My every travel carries
In my job, I do travel a bit.And when you travel, there are a couple of rules I have set myself and I have learned to stick to. To be clear, those are my rules, and they are very likely not working for you.
From left to right. I do value handwritten (battery free) notes a lot. The great thing about notebooks like this, is that it stores things related to the travel. When it comes to addresses, phone numbers and other contact data.
The next two items of the top row, are just power supplies. However, the last item on the list is very useful. It’s a travel router that has been pre configured on all my devices. Depending how and where you travel, Hotels restrict how many devices are allowed on their network with one purchase. This travel router circumvents that. You select it once, and then you can use all your devices. Depending on how much you want to spend on your router, you often get a neat little firewall as well.
The next row, is basically the essence of my travel gear. Laptop, headphones and a YubiKey that helps you keeping your accounts secure while traveling once setup. It’s probably the most secure you can get these days. I have my laptop configured with Tailscale so I can select the work network I need and connect securely to it without anyone listening.
The rest is fairly basic (the grey bag) with an assortment of cables and adapters, as well as a power bank that is capable to support my laptop if I have no powersupply close by.
There’s one noteworthy thing in regards to the Adapters though: Especially when traveling, you should be mindful where you put your devices to charge. I don’t care if it’s on the plane, taxi or really anywhere else where I might feel the urge to charge my phone, I use an adapter in between.
Why? A while back the ‘O.MG Cable’ made the round in the news- and people became aware of it. Now, these days your phone tells you if you are connecting for data or purely charging. However, given the ‘mythic’ level of pen testing that is going on at the moment, why risk it? This adapter takes away the possibility of any data connection and will just let you charge your device. It costs a few $$ on amazon, and will help you in the long run.
Last but not least, if you are on long flights, and travel frequently- you very likely have watched all those interesting things shows/movies on the plane. That’s where a good old retro handheld comes in handy. These little companions do run linux, and are do run the local emulation stack (RetroArch) and deliver days of fun with your original games!
That’s it, hope there was something useful in for you.