lie on your side. Most people using them want to fall asleep to something: maybe a symphony, maybe rock, maybe Guo Degang, maybe a ghost story. In any case, it’s definitely not going to be ASMR.

Of course, the two big requirements for sleep plugs are probably just these:

• The sound quality has to be passable, no noise
• Comfortable to wear — no matter how you lie on your side, it shouldn’t feel bad

So recently a batch of “sleep plugs” showed up on Taobao, pretty cheap, with a full set of connectors — they support the usual 3.5 as well as Type-C. Really thoughtful. So, being the bored idiot I am, I bought a pair to check them out.

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ALcot has been in a pretty rough spot these past few years. Apart from last year’s FD for the title they put out the year before, they’ve been completely quiet. Both the main studio and the side brand are basically dead in the water—everyone figured they were about to fold. Then, in the back half of last year, ALcot’s president Miyazo (宫藏) launched a crowdfunding campaign on Campfire, saying they wanted to do a “project where they invite the voice actresses of popular heroines from across ALcot’s catalog to sing OP and ED themes.” Strip away the dressing and it’s just a CD—a cover album, no less, where the singers happen to be various eroge voice actresses.

I didn’t care about this project at first. I mean, everyone knows who ALcot can get for its voice actresses — it’s either Toono or Kitami Rikka, right? But then I saw Kiritani Hana and Kurosaki Touko were in it, and I fucking paid up!

It was originally supposed to be finished this February, but then COVID happened and it got pushed back to now — it was only recently that it was actually, fully done. Alcot was at least honest about it, sending progress updates the whole way. Not like a certain Sendai obaachan who said she’d crowdfund a solo album and then spent every single update posting about what she ate that day, barely said a damn thing about the album itself, and wasn’t even diligent about updating the track list. I feel like I got played by that Sendai obaachan.

Now let’s get to the album itself. There are 17 tracks, or 16 if you don’t count the final group chorus. So I’m gonna go through them one by one—I’ve got nothing better to do, and I doubt you’ll find anyone else online reviewing an album like this. Since it’s a cover album, I’ll just judge the singing, so I’ll group the reviews by who’s performing.

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Preface:

My workplace just moved to a new office, and during the move my old computer stopped turning on. It was an ancient AMD machine anyway, slower than today’s low-voltage Celerons, and I’d wanted to replace it for a while — so this was a good excuse to put together something new.

But at work my desk space is limited, and there’s no room under the desk for a tower either, so the “new computer” had some requirements:

• It has to take up very little space
• Within that footprint, as much performance as possible
• It has to run Win10 without issues
• As cheap as possible — under 1000 ideally

After looking around, the Lenovo M73 that was popular a while back turned out to be a pretty good choice. After a bunch of research I decided to jump in.

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I was browsing eBay the other day and stumbled on this Offline Dino desk figure.

I know there’s an official version of it, but this one’s a 3D print, and way cheaper.

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As everyone knows, one of the ThinkPad’s biggest draws is the TrackPoint, and newer ThinkPads have been caring less and less about it — not only has the height been cut way down, but it keeps getting shorter and harder to use, again and again. Maybe the TrackPoint just doesn’t fit with the mainstream Windows laptop push toward touchpads these days, but it’s still the last stubborn holdout for ThinkPad fans.

The obvious fix is to swap the stock cap for a third-party one. I swapped mine out before — a 3D-printed piece by Mr. Saoto in Japan.

My impression back then was that it felt great: it fit the finger nicely and was easy to use. The only downsides were that the color was a bit ugly and the material seemed pretty ordinary — not very durable.

A while back I saw on Etsy that Mr. Saoto had released a new version of the 3D-printed TrackPoint, made with a composite material and with better colors, so I decided to grab one. Getting it, though, was a real ordeal.

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Originally I wanted to write something poking fun at the straight-guy Twitter guy, Awen, but then I figured he’s already pitiful enough and I shouldn’t pile on, so I deleted that and went back to the original format.

That said, this game is incredibly practical. I don’t mean that kind of practical. I mean the “teaches you how to fall in love” kind. HOOKSOFT and SMEE have always been solid at this, but unfortunately most otaku just use their games as joke-dispensers for rom-com sketches. Genuinely a shame.

In recent years HOOKSOFT and SMEE seem to have pulled off a weird identity swap: the former started doing SMEE’s “love simulation” thing, while the latter leaned into fantasy settings. Most people don’t care, since both brands come from the same daddy and their art styles are converging at a frankly alarming rate anyway. Nobody cares about brand purity — honestly they could merge into one label someday.

This time HOOKSOFT’s offering is Houkago Cinderella (放課後シンデレラ) — literally “After School Cinderella” — built on the premise of “romance through chance encounters depending on which route you pick on the way home after school.”

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The fingerprint reader in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 has hardware ID 138a:0097. Unfortunately, the official fingerprint management module under Linux doesn’t support this thing at all. Plenty of people online have been reverse engineering it to make the module usable under Linux, but after all that tinkering it still feels pretty awkward.

There was once a solution that patched libfprint, but it only worked for about half a year. Then libfprint 2.0 came out and the original patch bit the dust.

Recently, though, someone solved the problem with a new approach: they wrote a fingerprint manager and driver directly in Python, replacing the dumb libfprint, and it works. Thanks to uunicorn and Marco and the other people behind the scenes.

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I installed one before… and now I’m doing it again. This time around it seems way less trouble than last time — maybe that’s the newer hardware revision, who knows. Anyway, my old Intel 18625 card kept hard-locking the laptop on wake, and swapping it out fixed it instantly. Could be a hardware issue. If the card still gives up the ghost, I can always sell it to Wu Lao Er.

So here’s a quick rundown on getting this card properly driven under Ubuntu.

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