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…

So I switched to a 4K monitor a while back, and the old Ice Dragon 770 4G just couldn’t keep up with Doto 2 or Overwatch at native 4K. Overwatch was still playable, but from what I could tell it was rendering at 2K and upscaling to 4K — not exactly the pure experience I wanted! So I figured it was time to sell it and get a new card.

We’ve had an HP all-in-one printer at home forever, but it was bought around 2008 and used on and off until now — honestly not that many times. Tried to use it recently and it’s dead. The feed roller is gone, and the thing isn’t worth repairing. Figured I’d just buy a new one. A few hard requirements when buying: Good Linux support. Wireless, no cables. There are several computers at home and they all need to use it. Color printing, and the consumables problem has to be solved. Buying ink cartridges for the old one was a pain in the ass. Budget around 1000. After thinking it over, I bought the HP DeskJet GT 5820. It has a built-in continuous ink supply and meets all the conditions above. Epson and Canon were also in the running — why HP? Because its Linux support is the best.

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…

I used to be a Sony PHA-1 owner. For the longest time I ran it with my laptop as an external sound card, which nicely dodged all the noise coming out of the laptop’s built-in audio. Honestly, it worked fine. Then a few days ago some little bottom I used to gank over and over back in my World of Warcraft days — opposite faction, same server — forced me to sell him my PHA-1. So I had to buy a new one. I considered the Creative E5 first, but word is it’s crap. I also considered the PHA-3, until I found out it needs its own power supply, and my laptop doesn’t have that many USB ports. So the PHA-2 it was. It arrived, and sure enough: praise be to Sony.

I do have a Sony ZX1, but it broke a few days ago… Okay, actually it got rained on and water got inside, so I played dumb and sent it to after-sales. They could tell it was water damage, but in the end they decided to honor the warranty anyway. “The motherboard has to be ordered, no idea when it’ll be fixed. We’ll call you when it arrives.” That’s what the repair center told me… So I found a new excuse to spend money: I bought an iPod Classic 160G on Taobao (now eBay). No idea if it’s new or not, but it looks pretty new. I’m not asking much from this thing, cheap is good enough. I’m not an Apple cultist, I hate iTunes, and all my music is FLAC, so I decided to flash the freshly-arrived iPod Classic with Rockbox for more freedom and format support. This is what it looks like after flashing.

During Spring Festival JD had a coupon, 200-50, so I couldn’t help myself and chopped off the Logitech touchpad that normally sells for 199, the T650. It came to 149. I’ve been using it for a while now, so let me talk about how it feels. Since I mainly use Ubuntu, I’ll focus on that. For the summary crowd, look here: works, usable, serviceable, but not what you’d call nice. Fine as a backup. Actually, at first the shop owner said for ten extra yuan he’d throw in a knockoff copy of something like a black-and-white bear thing, and I refused……