For the whole of last year my eroge machine was the Chuwi Minibook. It’s got plenty of small problems, but I thought it was fine — good enough for playing games. Then at the start of this year I lost my laptop bag, and the Chuwi Minibook went with it, so I started thinking about getting a new machine. My requirements were pretty clear by then: A good screen. The Chuwi Minibook uses PWM dimming, which is a pain over long sessions. Good battery life. A galgame machine doesn’t need much power, but the battery has to be biiiig. Enough cooling. The Chuwi Minibook got scorching hot when I ran it, and the fan sounded like a plane taking off. Expandable storage, at least NVMe. 16GB of RAM. I like leaving a ton of stuff open in the background. USB-C for docks and charging. After shopping around, the only thing that fit was the GPD P2 MAX, so I grabbed one on Taobao.

Bought these at the end of last year, when Amazon Global had them on sale for a little over 1200 — the lowest price they’d ever hit, and way cheaper than buying domestically. I already had a long-serving ER4P, but I still went for these. The biggest reason: the detachable cable. I’m always worried the cable on my ER4P will give out, and as the upgraded model, the ER4SR’s replaceable-cable design is obviously a lot safer. Surprisingly, the overseas order didn’t get hit with customs, and it arrived safe and sound. The only downside was the long wait for shipping from the US.

Everyone knows my main machine used to be an X1 Carbon 2017. Unfortunately, I lost it earlier this year. After that, my wife was actually on board with me buying a new one, but the X1 Carbon 2021 was about to launch and the rumors said it was a big upgrade — new 16:10 screen, better GPU and CPU performance. So I decided to wait. But while waiting, I still needed a laptop to get work done. So I started looking: Performance has to be passable Keyboard has to at least be usable Screen at least 1080p, color gamut can’t be terrible Strong battery life Build quality as good as possible

Preface: I picked up a Pinebook Pro back around 2019. I vaguely remember the other machine I was fiddling with at the time was a Chuwi Minibook. Nearly a year and a half went by and the Pinebook Pro spent most of it collecting dust, until my ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 went missing a while back. I really had no computer to use, so I dug it out and used it as my “main machine” for a stretch. And honestly, when the Pinebook Pro first launched, the ecosystem around it was pretty incomplete (though already a big step up from the old Pinebook). Now that I have a new temporary main laptop, I can set the Pinebook Pro aside for the time being. The days of using it were an interesting and painful memory, but it was also a chance to seriously try out this “open-source Arm Linux laptop” and see its strengths and weaknesses. So I figure I’ve earned the right to give it a subjective review here.

Buying this thing was a total accident — I saw it going for absurdly cheap on Xianyu. I’ve got a decent impression of the Xiaomi Piston Pro. I still use it plugged into my tablet or PC for Galgames and videos. The sound isn’t anything high-end, but it’s not bad either — good enough for watching videos or playing games. It has a mic too, so it can pinch-hit for voice chat. So when I saw how cheap this was, I bought the “Xiaomi Dual-Driver Earphones.”

The reason I picked these up is pretty simple: I wanted a pair of TWS earbuds I could use at work. I’d been using over-ear headphones before, but they felt way too conspicuous. I didn’t like being noticed all the time, so I figured I’d get something a bit more low-key. Requirements: Type-C charging port Long battery life Sound that’s good enough Latency as low as possible The higher the quality of the supported codec, the better The cheaper the better I happened to see QCY was taking pre-orders for a new model, the T10, with a bunch of random new features. It basically fit the bill, so I got on board. Price was 120 yuan with free shipping, so I hopped on.

I used to run junk routers from overseas as APs at home. Nothing really wrong with that, but recently I noticed the AP at one of my places started losing signal—my guess is one of the antennas died. So with that, and the Double 11 sales landing at the same time, I decided to swap them out. My main router is a software router, so these were bought to be pure APs anyway; all they needed was good wireless specs. That’s how I ended up looking at two new Redmi models. So I bought both, one AX5 and one AX6, to replace the two junk ones.

The iPhone 12 is out. Sure, plenty of people are grumbling about the lack of a high refresh rate and the smaller battery, but given that the design went back to the sharp-edged look of the iPhone 4s era, it’s still worth a look. I picked up the iPhone 12 in green, 128G, and traded in an iPhone 8 64G for cash. When the iPhone 12 first launched you actually couldn’t reserve one — aside from the first batch of online orders, if you wanted a physical unit from a brick-and-mortar store you had to keep waiting. I went to the Apple Store at Zhengzhou MixC and found nothing but iPhone 11s inside. I asked the sales girl — one who looked like Inori Minase — and she said there were no units in store right now, and she couldn’t say when stock would arrive.

I’d been using the Sony Walkman ZX300a China version the whole time before this, and honestly I was pretty happy with it. In theory, two years later Sony puts out its upgraded Walkman ZX505, and I should be excited and upgrade ASAP. But I wasn’t. The upgrade points were too few: The system switched to Android (but it’s just a player — Android is useless here) The port switched to Type-C (a good thing, but not enough to drive an upgrade; I already have way too many Walkman cables) A bigger non-matte screen with higher resolution (who was it that hyped matte screens back then?) Some features that look nostalgic (who actually uses that Walkman cassette playback mode? Besides buying it to show off) More for the same price (slightly cheaper than the ZX300 preorder, but still not as good as the FiiO you’d compare it against)

Why did I even buy this thing… probably because I had such a good time with my last-gen Pixel Buds. I was actually pretty happy with the Pixel Buds, except the fit was beyond words. That dangling cord was just stupid. I mostly wore them running, and that damn cord kept swinging around, teaching me what “occlusion effect” really means. Now the Google Pixel Buds 2 finally exist, and the stupid cord is gone. But this thing Google built to pair with Pixel phones and fight Apple’s AirPods is still as unreliable as ever: No AptX support Only white at launch Various problems and complaints shortly after release But Google products are American-made after all, and plenty of American tech media started hyping it from day one, the same way they hype the Pixel line. If it’s Google, it can’t be too bad. And after the hype, they go home and keep using their iPhones…