The office got renovated and moved into new digs, so I got a new desk. My old busted monitor became unbearable to look at, so I decided to replace it. But this is still a workplace, after all. I didn’t want to buy anything too nice and look like a show-off. I wanted something cheap, with a resolution I could live with, and a screen big enough to get work done. After some thought, I set three targets for the monitor I needed: Under 1000 yuan, and the cheaper the better 27 inches is the floor, nothing smaller 4K would be ideal, 2K is acceptable I was initially worried that 2K on a 27-inch monitor would break scaling on my Linux setup, but after a rural schoolteacher on Twitter told me that 2K at 27 inches works perfectly fine at 100% scaling, I stopped worrying.

So-called “stress relief toys” are basically the kind of thing that… serves no real purpose in your hand, but always gives you something to do. The big stress relief toy before this was the fidget spinner. Its influence spread worldwide: foreigners hated it, China banned sales, teachers loathed it. Still, I thought it was pretty satisfying. Recently I bought another stress relief toy, this Flipo Flip.

The ODROID-GO Advance is the follow-up to that ODROID-GO handheld. Better performance, plus a stick and shoulder buttons. From what I gathered reading various foreign reviews, the performance is supposedly monstrous and it has a huge future ahead of it… So I bought one. It actually arrived a while ago; I just never had time to put it together, and only recently dug it out and got to work. Recording it here.

The place was getting too dusty — the bed and the sofa both had a layer of it — so my wife said we should buy a “mite remover”. I looked into it and, well, a “mite remover” is just a vacuum cleaner with a UV lamp bolted on… So we might as well buy an actual vacuum. A vacuum isn’t only good for handheld work; you can swap the head and use it on the floor too. That’s how I ended up with a Xiaomi vacuum. It happened to be on sale — 12 interest-free installments, a 50-yuan coupon, and a free Xiaomi desk lamp thrown in. So I bought it.

This isn’t my first 8BitDo controller, actually, but the one I bought before somehow went missing, so all I’ve got left is one with a bad feel. This time, in order to play some “poorly optimized garbage Unity game,” I had to buy a new 8BitDo controller. Times have changed, though—this thing has evolved. It’s got built-in rumble now, and supposedly a gyroscope too. I’ve used it for about two weeks, so let me share my impressions.

As a ThinkPad X1C 5th user, there’s actually one problem that’s been bugging me. The laptop is so thin that the screen hits the keyboard when the lid is closed, leaving keyboard marks. That’s also why I recommend a screen protector. But a screen protector isn’t a real fix, and putting one on a laptop is honestly pretty dumb. So I thought of another solution.

I’m a Wear OS watch user, the stock Wear OS kind. The watch I’ve been using is still the LG Watch Sports, and I’ve had it for over two years now — I even replaced the battery. Its battery life is honestly fine, but I’m still not happy with it, for three reasons: You can’t swap the strap. I’ve been stuck with the default rubber one, which feels pretty dumb. Once it cracks there’s no fixing it — you can only go buy knockoff parts. Nobody’s in charge of system updates. Google says LG handles it, LG says Google handles it, and the two of them just kick it back and forth. By 2020 that legendary Wear OS H still hadn’t shown up. It’s way too bulky, and the SoC isn’t new either, so it stutters sometimes. So I couldn’t take it anymore and wanted to switch. Right around then Xiaomi announced its watch — big battery, decent RAM, plenty of features — and I got tempted.

Once again, my hands got itchy. This one was for use at the office, so obviously I couldn’t buy anything too nice, and the budget couldn’t be too high either. So I found this on Taobao. It claims to be an RHA CL750, some kind of “factory surplus stock,” but the price is obviously suspicious — only 150 yuan.

I originally planned to write a 2019 eroge roundup, but my beloved Duan-ye nagged me on social media to post a shopping writeup, so that one gets pushed back. Honestly I like writing shopping posts too. They’re fast, simple, low-effort, and they still count as a post. Who wouldn’t? Esoteric audio stuff especially — you can bullshit freely with zero accountability, and apparently there are idiots who enjoy reading it. Perfect time for one, no? This time it’s about: the FiiO EH3 NC over-ear Bluetooth wireless headphones.

I’ve been tinkering with open-source handhelds for a long time. The last one was probably the Retro Game 97 — I reflashed its firmware several times and even swapped the conductive pads. It worked well enough, but I always felt it wasn’t perfect and still had a lot of problems. So a while back I was browsing the forums and found that a successor to the Retro Game 97, the Retro Game 350, had been released. The price seemed acceptable, so I bought one to check it out.