Black Domain on Android is an app that kills rogue apps, aiming for “an Android experience just like iOS.” That’s a bit different from Greenify — Greenify feels more academic, while Black Domain is more practical. I paid for both. In the end I went with Black Domain. Black Domain works without root too. You just have to turn on USB debugging and type a command to start one of its processes. Calling it a hassle is fair, and calling it convenient is fair — basically, every time your phone reboots, you have to find a computer to activate it… So the author of Black Domain had an idea: make a “Black Domain Activator.” It’s a collaboration with some gamepad adapter, but using it is fine anyway, and it’s cheap.

I went to Beijing a while back, and took the chance to buy a few things. First up is ZMI’s latest USB-C charging cable. It’s a decent cable, braided, and the best part: the plug has a little white light. I know ZMI isn’t the first to come up with this, but it’s there and it works well enough.

A crowdfunding product I stupidly backed last year. The JD crowdfunding page probably has a fairly detailed writeup. And as I said a while back, the company had no real intention of crowdfunding — they were just using it as a presale. Plenty of KOLs had already reviewed the thing before the campaign even finished. The box was actually pretty decent when it arrived.

A while back I had the Mojo modded and hooked it up to another computer as a DAC, so the laptop has been without a portable DAC lately. Figured I’d pick up something cheap as a replacement. The requirement was to get charge-and-play working as much as possible, instead of the Mojo dying on me every other minute. And the bar for sound quality isn’t that high either — just needs to be a real step up from the laptop itself, ideally without too much hiss. Obviously none of this compares to the high-end demands of mystic audiophile tycoon Wu Lao’er, who runs desktop amps straight into Xiaomi hybrid IEMs — the very setup that pulled him out of the Philips fan camp and got him hooked as a proud Miboy. Given my lowly requirements, I thought it over and went with a Japan-import CYBERDRIVE USB DAC. This CYBERDRIVE USB DAC thing is made by a Taiwanese company, ran a crowdfunding campaign on JD.com, and went for 240 or 300 RMB there, can’t remember which. Claims to be USB-stick-sized and decode DSD.

I’ve got a fair number of digital devices on hand, and the biggest headache after buying them is buying accessories for them… screen protectors, cases, and all sorts of add-ons. I’ve wasted quite a bit of money on this front over time, so let me briefly go over what I’ve picked up recently and share a few lessons along the way.

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.