Another exam came up in the first half of the year, so I’ve been in study mode again lately. I’ve been wanting to try the “all-digital” paperless study thing — reading PDFs, books, and magazines on a tablet. I’d been using a Lenovo Chromebook Duet, but the stylus on that thing is godawful, and the screen aspect ratio isn’t 4:3 either, which feels like a waste. Then I remembered the very chicken-rib Surface Pro 4 I had lying around. It’s got a 3:2 screen and a 12-inch size — just right for reading books and magazines. Let’s look at the basic specs first: CPU: Skylake i5-6300u RAM: 4GB Storage: 128GB NVMe SSD As you can see, here in 2022 a Windows machine with 4GB of RAM is basically unusable. The CPU feels salvageable — ancient, sure, but it’s battle-tested 14nm at this point. The drive is too small and probably needs fixing too. And this thing has been used for who knows how many years, so the battery’s down to about 60% capacity and needs replacing.

The Walkman ZX300A is probably one of the more honest players Sony has put out recently. First off, the chip. It uses Sony’s newly developed S-Master chip, which is a higher hardware revision than what’s in the Black Brick and Gold Brick, and it supports more features too. In theory the sound should be on par with those high-end models, and the price is still low — the Chinese domestic version seems to be under 3000, which is downright reasonable compared to the Black Brick, the Gold Brick, and the “Sony Sixty Thousand.” So anyway, I’m broke, I can’t afford a Black Brick, and this is all I can manage. It has every feature I need, and I’m pretty happy listening to it. Then comes the even better part: this thing keeps getting firmware updates, and the latest one is a bombshell.

Ever since I bought the “Noise Cancelling Beans”, I’ve been using them almost every day. Honestly, I’m happy with them. Happy to what degree? Let’s put it this way: I’m even thinking about selling off all my audiophile-mysticism gear, because these are just too convenient. The Beans sound good enough, the battery lasts long enough, and there aren’t many connection dropouts. Apart from a little video latency, they’re more than enough for just listening to music. But a few days ago the Beans pushed out a 2.0 firmware update, said to further improve stability, so I figured I’d just upgrade.

I’ve had the Moto 360 v2 for almost two years now, and Android Wear 2.0 has been out for nearly a year too, yet the update only showed up today. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about switching watches—there just wasn’t anything suitable. So since the update rolled out today, I might as well use it for now.

So I switched to a 4K monitor a while back, and the old Ice Dragon 770 4G just couldn’t keep up with Doto 2 or Overwatch at native 4K. Overwatch was still playable, but from what I could tell it was rendering at 2K and upscaling to 4K — not exactly the pure experience I wanted! So I figured it was time to sell it and get a new card.

I’ve been using the FiiO X7 for a while now, and there are a few problems: When playing songs, it stalls once at intervals ranging from 30 seconds to 1 minute; the stall lasts about 20 seconds before playback resumes. Battery life feels like it should be around the official 9 hours, but standby is a real weak point. It ought to have auto-shutdown. Any artist name in English gets displayed in all caps. Firmware updates can only be done by copying to an SD card—it’s supposedly a smart device but doesn’t support Wi-Fi updates. The breathing light stays on constantly, which is light pollution at night. The machine formats cards as exfat, which doesn’t support long file names. So I was grumbling about all this when I saw FiiO had released firmware 1.3. The update method is the same as for older devices, but 1.3 did fix quite a few things. First, the breathing light is now configurable. Second, there’s now a mode that auto-shuts down after a set number of minutes in standby, so long standby periods won’t drain much battery. Overall it should now beat the ZX1. But the most infuriating problem—playback stopping—still isn’t fixed. I emailed FiiO, and they suggested I try a different card.

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.

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.

The Surface Pro 3 is Microsoft’s own hardware, and also the handheld gaming platform Microsoft was pushing, so upgrading it to Windows 10 really shouldn’t be a problem. I bought the regular version of the Surface Pro 3, then picked up a key on eBay to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 Pro, so the Windows 10 upgrade I got was naturally Pro too. The upgrade itself went smoothly. Just like everyone else: reserved the Windows 10 upgrade, downloaded it ahead of time, upgraded directly. The process was fast, and then I ran into a few problems: