I’ve been using some rebranded Philips charger in my car all this time — I’ve mentioned it before, and it doubles as a mount so you can glance at navigation. I bought it back then because it was one of the few products that could charge wirelessly. But after all these years, a few things about it have gotten genuinely annoying. The suction cup doesn’t hold well. When it gets too hot, it falls off. At least 4-5 times over the years — rare, sure, but having it drop while you’re driving is pretty nasty. It blocks your view. A big lump like that sitting in the middle does get in the way sometimes. Wireless charging power is too low. After I retired my OnePlus 5 for a Pixel 3XL, this thing couldn’t even charge it — it would actually drain the battery. Besides not charging fast enough, the Pixel 3XL would also disable LTE data from overheating. I’m using this for navigation, damn it — no data, no navigation. Why does it overheat? Because the thing sits dead center. Fine in winter, broken in summer. Anyway, it’s been several years. Time to replace it.

Everyone knows my main machine used to be an X1 Carbon 2017. Unfortunately, I lost it earlier this year. After that, my wife was actually on board with me buying a new one, but the X1 Carbon 2021 was about to launch and the rumors said it was a big upgrade — new 16:10 screen, better GPU and CPU performance. So I decided to wait. But while waiting, I still needed a laptop to get work done. So I started looking: Performance has to be passable Keyboard has to at least be usable Screen at least 1080p, color gamut can’t be terrible Strong battery life Build quality as good as possible

Buying this thing was a total accident — I saw it going for absurdly cheap on Xianyu. I’ve got a decent impression of the Xiaomi Piston Pro. I still use it plugged into my tablet or PC for Galgames and videos. The sound isn’t anything high-end, but it’s not bad either — good enough for watching videos or playing games. It has a mic too, so it can pinch-hit for voice chat. So when I saw how cheap this was, I bought the “Xiaomi Dual-Driver Earphones.”

I used to run junk routers from overseas as APs at home. Nothing really wrong with that, but recently I noticed the AP at one of my places started losing signal—my guess is one of the antennas died. So with that, and the Double 11 sales landing at the same time, I decided to swap them out. My main router is a software router, so these were bought to be pure APs anyway; all they needed was good wireless specs. That’s how I ended up looking at two new Redmi models. So I bought both, one AX5 and one AX6, to replace the two junk ones.

The office got renovated and moved into new digs, so I got a new desk. My old busted monitor became unbearable to look at, so I decided to replace it. But this is still a workplace, after all. I didn’t want to buy anything too nice and look like a show-off. I wanted something cheap, with a resolution I could live with, and a screen big enough to get work done. After some thought, I set three targets for the monitor I needed: Under 1000 yuan, and the cheaper the better 27 inches is the floor, nothing smaller 4K would be ideal, 2K is acceptable I was initially worried that 2K on a 27-inch monitor would break scaling on my Linux setup, but after a rural schoolteacher on Twitter told me that 2K at 27 inches works perfectly fine at 100% scaling, I stopped worrying.

A lot of people want to buy “sleep plugs” — by which I mean earbuds that are comfortable when you lie on your side. Most people using them want to fall asleep to something: maybe a symphony, maybe rock, maybe Guo Degang, maybe a ghost story. In any case, it’s definitely not going to be ASMR. Of course, the two big requirements for sleep plugs are probably just these: The sound quality has to be passable, no noise Comfortable to wear — no matter how you lie on your side, it shouldn’t feel bad So recently a batch of “sleep plugs” showed up on Taobao, pretty cheap, with a full set of connectors — they support the usual 3.5 as well as Type-C. Really thoughtful. So, being the bored idiot I am, I bought a pair to check them out.

Preface: My workplace just moved to a new office, and during the move my old computer stopped turning on. It was an ancient AMD machine anyway, slower than today’s low-voltage Celerons, and I’d wanted to replace it for a while — so this was a good excuse to put together something new. But at work my desk space is limited, and there’s no room under the desk for a tower either, so the “new computer” had some requirements: It has to take up very little space Within that footprint, as much performance as possible It has to run Win10 without issues As cheap as possible — under 1000 ideally After looking around, the Lenovo M73 that was popular a while back turned out to be a pretty good choice. After a bunch of research I decided to jump in.

So-called “stress relief toys” are basically the kind of thing that… serves no real purpose in your hand, but always gives you something to do. The big stress relief toy before this was the fidget spinner. Its influence spread worldwide: foreigners hated it, China banned sales, teachers loathed it. Still, I thought it was pretty satisfying. Recently I bought another stress relief toy, this Flipo Flip.

After buying FiiO’s Bluetooth over-ear headphones last time and liking them, I’ve finally started buying FiiO earphones too. The reason I bought this was purely my hands acting on their own. By the time I came to my senses, the order was already placed. Of course, the main factor in that impulse was the discount being too big to resist. The first-batch preorder was 30 yuan cheaper, with six interest-free installments, plus a free cable if you posted a review. Basically 100 yuan off. The earphones arrived pretty fast, and unboxing them was full of that typical FiiO “pile on the extras” vibe. It came with a bunch of accessories — a case, a pouch, everything you’d expect. But what we care about is the earphones themselves. As a certified fat otaku, purple was the obvious choice.

I decided to buy a Pinebook at least a year ago, back when all the Linux news sites started covering it. Most of them called it “the $99 Linux laptop,” and sure enough it really does cost $99. But there’s nothing especially novel about it, because the so-called Pinebook is just the Pine64 dev board that was crowdfunded on Indiegogo, shoved into a laptop shell. There are already plenty of similar products out there, mostly “Raspberry Pi laptops”—a Pi stuffed into a laptop case, or a 3D-printed shell with a battery and so on. Let’s look at the main specs of the Pinebook first. 11-inch or 14-inch 1366x768 screen (11-inch is IPS, 14-inch is TN) 2 GB RAM 16GB eMMC Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MicroSD card reader USB port, headphone jack, HDMI output Nothing impressive there, and none of it is what got me interested in the Pinebook. The biggest selling point of the Pinebook—and its biggest appeal—isn’t performance. It’s that it looks good. Yes, compared to the whole flood of similar “Raspberry Pi laptops” on the market, the Pinebook is drop-dead gorgeous. Combined with the fact that it’s not expensive at all, I decided to buy one to play with. It’s cheap, and Pine64 claims to be a more advanced 64-bit ARM processor than the original Raspberry Pi (back when Pine64 was crowdfunding, the Pi was still on gen 1, if I remember right). At the very least it should make a decent toy. But I never expected that from deciding to buy it to actually holding it in my hands, it would take me a full year and more. Once the machine arrived I played with it for almost two weeks. There were pleasant surprises and disappointments. Picking up shells on the beach, sorting out my thoughts, let me sum up the sweet and the bitter for you.