Tl;dr: Sanctions on oligarchs bad, they forced us to support russias war, woe is me. I am so so so very brilliant. I support the war effort, yet take no sides and make no moral judgements. Do not put more pressure on russia.
Have you looked at Cowon? These are somewhat premium end players, but they are absolutely great. Their Cowon J3 was legendary, was declared the best mp3 player of all time by some outlets. I'm currently using a Cowon Plenue D2, which is also really good.
As someone that has worked with this for a year (pro edition): expose instances of this to the public at your own risk. This thing is riddled with security issues ranging from trivial to absolutely critical and the team developing this has completely ignored them, despite being repeatedly notified about them.
Also, if you start developing on top of this, expect the code and feature quality to rapidly drop once you get past the initial presentation.
I have an Asus Essence STX II sound card. Paired with decent enough headphones, it is night and day, compared to built in realteks or whatever. It is around 300eur, but this card won't become obsolete (unless it becomes incompatible with some other hw). A very worthwhile investment, if you value music, or even sound in games.
Europe's insane willingness to rely on dictators for our energy needs has brought a large scale war, complete with civilian massacres, tortures and indiscriminate bombings to our doorstep. When will we wake up and realize we border an actual psychopathic enemy?
My pet theory is that developers exist on a spectrum between "planner" and "prototyper" - one extreme spends a lot of time thinking about a solution before putting it into code - hopefully hitting the goal on first attempt. The other iterates towards it. Both are good to have on the team.
Check out the STALKER modding scene, it appears to be going through a renaissance right now, with lots of standalones being made. And then there is STALKER GAMMA, which gives even modern AAA games a run for their money with its gameplay, features and even visuals.
Check out Cowon products. Big fan since the J3. Sadly they haven't made anything quite as good since, but the Plenue D2, that i have now, is very decent.
I have an Asus STX II dedicated sound card and it is a very substantial improvement over built in sound cards, to the point i'd never consider having a PC without one. Most people have just never tried anything better and thus live under the illusion that the built in sound cards are "good enough", rather than the lowest common denominator.
Lack of marketing, maybe? A myth that you need to fork over thousands for a complicated audiophile setup to get very incremental improvements over the baseline? Probably a combination of these is to blame.
4 days/32hrs, working at current job for over 2 years now. It's not a common arrangement over here, sadly. I just decided that that is how i want to do things and simply asked for it, when looking for jobs, until i got a good offer that accepted this. I did take 20% off from my salary, were i working 40hrs, but still ended up with more than i was making at my previous job.
I like it, the weekday/weekend balance seems just right.
Korean, not Chinese, but I'm a massive fan of Cowon products. The (sadly discontinued) Cowon J3 was legendary, rightfully called the best DAP of all time by many. Currently have a Cowon Plenue D2 in my pocket.