I bought a Mi Pad 4 a while back. Honestly it has no other problems, but for gaming it has a huge one:

**Namely, “touch dropouts.”

Actually, this kind of touch dropout is an old issue with Xiaomi and the like. Lots of people have talked about it — from the Mi Mix 2s to the Redmi Note 5, it’s everywhere. Many say the problem is that Xiaomi’s touch ICs just aren’t good, and the Mi Pad 4 being a low-end product certainly wouldn’t use any fancy touch IC. So not long after buying this tablet, after playing some Honor of Kings on it for a while, I noticed the screen touch started jumping around, and sometimes it would just randomly cut out… or stop responding.

At first I concluded the root cause was:

Because the touch chip is cheap, after the machine runs for a while and heats up, the touch goes haywire.

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Honestly, my life before high school was nothing like the cushy existence kids have now. I had zero pocket money.

Not “very little” — literally none. Picture my elementary and middle school years.

My parents weren’t completely against giving me money, but occasionally handing me one or five yuan was already the biggest concession. Going out to buy a shaobing or a youtiao egg pancake counted as a fancy purchase. I had no money of my own to buy what I wanted.

I used to envy friends who had their own wallets and allowances, who could just buy stuff. Me? Anything I wanted had to go through parental approval. Sure, I only wanted things like Mini 4WD cars, but obviously my parents weren’t going to buy them on a whim. Back then a pirated “Auldey” car cost 10 yuan, and I only had 1-2 yuan in coins. Out of reach.

“Man, if only I had ten yuan.”

That was my wish. Simple, direct, pure.

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I got a 4G modem for my ThinkPad X1 Carbon: the EM7455.

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Poaching an egg is simple or complicated depending on how you look at it. I gave it a try and it worked, so here’s what I learned.

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Got tired of making chicken cutlets, so I moved on to steak…

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Butterfly Seeker came out early this year, so naturally in the back half of the year they put out Butterfly Seeker: Chaos Nightmare, billed as its fan disc.

Usually a game that sells well gets an FD, and sometimes a game that sells like shit gets one too — making a visual novel isn’t expensive, the worst that happens is the voice actors get tired, everything else is copy-paste. Why not squeeze some money out? Going by the other titles from this brand… (yes, I’m looking at you, Kage no Umi no Apeiria), the FD should just be a little slice-of-life sideshow with no real connection to the main plot, lower quality than the main story, maybe giving a route to a heroine who didn’t get one, maybe just shooting the shit.

In short, a cash-grab riding on nostalgia. No reason to expect much.

But Butterfly Seeker: Chaos Nightmare genuinely brings a lot of surprises.

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I’d been wanting to buy the original manga for a while, but the tankoubon were too expensive so I never picked one up. This time I was just rounding out an order and grabbed one volume:

Onii-chan wa Oshimai! (お兄ちゃんはおしまい)

There’s actually an official Chinese version of this manga too, titled 《不做欧尼酱了》. Sure, “おしまい” in that title does carry the sense of “quitting / throwing in the towel,” but after reading it, the original manga seems to use it with that mocking, teasing “he’s done for, he’s finished” flavor as well…

Anyway, once the manga arrived I finally had time to read it. It’s the first tankoubon, so the content is neither too much nor too little, and I was genuinely surprised by how good it was.

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I’ve been using my ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th for over a year now, and since I run it on battery every day at work, the battery wear… actually got worse faster.

A few days ago I noticed the wear was already at 20%. That in itself isn’t a big deal — the real problem is that it keeps cutting out around 20% and telling me it’s dead. That I can’t tolerate, so I went straight to eBay and bought a new battery.

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The Banana case I’d been using on my XZP finally cracked, so time for a new one.

Saw that the XZ2P still isn’t dropping in price, the XZ3 has an A-screen, and the Pixel 3 XL is just plain ugly — so I’m keeping the XZP alive a bit longer and buying a new case instead.

Looked around and landed on incipio, ordered straight from their US site and had it forwarded over.

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Can’t afford beef, don’t want pork. Grabbing some chicken breast and pan-searing it at home is still a pretty good deal.

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