I had a really weird problem, and it haunted me for about a year. At home my laptop sits in a Thunderbolt 3 dock, and on that dock I plugged in a USB DAC to make sure my desk has a headphone output, plus that USB DAC also feeds two speakers. Short version: I don’t use the dock’s built-in audio. I added a separate USB DAC on top. Starting last year, that DAC began acting up in a strange way: whenever I played music or video, the sound would crackle. At first I blamed the dock, but plugging the DAC straight into the laptop’s USB port made the problem disappear. It only happened when it was plugged into the dock, which pointed to a power-delivery issue.

The Thunderbolt 3 dock I was using before was Dell’s TB15. And that dock had one huge problem: When you use it to drive dual 1080p monitors, one of them will likely go unstable and black out, either because the dock itself overheats or for some other reason. The only fix is to pull the dock’s power cable, plug it back in, and wait for the damn thing to reboot or snap out of it. Then the problem goes away temporarily. Yes, temporarily. It’ll blow up again soon enough. If you’re only running a single display, you’re probably fine. But I couldn’t put up with it, so I threw more money at the problem and bought the official ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock.

Bought this dock for the GPD Pocket and for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 I’ll be getting eventually. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 still hasn’t fucking shipped because I went with the 2K screen version, so I’m just using it with the Pocket for now…

Back when I used the Xperia Z1, I remember the charging dock came in the box. Then the Xperia XZ Premium rolls around and it’s not included anymore… you have to buy it yourself.

As of right now, Ubuntu Linux still ships Empathy as its default IM client. I won’t go into how bad that thing is, but at the very least it doesn’t even support proxies, so Pidgin is the only way to get things working properly. Pidgin on Unity already supports integration with the indicator-message in the top-right corner, but there’s one important feature it hasn’t integrated: showing the unread message count on the dock icon, the way Empathy does. In fact, someone made support for this a long time ago, it’s just that it’s only recently gotten on track. If you’re on Ubuntu 14.10 or later, you’ll find this plugin in your Pidgin install.