I bought this for my parents. Before this, my mother was using a Sony Xperia Z1 I’d handed down to her, and my father was on a first-gen Meizu M1 Note. I bought the Redmi Note 3 mainly for three reasons: New 全网通 processor, supposedly very solid. Massive 4000 mAh battery, supposedly very solid. For people my parents’ age, MIUI is an explosively user-friendly system.

A while back there was a JD sale, and the Edifier S1000 had a pretty good price. I’d been wanting to replace my old Edifier R1600TIII anyway, so I just went ahead and bought it. At the same time, to make swapping in headphones easier, I picked up the Aune X1S, this DAC/amp combo unit. So just getting these two things set up took a hell of a lot of effort.

The NETGEAR R6300V2 is a good router. Plenty of people say the first thing you should do after buying one is 1. I have no idea what that Merlin thing even is. I’ve always used Linksys and never touched NETGEAR’s higher-end stuff, but I finally picked up an R6300V2 during a JD sale a while back. Not for home, though — it’s for work, where it serves as a plain AP. The network situation at work is a bit messy. First, the office has around 20-plus phones and tablets that need to connect wirelessly, plus 5–6 laptops. So the office Wi-Fi has some requirements. The office has three ISP connections coming in: one China Unicom (Netcom), one China Mobile, and one China Telecom. Telecom has the most bandwidth, Netcom the least, and Mobile sits in the middle. But for certain reasons you probably know, the best route for “scientific browsing” is Netcom, while Telecom is fastest for domestic sites. Mobile is the awkward one — not good enough for either. The gateway router has an address table that decides which exit to use based on the ISP address ranges in it. That setup doesn’t satisfy me. I need to specify the network exit more bluntly.

I’ve got a fair number of digital devices on hand, and the biggest headache after buying them is buying accessories for them… screen protectors, cases, and all sorts of add-ons. I’ve wasted quite a bit of money on this front over time, so let me briefly go over what I’ve picked up recently and share a few lessons along the way.

Things have been tight lately for reasons, so I’ll keep this short and to the point about the Nexus 5X.

The FiiO X7 is a player I’ve grown to like more the longer I use it, but I still have to say it has one fatal flaw: the stock AM1 amp module is just crippled. On some tracks the X7 has a spiky, gritty treble, but when I run the X7’s LO output into my car stereo those treble spikes disappear. Think about it long enough and the only explanation is that crippled amp. Maybe FiiO did it on purpose, but at least they did release the official mid-tier AM2 amp, and swapping modules is easy — all you need is one hex screw.

Buying these earphones was an impulse purchase. I was helping my mother buy a Xiaomi Mi Band, and I figured I’d add some Xiaomi batteries to the order. My hand slipped, and I bought a pack of AAA batteries instead. I only noticed the mistake when the package arrived. Not that AAA batteries are useless to me. Thanks to that mistaken pack, the crappy TV in my room no longer needs me to hunt for buttons on the unit itself, because its remote’s batteries died long ago, and they’re AAA. So I thought about ordering the Xiaomi rainbow batteries again, this time AA. But batteries are so cheap that shipping is never free, and shipping alone costs more than a battery, which is a bad deal. I figured I’d add something to hit the free-shipping threshold, and that’s when I saw the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid earphones. I hadn’t looked into what the market thought of the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid. I’d only heard bits and pieces, and naturally none of it was good. “For that money, go eat a nice meal.” “It’s just garbage.” “I pulled them off after 30 seconds.” “No sound quality whatsoever.” “Boomy, can’t hear the vocals at all.” Anyone with even a passing knowledge of earphones would say the same. I was inclined to believe they were trash too, because at this price, unless it’s a specialist manufacturer, they’re all the same: boosted bass and nothing else. But these are hybrid drivers, and I’d never heard a hybrid before. And… I needed something to pad the order. The power banks were out of stock! So somehow I bought the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid. Or you could say I bought batteries and threw in a 99 yuan hybrid to hit the shipping threshold. So the question is, how do they actually perform? I hate keeping people in suspense—as the title says, “they’re not as bad as expected.”

I don’t feel like spending too many words on how these two things are, because it’s really hard to say much in detail.

So, I broke my sleep earphones again. My sleep earphones basically serve two purposes: plugging into the Surface Pro, and plugging into other tablets to listen to voice tracks. At first I used Earpods, then Princess talked me into buying an Audio-Technica CX550. Then I lost that pair, and after some searching I found out the strongest sleep earphones are the K314p. A year after I got them I learned they’d actually gone up in price, which scared me into putting them up on a shelf. To have a replacement I bought a bunch of Diving Expert models, but the quality was honestly terrible, so I had to pick up Beyerdynamic’s new DP100, which broke soon after too. Then I bought M&G’s K314P reissue, and as you’d expect, the cable snapped before long. So out of sheer desperation I bought this Edifier H293P Killer Earphone, 99 yuan. You can probably understand my helplessness by now. My requirements for sleep earphones are simple: Nothing with heavy bass. I use them for Galgame and voice tracks, I don’t want boom-boom-thump. Comfortable to wear. This should be the basic requirement for sleep earphones. Durable. This one matters a lot, since I’ve broken every pair before. So how does the Edifier H293P Killer Earphone perform?

The Philips SHP 9500 has been absurdly popular lately. That Smzdm thing kept pushing it until it was everywhere — it’s cheap, and the word of mouth is good. I wasn’t impressed at first. The price bracket is what it is, and yeah, people hype it as “this used to cost X back in the day,” but in the end it’s still a budget can, isn’t it. Then one day — I forget which bastard on G+ egged me on — I somehow ended up placing an order. Newegg international, no less. After ordering I completely forgot about it, and only remembered a month later. Turns out I’d registered on Newegg too early and the phone number on file was an old one, so the delivery address got flagged as undeliverable and the package was in limbo. After a whole runaround I found out Newegg doesn’t have its own logistics and had handed it to Tiantian Express, so more phone calls, and only then did I finally get the thing in my hands…