The Logbook · Le Voyageur Tech

The day I missed the bus in Chiang Mai

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:42:00 GMT

There’s a version of this story I tell often. And one I hadn’t told until now. The first: I missed the 7am bus to Pai because my bag wouldn’t zip shut. The second came later, on a bench, and it’s the one that stayed.

The bag that wouldn’t close

The tuk-tuk dropped me at the Chiang Mai bus station at 6:52am. Eight minutes, plenty of time. In theory. My cabin bag, the same one for ten months on the road, had come to resemble a badly inflated balloon: two zippers out of three, the third jammed on a T-shirt that refused to go in.

I put it down on the pavement. Pulled half the contents out to refold everything. Checked my watch. 6:58. I ran, bag half closed, a T-shirt sleeve flapping like a white flag. The bus left at 7:00. Not 7:05, not “roughly”: 7:00. I watched it turn onto Chang Phuek Road just before I reached the platform.

What I thought I’d learned

My first conclusion, in the moment: I own too much stuff. The kind of lesson you hand yourself after doing something stupid, because it’s simple and it flatters you a little.

Except once I actually counted, there was nothing to cut. Three T-shirts, a wash kit, a charger, a bottle, a rain shell, a notebook. The problem wasn’t quantity, it was folding: ten months of sloppy folding had puffed every item up by an extra centimetre, and a cabin bag doesn’t have a spare centimetre to give.

The real lesson, which came later

The next bus left at 9:30. I waited for it on a metal bench, in the shade of a mango tree outside the station. That’s where the useful lesson showed up, not in the missed run. A well-designed cabin bag folds flat like a book, or it doesn’t fold flat at all. Mine had good volume and a bad opening: a standard top zip that forces you to pull everything out to pack the bottom properly. A panel-loading bag, opening flat, would have changed the whole scene. Two minutes of packing instead of eight of fumbling on a curb.

Since then, I check a bag’s opening before its advertised litre count. The number on the label says nothing about how fast you can repack it on a morning you’re already running late.

What I didn’t verify

I don’t have a scientific method to set against this story. It’s an anecdote, not a protocol. Another traveller, same bag, same rush, might have lived through something else entirely. There’s probably as much fatigue and inattention in this story as there is bag design. That one day changed how I choose a bag, and that’s the approach I try to pass on in this logbook’s gear articles.

The 9:30 bus arrived on time. I was sitting up front, bag closed, ten minutes early. Not a better story to tell. Just the only thing that actually matters on a morning you’re leaving.

Six months after the theft, what I haven't replaced

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A reader wrote to me in June. Three sentences, and the last one is what produced this piece.

You wrote a piece about the laptop you replaced in four days. Is there anything you haven’t replaced?

The short answer is one object. A machine, bought in February in Lisbon, under time pressure. Since then, nothing. Six months on the road, three continents, and not a single replacement.

I hadn’t noticed until I made the list on the table of a room in Batumi, with the paper notebook and the January inventory in front of me.

The headphone case

It went missing in the luggage rack of a train between Porto and Lisbon, empty, with two cables inside it, while the headphones were on my head. The full story is in the first piece of this logbook, and I’m not going to retell it here.

What the absence changed, though, can be measured.

The headphones have hung off the bag by their headband for six months. They picked up a scratch, on the right earcup, against the back of a chair in a Taipei train station. It’s visible, it isn’t going away, and it doesn’t bother me much.

The bag itself, though, has changed shape. The rigid case took up a fixed volume and held the bag open from the inside, something I never noticed until it disappeared. Without it, the fabric sags, and everything small sinks to the bottom. The cable pouch is three times more annoying to find than it was in December. That’s a real cost, one that has nothing to do with protecting the headphones, and nobody could have predicted it for me.

I’d been complaining about that case for two years. Two years of complaining never produced anything. Four seconds in a train corridor did.

The headphone cable

It was in the case. It left with it.

I missed it once, in April, at eleven thousand metres, on a thirteen-hour flight whose seat screen offered a wired headphone jack and nothing else. I had wireless headphones the plane refused to recognise, wired earbuds with the wrong tip, and twelve hours ahead of me.

An absence that costs something specific, exactly once in six months, on a date I can name. That’s the kind of accounting I prefer over speeches about how much a bag weighs.

The padded sleeve

The machine I replaced in February never got a dedicated sleeve. It travels in some generic fabric pouch, no logo, no padding, that doesn’t look like anything in particular.

The back left corner of the lid has carried a mark since May. It’s from a van ride, on a road where I’d set the bag against a wooden crate. A padded sleeve would have prevented it, and I know it.

I still haven’t bought one, because I keep thinking that a case advertising what’s inside it is a label, and that was the one useful thing I took away from January. That conviction cost me a mark on a laptop lid. It hasn’t earned me anything I can prove, since you can’t measure a theft that didn’t happen.

The padlock

That one wasn’t stolen. It’s in the drawer of a room in Lisbon, where I left it in February after spending forty minutes recovering its combination by exhausting all thousand possibilities.

Its absence hasn’t changed anything I can measure. What it removed is a daily decision: do I lock it, do I not, is it worth it for three hours in a luggage locker. The decision no longer comes up. I’m not saying that’s better. I’m saying it’s one less thing to weigh every day, and I would never have gotten there by deciding anything.

The orphaned charger

It’s the only object on this list I removed myself, and it deserves telling because it half-contradicts everything above.

The charger for the stolen machine was still in the bag the day of the theft. It’s listed in the January inventory, catalogued as perfectly useless. I carried it for nine weeks. Lisbon, Faro, Seville, Tarifa, Tangier, Marrakech. An object in perfect working order, with no machine left to power, carried two thousand kilometres because throwing away a working device apparently takes an effort I can’t afford.

It ended up in a room’s bin in Marrakech, in March. Nine weeks and six cities to remove from a bag an object I knew, from day one, was no longer any use at all.

Did the habit hold?

That’s the question I’d left open in January, and six months is roughly the point at which you can answer it without kidding yourself.

The rule that costs nothing held with no effort at all. None of my containers advertise what’s inside anymore, and I never had to think about it, because keeping that rule just means not buying anything.

The rule that costs something has eroded. The backup drive was never supposed to travel in the same bag as the machine it backs up. It’s gone back in three times since May, on days when carrying two bags to work from a café felt like punishment. The security key, on the other hand, has stayed in the jacket, because it only costs me three seconds a day.

It’s not a question of discipline, it’s a question of price. A free habit holds. A habit you pay for every morning wears down, and it wears down all the faster the longer nothing bad happens in the meantime.

What six months of absence lets me say

A reader had asked me in January what I was entitled to claim about objects I haven’t tried. The list above asks the question from the other end, and the answer is the same, which surprised me while writing it.

Six months without a rigid case prove nothing about rigid cases in general. They prove that, on this particular route, with this headphone and this bag, I did without one at the price of a scratch and a bag that sags. Someone who flies four times a month with the same headphones in a checked bag has a different equation, and I have no way to solve it for them.

Absence isn’t proof. It has exactly the same status as ownership: it tells one case, one use, one duration, and nothing beyond that. I can no more recommend doing without an object than I can recommend an object I’ve never held, and it’s the same limit either way. What I refuse to do on this site is written in what I refuse to do.

The only thing I’ll claim after these six months is about me, not about the gear. I have never removed anything from this bag by decision. I removed things because a stranger took care of it in four seconds, because a forgotten combination made a padlock unbearable, because a cable went sticky in the sun. Seven hundred days of complaining about a case never produced what a train corridor produced without me. I don’t have a method for triggering the event, and I’m wary of anyone selling one.

I wrote to the guesthouse in Lisbon in June, to ask if the padlock was still in the drawer. The answer came back the next day, with a photo: it’s there, in the top drawer, next to a charger and a man’s sock. They offered to send it to me, free of charge, the host knows the site. I haven’t replied, and it’s now been three weeks.

No signal, no cash, three kilometres out

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The van drops me at two-thirty on a gravel shoulder, in front of a tin shelter and a sign I can’t read. It’s the right stop. I checked three times with the driver, showing him my phone screen, and he nodded three times, the last one with the look of a man who’d like to get moving again.

The village where I’m sleeping is three kilometres away. I know that because I read it the day before, in Tbilisi, in a room where the wifi worked, on a map I closed without thinking about it.

The phone shows four bars. Sixty-one percent battery. Nothing goes through.

The list of what’s fine

I’ll start there, because it’s this list that makes the afternoon interesting.

The phone turns on, the screen answers to touch, the SIM card is recognised, the carrier name shows top left with a clean four bars. The bag is closed and complete, nobody has had a hand in it, which is not nothing given how this year started. The bank card is in the jacket pocket, valid, not blocked, used that same morning at a bakery in Tbilisi for something warm whose name I still don’t know.

There’s no breakdown. Nothing broken, no dead battery, no blown circuit, no theft. Everything I’m carrying works exactly like the day I bought it.

And I’m still stuck on a gravel shoulder.

What doesn’t go through

The map opens onto a grey square. There’s the road, drawn in white, and a piece of river. No names, no villages, nothing beyond what was cached at the zoom level I happened to look at this area eight days ago, in another country.

The booking app opens onto its shell, with a spinner turning in the middle and a polite message about checking the connection. I know the village’s name and the host’s first name by heart. The phone number, though, is stuck behind that spinner.

It’s also missing from the paper notebook, where I copied down the village’s name and the host’s first name, and nothing else. I never wrote down that number, because a number inside an app isn’t a number. It’s a button.

The shop

There’s one fifty metres away, with a fridge sitting outside and a man behind the counter watching a wall-mounted TV. I grab water and two things to eat.

I present the card. The terminal thinks for forty seconds, which is a very long time when you’re watching a terminal screen, then shows a refusal with no reason given. Second try, same duration, same refusal. The man gestures toward the machine, palms up, meaning it isn’t him.

In my pocket there’s a bill too big for what I’m buying, two coins from a country I left three weeks ago, and a bus ticket. I haven’t touched cash in eleven days. I didn’t decide that on purpose, I simply hadn’t thought about it, the way you don’t think about breathing.

He pushes the bottle toward me and makes another gesture, which I translate as later. Maybe it meant something else. I have no way to know, and I’m not going to invent a nice little scene about it.

Three kilometres

There are two cars parked in front of the shop. I could ask, and I could pay, except I can’t pay. The app that would order a car needs the same thing as the map and the booking.

So I walk. Fifty minutes, because forty litres on your back and a crossbody bag don’t move at the pace of someone out for a stroll. The road has no shoulder for the last kilometre, so I walk on the gravel, stepping aside twice for trucks that had no intention of hitting me anyway. It’s warm without being extreme. It’s not an ordeal, it’s a long-running annoyance, and the one thing that genuinely bothers me is knowing the left strap has started slipping again.

The house is exactly where it should be. The host is there, waiting, not worried at all. The kitchen wifi hands me back the map, the booking, and the number I never actually needed to call.

What it showed me

I had three solutions to this problem, and they were completely independent of one another. A map, a way to pay, a way to move. Three apps, three companies, three logics with nothing in common.

They all rested on the same thing, and I’d never seen that written anywhere, because it isn’t written anywhere. Each one presents itself as a self-contained tool. None of them displays the list of what it actually needs to work.

A network outage becomes a payment outage, which becomes a mobility outage, and at no point does any single object actually break. That’s the difference from everything I’ve told here so far. A broken machine gets repaired or replaced, a stolen machine gets bought back in four days. Here, there’s nothing to repair and nothing to replace. The gear is intact, complete, charged, and useless for two hours.

I’m not going to turn this into a lecture on digital dependency. Everyone’s written one, they all sound the same, and what I refuse to do on this site is spelled out in what I refuse to do. What interests me here is narrower: I had a redundancy that wasn’t one, it looked like a redundancy, and the only moment you find out is the one where it costs you something.

What would have helped

Two lines in the paper notebook. The house’s number, copied down the day before while the wifi worked, next to the village name I’d bothered to write. It takes fifteen seconds, and I didn’t do it, because I had the number right in front of me when I was writing.

The area’s map, downloaded ahead of time. I do that for the towns where I’m staying, never for the hundred kilometres of road between two towns, which is exactly where there’s nothing.

What wouldn’t have changed anything, and I’m noting it here because it’s exactly what I’d have bought on reflex: a second bank card, a newer phone, a spare charger. The terminal wasn’t asking me for a card. It wasn’t asking for anything at all.

The next morning, the host showed me a path that starts behind the lean-to, drops between two gardens, and rejoins the road after eight hundred metres. That’s how everyone actually walks up. It isn’t three kilometres, it’s less than one, and this path doesn’t appear on any of the maps I had on my phone, including the ones that were working.

Three days of rationing under a typhoon

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nothing broke down.

I’m starting there because it’s the opposite of what I usually write when I talk about electricity. The month before, in Chiang Mai, a power strip had died with a sharp crack and a smell of hot plastic that lingers in a room for two days. This time, nothing. No smell, no blown fuse, no warm casing.

Every piece of gear I own worked perfectly, and that’s exactly what made the situation absurd. I had six devices in working order and nothing left to fill them with.

What happened

The typhoon had been announced days ahead. I’m not going to give you weather figures, I didn’t record any and I’m not going to copy someone else’s numbers to sound credible.

What I actually saw amounts to little. The corner store had one aisle empty and one aisle full, and I couldn’t tell which of the two was the signal. The metal shutters along the street came down that afternoon, one after another, with a noise I can still hear. Around seven in the evening, the power went out in the building, and it came back seventy hours later.

I was never in danger, I never went without anything essential, and this article contains no survival story. I spent it in a room doing division.

The evening inventory

First reaction: turn on every screen to figure out where I stood. Second reaction, a second later: realize that’s exactly what not to do.

I checked the levels once, and wrote them on the paper notebook. Not out of nostalgia. Because keeping a list on a phone means turning the phone back on to reread it.

The laptop was at three-quarters. The phone a bit above forty percent, which was my own fault and not the typhoon’s. The headphones showed something around half. The old projector tablet, twelve percent, which took it out of the running immediately.

The clip-on Bluetooth speaker doesn’t have a gauge. It has a voice that announces, one day, that the battery is low, and before that day you know nothing. This is my third unit of that model, and I’m only now discovering that I’ve never known how much charge it had left.

Add up those percentages and it looks comfortable. Split them up and it stops being comfortable, because a percent point doesn’t travel from one device to another.

The exception, found on day two

One device can fill another. The laptop charges the phone through the connector the two share, and it holds by far the biggest reserve in the room.

I only learned this on the second day. I’ve had the machine since February, I use it every day, and it took a power outage to make me look at the most expensive object in my bag as a tank.

That transfer costs something. The laptop wakes up, the screen lights up for a second, and some energy is lost along the way. How much, I have no idea. I don’t have an instrument, and I’m not going to invent an efficiency number just to sound precise.

What I can say is that the device I used the least over three days did the most work.

The signal existed and was useless

Mobile data never fully disappeared. It was there, showing bars. Between mid-afternoon and the middle of the night, it carried nothing usable. Around four in the morning, everything went through.

I’m not explaining this, just reporting it over three days on one phone in one neighborhood. That doesn’t make it data.

The material cost, though, hit hard. My phone drained faster than a normal day while doing far less. I spent an hour and a half the first evening waiting for messages to send, screen on, watching a wheel spin. It’s the dumbest expense of the three days, and I made it with full awareness of what I was doing.

The order that emerged

By the second day, I had a ranking. It doesn’t look like anything I would have written cold.

The phone. Not because it does the most things, but because it’s the only one that receives anything from outside.
The laptop. A tank. Opened twice in three days, and never to work.
The wired earbuds. Zero percent consumed, and that’s their only virtue in this story.
The headphones. Their noise cancellation is a comfort feature, and comfort was the first thing cut.
The speaker. It gives nothing that another device doesn’t already give. Stayed off.
The projector tablet. Twelve percent, a projector, a blank wall, and no reason at all.

This ranking follows neither the price of the objects nor the place they normally hold in my day. It follows a single question: what does this device give back, relative to what it costs, over the next three hours.

It’s a kind of triage nobody prepares for, myself included, even though this is literally my job.

What would have helped

Not an object. That’s the least appealing conclusion possible, and it’s the one I’ve got.

What would have helped is knowing my own numbers. How many hours my phone holds standby on a weak signal, I didn’t know before and only know approximately now. That my laptop could power everything else, I discovered six months too late. That my speaker has no gauge at all, I learned at a point when the information had become useless.

The power bank I wrote about last spring, I still haven’t bought, and these three days aren’t pushing me to decide in a rush. They simply gave me the question I’ll ask before buying one, and that question isn’t about capacity.

These questions stay open, and what I refuse to conclude from a single episode is written in what I refuse.

The power came back a little before midnight, on the third day. The air conditioner beeped three times, the hallway light turned on, and I didn’t feel anything in particular, because all my devices had been off for hours and nobody was there to celebrate anything.

I got up, plugged in the laptop, and looked at the queue: one accessible wall outlet in the room, five devices to fill, and an order to decide on all over again in the same week. I picked up the notebook and started a list I finished writing two weeks later, in Seoul.

Someone asked if I work on night trains

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The message arrived while I was still in Chiang Mai, and I left it unanswered until Đà Nẵng, which makes three weeks and isn’t very graceful. A reader wanted to know if I worked on night trains. And, if so, how I organized myself around it.

The second half of the question is the one that stopped me. It assumes there’s an organization, a setup, some small mechanic I could describe. I’d just spent a night on a train between Hanoi and Đà Nẵng, laptop open on my knees, and I have nothing like that to report.

So I’m going to give the real count, including the nights that produced nothing, because a count with the failures removed isn’t a count anymore.

The count

Three nights of transport since the start of spring.

A night bus in Thailand, between Bangkok and the north. Actual work done: zero minutes. I didn’t even take the laptop out, and the only useful thing I managed was four hours of sleep in one-hour chunks.

A thirteen-hour flight, in April. Zero as well, and there I don’t have a solid material excuse: there was a tray table, power, a seat. I watched two films whose titles I can’t remember.

A night train between Hanoi and Đà Nẵng, last week. About nine hundred words written. I kept one paragraph.

One night out of three produced something, and that something fits in eight lines. If someone wants to call that a lifestyle, they’re welcome to.

What the train gives, and what I’d been asking for

I wrote in February, after a day with four connections between Portugal and Morocco, that I’d produced strictly nothing because the day was fragmented. An hour and twenty on a bus, forty minutes waiting, ten minutes for a connection. The minimum unit below which I’m useless is two hours in a row, and that day never once gave me two hours in a row.

The night train gives you that.

It gives you more than that. Nobody gets on, nobody gets off, nobody speaks to you. No connection to watch for, no departure board to check every ten minutes, no bag to drag from one platform to another. The world goes on without you having to account for it, which settles the question of messages by simply removing them.

On paper, it’s the longest block of continuous time in my entire month of April.

And I got one paragraph out of it.

What it takes away

The first thing missing is dumb and physical: a surface. The small table under the window is taken up by four people’s water bottles. Working on a bunk means lying down or half sitting up, laptop on your thighs, wrists hanging in the air, screen sixteen inches from your face and tilted sideways. I held that position for forty minutes before my right shoulder started to complain.

The second thing is social. A lit screen in a four-berth compartment is a lamp. It lights up three people trying to sleep, and there’s no way to make it discreet. I turned the brightness all the way down, then closed the laptop before midnight, not out of discipline but because the guy across from me had turned over three times.

The third thing is the one I hadn’t anticipated, and it’s the only interesting one.

At one in the morning, I’m writing. At four, I’m still writing, with a very clear sense that it’s going well. The next day in Đà Nẵng, in a room where you can hear the sea if you listen hard, I reread the nine hundred words. Half of it was rephrasing things already written elsewhere, a quarter went off in a direction I hadn’t chosen, and the rest actually held up.

Time was continuous. My attention wasn’t. That’s not the same resource, and I’d spent six months confusing the two, because one is measured in hours and fits on a calendar, while the other isn’t measured at all.

What I actually answer

I could stop here, except there’s still the part of the question I haven’t answered, the one about organization.

There isn’t one.

When someone asks me how I do it, at a table, in a hostel, or in a message, I answer yes, I work on trains. It’s a sentence I’ve said for years without thinking, and it’s true about one time out of three. I say it because it closes the conversation in a way that’s pleasant for everyone. It paints the picture of a life that holds together, where transit hours aren’t lost hours but repurposed ones, and the other person walks away satisfied.

The hours are lost. A good part of them, anyway. What this logbook tries to do is stop pretending otherwise, and the refusal of postures that sell well is written where it belongs, in what I refuse.

Working on the road gets presented everywhere as a lifestyle choice, with photos of laptops open on beaches where you couldn’t actually read a screen. Seen from the inside, it’s an organizational problem with no general solution, only an unpleasant accounting: this month, out of three theoretically favorable occasions, one produced eight lines.

I have no method to sell you on this. If I had one, it would show up in the count.

Rereading the file in Đà Nẵng, I checked the timestamps on the autosaves out of curiosity. The paragraph I kept was written at 10:40pm, about twenty minutes after leaving Hanoi station, while the train was still rolling through the suburbs and nobody had turned off their e-reader yet. Everything written after three in the morning went in the trash. The only usable piece of my night on a night train was written before the night really started.

The Chiang Mai storm that ate my power strip

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It rained for forty minutes, which is nothing unusual here in April. What made me look up was the noise on the roof. Corrugated metal, two floors above, and a downpour that goes from background noise to construction-site noise in about ten seconds.

I was at the table, laptop open, a small USB fan running because the room had been sitting at thirty-something degrees for a week. The ceiling light flickered twice. Then a third time, longer, with that slow-motion dip old bulbs get when the voltage drops before coming back.

Then there was a smell.

What broke

Not smoke. The smell of an iron left too long on fabric, warm, chemical, the kind that takes two or three seconds to tell you where it’s coming from.

The power strip was on the floor, against the baseboard, behind the bed leg. I’d bought it four days earlier at a hardware store across the street, because the room had exactly one wall outlet and I travel with more than one plug’s worth of needs. Six sockets, a switch, a small orange light that came on when the strip was powered.

The light was off.

The ceiling light, on the other hand, was still on. The hallway fan was still running. The reception desk downstairs was playing the same news channel as always. The power hadn’t gone out in the building, it hadn’t even gone out in the room. It had gone out in the strip, and only in the strip.

I unplugged it from the wall and set the strip on the tile floor, away from the bed, because that’s what you do when something smells hot and you don’t know what’s wrong with it. I didn’t open it up. I don’t know how, I have nothing to do it with, and I have no desire to write the three paragraphs where I explain to a reader how to take apart a piece of electrical equipment in a room rented by the week.

What was plugged in behind it

The laptop charger, with the laptop on the other end.

The phone charger, with the phone on the other end, at eighty percent.

The USB fan, running, on a mains adapter.

The carabiner Bluetooth speaker, charging, the third of the same model since I started breaking them.

And the old Android tablet with a built-in projector, plugged in since the morning, switched off, whose projector doesn’t project much of anything anymore but which stubbornly refuses to die.

The backup hard drive wasn’t on it. It wasn’t even in the room, it was in the other bag, unplugged, a habit I picked up in January for a reason that had nothing to do with electricity.

That night, and the next morning

I didn’t do anything that evening. The laptop had battery, the rain stopped around nine, and I decided the problem could wait for daylight. It’s the only intelligent decision in this whole story, and it came from tiredness, not method.

The next day, I did the only thing I knew how to do: plug the devices in one at a time at the wall outlet, waiting between each one, and watching.

The laptop charger: the little light comes on, the machine charges, the housing stays warm as usual.

The phone charger: charges.

The fan: runs, at all three speeds.

The speaker: charges, pairs, sounds the same.

The tablet: boots up, takes its usual old-tablet time, shows its 2019 home screen.

Nothing. Not one damaged device, not one odd behaviour, not one abnormal heat-up, not one unexplained restart. Six weeks later, writing this from another country, I can add that nothing has failed since either.

The only casualty of the evening was the strip, and it cost me about the price of a street-food plate.

What I don’t understand

This is where I’m stuck, and it’s why this piece exists.

One object died. Five devices plugged into it came out unscathed. I’d like to tell you what happened in between, and I notice, trying to write it, that all I can offer are stories.

First story: the strip absorbed something on behalf of everything else. It’s appealing, it explains everything, and I notice above all that I like it. The box the strip came in had text in two languages, one of which I can’t read. I didn’t keep it, and I’d be unable to say exactly what it promised.

Second story: nothing in particular happened to the devices because nothing in particular happened at all, and the strip died of its own mediocrity, four days after I bought it, at the exact moment it happened to be raining. A coincidence like that is entirely possible, and it bothers me far more than the first story.

Third story: something really did come through the line, and the devices survived it for reasons of their own, with the strip having nothing to do with it. In this version, my power strip isn’t a hero, it’s just the weakest link, and the weakest link breaks first even when it isn’t protecting anyone.

I have no way to settle between these three versions. None. I don’t have an instrument, I didn’t see what happened on the line, I didn’t open the object, I wouldn’t know what to look for if I did, and the building isn’t going to hand me its electrical history.

What I can do is note the question in the logbook and go read up. I’ll spend the coming weeks on it, because the question interests me now that it’s cost me an object, and I’ll come back to it here once I have something more than three hypotheses in balance. This logbook doesn’t have a lab, which is already stated in what I don’t test myself, and it doesn’t have a diagnostic workshop either. I’m discovering it’s the same limitation wearing two faces.

The dead strip traveled with me to Hanoi, in the bag’s side pocket, for a week. I carried it across a border and two airports telling myself I’d eventually show it to someone who’d know how to read it. I don’t know anyone like that on this route, and I knew it when I packed it away. It ended up in a hotel-room bin in the old quarter, without me learning anything more than I already knew the moment I unplugged it.

Thirteen hours on a plane, hour by hour

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two hours before, the security line.

The gray tray imposes its own order. Laptop flat, liquids in their bag, jacket off, belt off, power bank out and clearly visible. I put eleven items on the belt and got eleven back on the other side, which remains the only satisfying piece of accounting all day.

What nobody tells you about security checks is that they don’t cost ten minutes. They cost ten minutes plus the thirteen hours that follow, because your bag comes out repacked by a machine and you zip it shut in ninety seconds with a line behind you. The paper notebook ended up under the coil of cables. It stayed there until Bangkok.

Boarding, and a forty-second decision.

Two bags, two destinations. The forty-liter bag goes in the overhead bin, the smaller one stays between my feet. That split looks trivial and it’s the only real decision of the flight: whatever goes up is gone until landing, unless you’re willing to make two people stand up so you can dig out a charger.

Since January, the backup drive no longer travels in the same bag as the laptop it backs up. The rule is a good one and I’m keeping it. On a plane, it means the drive spends the whole day a meter above my head, in a bin I won’t open. The real question isn’t about fragility so much as access: what am I willing to give up reaching for thirteen hours straight?

What’s left is the seat pocket in front of me. A notebook, a pen, wired earbuds, the power bank. That’s the complete inventory of what I own for the length of the flight, and it fits in a fabric pocket the size of a magazine.

The first hour, when everyone settles in.

Nobody’s asleep yet, nobody’s working, nobody’s resigned to it yet. A family reorganizes itself three rows up, someone opens and closes the bin above me twice, and the seatbelt sign stays on well after everyone has stopped moving.

A plane is a room whose furniture someone else decided on. The temperature isn’t yours to set. Neither is the light, and how far your seat reclines belongs half to the person sitting behind you. The only flat surface available is a tray table, and the tray table belongs to the meal.

The second hour, the tray table.

It comes down, takes over everything, and stays there well after the meal ends, until the cart comes back through. Count on an hour during which nothing else can exist on that surface. My elbow lives on that tray. My right knee has touched the seat in front since boarding and will still be touching it on arrival, which is less painful than it is informative: over thirteen hours, permanent contact becomes just another fact of the day, like the light or the noise.

Then the announcement.

Power banks must stay accessible and cannot be used during the flight. I wrote a whole article about this exact point last week, explaining that the word “allowed” on a spec sheet talks about transport, never about use. Knowing a rule and living it are two different things.

Mine had been chosen to stay under the hundred-watt-hour limit. That calculation settles the question of getting it on board and nothing else. It spent thirteen hours in the seat pocket, a foot from my knee, charged, in working order, and perfectly useless.

The armrest’s USB port exists. Nothing indicates what it delivers, no document on board specifies it, and the phone gained roughly a third of a charge in four hours. I’m noting the fact without converting it into watts. I didn’t have an instrument, and a made-up number would be worse than no number at all.

The middle hours, the ones with no name.

At this point the flight stops being measured in hours. It’s measured in service rounds: after the first meal, before the second, between the two. Six or seven hours in one block, lights off, window shades down by instruction, air dry enough to pull at the skin on your hands.

I opened the laptop once, somewhere in that block. Forty minutes. The seat in front hadn’t reclined, the tray table held, the battery was full. What stopped me is that a thirteen-inch screen at minimum brightness is still the brightest object in a row where everyone’s asleep, and a keyboard can be heard. I closed it and switched to the notebook, writing in the dark, hunched over, pen caught in the spiral binding.

The woman next to me had been asleep with her arm on the shared armrest since the block began. That’s not a complaint. It’s an exact description of the space I had to work with.

The cost of moving three feet.

Going to the bathroom is expensive, and the cost has nothing to do with the distance. You have to make someone stand up. You have to take the smaller bag, because you don’t leave a bag open on an empty seat. The jacket doubles as a pillow and the safety deposit key has been in the jacket since Lisbon, so the jacket comes too.

Three feet, and you dismantle your entire setup only to rebuild it on the way back, in the dark, by feel, hunting for wherever you left the pen. On a train, you stand up. On a plane, you negotiate.

The ninety minutes of descent, where there’s nothing left to do.

Tray up, seat back straightened, bags stowed, screens off at some point. You’re awake, sitting upright, with nothing within reach and nothing to do. It’s the longest stretch of the flight, and it’s also the shortest.

After, the line.

Forty minutes standing, with thirteen hours of stiffness in your legs and a cabin bag that has tripled in weight since boarding. The phone has no signal and won’t for a while. The first physical sensation of arrival comes before the terminal and the screens: the air in the jet bridge is hotter and heavier than anything the cabin produced in thirteen hours.

The belt.

The forty-liter bag comes out among the last. I sit down on the floor against a pillar, open it, and finally arrange things the way I want, for the first time since the security line fifteen hours earlier. The drive is there, in its gray fabric pouch, right where it should be, and I don’t plug it in.

I won’t be writing here that paying more gets you a less uncomfortable seat. Half of in-flight comfort advice consists of selling you access to a problem that money solves, and what I refuse to write is laid out in what I refuse.

The notebook page written in the dark runs three lines. I reread two of them the next morning without any trouble. The third is illegible: the letters overlap across an inch, the pen must have jumped during a bit of turbulence, and I no longer know what I meant to keep. It was probably the best of the three, because it’s always the best one that’s missing. I waited for it all the following day, between two jet-lag naps, and it never came back.

What heat does to machines

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The room is on the top floor, over an interior courtyard, with a door onto a flat rooftop terrace. The desk sits under the window because that’s the only spot with any light, and the window faces in such a way that from one in the afternoon, the sun lands on the opposite wall, then on the sill, then on the desk.

The wall behind the desk is hot to the touch. Not warm. Hot, like a stone left out in the sun, which is exactly what it is.

The air is dry and it doesn’t move. Opening the window changes nothing except the noise level. I’m describing a room, a month of March, and an exposure, not a country: two streets over, a ground-floor room facing the same courtyard stays cool all day, and I’ll only find that out too late.

What the room did to the gear

On the first day, I didn’t notice anything until three in the afternoon.

At three, a file export I run two or three times a week, the kind that takes about as long as fetching a coffee, was still running when I got back with the coffee. It finished after a quarter of an hour. Everything else followed: windows taking a full second to open instead of just opening, the cursor skipping, text appearing half a second after I typed it.

No message. No error. No alert.

And above all, no noise, which is the important part, and which took me two days to understand. My machine has no fan. It’s a deliberate design choice by the manufacturer, even a selling point, and I’d bought it in February thinking it was elegant.

A machine with a fan warns you. It whirs, it spins up, you hear it working and you hear it struggling. A machine without a fan has no channel to tell you anything at all. It slows down. That’s its only language.

The phone, which doesn’t say anything either

Around four, I plugged in the phone, a Galaxy S22 I’ve had for four years, which has survived everything, including a theft on a train where the thief didn’t find it because it was in my pocket.

An hour later, it showed the exact same percentage as when I’d plugged it in.

I started with the cable, which I swapped. Then the charger, which I also swapped. Then I blamed the wall outlet, in good faith, because that particular outlet does have a real mechanical problem, and I’d just spent a week writing an article about it.

The outlet had nothing to do with it this time. The phone had paused charging and said so, right on screen, in a notification I’d swiped away without reading, because I’ve been swiping away everything that appears at the top of the screen for four years.

It was sitting on the desk, the desk had been in the sun for three hours, and it refused to keep heating up further just to please me.

What this actually is, and why it looks like a failure

A machine that gets hot cuts its own power draw. Less power, less heat produced, and the electronics stay within the range they’re supposed to operate in. A phone that’s charging does the same thing a different way: charging produces heat, so it slows the charge, or stops it and waits.

These are protective behaviors. They’re built in on purpose, documented by manufacturers on their support pages, and they kick in without breaking anything.

I won’t give you a temperature threshold. I don’t have an instrument, I didn’t measure anything, and the numbers floating around on forums aren’t sourced anywhere. The only figure worth anything would be the one the manufacturer publishes for this exact model, and I’d rather write nothing than write a number I can’t trace to an official page.

What I can describe is the mismatch. Protective behavior looks, in every way, like a defect. Unexplained slowness, charging that doesn’t move, an operation that doesn’t complete. Faced with those three symptoms, a user concludes it’s broken within ten seconds, and the natural reaction is to push harder.

I restarted the export three times. Each time, I was asking the machine to give its maximum right when it had already decided to give less. It held that position for an extra hour, longer than it would have if I’d just gone for a walk. My persistence extended exactly what I was trying to stop.

What I did instead

Nothing clever, and nothing I’m going to sell you as a method.

I shifted my hours. Up at six, working by quarter past, in a room that had spent the night cooling down. Between six and eleven, the machine behaves like it would in Lisbon in February: the export takes two minutes, the cursor doesn’t skip, the phone charges in an hour.

The afternoon stopped being work time. It became time for walking, for the paper notebook, for meetings, for things that don’t need electricity. And in the evening, once the room has cooled back down, I pick up an hour or two more if I feel like it.

I’m not going to tell you to prop your machine on a slotted stand, raise it up on two books, aim a fan at it, or put it in the fridge inside a bag, which I’ve seen recommended in all seriousness. I haven’t tried any of that, I don’t know what it does, and improvising on the thermals of a device I don’t know how to open up isn’t a field where I’m going to start handing out opinions. This site refuses that kind of advice, and that’s stated where it belongs.

The only lever I pulled was the one I actually had control over: the hour I work, and the room I sit in.

On the second evening, I opened the manufacturer’s support page and started typing into the chat window. “Hello, my machine, bought in February, has become very slow for no apparent reason, I think it has a defect.” I reread the sentence. The word that bothered me was “no apparent reason,” because the reason was apparent, it was even written on the wall, thirty centimetres from the screen, and I could touch it with my hand. I closed the window without sending it. The next morning, at half past six, the export took two minutes and ten seconds, and I checked that the file matched, byte for byte, the one the machine had eventually produced the night before after a quarter of an hour. It did, exactly. It hadn’t done anything worse. It had just taken the time it needed not to damage itself, and I’d spent two days holding that against it.

Two countries before breakfast

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

6:20am, Faro. The bus station opens straight onto the street, and it’s fourteen degrees inside, which is exactly the temperature outside. A coffee machine gives change in five cent coins, one at a time, with a slot-machine clatter that wakes up the three people sitting on the benches.

I slept nearby, in a room above a restaurant closed for the winter. I’m heading south with a forty litre backpack, a shoulder bag, and a computer bought three weeks earlier that I fully intend to get my money’s worth out of on the buses.

So much for the plan.

A bit after 7am, heading east. The bus is three quarters empty. I take out the computer, open it, and close it again after twenty minutes. Not because of the noise, or the tray table, or the seat back in front of me. Because the Algarve road winds, and reading a line of text while winding around curves makes you queasy in a very specific way I hadn’t anticipated.

The phone, on the other hand, is fine. Smaller screen, held closer, an angle that follows your head. I do unimportant things for an hour and a half.

Somewhere before Ayamonte, the border. There’s nothing there. A blue sign with stars, a bridge, and the bus doesn’t even slow down. The phone, though, notices something: it switches networks over two minutes, drops data, picks it back up, and shows a welcome message.

It’s the only object on board that noticed we’d changed countries. That gets a five second smile, and then it becomes useful: on every leg after that, it’s that network switch that served as my marker whenever I dozed off.

A bit after 11am, Seville. A two hour wait. The hall is big, heated, and contains exactly one accessible power outlet, behind a vending machine, thirty centimetres off the floor.

I know because I walked the whole hall. Twice. Dragging a forty litre backpack, looking like someone searching for something they’ve lost.

Someone was already using it, a guy in his twenties with two phones plugged into a splitter. He offered to share when I finally sat down next to him without asking, which is one of the rare nice things I can say about bus stations.

One outlet, in a hall with several hundred seats. That’s not an oversight, it’s a decision. They don’t want you sticking around.

1pm, lunch. Two countries since waking up, an omelette and a coffee at a bar across the street, and the first moment of the day I pull out the paper notebook instead of a screen.

A paper notebook doesn’t need an outlet, doesn’t turn with the road, doesn’t shut off in a tunnel, and doesn’t ask for a network. Every time I have a day like this, I jot down three lines in it and tell myself the same thing, and every time I’ve forgotten it again by the following week.

2:30pm, toward the strait. Three hours of bus along the coast. No outlet, no tray big enough for a tablet, and afternoon light hitting the screen head on for anyone sitting on the right side of the vehicle.

I put on my headphones and do nothing for three hours. It’s the first time all day that doesn’t bother me.

5pm, Tarifa. The port is small, the wind is constant, and within ten seconds you understand why this town is covered in kitesurfing shops. The ticket counter, the wait, boarding.

Moroccan border control happens on board. You get on, you sit down, and at some point an officer set up at a table in the lounge calls passengers up in small groups. You fill out a form balanced on your knees while the boat is moving, with a pen you’re glad to have on you.

That detail has a practical consequence I hadn’t anticipated: your passport isn’t in your pocket for twenty minutes, it’s in a stack, and for those twenty minutes you watch the stack.

A bit after 6pm, the strait. An hour long crossing. The onboard wifi exists, advertises itself on a sign, and doesn’t work. Nobody on board looks surprised.

The phone battery is at a third. The computer hasn’t been reopened since the Algarve. The charger is at the bottom of the bag, in a compartment I haven’t opened all day, which is in itself a piece of information about how I pack.

7:30pm, Tangier. It’s dark, it’s mild, and the first thing I check on arriving in the room, before even putting down my bag, is the wall outlet.

It’s identical to the one in Lisbon. Two round holes, same standard, no adapter needed. I carried a universal adapter all day in a side pocket, the way I’ve carried it for four years, without ever checking whether it actually worked on this route.

The day’s tally

A little over twelve hours, four connections, two borders, one power outlet.

Actual work time: zero minutes.

It’s not the noise, not the comfort, not the lack of a table. It’s the fragmentation. A day broken into that many segments never gives you two hours in a row, and two hours in a row is the minimum unit below which I don’t produce anything usable. An hour twenty on a bus, forty minutes waiting, ten minutes for a connection, fifty minutes on a bus, two hours in a hall. Add it up: that’s a lot. Break it apart: it’s nothing.

I don’t try most of what I talk about on this site, and I lay that out in detail in what I don’t try. Nothing here is a recommendation, none of the objects mentioned are linked, and the only ones I talk about are the ones I’ve been carrying for years.

There’s one thing I understood while waiting in Seville, and I wrote it down in the paper notebook before I lost it. I organize my bags so I can find anything in three seconds, and I spent the whole day not taking anything out at all. The only pocket I opened was the one with the notebook. All that optimization serves a scenario that, that day, never actually happened.

I haven't tried half of what I recommend

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A reader wrote to me. The message was three lines long, and only the last one mattered.

You recommend a bag you’ve never carried. Why would I read you?

It’s the best question anyone has asked me on this site, and I don’t have a clever answer. I’m going to take the time to answer for real, because if the answer doesn’t hold up, nothing I write afterward holds up either.

Why I don’t run hands-on trials

Testing a backpack doesn’t mean opening the box and deciding it looks nice. It means buying five or six comparable ones, loading them identically, carrying each for three weeks under equivalent conditions, noting what chafes, what tears, what seals badly in the rain, then throwing away five bags.

I live out of forty litres and change cities every three weeks. I have neither the budget to buy six bags, nor the room to carry them, nor the stock of identical trips that would make the comparison honest. This isn’t a moral stance on consumption. It’s a physical constraint, and it isn’t going to move.

Sites that do this properly exist. They buy their own gear, publish their protocol, employ people, and live off subscriptions as much as commissions. I have no interest in pretending to be them.

What I do instead

I read the manuals. One Wednesday in January, in a café on Rua da Graça where the wifi barely held, I spent an hour and a quarter on a backpack’s manual for a single piece of information: the exact back-panel height, which appears on no sales page and decides whether the bag fits under an airplane seat. Manuals are there to download, nobody opens them, and they contain the usage limits, the operating temperatures, and the warnings the sales sheet never repeats.

Standards, when there are any, are worth more than everything around them. A water-resistance rating, a watt-hour capacity, a surge-resistance class mean something precise. The adjectives on the sales page don’t.

The average rating says nothing. I read the detailed negative feedback, over twelve or eighteen months, looking for flaws that recur across several different people in several countries. A zipper that fails for three people in Europe and two in North America over the same period is a signal. Forty glowing comments posted the same week is another signal, in the opposite direction.

And above all, I eliminate. That’s the most useful part, and the one that takes the most time. For any family of objects, nearly the entire catalogue falls away on criteria you can verify without owning the thing: dimensions that don’t fit in the cabin, no spare parts available, not sold in France, weight incompatible with the stated use. What’s left, three or four options, deserves to be talked about. The other fifty deserve an explanation of why they were cut.

The four words

For every object I write about here, there’s a word that says where I’m speaking from. It’s displayed, not buried in a methodology page nobody opens.

Owned. The object is mine, I use it, and I say for how long. The phone I’ve had in my pocket for four years falls in this category. Even this level doesn’t let me say it’s better than another one, only that it’s held up for four years under my own conditions.

Handled. I’ve held it, in a shop or at someone’s place, without extended use. I can speak to its weight, its finish, how a zipper behaves. This level doesn’t let me claim anything about durability, which happens to be the exact question everyone asks.

Analysed. I haven’t held it. I’ve read the manual, the specs, the published teardowns where they exist. This level doesn’t let me claim anything about comfort, real-world noise, or what the object becomes after six months. The text you’re reading right now falls in this category: it’s about method, it recommends nothing, and it proves nothing about any object.

Cross-checked. I haven’t held it, and I’m relying on public feedback, for which I give the count and the time period. This level doesn’t let me claim any personal experience, and it inherits every bias in that feedback, including the ones I haven’t spotted.

These four words are spelled out in what I don’t test myself and how I choose. Until I’ve bought something from a given family of objects, only the last two apply, and I stick to that.

What I won’t do

I will never write “I tested this” about an object I haven’t tested. Nor “after six months of use”, nor “I carry it everywhere”.

This rule is the only thing separating this site from what it criticises. The sentence is easy to write, it boosts conversion, and it’s false. It’s also common enough that an investigation published in February 2024 by a small testing site was able to document, with archived screenshots, how very high-traffic publications claimed dozens of tested devices on pages where, a few weeks earlier, no mention of testing existed at all (the investigation is here, published February 2024).

I’m not naming anyone, that’s not my subject and I haven’t redone their verification work. What interests me is that the fraud is undetectable just by reading. A page that claims to have tested something and a page that actually did look exactly alike. The reader has no way to tell, unless the author says outright where they stand.

And the money

There are affiliate links on this site, and I earn a commission when someone buys after clicking one. That’s stated before every link, not buried in a footer. The details are in how I make money.

What that changes about what I write: nothing about the objects I recommend, because the commission is the same regardless of which one. What it changes about which subjects I pick: everything. I choose to write about families of objects that exist in a catalogue rather than things you can’t buy. You should know that.

I didn’t answer the reader right away. It took me four days, because my first draft opened with “actually, testing doesn’t guarantee much either”, and that was a dodge. Testing guarantees something. Not everything, but something, and claiming otherwise would have been the first lie of a long series.

What the thief left in my bag

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The next morning, in a room in Graça with a window looking onto a wall, I emptied the bag onto the bed.

Nine objects. Not my favorite things, not the most expensive, not the most useful. They’re the ones a stranger touched, looked at, and set back down, in a train carriage, in a few seconds, without light and without time.

In other words, someone had just drawn up a ranking of my own belongings, using criteria that weren’t mine, and I could read it.

The hard drive

Two terabytes, in a gray fabric pouch that looks like a hotel toiletry bag. Four years of files, three of which exist nowhere else, which is an admission I’m making here once and won’t make again.

It was at the bottom, under the cables. Soft to the touch, no hard edges, nothing that looks like a device. If I had to rank what I was carrying by actual value, it would come first, far ahead of the computer, which is just an object I can replace in four days.

It stayed.

The security key

A black plastic rectangle the size of a knuckle, with a hole for a keyring. It unlocks my accounts, my client access, my email, and the account that hosts this site.

It was in the front pocket. The one that opens by pulling a tab, in a second, without any effort, and that’s the first thing you find when you reach into a bag.

Taken along with the computer, it would have turned this from an expensive annoyance into a sleepless night followed by three days of revoking access. It looks like a promotional keyring from a car garage.

It stayed.

The mouse

A small wireless Logitech, with a receiver plugged into a slot above the logo. This is my third of the same model. The first two disappeared, one in a room in Split, the other on a night bus whose route I no longer remember.

Each time, I bought the exact same one again, without even looking at what else was out there. I should probably be ashamed of that sentence given what I spend my days doing. I’m writing it anyway, because half the people reading this operate the same way with at least one object, and nobody ever admits it.

It stayed, and I understand why. Nobody steals a mouse.

The chargers, the adapter, the cables

Four objects, one line each, because they don’t deserve more.

A universal laptop charger, the one for the computer that’s gone, now orphaned and perfectly useless for four days.
A cheap phone charger bought in Portugal two weeks earlier.
A plug adapter I’ve been hauling around out of superstition ever since a trip where I actually needed it once.
A bundle of cables held together with an office elastic band, two of which have been useless for a long time.

The thief left them. It’s the one point on which his ranking and mine agree.

What wasn’t in the bag

Three objects survived for a different reason: they weren’t there.

The phone, a Galaxy S22 bought in spring 2022, in the right pocket of my pants, where it’s lived for four years. The passport, in my jacket, because the conductor had asked for it that morning and I hadn’t put it away. And an old Android tablet with a projector built into the hinge, my hotel-room cinema, in the small bag I keep between my feet.

Those three owe nothing to any ranking. They owe their survival to a pants pocket, a moment of distraction, and a mental boundary I’d set for the wrong reasons: the tablet isn’t for work, so it doesn’t go with the work gear.

The thief’s ranking

Go back over the list and look at what he did with it.

He took two objects, a computer and an empty case. He left a drive holding three years of irreplaceable work, the key that unlocks all my accounts, and a mouse worth the price of a meal.

His criterion isn’t price. It’s not use value either, which he has no way of knowing. It’s resemblance: does this object look like an expensive object? A molded case says yes. A fabric pouch says no. A three centimetre piece of black plastic says nothing at all, and saying nothing is the best protection on this entire list.

The most unsettling part isn’t that he got it wrong. It’s that so did I. I’d put the single most critical thing in my bag, the security key, in the most accessible pocket, because I pulled it out often and it was convenient. My own ranking was based on frequency of use. His was based on appearance. Neither one was based on what actually matters, which is what I can’t replace.

What I changed

Two things, and neither costs anything.

The security key no longer sleeps next to the machine it unlocks. It now lives in a jacket pocket, with my papers, and I lose three seconds a day looking for it.

The backup drive no longer travels in the same bag as the machine it backs up. It’s an annoying constraint, because it forces me to carry two bags on days when one would have done.

I didn’t buy a padlock, a lock, or a tracker.

I don’t try most of what I talk about on this site, and I lay that out in detail in what I don’t try. The objects above are part of the minority: they’re mine, they have years of use behind them, and that’s why I allow myself to talk about them the way I just did. It still doesn’t let me tell you they’re better than anything else. I haven’t tried the others.

There’s one thing I didn’t do, and I still think about it. I never checked whether the hard drive actually worked. It sat in the bag for six weeks before I plugged it in, because I was so relieved it was still there that the idea of checking it never crossed my mind. An object you’ve recovered isn’t an object you’ve verified, and I got lucky.

He took the case for my headphones. I was wearing the headphones.

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

My bag was in the overhead rack, right above me. Not two rows down, not at the other end of the carriage. Above me. I could have touched it by raising my arm.

Someone opened it during the ride, reached in, took two things, and left it there. I saw nothing, because I was looking at a screen. I heard nothing, and that’s the detail I still find funny seven months later: I had noise cancelling turned all the way up, on headphones that cost the price of a long-haul flight, for the express purpose of hearing nothing.

The tool that made the theft possible and the object that got stolen are almost the same object.

What was missing

I noticed in Lisbon, taking the bag down. The zipper on the main compartment was open about twenty centimetres. Not torn, not forced. Open, the way you open a bag that’s your own.

The computer was missing. A 15 inch LG Gram, in its padded sleeve. The one that weighs barely more than a thick magazine, lasts the day without a charger, and had the worst keyboard I’ve ever used. A soft, mushy key travel with no feedback, on which I typed twice as many mistakes as on anything else. I’d been complaining about it for two years.

And the case for my headphones was missing.

The case. Not the headphones. A Sony WH-1000XM4 packs into a rigid case shaped like a flattened pebble, which takes up an absurd amount of room in a bag, and which I complained about almost as often as the keyboard. That case was empty. All that was left inside was a jack cable and a USB cable.

The headphones, meanwhile, were on my head. They’d been there since Porto. They were still there when I opened the bag in Lisbon.

What he left behind

The external hard drive, in its fabric pouch, at the bottom.

The security key, the little plastic thing that unlocks my accounts, in the front pocket. The one that opens by pulling a tab, effortlessly, in a second.

The mouse. Two chargers. An adapter. A tangle of cables held together with an elastic band.

Add it up. What he left in that bag is worth more on resale than the empty case he took. And the security key, taken along with the computer, would have turned a gear theft into a problem of an entirely different order.

He didn’t take it. He didn’t look.

Four seconds of sorting

Here’s what this episode taught me, and it’s the only thing I took from it.

A guy who reaches into a bag on a train doesn’t take inventory. He has a few seconds, he’s standing in an aisle, and he sorts blind with one simple rule: whatever has the shape of an expensive object is an expensive object.

A rectangular padded sleeve is a computer. He took it, and he was right.

A hand sized, molded, rigid case with a zipper running all the way around is a fragile, expensive object. He took it, he was wrong, and he never opened it to check. It weighed four hundred grams less than headphones, and he didn’t even notice the difference, because he wasn’t trying to.

A hard drive in a soft fabric pouch looks like a toiletry bag. An authentication token looks like a plastic keyring. A mouse looks like a mouse, and nobody steals a mouse.

The sorting happens by appearance, not by content. I’d always believed the opposite, without ever questioning it, because I’d never had to.

What would have helped

Not a padlock. A padlocked zipper on a canvas bag, on a train, signals a bag that has something worth taking.

Not a tracker either. All it tells you is that your computer is now in a neighborhood of Lisbon where you don’t want to go knocking on doors.

What would have helped fits in one sentence I wouldn’t have written before January: stop packing my things in containers that advertise what’s inside them. A padded laptop sleeve is a label. A molded headphone case is a label. They’re sold as protection, and they also do signaling, for free, in both directions.

Since then, the computer travels in a plain fabric pouch, and the headphones no longer have a case at all. They hang off the bag by their headband, in full view of everyone, which is exactly the opposite of what any travel security guide recommends. Nobody has touched them in six months.

I should be clear that I’m not drawing any general rule from this. One case, one line, one thief, seven months of observation. It’s an anecdote that made me change a habit, not a method.

This logbook doesn’t try most of what it talks about, and that’s stated plainly in what I don’t try. The objects mentioned here are an exception: they were mine, and I used them every day. That lets me say what they did for me, nothing more, not that they were good, not that they beat whatever’s in your bag.

I’d been complaining about that case for two years. Too big, too rigid, badly designed for something you wear on your head and never actually put away. I spent two years telling anyone who’d listen that I’d get rid of it someday. Someone took care of that for me, somewhere over the three hundred kilometres between Porto and Lisbon, and I’ve never replaced it.