Night View of the Bund

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This article was translated from Chinese by AI.

It’s been a long time since I last posted on my blog, so I’m jumping in to clear the backlog. The website server has been switched to Nginx + PHP7, resulting in another slight speed boost and, more importantly, a significant reduction in resource usage. If you’re still using Apache or PHP5, you might want to try upgrading—just make sure to test it on a separate server first, as some code may have compatibility issues.

Let me start with a recent story about what kind of products people actually need. I’ve been using Apple’s Time Capsule router for years and haven’t touched routers from other major brands in a long time. Recently, since the TC hasn’t been updated in ages and I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with my current device supporting only 802.11n instead of 802.11ac, I felt it was time for an upgrade. So I bought an ASUS AC87U on JD.com. Upon receiving it, I was surprised to find that modern router products seem to have completely abandoned UX design—the setup interface is an absolute mess. After unboxing and installing it, I discovered that the initial setup requires a wired Ethernet connection; otherwise, Wi-Fi cannot be enabled. For this generation of MacBooks, which lack Ethernet ports entirely, this makes the device practically unusable… And if you only have an iPhone/iPad at home, forget about it altogether…

Then there are all sorts of bizarre, useless features. For example, it displays its own CPU and memory usage—but who actually cares about their router’s CPU and RAM stats? Isn’t a router supposed to just sit there and work reliably without worrying about such things? It also allows you to set up six different guest networks, monitor which websites different devices are visiting, and block specific users from accessing certain sites… Furthermore, it supports VPN connections but not IPSec, allows printer sharing but doesn’t work with Macs, and supports offline downloading but not Xunlei. It also requires an external hard drive, and incredibly, the USB 3.0 port is located on the front… So you end up with cables, power, and four antennas plugged into the back, while USB devices stick out from the front…

So I have to say, for average home users, these features are pretty much useless… Who needs six guest networks at home? Who wants to restrict family members from accessing certain websites…? The physical design is also somewhat odd: the top surface is slanted, so you can’t place anything on it, nor can you stand it vertically. Add an external hard drive, and the whole setup takes up more than twice the space of a TC… filling up an entire desk… In actual testing, due to rapid 5GHz signal attenuation, direct read/write speeds on my iMac to a connected hard drive were around 20MB/s—not much better than my old TC. So I gave up and decided to return it. I have to say, JD.com really does an excellent job handling returns…

Anyway, if you’re here just for the photos, please ignore this random rant. Here are the photos:

Due to certain limitations (such as not having a tripod, etc.), the quality of this set is slightly subpar. Additionally, I plan to use higher-resolution images on the website in the future to better accommodate Retina displays.