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.

Bought the ChromeCast on Black Friday. The point was to test EMS’s official overseas forwarding service. Turns out that forwarder is deeply unreliable — this $19 thing from Amazon US took a month to reach me, and it went missing a couple of times along the way. Anyway, it arrived. A lot of people probably want to know what this thing is good for, and how it can still be used in China in 2015. So let me run through it briefly.