A hot product a while back. It promised “small” “powerful” “multi-functional” all at once, and on top of that it actually looked good, so I bought one. Also, I’m a sucker for the ThinkPad red-and-black color scheme. Too tempting. Turns out I’d pre-ordered it ages ago, only to find out it was just a crowdfunding campaign. I don’t know why these idiots insist on crowdfunding everything. Call it a pre-order, slap a new name on it and call it crowdfunding — genuinely stupid. Anyway, I got the thing in early December, and the packaging was the familiar ThinkPad style.

Bought a Nexus 5X to use as a car navigation unit. Plugged it into the car charger’s USB port and… there’s the problem. I’m not even asking for “charging rapidly,” but you’ve decided to be “charging slowly”… Thinking it over, it’s simple enough. The car charger I had was a gift. Figured I’d buy a proper one. Since the fast charging supported by the Nexus 6P / Nexus 5X / Pixel C is the 5V / 3A standard and not Qualcomm’s, there’s currently no car charger head that fully hits that spec, so I settled for an Anker 5V / 2.4A one.

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.

Recently I picked up two things: a USB fast-charging adapter for the Nexus 6P that I plan to use at work, and a Bluetooth module for my desktop. The Bluetooth module is straightforward. Usually you plug in a USB one and the system just recognizes it, especially since my desktop runs Linux — even more likely to work out of the box. But that was too easy. I could’ve just bought any random one, but I always want something fancier, so I got a Dell Bluetooth dongle that supposedly supports entering the BIOS. Of course, that BIOS trick only works with a Dell Bluetooth keyboard. The Dell Bluetooth keyboard works fine with this dongle, but plug the thing into a desktop and it isn’t recognized… and that’s not all — it doesn’t work under Windows 10 either.