I figure plenty of rich folks, Wu Lao Er included, have already moved on to the OnePlus 7 Pro. Me, I’m still on a OnePlus 5.

Though my OnePlus 5 is really my backup phone. It’s fine, honestly. Performance holds up, no reason to replace it. Only the protector I’d stuck on it cracked, so I decided to get a new one.

The protector I had on the OnePlus 5 before was from Fangshao. The coating on that one felt weird to me, not smooth enough — probably some knockoff coating from a small factory. Since the Nillkin protector on my Pixel 3 XL feels great and the coating is great too, I decided to give the Nillkin one for the OnePlus 5 a shot.

Then I used it and cried.

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Summer’s here and my laptop keeps getting hotter, so time for a cooling mod.

Besides the usual thermal paste swap, I also went after the SSD this time.

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Haven’t cooked anything new in a while, so I tried this dish that “looks complicated but is actually dead simple.” Tastes great too — goes perfectly with rice.

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Intel recently released the AX200 series of Wi-Fi cards. A batch showed up on eBay too, and surprisingly cheap — pretty friendly compared to the old 7265 and friends, which used to run close to 200.

And after the ThinkPad X250, ThinkPad products no longer have a whitelist. Still, even though by conventional wisdom Intel wireless cards and Linux get along just fine, I have to say this product is an exception.

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A while back on Twitter, some fat otaku in black tights who has a girlfriend and never stops being lovey-dovey with her sold me on a piece of anime merch:

It’s the IKEA shark plush, basically. I’ve been furniture shopping lately and figured this thing looked decent too (my wife says the shark looks terrifying, though?), so I decided to grab one.

At first I hesitated a lot — buy from the IKEA site, or from eBay? eBay’s over 50 cheaper, the official site is that expensive.

But I read the eBay reviews and they all said the ones on eBay are fakes with bad texture, blah blah blah, so in the end I went with the official site… This is a dakimakura, bad quality and someone’s gonna die…

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One

When I was little, I knew some friends. All kinds of friends. Since we were young, we inevitably talked about the future, and we’d talk about what kind of dreams we had.

Apart from listing various vague professions, I noticed none of us had anything particularly “positive” to say about our dreams.

How should I put it—a lot of our dreams were things like “endless money, endless snacks,” really simple, low-tier ideas, plus that kingly aura of “rule the world, rule the universe.”

One buddy of mine told me back then: my dream is to “destroy the Earth.” When I asked why, he said: “I just wanna see what happens when the Earth blows up.”

Sure, different people have different dreams, but I can confirm not one person’s dream was “to protect world peace.” Everyone wanted to be the hegemon—the one who destroys world peace.

When I grew up and saw “man’s nature is good at birth,” I always felt it was self-deception.

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How many days and nights did this problem torment me? Finally solved!

Ecstatic.

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If you run Ubuntu Unity like I do, you might run into the “can’t establish a 4G dial-up connection” problem. It doesn’t happen all the time — on standard GNOME Shell or KDE the connection should come up fine. But Unity’s NetworkManager isn’t standard, and that’s where this whole mess comes from.

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A while back there was a thread on Reddit recommending some cheap Chinese e-waste, and it was pushing this Bluetooth speaker: the Jambox mini.

I’d honestly never heard of this Jambox mini thing. I just saw the thread hyping it up with “can’t lose at this price” and “beats stuff at the 500 yuan tier,” so since it was cheap I figured I’d buy one and mess around with it.

This kind of thing always reminds me of back in the day when I’d read some idiot “poison-pen” post going on about how some earbuds only cost 49 or 99 and you can’t go wrong buying them, and in the end it turns out you really can’t go wrong — they just sit there gathering dust.

This time I couldn’t hold back and ordered one. And the seller, who seemed to be some kind of official Foxconn outlet, took nearly a week and a half to ship. But it did eventually arrive. The speaker is bare-bones: just the unit and a charger, that’s it.

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WPS recently put out a new Linux build. Looks like it’s been ported to QT5, the UI actually looks decent now, and it supports scaling too. Great news, genuinely.

But after using it for a while I ran into a problem: there’s always a wps-office process sitting in the background.

Nice. So Kingsoft brought its Windows habits over to Linux too, huh?

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