I decided to switch to the Pixel 6 Pro a long time ago, because the Pixel 4 XL was just too slow. But this phone somehow sold way better than expected. Normally you’d get a Nexus/Pixel within the first week, but this one was out of stock forever. In the end, a guy who runs a proxy-buying service, “Watermelon Daigou,” generously helped me out, barely charging me any fee, and I got the Pixel 6 Pro 256GB white version at retail price. It’s been a while since I got it, so let me talk about how it feels. I’ll skip the generic stuff and get straight to the real points.

Zhou Ge (Maxzhou) is one of those figures in the “open-source handheld” scene who gets both love and hate. The love is because he keeps cranking out new products, and the new products generally look pretty good. The hate is because they’re all expensive, the performance gains are minimal, and people roast him for “harvesting the leeks.” Honestly, though, while there’s profit in Zhou Ge’s machines, calling it leek-harvesting is a stretch. His machines just take open-source designs and pile on a lot of his own tweaks and optimizations—higher-quality metal shells, better-feeling conductive rubber pads and metal dome switches, and so on. You can argue this kind of handheld isn’t worth that much, but if you bought one and modded it yourself, the cost wouldn’t be much lower than buying straight from Zhou Ge. Think of it as buying a fully modded open-source handheld out of the box, saving you the hassle later. From that angle, it’s really not that expensive.

The reason for buying this is simple: to replace the old Surface Pro 4. That Surface Pro 4 would overheat badly the moment I opened DingTalk to teach a class, and on top of that the screen would start shaking. Turns out that screen shake is a known defect — “Zhang-chan” actually had to swap machines because of it, while I probably never hit it since I’d never thrown anything “heavy” at the tablet. Anyway, the Surface Pro 4 just couldn’t keep up anymore, so I bought a Surface Pro 8. Spec is i5 + 256GB + 16GB RAM, with the standard keyboard/pen/cover bundle. Double 12 sale, 9998 RMB for the lot. Not a bad price, eh.

I needed a keyboard, backed by various bullshit excuses. Requirements: Portable, small Bluetooth, multi-device support At least 84 keys; I’ve had enough of life without an F-row and arrow keys Good build quality In the end I settled on the Keychron K3 — which is also the 京造 K3 version. This keyboard stirs up a lot of controversy online: opinions are extremely polarized. Most KOLs give it the usual praise, and looking at it I couldn’t find any obvious problems; the specs are fine too. Sure, it’s low-profile, but I don’t see what’s wrong with low-profile switches. The funny thing is most negative reviews online just call it “garbage” without explaining where the garbage is. The positive reviews, on the other hand, are very detailed. That struck me as bizarre. Is the marketing just too strong, drowning out genuine impressions? Or is this thing really that good?

Why did I buy the Redmi Watch 2? Mainly because my Fossil watch went in for repair, and they said it’d be at least a month before it came back from the factory. For a month I’d have nothing on my wrist to check the time, so I had a fresh excuse to buy this thing. I got in on the first batch, paid around 299 yuan—retail was supposed to be 399. The packaging is nothing fancy. Open it up and there it is. Gotta say, even though it’s basically an oversized fitness band, the build quality is genuinely nice. From a distance it really looks like an Apple Watch. Up close it still looks like one. As long as you don’t swipe, you can pretend it’s an Apple Watch. I’ve used it for about two weeks now, and I’ve got some thoughts, so I figured I’d write them down.

I forget when Xiaomi put out these earphones. Launch price was 999, then all of a sudden I noticed they’d been cut in half to 499, and before long you could pick them up on eBay for 299… From 999 down to 299. These things lose value fast. And this is supposedly a kickass “dual dynamic” + “dual balanced armature” setup. Mine came from eBay, listed as brand new. What showed up was a plain box with the earphones, some spare silicone tips, and even a mysterious “Bluetooth adapter” of unknown provenance (turns out that was in the original package too, for phones without a headphone jack). The stock silicone tips are genuinely badly sized — way too big. They leak sound, which is why I kept thinking something was wrong with the sound at first. Switched to one size smaller and the problem went away.

I don’t know when the “YuanDao” meme blew up, but by the time I noticed, it was everywhere. What is “YuanDao”? A flathead earbud that ships for 9.9 with free shipping (sometimes even less). I was already familiar with this kind of product, because back in the day it wasn’t called “YuanDao” but something like “Diving Expert,” so at first I figured it was just a “budget Diving Expert.” Later, as the YuanDao meme took off, my curiosity about it grew a bit: Is this thing really that amazing? Plenty of people, I’m sure, ended up trying YuanDao the same way I did — by accident. I got my hands on YuanDao a month ago. The price was great — 9.9 with free shipping, I think, and they knocked 4 yuan off, so it cost me less than 6. I’ve been listening to these earbuds on and off for about a month. Not that many times, honestly, but not few either. Quick impressions:

There are plenty of people on Xianyu selling modded webcams that support Microsoft’s Windows Hello face unlock. Basically they take cameras out of laptops, hack them into USB devices, and you plug one in as an IR face-unlock camera. The cost isn’t high, but most of the shells are 3D-printed or metal shims and look a bit janky. Not a big deal unless you look closely — the main draw is that they’re cheap. I ended up buying one for 69 yuan with free shipping, since the other sellers were asking 79 to 99 and up, sometimes without free shipping too. Once it arrived it turned out to be pretty simple: a 3D-printed shell with a laptop pull camera inside. No cable included by default, but I found a USB cable and plugged it into the computer. Mainly meant for the PC at work, which is running the currently trendy Windows 11. The shell comes with double-sided tape, so you can easily stick it to the top of the monitor, like this:

I’ve been using some rebranded Philips charger in my car all this time — I’ve mentioned it before, and it doubles as a mount so you can glance at navigation. I bought it back then because it was one of the few products that could charge wirelessly. But after all these years, a few things about it have gotten genuinely annoying. The suction cup doesn’t hold well. When it gets too hot, it falls off. At least 4-5 times over the years — rare, sure, but having it drop while you’re driving is pretty nasty. It blocks your view. A big lump like that sitting in the middle does get in the way sometimes. Wireless charging power is too low. After I retired my OnePlus 5 for a Pixel 3XL, this thing couldn’t even charge it — it would actually drain the battery. Besides not charging fast enough, the Pixel 3XL would also disable LTE data from overheating. I’m using this for navigation, damn it — no data, no navigation. Why does it overheat? Because the thing sits dead center. Fine in winter, broken in summer. Anyway, it’s been several years. Time to replace it.

My old laptop was gone, so I decided to buy a new one. And since I was buying new, I figured I’d stick with the X1 Carbon line—especially since around Chinese New Year there were rumors that this generation would bring a ton of great changes. Sure enough, right around the holiday, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 9th was officially announced: a brand-new 4K screen, a new 16:10 aspect ratio, better speakers, a bigger battery, a beefier Iris integrated GPU, and a shorter key travel. Overall it still looked way better than the old versions—at the very least, that screen alone was worth bragging about. So I decided to go for it.