I sold my year-old Google Nexus 9 and, as a replacement, imported the latest Google Pixel C. The reason was honestly that I wasn’t all that satisfied with the Nexus 9—screen too small… build quality so-so… maybe that was it. More than that, though, I think the Pixel C just appealed to me more. The import went smoothly, but Google still shipped the keyboard and the tablet separately, which meant I had to deal with two forwarding orders. The keyboard ended up getting taxed too. I don’t think it should have been, but the forwarding company declared it proactively. They had a tax receipt, so I let it go. I’ve used the Google Pixel C for a fair amount of time—not short, but not long either. I’ve honestly written quite a bit on it: reports, and every blog post from the last one of last year up to now. I figure that gives me the right to have an opinion on this thing.

I’ve got a few too many laptop hard drives lying around. Up to now I’ve been using all sorts of different enclosures, so I got to wondering—do dual-bay external enclosures exist? Turns out they do. One is the much pricier kind with Thunderbolt and USB Type-C, clearly aimed at Mac people. The other is the one I bought: cheap, plain USB 3.0. The Taobao reviews looked decent enough, so I figured I’d grab one and see.

As a FiiO X5K user, I can’t say the FiiO X7’s hardware upgrades excite me much. I never bothered reading closely about which chips it upgraded or what tech it uses, because sound-wise the X5K already satisfies me — at least it has way more driving power than the ZX1, and the basics are good enough. Tuning is all smoke and mirrors anyway; you can fix it with earbuds. But one thing about the X5K always grated on me: the UI. FiiO already has the best UI among Chinese DAPs, but the X5K’s godawful dot-matrix font and lack of touch support drove me crazy after getting used to Sony’s stuff. Browsing for songs was a nightmare. And the kicker: even though the X5K handles album art and other metadata well enough, song names in the file list still show up as filenames. I was stuck navigating piles of 1.XXXX-XXX.flac, and since a lot of them start with album numbers, sorting to find anything was hopeless. I gave up on that idea. You can probably guess what I’m getting at. The biggest win of the X7 for me is the brand-new touch-controlled UI. When I first heard FiiO was making an Android player, I was worried about a Chinese Android playback UI — figured the best case was it barely escaping the shanzhai smell. But after the product came out and I watched some overseas review videos, it surprised me quite a bit. No need to beat around the bush: honestly, this UI is already pretty great.

Before this I was using a plain car mount. Nothing wrong with it, except it blocks the air vent. In summer that’s tolerable — the cold air blows on the device and cools it down. In winter it’s a problem: the phone is already warm, and blowing more hot air on it makes it completely useless. So I started looking for a replacement, and one day on eBay I found this…

After getting the Nexus 6 last year, some things satisfied me and some didn’t, so when the Nexus 6P launched this year I kept hesitating about whether to upgrade. The things I wasn’t happy with: The screen was too yellow. It’s an AMOLED panel, and supposedly not even a good Samsung one, which is why it took me forever to adjust after switching from a Sony Xperia Z1. Battery life was a bit of a mess. With the Moto 360 sipping power over Bluetooth, I barely got through a day, and sometimes had to top up around noon. No LED notification light. The Nexus 6 actually has one, but Android disables it by default, and even if you turn it on you apparently need a paid app to make it work. Ridiculous. The biggest thing making me hesitate was this: the Nexus 6P does fix those complaints, but not in a way that leaves you feeling reassured.

As a handheld, the Surface Pro 3 kept me company for a long while. But eventually the newer Surface Pro 4 came out. Not a huge upgrade, but considering I spend more time with this thing than with my desktop, I figured I should treat myself. So I upgraded. On the whole the two machines aren’t that different. Most of it is a spec bump.

I’ve known about NFC for ages — my Sony Xperia Z1 had it way back — but I never really used the feature. Okay, not entirely never. I tapped my China Construction Bank card with it once and saw some card info through Alipay, and that was it… I’d seen NFC tags around too, Sony made some I think, but at the time it felt like a solution in search of a problem. Still, one of these pointless things eventually landed in front of me as a filler item on a JD order. Might as well try it.

For years I ran TP-Link routers, until I got sick of having to reboot them all the time. In 2011 I bought a Linksys E4200 and, paired with an RE1000, covered the whole house wirelessly. Then came four-plus years of peace. Honestly, apart from power outages I basically never touched those two routers, and they almost never crashed—only now and then a loose WAN port needed re-plugging. A few days ago, though, I found this router was finally done. First the ports wouldn’t come up, then config changes wouldn’t save, and it stayed that way after a reset; flashing firmware threw an error. That’s when I realized the thing was probably dead. Dead means replace. Linksys hasn’t been Cisco’s for years, but I still have a good impression of them, so I picked up a Linksys WRT1900AC plus RE4000w to replace the E4200 and RE1000.

Last year I bought the first-gen Moto 360, swapped the band later, and it turned out great. I wore it for a full year and honestly it changed my life a little. Now the upgrade, Moto 360 2nd, is here — redesigned lugs, better battery life, more customization options, and an official China release. I wasn’t really unhappy with the first gen. Battery was enough for me, and the second gen’s “a bit over a day” feels awkward anyway — you still have to charge it at night… The main reason I bought the Moto 360 2nd is… looks. I hated the black first-gen Moto 360. Plenty of people saw it and said it looked like plastic. So while I was kicking myself for not buying silver, I kept refreshing the Google Store until the silver version came back in stock, ordered it and shipped it through a forwarding service. Arrived without a hitch.

My memory is bad in certain ways, and lately I’ve been trying to work on my foreign languages—English and Japanese—so I wanted something I could carry around and jot down new words in as I run into them. Before this I used an ordinary leather-bound notebook. I wrote quite a lot in it, and then a while back I lost it… When I was getting ready to replace it, I happened to see on YouTube that Sharp makes this “electronic notebook” (電子ノート) thing, and that it’s already on its umpteenth generation. The newest WG-30 was about to go on sale in mid-October, so I kept an eye on it, ordered from Amazon Japan on launch day, shipped it through Tenso, and had it in hand for about 1000 RMB all in.