Back in May last year, I noticed the ROG Ally X handheld was not only in stock on JD.com, but the price was back to normal, and it even qualified for the national subsidy. Basically, a machine that originally cost over 6000 RMB ended up discounted by a little over 1000, so I got it for under 5000. The reason JD.com gives you is the “national subsidy,” but in reality you don’t need to bind any qualification for this subsidy—you just need your delivery address to be in Shanghai. A victory for the “Shanghai lords,” you could say. Naturally, I asked a fellow townsman bigshot in Shanghai to receive and buy it for me, and successfully got my hands on this handheld. A lot of people probably want to know: I’m a SteamDeck shill, so why did I buy ASUS’s handheld? How should you choose between it and the SteamDeck? I think I can explain it briefly with these points: It’s a Windows handheld, so it can play Windows-exclusive games (Galgame) It’s the only Windows handheld I know of that’s continuously optimizing power efficiency It’s the best Windows handheld I know of when it comes to self-made power control software At the time (2025), it had the largest battery capacity among Windows handhelds Some might bring up the ROG Ally + big battery mod, which has basically the same performance, but the biggest difference with the ROG Ally X is its 24GB of native RAM. The change that big memory brings is that you can allocate a large amount of VRAM to games, especially those poorly optimized ones that all need lots of VRAM. And from my observation, the root cause of stuttering when the SteamDeck runs those badly optimized games is often insufficient memory, and the ROG Ally X can clearly improve that.

I’ve been playing fewer galgames lately, but that doesn’t mean I’ve left the scene — I’ve just played a bunch of stuff and haven’t felt like writing about any of it. And since that last post, I’ve upgraded my “gal machine” too: swapped it out for a GPD Win Mini, which I’ve been using ever since. This little thing is honestly better than I expected. As a “gal game player,” I can’t find anything more suitable right now. I’ve said before that if I ever bought another GPD product I’d eat shit, but this little guy has somehow become GPD’s best product to date, and the “gal machine” I’d recommend most. So, well — time to eat.

A while back I was listening to a podcast from Aifou, and one line stuck with me: “I think the most impressive thing about Lei Jun is that he can push prices down so low that nobody else can match him.” In that context, judging by the standard of “pushing prices down,” Lei Jun really is impressive. Whether it’s Xiaomi or Redmi, they’ve definitely driven down the price of a lot of things. But is that what “impressive” really means—driving down the price of something expensive so it sells cheap? Shouldn’t it be the opposite? Isn’t it far more impressive to take something worthless and sell it at a very high price? By that standard, the “Big Monster Block Bluetooth Earphones” are a very “impressive” product.

2023 was a fairly significant year for me, and a busier one. The price of being busy is that I messed around with a lot of stuff but couldn’t be bothered to write up impressions. Half the time I’d tinker with something, list it on eBay, and then feel even less like writing. You can call me busy, you can call me lazy, or I can just say the thing had no highlights and wasn’t worth writing about. But it’s the end of the year, and I don’t want this year’s business spilling into the next. So here’s a summary looking back at what I messed with this year that’s worth mentioning, with some blunt takes and a recommendation ranking thrown in. These are all short notes, no screenshots. Anything that deserves a deeper writeup I’ll do separately.

A long time ago I used Logitech’s trackball line — the much-praised M570. For a while it was my daily driver; I bought several of them and even swapped in a fancier microswitch. Then… at some point I just gradually stopped using it. Maybe I got tired of cleaning the ball every day, or maybe it was the lack of Bluetooth, which always meant giving up a USB port — either way, “trackball” quietly dropped off my peripherals list. Later I heard Logitech had put out a new trackball with some kind of electromagnetic scroll wheel, but the price was absurd. Then came the M575. It’s the M570 with Bluetooth added and a slightly reworked shape, and that seems to be about it. Filling in the old model’s Bluetooth gap took Logitech at least five years. Impressive stuff.

Not long after I sold off my HP Chromebook X2 11, I regretted it badly. I couldn’t find a tablet that met my needs anymore. Sure, that knockoff Surface from HP had all sorts of crappy problems, but compared to Android tablets that can only play games and watch videos, its advantages were pretty obvious. Then I saw this thing on eBay: Lenovo Chromebook 10e Another Chromebook tablet. Performance-wise it’s about the same as the Duet, but the difference is it actually has a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and it comes with a keyboard cover that looks pretty solid. The only catch is it has no trackpad, but who cares—it’s a tablet, it has a touchscreen!

I actually got this thing back in December, having joined the whole pre-order process, and later got kicked out of the Discord group by GPD’s marketing guy “Old Zhu” (real name Zhu Kaihui, overseas ID: Kendyzhu). I was so pissed off at the time I thought about making a video to fire back, because this asshole is just that repulsive, and he’s even cultivated some asshole lackeys. But after half a year of learning about other manufacturers (AYN, AYA, Anbernic) and seeing the state of the whole industry, I figure Zhu Kaihui might not even be the biggest asshole out there. Thought about it and let it go. So here I’ll just briefly go over the pros and cons of this product, plus my personal views on GPD, including some thoughts and advice on the so-called “Win handheld” market as a whole. Around September 2021, GPD revealed design sketches of the next Pocket series product, the Pocket 3. Along with their constipation-like “leaks,” the product’s appearance became clearer and clearer — basically an enhanced GPD Micro PC with better performance, a bigger screen, a new manufacturing process, and a rotating screen.

The reason for buying this is simple: to replace the old Surface Pro 4. That Surface Pro 4 would overheat badly the moment I opened DingTalk to teach a class, and on top of that the screen would start shaking. Turns out that screen shake is a known defect — “Zhang-chan” actually had to swap machines because of it, while I probably never hit it since I’d never thrown anything “heavy” at the tablet. Anyway, the Surface Pro 4 just couldn’t keep up anymore, so I bought a Surface Pro 8. Spec is i5 + 256GB + 16GB RAM, with the standard keyboard/pen/cover bundle. Double 12 sale, 9998 RMB for the lot. Not a bad price, eh.

I’ve been out of the audiophile game for years, but I talked to some young folks recently and they told me domestic Chinese “mysticism” products are nothing like they used to be. By “nothing like they used to be” they mean flagship prices have shot through the roof — I have zero interest in that — and the low end has gotten “even stronger.” “Moondrop” is the brand the kids keep bringing up. I’d heard of it, but other than noticing they’re pretty deep in the anime thing, I had no real impression. So by chance I got my hands on a Moondrop “Quarks,” supposedly their honest-to-goodness entry-level model. Say what you will, the packaging is actually decent, and it even comes with a card I have no idea what to do with. Some kind of coupon, I think. The earpieces are genuinely tiny. Tiny and nicely made — the material is plastic, but it doesn’t feel obviously cheap. What confuses me is I can’t tell which of the red and black ones is left and which is right. Conventionally red should be the right, right?

There are plenty of people on Xianyu selling modded webcams that support Microsoft’s Windows Hello face unlock. Basically they take cameras out of laptops, hack them into USB devices, and you plug one in as an IR face-unlock camera. The cost isn’t high, but most of the shells are 3D-printed or metal shims and look a bit janky. Not a big deal unless you look closely — the main draw is that they’re cheap. I ended up buying one for 69 yuan with free shipping, since the other sellers were asking 79 to 99 and up, sometimes without free shipping too. Once it arrived it turned out to be pretty simple: a 3D-printed shell with a laptop pull camera inside. No cable included by default, but I found a USB cable and plugged it into the computer. Mainly meant for the PC at work, which is running the currently trendy Windows 11. The shell comes with double-sided tape, so you can easily stick it to the top of the monitor, like this: