The old router at work has been feeling its age lately. It’s been solid for a long time, honestly, but I’ve decided it’s washed.
So I grabbed an “old and busted” PC to build a new soft router. Specs below:
After almost two weeks of messing with it, it finally feels stable. I’ve got “load balancing,” “circumventing the GFW,” “ad filtering” and the like running on this thing, but I hit a ton of pitfalls. Here’s the summary.
The game I’d been hyping up all last year, the one bro kept dumping on — Pieces / Wataridori no Somnium — got a sequel after a whole year…
Sure, they call it a sequel, but it’s a fandisc any way you look at it — Pieces/揺り籠のカナリア, the canary in the cradle.
Honestly, the fact that it got a fandisc surprised me. The original story was already over — if you’re making a fandisc, there’s basically no room for an after-story. Every protagonist wakes up from that “dream world,” and when the male lead and the heroine meet again, they’ve both lost their old memories. It’s just a fated reunion. What else is a fandisc supposed to say? Are they gonna have another go at it in the real world?
Real life already has enough of that boring-as-hell “take a humblebrag, swallow it” type of douchebag like Chiku-niu. Not me, no thanks!
Then the game got a demo, and I looked at it and immediately started roasting it.
Every 4.4 balanced cable I’d bought for my headphones before this one died on me — either the contact went bad or it just plain wouldn’t make a sound. So this time, with a sale going on at Taobao, I grabbed two cables from FiiO. MSRP was 198 each, sale price 168 each, and the two stacked with a spend-more-save-more discount, so I got them for 295 total.
And even though I ordered the 4-strand version, one of the two that arrived was a 6-strand. No idea if that’s a freebie or they just ran out of 4-strand stock and sent me the pricier one. I checked and FiiO doesn’t actually sell a 6-strand, so it might be them clearing inventory — either way I figure I came out ahead.
You’ve all seen it: the great Miboy vanguard a.k.a. the Twitter hearse boss himself, Wu Er Lao, bought three Mijia Bluetooth Thermometer 2s.
So I, as Wu Er Lao’s most devout follower, bought one too. Let’s see what this “marked down to 9 yuan” little thing is actually like.
Anyone who knows a thing or two about Japanese people knows they get “particular” when telling a story.
That particularity is baked in — the kind of small-mindedness that lacks any grand scale, constantly getting weepy over the most trivial shit. There’s actually a word for this in Japanese: mono no aware, which Chinese renders as 物哀. Basically, you see anything at all and get inexplicably sad.
For pretentious artsy kids that’s maybe OK, but if it’s the only register you ever play, you’ve run out of tricks.
Mono no aware isn’t just in the usual stories — it’s more in how Japanese people tell stories. Endlessly wistful and mournful, a hundred twists and turns, and after a hundred laps around the track you still haven’t gotten back to the starting point. The reader gets anxious, and all that circling still lands you on some utterly unremarkable ending, which easily leaves you feeling embarrassed and angry.
Yes, I’m embarrassed and angry again. Miss Wang, bring me my Italian cannon, I’m opening fire.
If you need to work with Doc files and the like that came out of Office, WPS Linux might be your only option.
Yeah, “only option.” Don’t come at me with LibreOffice — if you say that, I have every reason to suspect you’ve literally never opened an Office file that was handled on Windows.
WPS Linux from a few years back was actually pretty decent: fast to open, feature set was enough, good compatibility with Doc files and so on. Sure, anything with slightly complex layout still looked like shit, but at least you could open the file and read it, which is more than I can say for fucking LibreOffice. I’ve been using it the whole time. But in recent years WPS Linux has picked up the same bad habits as the Windows version, bolting on dumbass “cloud drive,” “cloud templates,” “cloud space” type features that you can’t turn off. Even better, it leaves a background process running called “Cloud Office.” Cloud-deez-nuts, more like.
So I poked around a bit and found a trick for installing a “clean” WPS Linux:
Install the English version, then add the Chinese localization on top.
I don’t recommend just using the English version as-is, because it’s not about how good your English is — an English system is just bad at supporting Chinese typesetting.
Wayland already has built-in touchpad gesture support, but Wayland still isn’t usable — at the very least the mouse stutter under load hasn’t been fixed — so let’s talk about Xorg instead.
If you’re on Wayland you can just install an extension:
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2781/custom-3-finger-gestures/
So here’s the thing—this game has been sitting in my hard drive gathering dust for ages. I’ve always had mixed feelings about it.
This game comes from Campus, a label that got shut down and sold off. Campus was actually a sub-brand of Light, set up specifically to crank out quick cash-grab mini-games. The formula was basically: find a decent artist, push out a single-route or two-route short game, keep the budget low, sell it cheap, and hope it pumps some blood back into the parent company Light.
Honestly, Campus’s intent to recoup some cash by selling these games is way too obvious. Just look—every single one of them is a “multi-platform release,” with iOS and Android versions and everything else they can slap it on, not a single one left out. There are also free non-18+ versions, and only the 18+ content costs money. It’s basically a “we’re not making games to make money, we’re just here to make friends” stance, as if they think their game quality is so solid that surely some player—or some otaku who wants to see the lewd art—will shell out for the physical edition, and then they can pull a reverse play and rake it in, revive the company, and return to the old capital…
Except that didn’t happen. Light still died, and Campus got sold off too.
I had a really weird problem, and it haunted me for about a year.
At home my laptop sits in a Thunderbolt 3 dock, and on that dock I plugged in a USB DAC to make sure my desk has a headphone output, plus that USB DAC also feeds two speakers.
Short version: I don’t use the dock’s built-in audio. I added a separate USB DAC on top.
Starting last year, that DAC began acting up in a strange way: whenever I played music or video, the sound would crackle. At first I blamed the dock, but plugging the DAC straight into the laptop’s USB port made the problem disappear. It only happened when it was plugged into the dock, which pointed to a power-delivery issue.
