Almost three years ago (damn, has it been that long?) I bought an ASUS Xonar U7 sound card to get audio output while my laptop was hooked up to a dock. And now, three years later, that sound card has started acting up. Roughly, the problem is it often doesn’t get enough power and won’t come up—plug it in and it isn’t recognized. After unplugging and replugging it a bunch of times it occasionally has a chance of working. Eventually I couldn’t stand spending ages plugging and unplugging every day when I brought the computer home, so I decided to replace it. I had three requirements: USB powered, I don’t want to plug in a power supply Has audio input The DAC chip can’t be too crappy Has a headphone output jack I looked through a whole pile of Chinese-made DACs and couldn’t find one I was happy with. The biggest pain is that they don’t have audio input, and they can’t be USB powered either—they all make you drag along a big power supply…

I picked up another Chromebook recently, bought on Taobao. Probably leaked out of some factory somewhere. It’s an Asus Chromebook Flip, the ARM CPU version. The upsides are obvious: IPS screen, 1280x800, it flips around, it’s touchscreen, and the battery lasts forever. The Chromebook I bought before got sold off. Reason being I never actually used Chrome OS — the moment it arrived I wiped it and installed Ubuntu. Using it felt no different from a ThinkPad, and honestly worse than a ThinkPad, so what was even the point. This time I decided to actually give Chrome OS a proper try. But I’m in mainland China, and for certain reasons using this thing here definitely isn’t as smooth as in the US — bound to be a lot of pain. Though that’s more of a 2014-era take. How is it now? The answer: not bad.

After picking up a ThinkPad X250 I paired it with a dock. The dock was an engineering sample. Cheap, but with its share of problems. Most of them I can live with — no triple-monitor output, for instance, which I don’t need anyway. The real killer is that when the machine isn’t plugged into power, external audio picks up a loud hum. People reported this on the official site and on Youtube. It turned out to be a hardware fault on Lenovo’s end, and only got fixed after Lenovo recalled the thing. Like I said, though, mine is a cheap engineering sample, so no recall for me. That doesn’t mean there’s no fix. Just get an external sound card…