#review

I saw the Hidizs AP30 Music Boy on Reddit and got curious enough to reach out to Hidizs to see if they’d send me one to review. It’s a palm-sized DAP that launched on Kickstarter on 23 July 2026, and it’s pitching itself as a companion device rather than a standalone player, something to clip to a bag, hang round a neck, or snap to the back of a phone. I’ve had it for five weeks now, including a holiday where I used it out and about, long enough to have formed opinions beyond “this is a cute novelty.”

For years I was firmly in the mechanical keyboard camp, and specifically a 60% person. No numpad, no function row, no arrow cluster, just the keys I actually used, in a footprint small enough to leave room for the mouse. A handful of boards came and went, but they all had the same shape: clacky, and a bit of a statement piece on the desk. There’s still a couple in the photo on my now page, left over from that era. Lately though, I’ve drifted somewhere unexpected: low-profile, and further than that (off mechanical switches entirely). I’ve been daily driving a Logitech MX Keys alongside an MX Master 2S, and enjoying it more than I expected to. The original reason I picked them up had nothing to do with typing feel, it was for multi-device pairing. Both can be paired with multiple machines, one over the USB receiver for automatic switching, and up to two more over Bluetooth via a button on the device. Back then I had a Windows PC and a MacBook, and hopping between them without re-pairing was exactly what I needed. What’s kept them on my desk is something I didn’t plan for though: now that I’m on macOS day to day, Universal Control does most of that job for me, no more relying on third-party apps like Synergy2 or Duet to move a single keyboard and mouse between machines. The original reason has quietly become less important, and I’m still using them anyway. The keyboard charges over USB-C, wakes from a light touch on the frame, and is already ready to go by the time my hands land on the keys. The mouse, frustratingly, charges via micro USB (the newer MX Master 3S fixes that gap). But the bigger surprise has been the typing feel itself. I expected to miss the travel, the tactile bump, the clacking sound. In practice the low-profile scissor switches have been comfortable enough for long sessions that I haven’t gone looking for a replacement, quieter and flatter than the taller boards I used to run. The thing I do miss is the customisation, going through keycap sets bought because the key profile (obviously XDA is the best key profile) or key legend caught my eye. There’s no equivalent here, same slab of keys every day. None of those old purchases were extravagant on their own, but it added up over years in a way I didn’t notice until I totalled it up. This one, by contrast, was one purchase: £96 back in 2023, and that’s been it since. Old habits die hard, mind you, the numpad sits there on the right collecting dust, a little monument to a decade of telling people I didn’t need one. I don’t think I’m done with mechanical keyboards for good, but for the keyboard I reach for every day, low-profile and boring-in-a-good-way has won out, for now.

Between March 2011 and October 2021 I backed 19 Kickstarter projects, spending £386 and $565 across the lot. Here they all are, in order, with what became of each. March 2011 Minecraft: The Story of Mojang $30filmstandalone My first ever Kickstarter was 2 Player Productions’ documentary about Mojang’s first year. It delivered in late 2012, and I took the DVD tier, so my name is in the credits. I no longer own anything that can play the disc, but it’s a neat thing to have. On launch day 2PP uploaded the film to The Pirate Bay themselves, asking people to buy it if they could rather than pretend piracy wasn’t going to happen, and it went free on YouTube the following year. January 2013 GCW-Zero $155consolestandalone An open-source Linux retro handheld built around the Ingenic JZ4770, pitched as the spiritual successor to the Dingoo, by Justin Barwick (a Dingoonity regular). It delivered in 2013, but the shipping was a mess. We hosted the official GCW Zero subforum on Dingoonity, and it turned into a wall of “where’s my order?” posts despite us having nothing to do with fulfilment. I still have mine. It was underwhelming: by the time it arrived I had countless other devices that did the same job, often better. The community software carried it, but the hardware itself was nothing special. March 2013 Sweetbox II £32accessoryraspberry-pi A case for the Raspberry Pi. It arrived, but it fit an old model of Pi, so it stopped being useful fairly quickly. I’ve had better cases since, and these days I’d just 3D print an equivalent if I needed one. July 2013 Fairywren £50diyraspberry-pi A mini-ITX baseboard for the Raspberry Pi. It arrived. I never used it. I had aspirations and never got round to it (ADHD caveman brain). September 2013 RFIDler £24diystandalone A software-defined RFID reader, writer and emulator. It arrived, and I never worked out a good use for it. Writable RFID tags got cheap enough to buy and write straight from my phone, so I never needed it. I’ve got a backburner idea to make custom Tonies for the kids’ Toniebox, but they’ll probably grow up before I get to it. November 2013 Kano $120diyraspberry-pi A build-it-yourself computer kit wrapped around a Raspberry Pi, aimed at teaching kids to assemble and code. It delivered in 2014, a couple of months late, which for hardware is nothing. It seemed like a nice bit of kit, so I gave it to a nephew that Christmas. As far as I know the bright orange keyboard is still going strong. Kano itself became a real London company, raising around $45 million, doing the Harry Potter coding wand and a Windows machine with Microsoft, before drifting away from Pi kits entirely into Stem consumer audio (the Kanye West Stem Player) and splitting into two companies in 2023. March 2014 Planets³ $20videogamestandalone A voxel-based open-world RPG. It half delivered. Renamed Stellar Overload, it reached Steam early access, but Cubical Drift went bankrupt around 2018 and pulled it from sale unfinished. Backers were left with a Steam key for a dead game. I can’t even remember playing it. April 2014 LAST LIFE $15videogamestandalone A sci-fi noir adventure about investigating your own murder on Mars, with Double Fine attached as publisher. It never came out. Double Fine dropped it, the creator kept expanding the scope, the money ran out, and it ended up sitting unfinished on his hard drives. A complete write-off. June 2014 MyPifi LED board £6diyraspberry-pi An LED board kit for the Raspberry Pi. I remember soldering it together. I couldn’t tell you where it is now. June 2014 TerraTech £10videogamestandalone Physics-based vehicle construction and combat from Payload Studios. This one delivered properly. It left early access as a full release in 2018 and is still a supported game. I have no memory of playing it. November 2014 Espruino Pico £17diyespruino JavaScript on a USB stick, and the first of four things I backed from Gordon Williams at Espruino. He’s a local creator and the campaigns were always fun to back and tinker with, so once I’d backed one I kept coming back. It delivered, as all of his did. August 2015 The imossi N1 wallet £29accessorystandalone An RFID-protected wallet. I used it for about six years. These days I’ve got a MagSafe card holder on the back of my phone and mostly pay by contactless, so it’s retired. November 2015 Tingbot £50diyraspberry-pi A Raspberry Pi gadget with a screen, meant to make the Pi fun to build on. It delivered and I got into it for a bit, but in the end I needed the Pi for another project. It’s still in parts in my parts bin. I’d love to get it running again, but I don’t think the software stack is supported any more. December 2015 Pine A64 $41diystandalone A cheap 64-bit single-board computer pitched as a Raspberry Pi rival. It arrived barebones, the OS images weren’t great, and I already had Pis that did the job, so it was in a drawer before long. The company stuck around where most “Pi killers” didn’t, and Pine64 went on to make the Pinebook, PinePhone, PineTime and a line of RISC-V boards. The thing of theirs I actually use is the Pinecil, a USB-C soldering iron I bought later and still reach for often. July 2016 Puck.js £47 for twodiyespruino Gordon’s Bluetooth beacon, again running Espruino’s JavaScript. I spent proper time with these, contributing to a media-control script, nextSongPuck, and actually used it. August 2016 The Superbook $164accessorystandalone A laptop shell that turned an Android phone into a laptop, from Andromium, later Sentio. It raised nearly $3 million, one of the biggest hardware campaigns on Kickstarter at the time, then unravelled. They shipped about 75% of units before running out of money around 2019, with a distributor allegedly making off with $300,000 of inventory. Mine did arrive, after a very long wait, and it completely missed the mark. A 2016-era Android phone driving a laptop shell was beaten by any number of cheap old laptops, several of which I now own. I’ve still got the sheet of keyboard legend stickers and the Sentio-branded sleeve. The Superbook itself, I couldn’t tell you where it is. November 2019 Bangle.js £46wearableespruino Gordon’s hackable smartwatch. JavaScript on a watch (yes please, in principle). I wore it and gave it a proper go, but it was chunky and the software side was a bit of a bodge, so I went back to a better-supported watch of the time, a Pebble or similar. January 2021 Paper Apps Dungeon $20 for twotabletopstandalone A dungeon game in a 3x5 notepad. Delivered, and it still ends up in my bag from time to time. It’s a nice way to play something without a screen, and I’m holding onto it for when the kids are old enough to enjoy it. October 2021 Bangle.js 2 £75wearableespruino The second-generation open smartwatch from Espruino, and the last thing I’ve backed. Much the same story as the first, though nicer made. I bought it mostly to support Gordon. It sits in a drawer with my other watches now (I wear a Pixel Watch 2 these days). I’ve not backed anything since the second Bangle.js. Time and money are part of it: I’ve less of both spare for a bet that might take three years to arrive, if it arrives at all. The rest is the platform. In 2011 Kickstarter felt like funding things that wouldn’t otherwise exist. A lot of it now reads as drop-shipped tat with a slick video, or projects carrying enough red flags that another Superbook feels more likely than not. Almost everything above did arrive. Not much of it stuck.

I’ve had the Xteink X4 for a couple of months now, a £40 e-ink reader small enough to stick to the back of a phone. I’d seen a few posts about it (Khairul Selamat, Neil Brown, joelchrono, and moddedbear among them), so I got curious and ordered one.

Anbernic sent me an RG DS to review. It’s a clamshell Android handheld designed to evoke the Nintendo DS, running Android 14 on a Rockchip RK3568 with dual 4-inch screens. At around $95 (roughly £75), it sits in the same budget bracket as the Mangmi Air X I reviewed last year, but where that was a capable general-purpose handheld, this one has a much narrower brief.

In 2007 I was deep in the DS flashcart scene, cycling through a string of carts. GBATemp threads, firmware drama, custom skins, compatibility lists. By 2009 I’d moved on. Nearly twenty years later, the DS Pico has pulled me right back in. Open-source, built around an RP2040, and around £10 from Chiscart on AliExpress. I’ve bought three.

I’ve had a SNUNMU GK3 mini-PC kicking about since early-2023, barely used. An impulse buy that ended up on a shelf, alongside a drawer full of old drives from various machines and NAS attempts that never quite came together. Picking up a 5-bay USB enclosure finally gave me a reason to use all of it. It’s not polished and it’s not redundant, but it’s simple, flexible, and entirely under my control.

Chrome’s split view tabs is one of those features that silently arrived and slipped into my workflow. I’ve found myself using it more and more over the past couple of weeks since it rolled out at the end of 2025. It’s as intuitive as tab grouping (hold shift when selecting multiple tabs), and genuinely useful. The kind of feature that slots in and makes me wonder how I managed without it.

I’ve gone through a few sets of Joy-Cons since buying my Switch back in 2018. Every pair has ended up with stick drift, and at this point my Switch is running Android full time, so spending £60 on first-party replacements felt like a waste. I picked up the LinYuvo KS42 from AliExpress for around £18 instead.

I’ve owned plenty of Kindles and Android tablets over the years, but I’ve been curious about colour e-ink for a while - whether it’s actually useful or just a gimmick.

Back in 2015 when I reviewed devices like the GPD XD and similar Android handhelds, the whole ecosystem felt half-baked. Emulation wasn’t particularly good yet, the devices came from obscure Chinese manufacturers, the ROMs were loaded with questionable apps, and the SOCs couldn’t handle much.

I sold my HTC Vive back in 2020 and bought an Oculus Quest. Was it an impulsive lockdown treat? Perhaps; but it was time for an upgrade. I went for the 128GB model, and had to order from the German Amazon store as nowhere in the UK had stock at the time. I was impressed with Amazon Prime in this case, and then in awe of their logistics network. I ordered at around midday, and then received the Oculus Quest 24 hours later from Germany at no extra cost.

I’ve just got hold of a Lenovo Ideapad Duet 2-in-1 Chromebook/tablet. ChromeOS seems to have come quite a long way since I last used the HP Chromebook 11 back in 2013. With native support for Android apps and a full Debian linux that seemlessly integrates with the rest of the OS – maybe we’re finally at a point where a Chromebook could be a device capable of doing real work!

Today I’m reviewing the DPVR E3. This is a Virtual Reality headset with a high resolution display, comfortable straps and an experience that’s similar to the Oculus Rift.

The Virtoba S1 is a Daydream compatible controller from China that costs around £15 ($20). Let me just start with saying I’ve got a lot of cheap Bluetooth controllers – and for the most part they’re crap. I hit the “Buy now” button for the Virtoba S1 half expecting this to be the case, but I was quite happily wrong.

The GPD Pocket is a 7” Ultra-mobile PC that at first glance resembles a shrunken Apple Laptop, but it’s metal unibody exterior is where the similarities end.

I’ve been using Good Reads lately to track what I’m reading (mostly sci-fi and dystopian), and this week I’ve been reading my first suggestion from Good Reads: Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Time”. So far I’m hooked. This is a great take on some common themes. As usual I can’t help but thinking “This would make an awesome movie” after each chapter. Synopsis: A race for survival among the stars… Humanity’s last survivors escaped earth’s ruins to find a new home. But when they find it, can their desperation overcome its dangers? WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind’s worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth? Soo yeah. Worth reading. Follow-up To follow-up. I finished this. It’s an awesome book. I have recommended it to others. Even my wife is reading it, and she typically loathes sci-fi books and spiders!

I bought an HTC Vive last November (a week before the Black Friday sales, doh!) and have spent the time since trying to get the most out of it. So here are some highlights, thoughts and other musings about the HTC Vive.

I’ve been on the hunt for a 10” tablet for a couple of months now. Besides Google’s Pixel C, there isn’t much choice in this area (ignoring the iPad). There are a bunch of options for cheap Atom-based Android/Windows tablets on Gearbest/Aliexpress/etc. I decided to buy a Chuwi Vi10 Plus on Gearbest. For less than £120 what could I lose?

I’m back with another Android console out of China from GPD (after the G7 and the G5A), the GPD XD. I’ve had the GPD XD for a couple of weeks now, and to be honest I’ve been unable to put it down! In short it’s a great device for portable gaming, and it also handles my media needs with ease. This device was generously provided by Geekbuying, so I’ll provide more information about where to buy the GPD XD from the Geekbuying store at the end of this review.

… Well not much of a battle really, rather just some comments on my needs of an Imgur uploader, what I’ve been using historically, and what I’m now going to be using.

Today I’m refreshed to be reviewing a console that doesn’t try to cram too much in to the form factor, but instead tried to focus on doing one thing well.

Earlier this week a new browser called “Vivaldi” sprung up across many of my early-morning technology news feeds. I managed to put off trying it out for a couple of days, due to my being too busy, and agreeing with many of the pessimistic comments that were strewn across the release announcement posts.

A different sort of review today, the Mars G01 Game Pad from Tronsmart. Geekbuying provided me with this G01 to review, so first of all a thanks to them for that. I’ll mention where you can purchase the G01 at the end of the review.

I’ve got another Android gaming handheld to review, the GPD G5A from GamePad Digital. I’ve had this device for a little while now, and have played with it loads. This device was sent to my directly from GPD back in February, but I’ve been too busy with life to write up a review.

Hot on the heels of my last Android device review I’m back with another device: The GPD G7 Quad-core from GamePad Digital. The G7 is very similar to the JXD 7800B, but with a more ergonomic game-controller shape to it.

It has been a while since I’ve had a new portable console to play with (and I’m still waiting for my GCW to arrive!), so let’s ease back in to this stuff with an Android-powered console from JinXang Digital (JXD): The JXD 7800B.

I bought a HP Chromebook 11 as soon as I possibly could when it was announced. I’ve had a couple of weeks to play with it now, so here are my thoughts…

Earlier this year, Jenny got a Fitbit Zip, it’s basically a pedometer, but with the added cool-factor that it can synchronise over Bluetoooth with your computer (and some mobile devices), so that you can see statistics about your daily step count, active times of the day, etc. all online.

The long-speculated consolidation of Google Talk, Google+ Hangouts, and Google Video Chat has finally occured, and it’s pretty spectacular. My digital life is so dependent on Google services that it’s nice to find some cross-platform consolidation.

I’ve been putting this post off, and it has been hard. I usually like to declare my love for a new gadget just moments or hours after unboxing it; I’ve had a lot of tablets over the past couple of years that I’ve done that with, only to later change my mind, so I thought I’d use the Nexus 7 for a little while and then splooge about how much I love it, here on my blog.

I decided to buy an Android-powered set top box because my Apple TV 1 didn’t cut it for playing HD media, and I find it inconvenient to hook my MacBook up to the TV everytime I want to watch some HD media.

The Smashing Book #2 is a book about web design and development from the folks over at smashingmagazine.com. As the name implies, it’s their second Smashing Book. When the first Smashing Book was released in 2009, I jumped to the chance of buying a copy. I’ve always been a fan of Smashing Magazine, and figured Smashing Magazine in print form couldn’t be a bad thing (and it would be a nice book for reading on my bus commute to/from work each day). The first book talked a lot about coding best practice, usability and optimisation but was riddled with issues, from layout/editing issues (the justified text was unbearable, and it had numerous mistakes), to issues with the binding and over-all quality. On their end of the release I believe Smashing Magazine also had production delays too. The second book is cut from a different cloth in terms of production quality, and article subjects, this time talking more about the philosophies of graphical design, user experience, user behaviour and typography (amongst other topics). The issues of the first book are now gone, with a lot more time gone into editing/layout, and now contained in hard backing, the book feels like it’s a lot higher quality. At the start of each section there are illustrations by Yiying Lu (the creator of the Twitter “fail whale” illustration), which provide a good graphical representation of the subject of each section. This book is less code-heavy than the first, but features a lot of good quality reading material. Page layouts seem a lot nicer and the articles contain colourful screenshots and representations of what is being discussed, which do a good job of breaking the pages up - though from time to time you will find yourself facing a wall of text, which makes it not ideal for commute-reading in chunks. Overall I would say this is a much better book than the first Smashing Book. It’s a steal at the same price as the first, and a great resource for any web designer to have on their desk or book shelf. I look forward to the next Smashing Book when/if it’s released and I hope that Smashing Magazine consider re-releasing their first Smashing Book as a hardback second edition.

I’ve got lots of gadgets. I love gadgets. I’ve got a drawer full of portable games, and have a number of other non-game gadgets (though they’re mostly all able to play videogames!) My most recent gadget purchase was a Kindle 3 Wifi edition. I bought this device after three days of deliberation - quite a lengthy amount of time, given my usually impulsive habit of purchasing things. Since it arrived I’ve tried numerous e-book formats on it, all with great results, tried out the “experimental” web browser, which works very well given the limitations of the e-ink screen, and even modded the Kindle to allow for custom sleep/screensaver images Here are a couple of the screensaver images I’ve made: Unable to recover the image :( If you’ve got a Kindle and you’d like to use these, first you will need to mod the Kindle firmware, using the installers found here - http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88004 Over-all the Kindle is a great device. The screen is readable from any angle, and I find that many people have a hard time understanding that it’s a screen. It’s really nice.