Chrisoft

• 2×Intel Xeon Gold 6130T → 2×Intel Xeon Platinum 8260L
• (4 → 8)×32GB Samsung DDR4-2666 ECC RAM
• NVIDIA RTX A4000 (PNY)
• AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (Yeston Sakura Sugar) ⁺
• Intel Arc A770 16GB (ASRock Challenger) ^{+ ※}
• Supermicro X11DPH-T (C622)
• Samsung 980 Pro 2TB
• Samsung 990 Pro 2TB ⁺
• WDC WD221KRYZ-01BBAB0 22TB ⁺
• Corsair RM850e → Corsair HX1500i
• Dual OCuLink PCIe expansion card
• Gentoo Linux ~amd64
• Samsung S27A800U 27” IPS LCD (3840×2160@60Hz)

Time active: 2023-02-23 - present

The first truly custom computer that was spec’ed out and built by me from scratch. Very cursed specs, I know.

Initially built in February 2023. Upgraded along the way. The original intention is to build a powerful code compilation (reads: compile Gentoo and occasionally Android) machine that can also handle light graphics workloads (GPU rendering in particular) for cheap. I had the hilarious idea of building a computer with graphic cards from all vendors in it (to test my shitty graphics code that I’m never going to write again). And here it is.

The initial configuration after the first memory expansion (dual Xeon 6130T, 8×32GB RAM, A4000, 980 Pro) costed me ~$1000 for the bare setup (i.e. powers on and runs, no case, no nothing). The motherboard is notably super cheap for its class because the chassis intrusion header is badly deformed. I forced it back to the correct position using brute force when I got the board, but I’m not going to use that header anyway. The cost shot up after it was put into a proper case, had its processors upgraded, and the addition of the other two graphic cards, as well as additional storage: as of May 2026, I’ve spent around $3500 on this machine in total. The build was not put into a case until October 2023. Before that it was running as a bare motherboard, just like Alice in the vast majority of its lifetime.

Everything in this computer except the following was obtained second-hand:

• The AMD Radeon RX7900 XTX
• The Intel Arc A770 16GB
• All storage
• Both PSUs
• The case (Phanteks Enthoo Pro II)
• PCIe riser cables
• Secondary PCIe expansion cards (USB, OCuLink)
• Two of the case fans

Yes this means all but two of the Noctua fans running in the system are obtained in used condition.

One of the upgraded Xeon 8260L failed after being running in the machine for roughly a day. The computer would not POST with that specific processor installed. IPMI logged a thermal trip event and a CATERR before the processor failed, while the computer was idling.

The motherboard does not seem to support PCIe ASPM, even though the option for ASPM can be “revealed” in BIOS and can be adjusted, it has no effect. All other ways to force ASPM in software don’t work either. For this reason, power consumption of the Arc A770 in this machine hovers around 40W even when it’s fully idle (not even outputting any video). When the Intel card is not required it’s sometimes removed to reduce idle power consumption of the machine. With the Arc A770 installed, the machine idles at ~160W, without it ~120W. Highest reported power consumption of the machine from the HX1500i is ~1100W.

The 7900 XTX was purchased out of “sympathy for the little underdog company Advanced Micro Devices”. The card, purchased roughly 3 months after the initial build, was sold just below its MSRP (I believe it was 989 USD). Being a Yeston card, it has the now infamous “waifu” design, which gained its infamous status in the West at least in part thanks to the coverage given by Gamers Nexus. Their original coverage dated back to Yeston’s original “waifu” GPU of the RDNA 1 generation, and they covered this exact card as well. Unfortunately Yeston’s tactics probably didn’t work out here in North America, evident from its pricing dipping below the MSRP a mere ~6 months after the initial launch of RDNA 3. My guess is the target audience is simply not there in North America. Therefore I was able to pick this one up for a bargain. To be clear I am not the target audience of this design either: I’d much prefer a card with proper power stages and a vapor chamber thermal solution. This is also not my first Yeston card, as you will find out later in Concordia or its predecessor. To say this card is “A Little Bit Noisy” as in GN’s review is a bit of an understatement. The card is by far the most noisy component in the build. It’s not even possible to correct this through software means: the minimal fan PWM percentage on this card is 35%, meaning as soon as it goes out of zero-RPM mode, it will go to 35% instantly, regardless of what you do to the fan curves. And let me just tell you 35% is NOT quiet on these three 97mm fans.

Looking back, there’s no reason for me to feel any sympathy for AMD or purchase this card. I guess at the very least it allows me to not sound like a Nvidia shill when I criticize AMD’s Linux support. VFIO passthrough never worked properly on this card, while on the Nvidia side it has always worked flawlessly. You may argue that my AMD card is just a consumer card and I shouldn’t compare it against a workstation card from Nvidia. But VFIO passthrough worked fine on RDNA 2 consumer cards. So AMD clearly messed up something. Besides that, sometimes the card would just randomly decide it doesn’t want to run an application I’m using (often Blender), and freeze the entire desktop. I have a handful of kernel dmesg dumps named amdfail* to keep track of these incidents.

The Arc A770, on the other hand, was purchased for the sole reason that I want to support Intel’s graphics card business (and a chance to test my graphics code on Intel’s dedicated GPUs, if I start writing graphics code again someday). As you’re probably aware, more competition is usually good. I have never had any major issue with this card besides the aforementioned lack of support of PCIe ASPM on my motherboard. VFIO passthough worked first try. And the performance of this card isn’t even half bad. Support on the software side like oneAPI has been spotty at best, but theoretically will improve over time.

RAM in this machine was bought when they cost ~30 USD per 32GB stick, not >200 USD per like they are in late 2025 / early 2026. There are two unpopulated memory channels per CPU. I have considered filling them in by adding an additional 128GB of RAM before, but now it’s officially no longer possible.

The power supply (HX1500i) died for unknown reasons early February 2026. An RMA swap was performed and I received a refurbished unit, unfortunately.

There are multiple virtual machines configured with PCIe passthrough on this computer, including a Windows 11 Pro VM.

The monitor is shared between all graphics cards and is connected through a cheap DisplayPort switch box.

Weighs ~20KG in its current form.

The heat emitted from this machine when it’s compiling Gentoo is extremely palpable. I don’t even have to run any space heater in winter when this thing is building packages. I guess the memes are correct after all. In addition, hardware maintenance of this machine has always been a pain in the butt since its inception (mostly because how massive it is). But it remains my most powerful computer by far.

• Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (running at 3.6 GHz)
• (2 → 4)×4GB Kingston DDR3-1600 RAM
• NVIDIA GTX 960 4GB (ZOTAC) ^*
• AMD RX 550 4GB LP (Yeston) ^{* #}
• Gigabyte GA-EP43T-USB3 rev 1.0 (P43+ICH10)
• Crucial M4-CT128M4SSD2 (128GB) ^*
• Segate Barracuda 7200.12 (500GB) ^*
• Great Wall 650W PSU
• Debian GNU/Linux Trixie amd64
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64 ^×
• Windows XP Professional x64 Edition ^×

Time active: 2021-07-10 - present

Built in July 2021 out of the remains of “PC” (the ideacenter K300), from which it inherited all the storage, this computer is sitting at my parents’ home serving as their home desktop.

Yes it’s just a Core 2. But it handles their computing needs perfectly fine.

The machine was conceived when I bought the QX9650 dirt cheap back in 2017 to play with and realized there is no way the OEM motherboard that came with the ideacenter can make full use of it. So later I bought a random dirt cheap LGA 775 motherboard to pair with it.

The RX 550 was the designated graphics card originally. However I wanted to challenge myself by installing Windows XP x64 on it, and the RX 550 has no driver for Windows XP. So I put the GTX 960 taken from Alice in there.

The CPU unfortunately is not a very good overclocker. 4.0 GHz was possible, but not very stable without massively increasing the voltage. I definitely don’t want a computer that’s stable only when massively overvolted for my parents. Hence the very mild overclock on the CPU.

• Framework Laptop (Intel 11th gen, 4th batch)
• Intel Core i7-1185G7
• 2×32GB Crucial DDR4-3200 RAM
• Intel Iris Xe Graphics
• NVIDIA RTX 2080 (Founders Edition) egpu ^#
• SoC Platform
• 13” IPS LCD 2256x1504@60Hz (Reflective → Matte)
• 55Wh battery → 61Wh battery
• 1TB Samsung 970 Pro
• Intel AX210
• ANSI English keyboard → Traditional Chinese keyboard
• Gentoo Linux ~amd64
• Windows 11 Insider Pro x64 Retail

Time active: 2021-10-13 - present

I have multiple posts on this computer.

• Framework Laptop: The next thing in the laptop world?
• Framework Laptop: Repasting & Two Year Report

TL;DR: pre-ordered in September 2021, arrived the following month. Had a few components upgraded along the way, and gave me a bunch of headaches. Its battery pack became swollen twice, its fan was making a clacking noise until I replaced it, but still a fairly capable machine in 2026.

It’s already showing battle scars on the top case of the machine. I have the strange urge to paint it black some day but have yet acted on the impulse.

That should be enough lore for you. Yes the egpu is for playing Minecraft. But its integrated GPU doesn’t handle Minecraft too badly at all.

Besides paying my bills, it also handles my music production needs currently.

And yes I actually paid the full retail price of $199 for the Windows license. I am stupid.

• Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga 1st Gen (20FQ)
• Intel Core i7-6600U
• 16GB Samsung DDR3L-1866 RAM
• Intel HD Graphics 520
• SoC Platform
• 14” IPS LCD + Wacom AES digitizer panel → 14” OLED panel + digitizer (both 2560×1440@60Hz)
• 512GB Samsung SM951 SSD
• Huawei ME906s LTE WWAN ⁺
• Intel 8260NGW → Intel AX201
• Arch Linux x86_64 ^{^}
• Gentoo Linux ~amd64
• Android Pie x86_64 custom build ^{^}
• Windows 10 Pro OEM ^$

Time active: 2016-05-08 - present

Hey, I have multiple posts on this computer too!

• Initial review (in Chinese)
• Screen repair (in Chinese)
• Refurbishing my X1 Yoga

Long story short: the laptop was purchased in February 2016 for 1950 USD with almost maxed-out specs. It didn’t arrive in my hands until May that year due to international shipping kerfuffles. I broke its screen within the first 6 months I spent with the machine trying to put a screen protector on it. (Ironic, isn’t it?) And as a result, I broke my bank account too. Nine years later, I completely rebuilt the machine, restoring it to its former glory. That should be plenty of lore for you. But unlike Freddy, I have more on this machine. Mostly because it has served my so long.

The reasons I decided to go for a convertible were:

• I have been drooling over convertibles for quite a while. First it was the ThinkPad X Tablet series when I was in junior high, which I eventually got hold of one. Then there was the original ideapad Yoga that my high school friend had (yes, the one with the hideous i5-3317U).
• I’ve had enough with my back-breaking Y570, and I desperately wanted something much, much lighter.
• I heard that ULV Skylake was no ULV Ivy Bridge, and I believed it.
• I secretly wanted to learn (or rather, re-learn) drawing. So having a digitizer is a massive plus.

You can decide how well that worked out. Spoiler: I never learned drawing again. The only drawing that I’ve done on this machine (that’s not simply using it as a scratch pad) is preserved here.

Interestingly, the laptop self-identifies as a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 4th, which shares the same motherboard. More strangely the BIOS says the CPU has a maximum frequency of 8.3 GHz, which sure is a sight to behold. These small quirks don’t impact normal usage of the computer at all, and I’d image they can be fixed trivially if I had access to Lenovo’s machine configuration tool.

This is the first computer that I installed Gentoo on. Why am I running Gentoo on a computer with such a terrible processor you ask? Well, I don’t have to answer that!

I used to have stickers of the Komeiji sisters on the top cover of the laptop. But later they started attracting dirt and became messy, so I removed them.

This is an EXTREMELY durable machine. It has taken the almost insane level of abuse over the decade like it’s literally just light scratches. Of course there are marks and peeled-off skins, but the core functionality of the machine has never been affected. And you can dunk on the performance of ULV Skylake CPUs all you want, like I’m not already doing that anyway: its really hard to NOT lament its lack of performance when a random phone from 5 years ago beats its performance like there is no tomorrow. But it still handles text processing and my personal communications (plus sometimes, image processing) just fine. So I’ll keep using it.

• Steam Deck LCD 256GB
• AMD APU
• 16GB Micron DDR5-5500 RAM
• Integrated RDNA2 Graphics
• SoC Platform
• 7” IPS LCD 1280×800@60Hz
• 256GB Kingston OM3PDP3256B SSD → 1TB Crucial P310 SSD
• Arch Linux x86_64 (vanilla, not Steam OS)

Time active: 2022-08-23 - present

TL;DR: As of 2026, the weekly usage pattern of this machine is to run Bloons TD 6 for an hour, have its OS updated, then being put back into a drawer for the rest of the week.

I have no idea why I bought this thing. Maybe it’s FOMO, or more likely I couldn’t resist getting a fully functional PC for a low, low price of $400 (or in my case, $530). It even supposedly has pretty decent performance, or so I’ve been told. I made the reservation on 2021-09-03, paid the full price on 2022-08-18, and received the device 2022-08-23.

I wiped the pre-installed Steam OS the same day I received the device and installed plain Arch Linux. The choice of the OS kind of reflected my initial intended usage: I wanted to try to use it as a normal desktop computer. I did not choose Gentoo, which at that point was powering all my daily drivers, as if I knew that this machine won’t be used very frequently. Obviously things didn’t go according to the plans. The thing cannot function as a normal PC unless constantly docked. But I never reverted to the stock OS.

This is the first x86 computer with an AMD CPU that I used in a little more than a decade. Obviously this one doesn’t kernel panic every 2 seconds like its predecessor. There are a few hardware quirks when it’s not running stock Steam OS, but nothing major.

The performance is not too bad. Although it’s unreasonable to expect it to run Microsoft Flight Simulator at any reasonable visual fidelity, and the fan revs like crazy during a late game BTD6 session.

This is the only device where I regularly use a Wayland session. Unfortunately even in the year 2026, Wayland (the protocol) still stands in the way of my (admittedly weird) workflow. On the Steam Desk, the biggest problem is more prevalent and less niche: I can’t even use the on screen keyboard of my choosing. But other than that, this is an experience that’s the closest to usable that I had on Wayland, so I’m not complaining.

• MacBookPro15,1 (15-inch Touchbar, Mid 2018, A1990)
• Intel Core i7-8850H
• 16GB DDR4-2400 RAM
• Intel UHD Graphics 630
• AMD Radeon Pro 560X (4GB GDDR5)
• QMS 380 PCH
• 15” IPS LCD (2880×1800@60Hz)
• 512GB Apple SSD
• BCM4364 WiFi
• Gentoo Linux ~amd64

Time active: 2025-11-27 - present

A relatively new addition to the collection. I received this machine for free in late 2025. It was once the work laptop of someone from my extended family.

Possibly the worst laptop Apple ever made. Uses a notoriously undersized thermal solution for very high power components. Infamously throttles below base frequency under load. People have discovered putting it into a freezer increases performance. And guides like this are frequently recommended, despite making the machine no longer a “lap”top – you can probably get a third degree burn if you put this thing on your lap with the mod. Nevertheless, I carried out the mod on this machine because I don’t plan to move it off my desk anyway.

Thanks to the aggressive swap strategy of Mac OS X and the general bloat of software on said OS, the SSD in this machine had 55 TB data written to it despite being powered on for only 1500 hours by the time I received it. As a comparison, the SSD in my X1 yoga, which has the same capacity, had 70 TB data written over 47608 hours of operation. The rate this OS wears down the drive is astounding, which is the reason why I completely wiped the drive clean and only have Linux installed on this machine: you will not find a shred of Apple’s nonsense on this machine.

Sadly, getting Linux to work properly on this machine is also a pain, thanks to the stupid T2 chip Apple decided to put into this thing. The amount of pain and suffering I had to go through to set this thing up was almost unreal. At least now it’s working for the most part.

I do not need to criticize the keyboard and the touchbar, as they have been extensively criticized by Apple’s most loyal users, to the point that they were eventually bullied into reverting both on their later models. Well, all I need to add is owning one does allow me to personally confirm all the criticism myself: the keyboard on my unit double-triggers constantly, and the touchbar is barely useful besides serving as keys it was meant to replace.

The display assembly has a crack in the bottom plastic and a crack in the glass. Fortunately, the screen itself is intact. Yes, I also hate the extremely glossy screen (and how literally any liquid will leave obvious marks on it). The screen itself is beautiful though, something that Apple has been able to consistently get right over the past decade.

Currently a media consumption machine. Not even very fit for this purpose unfortunately because the fan would sometimes spool up if I move the mouse on YouTube’s web page. The wording is deliberate as it literally sounds like a jet engine!

Overall, a machine that I would never have owned if I had to pay a penny for it.

• Intel Core i7-2960XM (4.5 GHz max turbo, 96W PL2, 72W PL1) ^*
• 2×8GB Samsung DDR3L-1600 RAM
• Intel HD Graphics 3000
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4GB (ZOTAC) ^{^}
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (Founders Edition) ^{+ ^}
• Supermicro X9SCV-QV4 (QM67)
• Crucial M4-CT256M4SSD2 (256GB) ^{* ^}
• Hitachi HTS725032A9A364 (320GB) ^{* ^}
• HGST HTS721010A9E630 (1TB) ^{* ^}
• Cooler Master 500W 80Plus white PSU
• Debian GNU/Linux Sid amd64
• ThinkVision S22e-10 21.5” VA LCD (1920×1080@60Hz)

Time active: 2016-08-20 - present

My first computer that was assigned a hostname. A second hostname “Betty” was reserved for the other Ethernet interface on the machine, but that name never ended up being used. Thus began the tradition of me assigning either unisex or feminine personal names (sometimes, neuter or feminine Latin nouns) to my computers as hostnames.

The hostname has nothing to do with any characters with the same name from any popular work. Rather it’s just a name that starts with the first letter in the Latin alphabet. As evident in the reserved name “Betty”, at the time I planned to name my computers alphabetically. But that was soon scrapped in favor of taking the first letter from their brand names or some other property of the machine (e.g. T for ThinkPad, F for Framework, and H for Homelab).

Parts from the Y570 (Pre-Alice) made up the basis of this build. This machine is my first entry to the world of “cursed computing”: a socketed mobile processor, on a mini-ITX motherboard paired with desktop graphics cards that had no business sitting next to a Sandy Bridge processor. And wait until you see the improvised cooling made with a chipset tower cooler with two Noctua fans strapped to it with twist ties.

Was commonly referred to as “the fire hazard” when it sat in the lab by my labmates (and me as well), reason being it was just a bare board sitting on my desk without a chassis for the most of its lifetime.

An RTX 2080 replaced the GTX 960 as its graphics card in early 2019. That was my first graphics card from high end proper. Notably this graphics upgrade also brought USB 3.0 support to this computer. As the motherboard doesn’t come with any USB 3.0 ports (blame it on the Cougar Point PCH), the USB Type-C port on the 2080 intended for VR usage became the only USB 3.0 capable port on the computer. At that point there was an attempt to stick the thing into an 1U server chassis. But the RTX 2080 was completely choked of fresh air and can’t stop itself from overheating and shutting down the system. So that plan was scrapped. It was later placed in the chassis of my family’s previous home computer, and the stock 1U heatsink assembly was replaced by the aforementioned improvised thermal “solution”.

The improvised heatsink works shockingly well. It will dissipate 90W without breaking a sweat. The CPU was overclocked and performs almost on par with a stock i7-2600K. The motherboard VRM however, is probably under tremendous stress if the processor works at 90W sustained. Therefore the sustained power limit was lowered to 72W. I will not trust the setup to run for extended periods without being monitored though, because all the twist ties and the two-screw heatsink mount.

The first few public iterations of my website were largely developed on this machine, which also hosted said website before I was forced to switch to VPS hosting.

Storage for this machine has been removed for data archival, and the 2080 was repurposed as an eGPU.

• Lenovo ideacenter K300 (Chinese Model)
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 → Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 ^{^}
• 2×2GB Samsung DDR3-1066 RAM → 4×2GB Kingston/Samsung ^# DDR3-1066 RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 320 (MSI OEM, GT215, 1GB) -> AMD RX 550 4GB LP (Yeston) ^{^}
• Lenovo OEM Platform (G43+ICH10)
• Crucial M4-CT128M4SSD2 (128GB) ^{+ ^}
• Segate Barracuda 7200.12 (500GB) ^{^}
• Debian GNU/Linux Wheezy → Jessie amd64
• Windows 7 Home Basic x64 → Windows 7 Ultimate x64 ^×
• With 21.5” OEM TN LCD (1920×1080@60Hz)

Time active: 2011-01 - 2021-01

Bought early 2011. My mom and I went to a shopping district where there were a lot of computer stores just before Spring Festival, and bought this thing when I was having a fever. The full setup costed her ~¥8000 (roughly 1000 USD), which is a considerable rip-off (typical of OEM machines of the time), especially in the graphics department.

Nehalem Core i processors were available at the time, but hugely expensive. So we decided to opt for the older generation. The graphics card in this thing though, was a true abomination. It’s a single slot card manufactured by MSI with a red PCB and a pathetic heatsink on a three-year old architecture at the time. Temperatures would shoot straight over 90°C when the card is loaded in the slightest, an example that I can still vividly remember being the iTunes music visualization. Even at idle it sits at higher than 65°C. This is probably the worst thermal performance I’ve ever seen on a graphics card. Mind you the temperatures were like that when the computer was basically brand new, so it wasn’t dried thermal paste or anything like that. In fact I repasted the thing in 2019, and it still overheats the same exact way. Specifications wise the card is basically a slightly better Geforece 9600 GSO, so it has no business overheating like that at all.

As most home computers sold in China at the time were, it was preloaded with Windows 7 Home Basic. I found a random product key for Windows 7 Ultimate online and pasted it into Windows Anytime Upgrade. The key was accepted, the upgrade installed and Windows activated itself without a hitch.

I purchased and installed the SSD mid 2012. Back then SSDs were still quite expensive: I spent around ¥1200 (~160 USD) for the 128GB disk. The boost in user experience was … astonishing to me back then. It would take the machine only 11 seconds from power on to boot to the desktop. The boot animation of Windows 7 wouldn’t even play to its completion. I couldn’t imagine daily driving a computer that boots from spinning rust ever since.

When I expanded the RAM of the machine to 8GB, I decided to do the ultimately silly thing: I installed every single major release of Windows since Windows 95 as virtual machines, and fired all of them up at the same time. I did a lot of wacky things on this computer in general. The Samsung sticks that came with the machine died a few years after, triggering frequent OS crashes whenever they’re installed. They were removed afterwards.

I purchased the QX9650 CPU early 2019 for a low, low price of ~¥300 (roughly 45 USD). The processor was scratched up pretty bad, but worked. Soon afterwards I found out that there’s no way whatsoever to overclock this CPU in the OEM motherboard, so I purchased a dirt cheap LGA 775 motherboard and the rest is history. The majority of components of this machine were removed to build Concordia. The chassis now houses Alice, or since its decommission, whatever remains of it.

Roughly at the same time I purchased the QX9650, I bought a cheap RX 550 to go with it, with the hope of getting rid of Nvidia’s old drivers on Linux. The card worked fine, albeit was bottlenecked by the QX9650. Being a card from Yeston, it has some weird if not slightly questionable marketing materials. But it was no match for what they are doing nowadays.

• IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad X60 (6363-C7U)
• Intel Core 2 Duo L7400
• 4GB Samsung DDR2-667 RAM (3GB usable)
• Intel GMA 950
• IBM/Lenovo OEM Platform (945GM+ICH7M)
• 12” TN LCD (1440×1050@50Hz)
• 128GB Sandisk SSD
• Intel 3945ABG → Intel 8260NGW
• With ThinkPad X6 Tablet UltraBase
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 ^×
• Windows XP Tablet PC Edition ^$
• Debian sid amd64

Time active: 2022-03-26 - present

Bought from ebay in March 2022 for 150 bucks. The battery pack is completely dead. The physical WiFi switch has bad contacts. One stick of RAM it came with randomly died. But otherwise in great shape.

Due to the architecture of the 945GM north bridge on the motherboard, 1/4 of the installed RAM is completely unaccessible.

This is the convertible that I was drooling over mentioned in the section on Terry. I learned about the machine from Lenovo’s promotional materials I some how got hold of back in 2008. The convertible mechanism looked sick. The idea that one can use a pen on a computer screen fascinated me. Although that idea seems a lot less cool these days, now that I have two of those devices and have failed to find a practical use for them.

• IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad T43 (2686-DGU)
• Intel Pentium M 750
• 2GB Samsung DDR2-667 RAM (running at DDR2-533)
• ATI Mobility Radeon X300 64MB
• IBM/Lenovo OEM Platform (915PM+ICH6M)
• 14.1” TN LCD (1440×1050@60Hz)
• 60GB Hitachi PATA HDD (SATA Mod in process)
• Intel 2200BG
• Windows XP Professional SP3 OEM
• Debian sid i386

Time active: 2021-11-28 - present(?)

Bought from ebay in November 2021 for 100 bucks. Looks practically brand new.

For a bog-standard ThinkPad from the IBM-Lenovo transition era, that price is in no way a bargain. But this model does mean something special to me, namely its similarity to the R52 below. They have basically the same hardware, except this one having a vastly superior screen. I ran a bunch of applications and games I used to run on the R52 when I first received the machine, and the nostalgia instantly hit me hard.

Unfortunately the motherboard is completely ruined by me in the process of performing the SATA mod. The computer was able to access a conventional HDD connected through the modded SATA port every time, but when it was replaced with an SSD sitting on a mSATA to SATA adapter, it was completely unstable, causing hard drive errors in POST most of the time. Maybe I messed up the differential pair or something, idk. But in the process of attempting to fix it, I ripped the pads of the PATA bridge chip and later one of the capacitors on a signal. Now my only hope is to solder directly to the ICH chip, or add some messy bodge wires, which I dread to even think about.

Currently sitting in a USPS priority mail box as a bunch of loose parts, waiting to be resurrected some day in the future.

• PowerBook5,8 (PowerBook G4 DLSD/HR, Late 2005, A1138)
• PowerPC 7447B
• 2GB Samsung DDR2-667 RAM (running at DDR2-533)
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
• 15.2” LCD (1440×960@60Hz)
• 128GB Kingspec SSD
• AirPort Extreme BCM4306
• MacOS X 10.5.8 ppc
• OpenBSD 7.4 macppc

Time active: 2021-11-18 - present

Bought from ebay in November 2021 for 50 bucks. Looks not great. Smells worse.

The aluminum case was scratched up pretty good. It’s coated with a thick cigarette smell that I just couldn’t get rid of no matter what I tried. I put the thing in a sealed plastic bag with a small ozone generator for THREE WEEKS. After the treatment it still smells like cigarette, only diminished by a little bit. I have to wash my hands twice every time I touch the keyboard of this machine.

Surprisingly, the original battery still lasts two hours on light usage.

This particular model of the G4 was basically a limited run, likely because of its terrible performance. According to Wikipedia, it was available for three whopping months: from 2005-10-19 to 2006-01-10. And the aforementioned T43, released in August 2005, beats it just like how an M1 MacBook Pro would later humiliate its predecessors.

I might have some fond memories playing with the Power Macintosh G3 at my dad’s workplace. But that doesn’t explain why I decided to get this particular model which neither runs Mac OS 9 natively, or runs the Classic environment in its final supported OS. By the way, the hockey puck mouse was terrible.

• ASUS A8M
• AMD Mobile Sempron 3200+
• 512MB DDR2 RAM → 3GB (1+2) DDR2 RAM
• Integrated Nvidia GeForce 6100 Go
• Nvidia nForce 430 Go
• 14.1” LCD (1280×800@60Hz)
• 80GB Unknown SATA HDD → 320GB Hitachi SATA HDD ^{^}
• Windows XP Professional ^×
• Windows Vista Ultimate x86 RTM ^× (briefly)
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 ^× (briefly)
• Debian amd64 (briefly)

Time active: 2006 - 2015

The machine responsible for my AMD-phobia. It doesn’t seem to enjoy the idea of running anything other than Windows XP.

I’m fairly certain that this laptop was shipped with some kind of DOS because it booted into a command prompt when my parents first unboxed the machine in 2006. They had a copy of Windows XP installed on it (more than likely pirated) afterwards.

This machine has possibly fueled my early obsession with website building: I built a bunch of random stupid websites with Microsoft FrontPage (totally legit copy btw) on that laptop, and I somehow still have them sitting in my storage some where today. Additionally there was also the “interesting” memory of playing the Windows release of Road Rash past twelve in the evening with my dad on this laptop. The game was super popular in the elementary school I attended and could be found installed on many computers in the computer lab, probably without authorization.

My parents stopped using the laptop for their work a few years after that, and I took this laptop to some of the training trips in my earlier competitive programming days. A sad incident happened during one of the trips utterly obliterated the hinges of the laptop. I just returned to my accommodation and I swung my arm too hard. I lost grip of the laptop in my hand and it flew across the room, hitting the wall super hard without any protection whatsoever. The laptop was split in two halves. But to my astonishment, when I pressed the power button, it turned on as if nothing happened. You probably won’t be able to imagine the relief I had when I saw it loading into Windows with its screen completely detached (unless something similar happened to you too).

Did I mention the machine didn’t ship with a wireless adapter? These days we always take WiFi in laptops for granted. But apparently you can’t back then. I always thought I did something wrong when I installed the driver. But when I opened the machine up for the first time after the incident, I found the position for the wireless card left empty. Well, it was never going to work like that, wasn’t it?

Believe it or not, I also had my first installation of desktop Linux on this machine. It was not any well-known distribution. Instead, it was YLMF OS. That name will come up again in the section on the ThinkPad R52. Michael MJD has a video on this strange distro and its successors. But long story short, it was Ubuntu 9.10 with a Windows XP skin slapped onto it. I had my first experience of Compiz and all its fancy desktop effects, which fueled some of my later projects.

The stock hard drive died mysteriously (possibly because of the physical shock) within a year of the incident. I put in a 320GB drive from my stash to keep it working.

I played around with a few other operating systems on this laptop since then, but it doesn’t seem to want to run any of them: both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows Vista constantly blue screens, but that could just be Windows Vista being Windows Vista. 32-bit version of Windows 7 will freeze randomly after installing the driver for Nvidia’s chipset. 64-bit version of Windows 7 on the other hand, does seem to work in general, but attempting to watch a video would either crash the system, or give you a green-tainted mess. I tried to install Debian Jessie amd64 on the machine too, but the installation media kernel panicked while it was still booting.

That left me with the impression AMD processors don’t work with anything, and has been the reason I’ve been avoiding AMD platforms for a long time. That was obviously too harsh towards AMD, considering K8 was their original implementation of AMD64. But it eventually turned into something superstitious that overrides rational thinking. I didn’t own any computer on AMD platforms until the Steam Deck.

My 320GB hard drive was taken away from the machine later and the machine has never booted into an operating system since. The machine, still a property of my parent’s workplace on paper, is supposedly due to be returned. That still hasn’t happened. I suspect they probably don’t know what to do with this piece of e-waste either.

• Lenovo ideapad Y570-ISE (Chinese Model)
• Intel Core i7-2670QM → Intel Core i7-2960XM ^{^}
• 2×2GB Samsung DDR3-1333 RAM → 2×4GB Samsung DDR3-1333 RAM → 4+8GB Samsung DDR3-1333/1600 RAM → 2×8GB Samsung DDR3-1600 RAM
• Intel HD Graphics 3000
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M (Lenovo, 1GB GDDR5, GF108, 96 CUDA cores)
• Lenovo OEM Platform (HM65)
• 15.6” TN LCD (1366×768@60Hz)
• Segate Spinning Rust 5400 RPM (750GB) ^{^} → Crucial M4-CT256M4SSD2 (256GB) ^{+ ^}
• Windows 7 Home Basic x64 → Windows 7 Ultimate x64 ^× → Windows 8 / 8.1 Pro x64 ^×
• Ubuntu 12.04 amd64 → Debian amd64 / Arch Linux amd64

Time active: 2012-08 - 2016-08-18

Bought in the summer of 2012 for ¥7000. This was again, a “previous gen” purchase for budget reasons. Ivy Bridge laptops were fresh out of the oven, and thus Sandy Bridge laptops had their prices slashed.

To be honest, most my peers (i.e. high schoolers) didn’t have their own laptop at the time. I was allowed to have my own personal computer solely due to the fact that I was in competitive programming back then, and needed one for it.

This laptop got me scoffed at by the competitive programming team lead at my school: “your laptop has such a big power brick. It must have a very powerful graphics card!” implying I’m using the laptop to play video games instead of training for the competition. In reality, the dedicated graphics in this laptop is the worst one that bore the “GT 555M” name: Nvidia, in their infinite wisdom, decided to release 3 very different cards under the same name. And Lenovo of course chose the worst one for this laptop.

I upped the RAM to 8G and moved everything to an SSD that winter. I took out the optical drive and used the space freed to contain the spinning rust that came with the machine. That sentence was worded in this particular way because of course I didn’t do it the “normal way”. Instead of using a proper adapter, I just left that space empty and shoved the HDD in there, connected using a USB to SATA bridge. This became one of the reasons behind the tragic data loss I suffered in 2014.

I started my Linux daily driving on this machine. It all started because an acquaintance on the competitive programming team forced me to install Ubuntu using Wubi. Soon after I found myself moving its files to a dedicated partition and a proper standalone install. One year later I already moved on, in part because me being a huge Linux noob, I managed to break the Ubuntu install beyond any repair. So I chose the obvious and most reasonable option: to move to Debian. One year later, I decided to install Arch alongside all of this. By that time, I was triple booting Windows / Debian / Arch on this laptop.

I became disgusted by Microsoft’s business practices. So when Windows 10 was released, instead of installing it, I wiped Windows from the laptop altogether, leaving only two Linux distros on the machine.

Many of my days as an amateur game developer were spent on this machine.

The heatsink fins of this laptop were once completely blocked by dust buildup. The processor would hard throttle to 800MHz all core, and become insufferably slow. This would teach me to clean the internals of a computer every so often.

It has the incredible common and incredible hideous 1366×768 LCD common on laptops of its calibre of the time. If you crunch the numbers, that translates to ~100.5 DPI, barely above the 96 DPI standard. Looking at small text on that display truly hurts. This was the reason why I was so envious of MacBook Pro with Retina display at the time, and almost got one before I settled with my ThinkPad X1 Yoga.

I purchased the i7-2960XM and 16GB memory roughly at the same time when I got Terry. The processor costed me roughly ¥1500 (~200 USD). Soon I discovered I was in a familiar situation: I had an unlocked CPU but the motherboard wouldn’t allow me to overclock it. This paved the way for the later construction of Alice.

Was among my properties that ended up being scrapped by my undergrad institution thanks to COVID-19. Since by then the laptop is but a husk, with most of its important parts moved into Alice, so pretty much nothing of value was lost here.

• LEGEND (now known as Lenovo) 1+1 “天麟(Heavenly Qilin / Kirin)” (likely model 4620)
• Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz Northwood (Non-HT)
• (1 → 2)×256 MB DDR RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 64MB (Lenovo)
• Intel 845/ICH2 OEM Platform
• 40GB Unknown HDD → 80GB Segate HDD
• Windows XP Home OEM
• With 17” OEM Flat Screen CRT (running at 1024×768@85Hz)

Time active: 2003 - 2007-07

I actually don’t know if the specs listed above are the specs the machine eventually ended up with by the time of its demise. Read on.

This computer was purchased in 2003 for my dad’s word processing work, right before I started elementary school. It costed my family about ¥8000 (~1000 USD) at the time. I still have some memory of the salesman bringing the demo units into the room that eventually became the computer room. They brought both a conventional CRT monitor and a newfangled LCD monitor. I vividly remember them showing both to my parents, who decided to go with the CRT option. I believe the LCD option would have costed ¥10k, a price that was simply not justifiable for them.

As mentioned above, this is my family’s first home computer. For the first two years or so, I didn’t get to use the computer a lot. When I do get to touch it, I spent most my time playing the preloaded games, one of which is a shoot ’em up that I still have installed in my WINEPREFIX.

We didn’t get connected to the Internet immediately. But around 2004 or 2005, we did through a 56k dial-up service. My computer time increased drastically after that, but it was not spent surfing the web. I was stockpiling random applications and (in some cases) trying to learn them. I learned about most of these applications from the computer class in school. I still remember what downloading an illicit copy of PhotoShop CS through a 56k modem feels like. Keeping the computer on overnight, that is.

I got into casual online gaming for a short bit, mostly Mahjong. But I got caught by my mom not very long after I started and got disciplined hard for it. I never returned to it after that.

Soon afterwards I got into competitive programming. And the rest is history.

Oh, did I mention this machine came in a chassis that was clearly inspired by Apple’s aesthetics of the G3 era (iMac G3 and late Power Macintosh G3)? Its super evident from the translucent plastic decorative pieces on the chassis.

Some time in 2006, the computer was taken to an acquaintance of my dad who runs a computer shop for an “upgrade”. It returned in a completely different chassis. My parents said the computer “never run quite the same as before”, and suspected they “cheaped out on the components”. I unfortunately didn’t become savvy enough in computer hardware until years after, so I’d never know what was changed in the process.

The computer randomly decided to stop POSTing some time in the summer of 2007, letting out a long beep every few seconds. At the time I was reading some of the books on various computer-related topics my dad bought, one of which is computer troubleshooting. I reckoned the problem is probably the RAM, so I opened the machine up and tried to reseat the sticks. That was the first time I messed with the internals of a computer, and I fucked up in some major way: after reseating both sticks, I powered the machine on for a test. Immediately something let out the magic smoke, and the motherboard let out a long beep that didn’t seem to stop. Terrified, I powered the machine down and pulled out the memory sticks. There was a huge skid mark on the contacts of one of the sticks. Fearing the computer would spontaneously catch on fire, I pulled the power of the computer as well.

I’d give myself a pass though because a) the computer wasn’t working in the first place by then, and b) I was literally 10 years old. But it does mean my first attempt to fix a computer ended with a spectacular failure.

The entire computer was sent to a scrapyard a few months after the incident. I did pull the hard drive out of the case before it was scrapped, along with the optical drive and floppy drive for some reason. But the optical drive and floppy drive were tossed a few years after that.

Besides that, the only materials that’s left of this computer are its packaging and the CD set for its bundled software and drivers. I should really make images of those shouldn’t I …

• IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad R52 (likely 1847-28U)
• Intel Pentium M 750
• 256MB DDR2-533 RAM → 768MB DDR2-533 RAM → 1.25GB DDR2-533 RAM
• ATI Mobility Radeon X300 32MB
• IBM/Lenovo OEM Platform (915PM+ICH6M)
• 14.1” TN LCD (1024×768@60Hz)
• 40GB IBM/Hitachi Travelstar PATA HDD
• Windows XP Professional ^{× ※}

Time active: 2007 - 2012

Like the A8M, this laptop is also the property of my parent’s workplace. It was loaded with an obviously pirated installation of Windows XP Professional distributed by the then well-known Chinese warez supplier Y(雨)L(林)M(木)F(风) (roughly rain forest breeze. Or rain, forest, wood, wind, translated character-by-character).

The machine has a Windows XP Home license sticker on its bottom. However no R52 models with the X300 graphics is listed in Lenovo’s PSREF document with Windows XP Home preloaded. It might be a thing exclusive to “emerging markets”.

Like the A8M, this laptop was also taken on my competitive programming training trips. No spectacular mishaps occurred to it though. Being a ThinkPad, I’d imagine if thrown similarly across the room, the victim would be the wall instead of the laptop.

This computer also served as my family’s interim home computer between the time the original died and the purchase of the second one. During this time I upgraded its RAM twice. The Pentium M still visibly struggled with the contemporary web, which was riddled with Flash content. Later Internet Explorer 8 decided to randomly stop working on that machine: it would not display any images. After all my attempts to fix it failed, including resetting all Internet options and even reinstalling the browser, I made Safari for Windows the default web browser. Yes, that Safari. Back when it came bundled with iTunes, which I had to install to manage music on my iPod.

This computer kicked off my decade-long (and to some degree, continuing) saga with the video game Ballance and shenanigans I’ve done surrounding it. I don’t know whether I should thank it for that, or curse it because of that. Regardless, it is very hard, if not straight up impossible, for me to imaging what my life could look like if I was never introduced to that game. I will stop right here before I turn this section into a rant on that topic.

This machine is solely responsible for my addiction to TrackPoint as a pointing device. I basically can’t use a laptop without a TrackPoint any more, which is the reason why I have a bunch of external TrackPoint keyboards for use with inferior laptops. Achieving maximum pointer movement with minimal finger displacement, isn’t that super neat.

Unlike the A8M, this piece of workplace equipment was eventually returned to my parent’s workplace.

• Sony XPERIA 1 II (XQ-AT52)
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC
• 8GB RAM
• 256GB Storage
• Custom built and modded unofficial Lineage OS 23.2 (Android 16)
• With microG and Magisk

Time active: 2022-02-09 - Present. Main device status gained 2023-06-15.

Yes I’m still using a phone without a hole on the screen. And as you will soon see, I’m ready to die on this hill.

I am never a big fan of Sony’s phones, or Sony Ericsson’s phones for that matter. They have been mediocre throughout the lifetime of the brand, nearly without exception. And recently they have become comically overpriced. This phone is basically a forced choice, as I despise phones with a hole (or notch, or whatever the next bull%^#! these manufacturers will pull out of their ass next) in its screen, and there aren’t a lot of new phones that don’t have it these days, y’know.

If I can say one good thing about Sony phones, it has to be their open device program (after the partition-wiping trickery was gone anyway). It’s one of the remaining Android phone makers that offer a fuss-free bootloader unlocking service. This unfortunately isn’t true for all regional variants of all devices, as I would find out later. (So is it actually fuss-free?)

When I bought the phone, XPERIA 1 IV was around the corner. Purchasing previous-generation devices for a discount seems to be my thing I guess.

I continued my tradition of building my own Android system since 2018. This time I also ditched official Google services and instead opted for MicroG, as an attempt to free myself from Google’s digital surveillance.

The battery became a spicy pillow in April 2025. It was so spicy that it defeated the adhesive on the back and disassembled the phone for me. I purchased a replacement battery from Amazon and tossed the spicy pillow. The replacement battery has a smaller rated capacity than the stock one, but fortunately not by too much.

I don’t assign proper hostnames to my phones. I’d usually just use the codename for the device, or the SoC in this case. The device is therefore known as “kona” locally.

• Apple iPod Classic 2nd revision (A1238, 120GB)
• 3rd revision logic board (160GB model, max stock firmware version 2.0.4)
• KingSpec 128GB SSD
• Rockbox 4.0

Time active: 2009 - Present.

A gift from someone in the family, who bought two of these and kept one for herself. She was surprised that I still have the thing and it’s still in working order.

For a very long time this had been my only Apple device. Having used no Apple devices before, I simply couldn’t get why Apple forced the user to sync music through iTunes. And it took me a very long time to figure out how to do it.

The LCD started to show strange discolorations within the second year of use. They resembled dead pixels, but were in fact not, as pushing down hard on the spot sometimes will cause them to shift very slightly. Noticing this, me with my infinite wisdom decided to “push” the spot out of the display … by taking a 3.5mm headphone plug to it. Yes I really scratched the plastic protective surface of the LCD with a headphone plug deliberately, and I failed to drive the spot out of the screen anyway. The spot gradually disappeared on its own after a few months. I still don’t know what that was to this day.

I gave the device a thorough upgrade in 2015, including an 128GB SSD, a bigger battery, and later the main board from the 3rd revision of classic (max stock firmware version 2.0.4), as I somehow completely obliterated the flex ribbon socket for the headphone jack on my original board: the socket just broke off clean from its solder pads.

After the hardware upgrade I also loaded Rockbox on it, finally liberating myself from Apple’s weird synchronization mechanism.

I still bring this thing with me on every long-distance trip. I’m pretty confident that this is by far the my favorite Apple device.

• Sony XPERIA 1 V (XQ-DQ62, XQ-DQ54, SOG-10)
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC
• 12GB RAM (All units)
• 256GB Storage (All units)
• Stock Android 15 ROM (All units)

Time active: 2025-06-07 (DQ62) / 2025-08-10 (SOG-10) / 2025-11-09 (DQ54) - Present. Main device status not yet gained.

Yes that’s right, I have three of this piece of work from Sony. Eventually I will probably sell all but one of them. But each of them is bad in its own way. So this is going to be pretty difficult…

The XQ-DQ62 is bought second hand for a decent price and looks basically brand new … but it’s the US variant. And I didn’t know bootloader unlocking are straight up disabled in all US and Japan variants prior to this.

The SOG-10 was purchased with the help from my folks in China, and is supposed to be a XQ-DQ72 (the Chinese / Hong Kong variant), not a Japanese operator-specific model. Turns out I was scammed and the phone is just a SOG-10 with a HK stock ROM flashed on top of it … I guess that explains why the phone was suspiciously cheap. These variants without an unlockable bootloaders are much less desirable after all.

The XQ-DQ54 is bought from ebay and shipped from China. I was fully prepared to be scammed by a Chinese seller again. And lo and behold, I was indeed scammed. The seller never showed a picture of these phones with their screen on in the listing, and when the phone arrived I had a terrible feeling that something was going to go very wrong. I was correct. As soon as I turned the phone on I noticed insane level of screen burn-in on the OLED. The navigation buttons are basically permanently there. I’ve never seen an OLED screen with such prominent burn-in in my life. This tells me the phone is likely a demo unit, so it’s probably touched by countless hands as well. But at least this time it’s actually a XQ-DQ54, not something else with a flashed firmware trying to fool me.

At this point you might be wonder what’s so special with this phone that made me so committed to acquiring one. Well, I’d say it’s more about what’s so special with all other flagships that basically forced me into this position: they all have holes in their primary displays! There are a few outliers that have an under screen front camera and thus no holes in the screen, but they all have other deal-breaker traits that prevents me from buying them (most frequently, a locked bootloader).

XPERIA 1 V is also special on its own because Sony downgraded the screen on its successor, making it their last phone with a “4k” 21:9 display.

Some kind of screen swap or motherboard swap is required before I can make this phone my main device. This means I’ll have to use one of them for parts unless I want to sink even more money into this bottomless hole (I don’t). Otherwise it doesn’t look very different from the 1 II … just a standard Sony phone. It will probably not succeed my XPERIA 1 II until that phone completely dies. And when my XPERIA 1 V also eventually dies, I really don’t know what phone to get after that. I hope by then the high screen-to-body ratio fad would finally run out, or someone would crack the code for a better under screen front camera and popularize it. But I’m not feeling super optimistic about it.

• Xiaomi Mi MIX 3
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 845
• 8GB RAM
• 256GB Storage
• Custom built and modded unofficial Lineage OS 20 (Android 13)
• With MindTheGApps and Magisk

Time active: 2018-11-19 - 2023-06-15. Main device status gained 2020-10-06.

Review post available in Chinese.

The first phone I bought after the release of the godforsaken iPhone X, as mobile phone manufacturers started their fixation on big screen-to-body ratio numbers.

When the iPhone X came out, I instantly loathed the notch with a passion, and vowed to never buy a phone with such an idiotic design – a vow that eventually became a curse and permanent handicap on me.

I’ve been using my Galaxy Note 4 for a little over a year then, so I didn’t really need a new phone at the time. I bought this phone without the intent to instantly switch to it. I saw the disturbing trend of display notches quickly spreading. Therefore when I saw the announcement of this phone I thought it’s the exact phone for me to buy, just in case there are no phone without a notch in its screen in the future. This case of unfortunate timing gave rise to my weird habit of having super long transitional periods when I switch phones.

This phone is REALLY heavy. At 218 grams, this phone (and its kins) earned Xiaomi the nickname 半(half)斤(pound)米(mi). If accidentally dropped while scrolling in the bed and it hits the face, the pain is going to last a while. It has an interesting slider mechanism that reveals the front-facing camera when manually activated.

I interacted with Xiaomi’s official repair service in some interesting ways documented in my review post. Long story short I paid to have a smashed screen glass replaced, but I eventually got the entire display assembly replaced for free because the OLED completely died within a month of the glass replacement. While this was not a particularly bad experience (I got something I didn’t pay for after all), it did reveal that their contract repair provider probably had some skill issues. The back cover became trivially removable after the second repair. That became a surprise tool that would help me not very long after …

I dropped the phone into a sink full of water a few days after it returned from the second repair. This phone is not water-proof at all. I immediately disassembled the phone (thanks to the now easily removable back cover) and found its internals dripping with water. I did a whole dance trying to get rid of the moisture and it apparently worked, because the phone somehow survived the ordeal and kept working for years after that.

The phone was given to my parents in 2023. It probably still make a fantastic daily driver in 2026 … if it didn’t die towards the end of 2025. It started boot looping one day randomly, and wiping all user data did nothing to fix it. More recently it would be able to boot into Android again, but still throwing random errors that I’ve never seen before. The phone’s flash memory is probably dying, and likely not worthy of fixing at all.

The phone was locally referred to using its codename, “perseus”.

• Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Duos (SM-N9100)
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 805
• 3GB RAM
• 16GB Storage
• Custom built and modded unofficial Lineage OS 17 (Android 10)
• With MindTheGApps and Magisk

Time active: 2017-03-08 - 2020-10-06.

I wanted to liberate myself from the Mi MAX that I didn’t ask for. So I purchased this phone for cheap, mostly because it was obsolete by 2 generations when I bought it. Samsung’s latest piece of work at the time was the troubled Galaxy Note 7. I looked at that and thought: huh, I want the predecessor of that! So I did it.

Believe it or not, the phone was actually a delight to use, barring the down right hideous SoC that constantly tries to burn itself to death. It has the right size, the right feature set, and almost ticks all the bonus boxes I have in mind. I maintained a custom, updated build of Lineage OS for the phone just for my own usage too, so for the most part I’ve been free from Samsung’s bloat on the phone.

I splashed a substantial amount of vinegar on the display of the phone in 2019. To get rid of the vinegary smell I somehow decided that rinsing the (non-water-resistant) phone under running water was a reasonable choice … The OLED was water damaged in the process and would not hold a steady brightness at lower brightness settings[5]. I never bothered fixing it, as the display assembly was simply too expensive.

The phone was locally referred to using part of its codename, “trlte”.

• Xiaomi Mi MAX Standard
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 650
• 3GB RAM
• 32GB Storage
• Custom built and modded unofficial Lineage OS 14.1 (Android 7)
• With OpenGApps

Time active: 2016-07-05 - 2017-03-08.

Purchased because my dad wanted this phone. But when the phone arrived he decided that he doesn’t want it any more and simply gave it to me. It thus became my first Xiaomi device.

The biggest selling point of this phone is its massive 6.44 inch display. Keep in mind that this is a standard 16:9 screen. So in terms of actual screen area, this phone is on par with modern phones with 6.9 inch screens. Thanks to its gigantic screen, the phone basically has no structural integrity whatsoever. I managed to break the screen twice during its short and miserable life.

Despite the huge screen, the phone is by no means a flagship. It was sold for ~1200 CNY (~170 USD) at the time, which means the thing was built down to a price. It runs a mediocre SoC, has a camera that takes worse photos than a 2008 BlackBerry and questionable build quality. No wonder the phone just disintegrated spontaneously near the end of its life. Although it was still hanging on for its dear life as a completely headless device for a bit.

• Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 (GT-P3100)
• OMAP 4430
• 1GB RAM
• 8GB Storage
• CyanogenMod 13 (Android 6)
• With OpenGApps

Time active: 2015-2016.

Filled in as a substitute for my Galaxy S III after I broke its screen for a bit, but was quickly retired once I fixed the S III.

This technically is a tablet in the traditional sense, making my claim that the Teclast T720SE being the only tablet I had technically false. However I was using it as my only mobile device at the time, so it was really just a hilariously oversized phone for me.

This device was yet another gift from someone in my extended family that my parents didn’t know what to do with. It was pretty cheap (barely above 1000 CNY or ~150 USD IIRC), so I got to play with it.

Yes making a phone call on this device looked absolutely ridiculous. Mine also had a flip cover, adding to the ridiculousness.

Was among my properties that ended up being scrapped by my undergrad institution thanks to COVID-19. If it wasn’t for that, the phone would probably be still working.

• Samsung Galaxy S III (GT-I9300)
• Exynos 4412
• 1GB RAM
• 16GB Storage
• CyanogenMod 13 (Android 6)
• With OpenGApps

Time active: 2012-10 - 2016-07-07.

My first Android phone happened to be a flagship from a prominent brand. The phone was in fact not bought for me initially, but for my mom. She couldn’t understand how to operate the device and decided to hand it to me to “figure it out”.

I still don’t understand why they decided to get this phone. At ~4000 CNY (~550 USD), this phone was certainly out of the price range my parents were willing to pay. They usually shop in the price range that’s one quarter of the price of this phone. I don’t know what prompted them to spend so much on this thing.

I was in high school when they got this phone. The high school I was in wasn’t quite fond of the idea of students bring cell phone to the class. So I usually don’t take it with me to school. But because of my somewhat privileged position of being in the competitive programming business back then, I got to smuggle it in sometimes anyway. This phone accompanied me through countless boring school-bound nights.

I started dabbling with custom ROMs after Samsung pulled the plug on software support for the phone. Owing to my lack of experience back then I managed to soft brick the phone multiple times, erased its IMEI number, and rendered the phone completely unusable on cellular networks. Thanks to the huge Exynos 4412 modding community, I was able to return the phone to normal operation.

The phone fell off my bunk bed (roughly a two-meter fall) soon after I got into college. The screen looked flawlessly intact, but the OLED was completely dead. I had to temporarily go back to one of my Nokia phones after the incident. Fortunately someone in my extended family was retiring their Galaxy S III at the time, and exchanged their phone for some services from me. I used that phone as a donor to revive mine and kept it working for another year.

Was among my properties that ended up being scrapped by my undergrad institution thanks to COVID-19. If it wasn’t for that, the phone would probably be still working.

• BlackBerry Curve 8900
• BlackBerry OS

Time active: 2012 - 2015.

Another phone from a member of my extended family.

You simply don’t see BlackBerry phones in China that often. This phone is likely imported into the country as it shows Movistar branding in various places.

This is a phone targeting business users, and I was obviously not one of them. What I was doing back then was basically connecting it to WiFi and downloading random Chinese apps to play with on its quirky trackball.

Because of its exotic form factor, folks in China sometimes mistake it for some other type of devices. For this reason, sometimes instead of my Galaxy S III, I’d smuggle this thing to school. I read the original text of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four on this device during the boring nights of my final year in high school.[6]

Was among my properties that ended up being scrapped by my undergrad institution thanks to COVID-19.

• Nokia 500 (RM-750)
• Nokia Belle (Symbian^3)

Time active: 2013 - 2015.

Impulsive purchase that happened because I didn’t want to leave a Nokia store empty handed. I was just there trying to figure out what Nokia was up to with all the Windows Phone 7 devices.

This is a cheap device, costing my mom ~800 CNY. It was in fact almost exactly the same phone as its predecessor C5-03, except it’s running a Symbian^3 based OS. The only change that the user can feel is the use of a capacitive touch screen instead of a resistive one. Even the camera is exactly the same: no auto-focus and a terrible 5MP sensor. I was curious about Symbian^3, but very quickly found out that, sadly, on these super low-end devices that cut literally all the corners, it really wasn’t that interesting after all.

I very quickly reverted back to my C5-03 soon afterwards.

This phone was among my properties that ended up being scrapped by my undergrad institution thanks to COVID-19.

• Nokia C5-03 (RM‑697)
• Symbian S60v5

Time active: 2011-02 - 2015-11.

My mom got this phone as some kind of bonus from work. She gave it to me after I did well in a bunch of tests in school.

This is my first smartphone. Some people refuse to use that term on Symbian-based phones, but I simply can’t agree. This phone multitasked much better than any Android phone I ever had, with only 128MB of RAM too. It handled everything I would do nowadays on a modern Android phone. I’d chat with my friends, go to stupid social media sites, check the news, and occasionally play games on the device. Obviously without a GPU, games for this device would never be as flashy as those developed for modern phones. But still, the idea is the same. It even has a PuTTY port!

This is also my first WiFi-enabled phone. Back then cellular data was still quite expensive in China, so having this feature was huge for me.

Despite having a resistive touch screen, in terms of user experience, it wasn’t half bad at all. It felt vastly superior to any other resistive touch screen that I have tried at the time. It was in fact so good that it was closing in on capacitive touch screens of the time.

One thing that particularly impressed me about this device was its MIDI synthesizer, which I believe was a software implementation. I was loosely involved in the “Black MIDI” community back then, and I was very surprised that this device could play some of the worst MIDI files (in terms of size) without much trouble.

I used to come back to this device from time to time, just to experience Symbian again. Unfortunately this phone was among my properties that ended up being scrapped by my undergrad institution thanks to COVID-19.

• LG T310 “Cookie Style”
• Proprietary OS with J2ME support

Time active: 2010 - 2011.

Bought soon after its predecessor was completely destroyed because I was going on a competitive programming trip.

Some sources would label this a “kid’s phone”, which seems fitting considering the form factor of the device. This was the time when UI built around a touch screen started to go into entry-level devices thanks to Apple popularizing it.

Not a very interesting device to be honest. The resistive touch screen became unresponsive pretty fast and forced me to switch to something else.

Might not be actually lost but sitting in some drawer at my parents’ place.

• “NCKIA” or “NCKlA”
• Flip phone with qwerty-keyboard
• MediaTek MAUI with S60v3-like skin
• Mythroad applications supported
• No J2ME support

Time active: 2009 - 2010.

This is the quintessential Chinese bootleg (山寨) device: it has a logo that would either fool you at first glance, or make you laugh maniacally; a design that’s a mishmash of a bunch of devices of different brands; a user interface that reeks of poor imitation, and ringtones so hideous that makes you question whether you want auditory function anymore: If you have ever watched the YouTube channel SMOOREZ, who covers these bootleg devices in depth, you might have heard some of them before and also known the phrase “MediaTek funeral service”.

This device I had in particular, as you can probably guess from the branding, was trying to mimic a Nokia device. However it was clearly not taking the inspiration from a single device, because as far as I’m aware, Nokia never made a device in this form factor. In fact flip phone with a qwerty keyboard seems to be a rare design in general. The only branded phone using this design is the Alcatel OT-808, and that phone was released after mine had died.

The phone was almost certainly running on a MT62×× platform. It had no Java support, but it did support the “Mythroad” platform. I installed a bunch of random stuff on it, which ultimately led to its demise …

One day I was reading a corny novel on the phone.[7] My mom saw me slacking off on the phone. Furious, she toss the phone hard on the floor and the phone instantly disintegrated. Well, that was the end of the only bootleg device I ever owned!

• Teclast T720SE
• RK2818 SoC
• 256MB RAM
• 8 GB flash storage
• Android 2.2
• 7” LCD (800×480)

Time active: 2012 - 2015.

This was a free device given out by my dad’s workplace for some commemorative occasion. It was the average bottom-of-the-barrel, cheaply built early Android tablet. And coincidentally the only tablet computer (in the word’s traditional sense) that I’ve ever had. It was in fact, also the very first Android device that I regularly interacted with.

If you know your mobile SoCs, you should absolutely be terrified when you see “RK”, because it was a Rockchip. The performance of this thing was abysmal. The LCD was incredibly washed out, and it was a crappy resistive touch screen. The speaker sounded like a tin can. All this added up to a device that was barely usable.

The traumatic user experience wasn’t the reason why I never owned another tablet computer since though. I just find the form factor awkward: too big to be used as a phone, too small to do anything productive (for what I do anyway), and also lacks the proper input device: a keyboard, that is. No I was using the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 as a phone, so shush.

The device randomly started bootlooping in 2015 and was scrapped since. I still play a game preloaded on this device (Robo defense) on my modern Android devices from time to time though.

• Raspberry Pi 4B
• BCM2711 SoC
• 4GB RAM
• 32GB Micro SD Card
• Raspberry Pi OS testing aarch64

Time active: 2019 - Present.

My first Pi 4B. This was once running the wireless network for my family. Currently sitting at my parent’s home serving as a remote access gateway for me.

• Raspberry Pi 4B
• BCM2711 SoC
• 8GB RAM
• 64GB Micro SD Card
• Arch Linux ARM aarch64

Time active: 2023 - Present.

Bought soon after the 8GB model became availble.

Runs a private video surveillance system. It also supplies power to a Pico that’s running an http service that controls a window A/C via an IR LED tacked directly onto its receiver window. Otherwise nothing special really.

• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• BCM2835 SoC
• 512MB RAM
• 16GB Micro SD Card
• Raspberry Pi OS testing armhf

Time active: 2023 - Present.

Ironically my lowest-tier Pi is running the most complex application. It has a few peripherals connected to it (a temperature / humidity sensor, an RTC module, an ambient light sensor, and a 128×32 monochrome OLED display). It serves as a small digital gadget that shows me various information on its screen, a thermostat for the air conditioning system, and a remote gateway for the my private network when nothing else is powered on.

It consumes ~0.5W constantly measured at the USB cable. Not the best – I could easily reduce this by another 10% by simply desoldering all the power LEDs on the sensor boards that I’m currently covering with black electric tape anyway, but power usage is definitely one of the reason I used a Pi Zero.

• Raspberry Pi 5B
• BCM2712 SoC
• 8GB RAM
• 256GB Kingston OM3PDP3256B SSD ^*
• Raspberry Pi OS testing aarch64

Time active: 2023 - Present.

Bought because I wanted to find out how plausible is their claim that this thing can be used for general purpose desktop computing. My assessment was … honestly, just no. Even at the price I bought it for ($80, which is less than half of what it costs in 2026 …), you’d be better off if you just pick up some random used laptop at your favorite marketplace.

Currently runs a bunch of not-so-important services on my local network. It received the stock NVMe drive from my Steam deck after I upgraded the disk in that thing.

• Raspberry Pi CM5
• BCM2712 SoC
• 16GB RAM
• 32GB eMMC
• WaveShare CM5 carrier board
• Raspberry Pi OS testing aarch64

Time active: 2025 - Present.

Was 130 USD when I bought it. Now it sells for 325 USD mid-2026.

Bought after the announcement of the 16GB RAM variants basically without any justifiable reason whatsoever. Like who’s going to ever need 16GB of RAM in a project powered by a single board computer?

Not me, it turns out. I use this to play with the SBC aspect of the Pi 5 since my Pi-5-proper was stranded as a server. It runs some silly lighting effect in my room (that’s off most of the time anyway), and I also use it to play around with hardware sensors. All of these tasks can be done on a cheap Pi Zero by the way.

• Netgear RAX120v2
• OpenWRT snapshot
• AP Name (5 GHz): Nidificans🪿
• AP Name (2.4 GHz): Nidificans🐦‍⬛

Time active: 2025 - Present.

The hostname means “nest-building”. Bought second-hand specifically to be flashed with OpenWRT.

Has UART serial cables sticking out its side because of a stupid incident.

I flashed the router as soon as I received it. For a very long time it would randomly reboot due to the WiFi driver crashing every few hours. Basically the thing was so unstable that I’ve never seen an uptime greater than a day. I tried a bunch of things, different OpenWRT builds, snapshots, the earliest experimental builds, all versions of the wireless firmware that I could find, the NSS fork … pretty much everything I can think of. Nothing worked. Eventually I decided to check if the problem is also present in the stock OS. So I flashed it back to its stock firmware, but instantly found the stock firmware nauseating and reverted to OpenWRT as soon as I skipped the initial setup. To my great astonishment, this was what fixed it. These random reboots never came back since.

I don’t really run any fancy network setup on this thing.

• Netgear EX6120
• OpenWRT 24.10
• AP Name (2.4 GHz): Yucca

Time active: 2021 - Present.

The hostname means “somebody”, and the AP SSID is referring to the agave-type plant.

Cheap thing I got a few years back when I didn’t have great WiFi reception in my rental apartment. It was so cheap that the ethernet port on it is not even a gigabit port.

Runs an isolated network for old devices.

• Redmi AX6
• OpenWRT 23.05
• AP Name (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz): Mason_AP

Time active: 2021 - Present.

This is your average Xiaomi product, or to be more precise, Redmi in this case. On paper it looks like it is made of premium components. But as soon as you crack it open, you’ll find out a lot of corners have been cut. It has no multi-gigabit ethernet, no USB ports, soldered antennas, and a “hope and pray” thermal solution. But it works, and was indeed incredibly cheap for what it does offer. Mine barely costed me 300 CNY (~50 USD).

Currently sitting in my parent’s home providing the wireless network for them.

• Raspberry Pi 2B
• BCM2806 SoC
• 1GB RAM
• 16GB MicroSD + Raspbian on USB → No SD Card or OS

Time active: 2015 - 2018.

My first Raspberry Pi. I heard of these things back when I was in high school (around 2012), but couldn’t really get into it until I was in college. For a while I didn’t tap into the hardware aspect and simply tried to use it as another computer running Linux. And that even worked out to some extent, despite it only having four pretty weak Coretex-A7 cores and 1GB of very slow RAM. I played around with Mincraft Pi Edition and porting some of my applications to Linux on ARM and making them compatible with OpenGL ES. I put the computer into a “case” I made by hand out of a cardboard box. I even did my day-to-day work on it for two weeks. For sure I was using my Raspberry Pi as a desktop computer long before RPF ever thought to advertise their computers that way.

I started playing around with various peripherals a little over a year after I got the board. The first one I worked with is an LED dot matrix driven by a max7219 chip. I built a crappy system resource monitor with it. I also messed with camera modules and capturing time lapses.

Made obsolete by many of its successors. But I’m pretty sure that it still works.

• Raspberry Pi 3B+
• BCM2807B0 SoC
• 1GB RAM
• Broken MicroSD slot

Time active: 2018 - 2020.

Bought because I wanted to see what’s the fuss about this new armv8 SoC. I have in fact played with the non-plus version of Raspberry Pi 3 by that time used by a friend who was in a robotics class. And I was not impressed by it. Still I bought this hoping for some substantial improvement in this minor revision, with a plan of experimenting with 64-bit alternative OS options.

I ran Arch Linux ARM aarch64 on this board through most of its lifetime, and ported much of my previous code to this platform, which wasn’t a lot of work at all. The MicroSD card broke off the board by itself not very long after. It would still boot from USB, but I haven’t really used the board since.

• Raspberry Pi CM4
• BCM2711 SoC
• 8GB RAM
• 16GB eMMC
• Diode delight CM4 carrier board
• Arch Linux ARM aarch64

Time active: never. Acquired 2024.

I had big plans for this. I wanted to gut my Power Book G4, and build a custom interfacing board so that I can run the laptop on a compute module. However under the concerns that such projects might be seen as highly sacrilegious, it was shelved indefinitely.

So now it sits in a drawer on a random carrier board.

• Raspberry Pi Zero 2W
• RP3A0 SiP
• 512MB RAM
• 32GB MicroSD Card
• No OS installed

Time active: never. Acquired 2023.

Back up for the Pi Zero W in case it dies.

Time active: never. Acquired February 2026.

200 USD for 16GB of HBM? Take my money!

Although objectively speaking this is still a pretty terrible card … It will probably never use that much memory, or make good use of the available memory bandwidth (unless you’re doing something crazy).

Now I have two terrible cards from the 2018-2019 release cycle.

Time active: 2023 - Present. Acquired 2023.

My second model M.

My first model M was acquired early 2018 and was a P/N 1370477. That one has one-piece key caps and among my properties that ended up being scrapped by my undergrad institution thanks to COVID-19.

Time active: 2024 - Present. Acquired 2024.

Post and buyer’s remorse.

Surprisingly hasn’t become a dirty mess yet.

Time active: 2023 - Present.

First “expensive” (40 USD) mouse I have used. Doesn’t feel that different tbh. But the extra buttons and the free-spinning scroll wheel feature are appreciated.

Time active: 2021 - Present.

As you’ve seen elsewhere in this list, I can’t live without a TrackPoint when I use a laptop. That’s why I bring this with me whenever I travel with my non-ThinkPad laptops.

I also have an obscure (possibly China-exclusive) predecessor of this product, for use with my single board computers.

Time active: 2018 - Present.

A gift from a friend who was trying to get rid of it when he was graduating. Has a glitchy scroll wheel.

Time active: 2024 - 2026. Model 6555-803.

The first Trinitron CRT I’ve laid my eyes on since 2013. Has a crack in the case and a missing base. It’s also currently my only computer monitor that supports refresh rates higher than 60Hz.

My family had a late 90s low-end Sony TV and used it until 2013, which is the reason why I have some kind of a soft spot for these tubes.

This monitor goes to an absurd resolution for monitors of its era. It can do 1600×1200 at 85Hz. I haven’t bothered trying higher resolutions. I usually run it at 1024×768 at 120Hz, or sometimes 1280×960 at 100Hz. It seems to be a close relative to the Apple Multiple Scan 20, both specification-wise and appearance-wise.

Seems to have a fairly high-hour tube. The display is not super bright even at max brightness, but still entirely adequate for indoors use.

Something popped in the monitor during use in 2026 and it now has geometry issues (mostly vertical) that can’t be corrected. I have thus put this thing in dormant status, with a repair pending. I’m not super familiar with CRT internals and I am actually scared by the high voltages inside. So I guess I’ll either wait my fear to go away and properly learn some CRT repair basics, or have someone else take a look at it.

Time active: 2022 - Present.

A “meh”-tier 4k IPS monitor. Only supports 60Hz refresh rate.

It let out the magic smoke when it was about to reach one year of service and I had to send it in for a warranty repair.

Time active: 2025 - Present.

Runs modded firmware that allows it to read UHD Blu-ray discs. Nothing beats physical media.

Also burns archival discs for me sometimes.