After I switched to the Pixel 6 Pro a while back, I was surprised to find that my Pixel Buds 2 battery life had gotten absurdly short. The symptom: the left bud drains insanely fast. On my hour-and-a-half commute, by the time I got to work the left bud was down to 30% while the right was still at 97%. That’s not normal by any stretch. Then I had a brain fart and thought, well, I’ve been using these for over a year, and the similar cases I found online were all resolved by contacting Google for a replacement, so it’s gotta be the battery, right? I wasn’t counting on Google support — and even if I could reach them, this thing is out of warranty. So I went with the usual route: Taobao repair.

The Redmi Note 3 my parents have been using is almost two years old now, and I’ve had it repaired a bunch of times to keep it breathing, but recently I found out my dad smashed the screen again. So I couldn’t be bothered to keep it on life support. The Redmi Note 7 is out, so let’s just switch to that.

I have a Logitech T650 touchpad, but I bought it 4 years ago. Recently I dug it out on a whim. It still works fine, honestly — but that’s exactly when you get cocky and drop the thing…

A while back I noticed a bunch of problems with the Sony Xperia Z Premium. First, one of the external speakers stopped working — put simply, only one speaker produced sound. I also found yellow spots along the edge of the screen, maybe a screen issue. Since mine was a China-market unit, I went to Sony after-sales service. This time the Sony service location had moved to the Erqi Square area of Zhengzhou, on Dehua Street. I don’t think I’ve been here in ages… it’s changed quite a bit.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 suddenly got hit with a recall notice. The reason given was “a screw inside the machine may come loose, pressing on the battery and causing it to explode.” Fine, loose screws inside a laptop aren’t exactly news. Even if it were loose I’d have opened it up and tightened it myself. The recall and the screw aren’t what matter to me. What matters is that I finally have an excuse to register IWS global warranty for the ThinkPad I bought from Japan. Delightful!

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: