As someone who’s been out of the audiophile game for ages, I find the current enthusiast market kind of funny and kind of sad at the same time. Ever since I redirected the money I used to spend on headphones into buying music albums, I feel like my horizons have widened. “A ten-thousand-yuan IEM isn’t worth hearing ten thousand albums,” or something like that. At least I’m not like some grade-schooler on Reddit, buying insanely expensive IEMs just to listen to a music library that hasn’t been updated in years, flipping back and forth through the same dumb test tracks. Or running high-end gear to listen to doujin music produced in some low-end studio. That’s just unscientific. High-end audio gear really does work, sure. But for most people it’s useless, and for most audiophiles it’s also not much use — unless you’re a die-hard classical fan and love other large-ensemble music so much you refuse to listen to anything that isn’t a SACD from a famous studio. Then yes, high-end gear does work. But for most people like me, who listen to pop, occasionally some small-ensemble stuff, and just want to feel the charm of a melody — as long as the headphones don’t have that “boom-tss boom-tss” low-brow tuning and aren’t distorting or off-balance, that’s about enough. Yes, about enough. How do you know that the ten-thousand-yuan suit-and-tie stack you bought wasn’t used to listen to songs made by someone using a garbage 5-yuan USB cable? With that money you’re better off just listening to more music. So I’ve been increasingly abandoning wired gear and trying Bluetooth. The biggest advantage of Bluetooth is convenience. The biggest disadvantage is, naturally, sound quality. But with APTX and LDAC gradually opening up, Bluetooth has more or less reached the “listenable” stage. So I bought the FiiO BTR3 Bluetooth DAC/amp, two and a half months ago… Why did it take me this long to write up my impressions? That’s a long story.

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 use my own laptop for work. It’s not that the desktop machines at the office are bad, they’re just a hassle to use. Over a year ago I bought a ThinkPad X230, and using it since then I’ve really come to appreciate how good ThinkPads are. If something goes wrong you can just find the parts yourself and fix it. Honestly, even if you smashed it, I could buy some bits on eBay and put it back together for you… Over the past year or so I’ve replaced the screen, messed with the cooling, and the machine runs fine. But there were still a couple of things that bugged me. One, the screen was the cursed 1366 x 768. Two, the battery life was bad. Even with a 9-cell I could only push power draw down to 11W at best, and it would randomly spike to 20W… So when I heard the ThinkPad X250 was announced and that it brought back the original trackpad, I just bought it. Why not a Mac? Because I don’t use OSX, and I think putting Ubuntu on an RMBP is too much hassle.

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……