A while back there was a thread on Reddit recommending some cheap Chinese e-waste, and it was pushing this Bluetooth speaker: the Jambox mini. I’d honestly never heard of this Jambox mini thing. I just saw the thread hyping it up with “can’t lose at this price” and “beats stuff at the 500 yuan tier,” so since it was cheap I figured I’d buy one and mess around with it. This kind of thing always reminds me of back in the day when I’d read some idiot “poison-pen” post going on about how some earbuds only cost 49 or 99 and you can’t go wrong buying them, and in the end it turns out you really can’t go wrong — they just sit there gathering dust. This time I couldn’t hold back and ordered one. And the seller, who seemed to be some kind of official Foxconn outlet, took nearly a week and a half to ship. But it did eventually arrive. The speaker is bare-bones: just the unit and a charger, that’s it.

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.

My father said he wanted a Bluetooth speaker, to pair with his phone and listen to music. Sure, when he’s home he blasts music from his phone at some ungodly hour every morning and wakes me up with all that boom-tss boom-tss, but since it’s my tsundere old man asking, and he’s wearing that face of “if it’s convenient for you you can just casually buy me one, of course if you don’t I can buy it myself, it’s not like I’m asking you to buy it or anything”—no reason not to buy it. Money spent on your parents is money well spent. But since this was my first time buying one of these, I didn’t want to go too expensive. Buying a Bose felt like a bit much for him—start with something with good value for money, so it won’t hurt if Dad accidentally loses it. After looking around, I settled on the Sounder Honeycomb 2S+. It happened to be on special at JD, 299 - 100, and with a BaiTiao savings coupon it came to 169 in the end.

A while back I bought a Meizu EP51 Bluetooth earphone, and a few days ago it broke. It broke out of nowhere. I got home from a run and the right earbud just kept hissing noise, the thing stopped responding, then it got hot, then it was dead. I’m guessing some part of the waterproofing wasn’t done right. But I bought the mainland China version, so I figured I’d take it to the local Meizu place for repair. Their attitude was actually fine, it’s just that you have to wait in line.

So here’s what happened. A few days ago I went for a run, it started raining out of nowhere, and the next day I got home and found the bass gone from the right unit of my IE80… Thank god I bought the domestic version! Sent it in for repair. After that I started seriously thinking about whether I should get a waterproof pair of sports earbuds. I mean, you’re not really chasing sound quality when you work out. After looking around, the best recent option seemed to be the Meizu EP51, so I grabbed one on Taobao for 150.

I remember when I bought the FiiO X7, I raised a suggestion on their forum. “Could you make the screen stay on and support phone or car Bluetooth control without sound output? I always run AUX out to the car stereo.” FiiO’s official reply said they understood my need and knew that controlling a car stereo through AUX input was a real problem, and they’d find a way to solve it. So direct car control really did turn out to be difficult. FiiO instead released this little thing, a Bluetooth remote…

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.

A while back I went to a local Oracle “high-end summit” — yes, that’s in scare quotes. Calling it a high-end summit really just meant an ad for Oracle’s current push into healthcare IT. The engineer doing the talk worked hard, doing his best to explain in plain language to a room of paunchy “decision-makers” who know nothing about databases what “cloud services” are, what “IaaS” is, what “PaaS” is, what “SaaS” is, and so on. He kept insisting the future is cloud, that storing your data in the cloud and buying cloud services would be such a great deal, so much easier than maintaining your own data with your heart in your throat. Didn’t do a damn bit of good.

So after the Surface Pro 3 came back from repair, besides noticing the fan was a bit loud, I also found my stylus could no longer launch OneNote quickly by pressing the purple button on top. Honestly this feature isn’t all that useful to me—I rarely use this thing for notes—but it’s still a feature, and having a feature not work properly is just uncomfortable to look at. That’s a normal psychological need, not perfectionism.

Stumbled onto a sale at a ThinkPad shop on Taobao — both the ThinkPad TrackPoint Bluetooth Keyboard and the 6-cell battery (72Wh) for the X250 were going for good prices. I’d just returned a bunch of stuff I bought for Spring Festival and had some money sitting in Alipay, so I bought them. Both shipped from Beijing, and fast enough… First, the keyboard: