Pointless · Le Voyageur Tech

The spirit-level keychain

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:10:00 GMT

The rule for this section comes down to four conditions: it has to fit in 40 L, pass as cabin luggage, stay genuinely cheap, and be ridiculous while still being useful. The spirit-level keychain meets all four, which isn’t that common.

What it actually is

A keychain, metal or reinforced plastic depending on the version, with a small liquid vial and an air bubble inside. You clip it to your keys, hold the flat edge against a surface, and the bubble tells you if it’s level. That’s it. No app, no battery, no calibration.

Why it’s actually useful on the road

The use case isn’t where you’d expect. It’s not for hanging pictures at home. It’s for short-term rentals, apartments booked for a week or two, where you sometimes want to fix a map, a travel mirror, or a small wall shelf without spending ten minutes improvising a level with a glass of water on a board. It’s happened more than once on the road, and each time, having this small tool right on the keychain saved a scramble for a makeshift fix.

Why I ruled out the smartphone app

The most obvious option, on paper, is the level app built into most phones. It works, and works well. But it requires holding the phone flat against the wall, often up high, with one hand already busy holding whatever you’re hanging. The risk of dropping the phone isn’t theoretical. It’s exactly what this keychain avoids, by freeing up both hands.

Why I ruled out the tool-format level

A classic spirit level, in a DIY-tool format, is more precise on paper. But it doesn’t fit on a keychain: it’s one more object to store, with its own bulk and its own risk of getting lost at the bottom of a bag. For a use this occasional, the extra precision doesn’t justify the bulk.

What I can’t guarantee

I haven’t compared the bubble’s precision against a lab-calibrated reference level. For the intended use, hanging a frame roughly straight in a rental living room for a week, any gap doesn’t matter in practice. But I can’t put a number on it. I also have no data on how the object holds up to repeated shocks from being carried on a keyring for months.

The section’s verdict

Defensible, not indispensable. A spirit-level keychain doesn’t change a trip, but it saves a solid ten minutes of improvising every time a wall shows up. That’s exactly the level of usefulness this section is meant to celebrate: ridiculous to describe out loud, reasonable once it’s in your hand.

The UV sterilizer and its four competitors

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the shared kitchen of the building where I rent a room, a guy put his phone in a white box the size of a paperback. He closed the lid. A blue line lit up on the side. He went to make coffee, came back, and took his phone.

The gesture was calm and confident. Neither of us knew what had happened inside the box.

What I won’t write

That it works. Or that it doesn’t.

Both sentences require the same thing: a study, with a date, a protocol, and a sample. I have neither, and an unsourced reassuring or mocking statement would be exactly what this site calls out everywhere else. The rule is in what I refuse to do.

What I can do is open five listings. What they don’t state is the real surprise.

The three rigid boxes

Three of the five candidates are hinged boxes, two of which also add wireless charging.

Volume, precisely. A forty-litre bag has no constant space. Everything that goes in accepts being squashed, rolled, slid between two soft things. A hinged box refuses that deal. It demands its full shape every day, including the days it isn’t used.

They also need power. And wireless charging, I already carry that in a form that weighs about as much as a pack of gum.

The two soft-sided pouches

These clear the first condition. A pouch rolls up, slides against the side of the bag, and costs nothing when it’s not in use.

They stumble on the second. A UV emitter doesn’t run without power, and power is counted in outlets. I once spent a full day of connections with a single outlet, in a bus station hall, and it was worth more than anything I could have plugged into it.

The one figure nobody publishes

Whatever the model, the use boils down to one duration: how long the phone stays locked away, out of your hand, unreachable.

None of the five listings checked publish it. Yet that’s what decides whether the object gets used once a day or once a month.

None publish a protocol either. No distance, no duration, nothing on what happens to the side resting against the bottom. I’m not saying these devices have no effect. I’m saying none of these five listings give you any way to know, and that’s my actual reason.

Five rows, five eliminations, and not one that touches on microbiology. I didn’t need to, and that’s what makes the verdict solid.

The section’s filter

Four conditions, all four mandatory.

It fits in a forty-litre bag. The two soft pouches, yes. The three boxes, no.
It clears cabin security. Yes, for all five, subject to any onboard batteries.
It costs under about fifty euros. For the soft pouches, yes. For the boxes with built-in charging, no, and I won’t rule on prices I’m not citing.
It’s objectively ridiculous and it solves a real problem. Ridiculous, without question. Real, I can’t establish that, and nobody gives me the means to.

It’s the fourth condition that decides. A problem whose shape I can’t describe isn’t a problem I can tell you to solve with a purchase.

Verdict: no. On the family.

Two days later, I ran into the guy from the kitchen and asked him how he knew the box had done anything. He thought for a second and told me it beeps at the end. That’s an honest answer, and the only one he has. He didn’t make it up, it’s simply everything the listing gave him.

Eleven hours on a layover in Istanbul with an inflatable pillow

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Eleven hours between the flight that dropped me off and the one that was meant to pick me back up. Transit terminal, no visa, no bag to collect, nothing to do but stay on the right side of a line painted on the floor.

The first hour doesn’t count

You walk around. You find the screens, locate the outlets and the toilets, buy something hot.

I walked the length of the hall twice, bag on my back. Eleven hours was a workday, and a workday I knew how to handle. I still believed that.

Hours two to four

Good, all three of them. Seat next to an outlet, laptop open, headphones on. I even reread two pieces I’d been putting off since Taipei.

The laptop’s battery held up fine. Mine gave out first, near the end of the fourth hour, with no warning, like a light switching off.

The fifth hour, and the geometry of the seat

The rows in this hall come in modules of four, fixed armrests, welded to the frame. The armrest isn’t a manufacturer’s oversight. It’s in the spec: nobody commissions a terminal you can lie down in, and the armrest is the polite way of saying so.

You stay seated. Your body wants to tip over, and it only has two directions. Forward, and your head goes looking for your knees. Sideways, and it meets an armrest that comes up to hip height, never higher.

That’s the only thing I learned that night, and it has nothing to do with any product: a terminal seat is designed to be occupied, never to be left.

Hour six, the object arrives

Two rows ahead of me, someone pulled a thing out of their jacket pocket that fit in one hand. Five breaths. Wrapped once around the back of the neck. Not another movement for the next two hours.

I don’t have better data than that. I never touched the object, and I have no idea how good their sleep was.

What I looked at was the geometry. The object filled the gap between shoulder and ear, the one that neither the armrest nor the seatback fills.

The wrong context

Everything I’ve read about travel pillows evaluates them in flight. That makes sense, that’s where they’re sold.

In flight, the object is mediocre, and I won’t argue otherwise. You’ve got a reclining seatback, a wall by the window, and a neighbour’s shoulder if you’re unlucky and so are they. Your head has three surfaces available, the pillow comes in fourth.

On the ground, none of those surfaces exist. The seatback is upright and fixed, there’s no wall behind a row of seats set in the middle of a hall, and the neighbour is a stranger. The object goes from fourth to first without changing by a single gram.

That’s the shift no comparison ever makes: a comparison ranks products, never situations.

Hours seven to ten

I didn’t sleep. I read, I walked the main corridor, I watched a cleaning crew redo the same square of floor. Around four in the morning, I pulled out my paper notebook and wrote down what I’d do differently. The first line: find something to put between the shoulder and the ear.

Three out, one retained, and I’ll be honest: it wins because its listing promises three objects in one pouch while the others state nothing verifiable. That’s an argument about contents, not quality. None of these reasons requires having slept on it, a method explained in what I don’t test.

The section’s filter

Four conditions, all four mandatory.

It fits in a forty-litre bag. Deflated, yes. Nobody packs it full of air.
It clears cabin security. Yes, fabric and air.
It costs under about fifty euros. Easily.
It’s objectively ridiculous and it solves a real problem. Ridiculous twice over: by its shape, and because you have to blow into it in front of two hundred people. Real, but not where it’s sold to you.

That last line is what decides it. Defensible, provided you know exactly which hour of which day you’re buying it for.

At boarding, the person two rows ahead of me opened the valve, squeezed the object flat between their hands, and put it back in their pocket. Two seconds. That gesture is what decided the verdict, not the night: what this family sells isn’t sleep, it’s reversibility. An object that disappears when it’s no longer needed doesn’t have to be good, it just has to cost nothing the rest of the time.

Thirty-four degrees in the room, five fans

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Thirty-four degrees is what the box screwed to the corridor wall reads, at eleven at night, with the room door open. Chiang Mai in April, the season when the air doesn’t move and the sky is white by noon.

The room has a three-speed ceiling fan. Low moves nothing. High lifts the papers off the desk and slaps the curtain against the mosquito screen. The middle speed, the one you actually want, produces a clack per rotation, regular, about once a second.

A clack per second at two in the morning is a more serious problem than thirty-four degrees.

What you’re actually looking for

Cooling a room is beyond the reach of a device this size, and no seller really claims otherwise. What you’re asking of it is to make the room sleepable.

A fan that wakes you up is useless. The selection constraint isn’t airflow, it’s noise, and noise is judged fifty centimetres from the ear, over six hours, not for thirty seconds in a shop.

Immediate difficulty: the word quiet appears in four of the five listings checked, including the one I’m keeping. An argument that’s present almost everywhere sorts nothing, none of these listings state a noise value with a test standard, and I don’t compare adjectives.

What’s left is a method that’s actually verifiable on the listings themselves: look at what each object adds to the room. What an object adds is one more chance of waking you up.

The four eliminations

The misting fan. It sprays water on top of moving air. A liquid reservoir in cabin luggage falls under the hundred-millilitre rule, and a reservoir runs dry, which adds one more task in an unfamiliar room at an hour when you don’t want any tasks at all. It’s out on its own main selling point.

The one with a digital display. A screen showing speed and temperature, lit up, sitting on a nightstand, fifty centimetres from your head. A room where you’re trying to sleep is the one place on earth where a display is a flaw. It’s out on its own main selling point too, which is starting to become a pattern in this section.

The one with an 8000mAh battery. It brings lithium along where a cable is enough, for an object sitting next to a bed, in a room that has an outlet. The section’s filter forces me to check its cabin clearance, and I just spent an entire week on the rules covering batteries on planes.

The one that oscillates. The oscillation adds a moving mechanism to the motor, and it produces a breeze that comes and goes. A varying flow draws attention, a constant one fades from awareness. I can’t tell you which motor is noisier, nobody publishes that figure at this price range, but I can count moving parts.

What’s left is the last one. A desk fan that plugs in over USB, no reservoir, no screen, no battery, and no swivel. It wins by subtraction, like January’s clothesline, and I’m starting to think that’s the only trick this section knows.

The section’s filter

Four conditions, all four mandatory.

It fits in a forty-litre bag. Yes for the desk models. The folding oscillating one doesn’t state its dimensions, I won’t rule on it.
It clears cabin security. Yes for the retained one, which has neither liquid nor battery. The misting fan falls under the hundred-millilitre rule, and the 8000mAh model carries lithium, which sends it back to rules several airlines tightened this year.
It costs under about fifty euros. The whole family, easily.
It’s objectively ridiculous and it solves a real problem. Hauling a grapefruit-sized fan across Asia is ridiculous. A room at thirty-four degrees with a clacking ceiling fan is a real problem.

Verdict: indispensable. In a room where the furniture is already making noise, the only device worth having is one you can set down anywhere and switch off with a single motion.

None of these four reasons requires having plugged the object in. A reservoir, a screen, a battery, and a swivel are all claimed by their sellers as advantages, and those very claims are what disqualifies them. No listing publishes a noise value with a test standard, so no measurements table here: there’d be nothing to put in it. What this level of evidence allows and forbids is detailed in what I don’t test.

At three in the morning, I didn’t buy any of these objects, because no shop was open. I moved the mattress thirty centimetres toward the bathroom door, lining it up with the draft between that door and the half-open window, and switched off the ceiling fan. I slept four hours, two more than the night before. A room’s geometry is free, and it beats any device, except it doesn’t fit in a bag and it changes with every room.

I forgot my padlock combination, the night before departure

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The night before I was due to leave, I emptied the bag onto the bed to repack it properly, something I never do, and that the past month had put me in the mood to do.

At the end, I went to lock the padlock back onto the zipper. Three dials, three digits. I’d set it months earlier, at a time when I was sure I’d remember, with a combination chosen specifically because it was unforgettable.

Nothing. Not a memory, not a hunch, not even a toss-up between two numbers. A complete blank.

What I did

What anyone would do. I started at zero zero zero and worked my way up.

A three-dial padlock has a thousand combinations. Sitting cross-legged on a bed, with a podcast in your ears, you can get through about twenty-five a minute once your hand finds the rhythm. The math is immediate, and it’s depressing.

It opened after about forty minutes. I didn’t even have to go all the way through, which is the only lucky break in this story.

Forty minutes. From someone who wasn’t trying to force it, had no tools, and was bored.

What I found out next

This is the part that actually bothered me, and it has nothing to do with my memory.

Padlocks in this family are certified for security screening, which means one specific thing: authorized agents have to be able to open them without destroying them. That requires master keys, and every lock type carries a code.

These keys are sold openly. Listed by their code, individually, on the very same catalogue that sells the padlocks, right next to the padlocks. This isn’t a secret leaked on some obscure forum, it’s a listing for sale online, with a product page and a delivery estimate.

I won’t go into more detail, that’s not the point, and I have no interest in writing an instruction manual. The fact is enough: the object can be opened effortlessly by anyone willing to pay the price of a sandwich, and that’s by design, not a manufacturing flaw.

So what does it actually protect against

There’s one answer left, and it’s an honest one.

The padlock stops a zipper from working itself open under pressure, in the hold or a luggage rack. It also adds a few seconds for an opportunistic hand, and those few seconds aren’t nothing: whoever went through my bag on a January train spent four seconds in it, and probably wouldn’t have pushed further.

That’s it. It’s not nothing, and it’s not what the listing sells you.

The section’s filter

Four conditions, all four mandatory.

It fits in a forty-litre bag. Yes.
It clears cabin security. Yes.
It costs under about fifty euros. Yes.
It’s objectively ridiculous and it solves a real problem. Ridiculous, yes. Real, barely, and that’s the whole point.

Verdict: no. The first no of this section, and it had to happen at some point: a site that never advises against a purchase has no judgment worth trusting.

These questions stay open because I’m not buying four padlocks to test one, and the method is in what I don’t test.

The next morning, I left the padlock in the room’s drawer, with a note saying it was open and that the combination was the one written on it. I never replaced it. What still bugs me, six months later, is having spent forty minutes opening an object I’d bought to prevent exactly that.

The silk sleeping bag liner deserves better than its reputation

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There’s a question you never ask at check-in and always ask once you’re lying down, in the dark, with the lamp already off.

Were these sheets changed?

You don’t ask it beforehand because it’s unpleasant to put into words and because it implies something about the people renting you the room. You ask it afterward, when it’s too late to act, and you sleep badly for a reason you won’t admit to the next day.

The reputation

The silk sleeping bag liner has carried a summer-camp-gadget image for thirty years. A fabric sack you slide into, cut like a human-sized pillowcase, sold next to folding mess tins and plastic cutlery.

That reputation is deserved on one point: the object looks like a scouting accessory, and it folds down into a shapeless thing you have to re-stuff every morning.

It’s wrong on another: the family has changed material and sizing, and what the listings state today has little left in common with what used to get pushed onto kids.

What the listing says

Two metres ten by eighty-four centimetres. A stated hundred and twenty grams. A storage pouch included.

A hundred and twenty grams is half a laptop charger. It’s the only argument this object has, and it’s enough. In a forty-litre bag, the question is never “does this help,” it’s always “what do I take out to make room.” An object weighing a hundred and twenty grams doesn’t call for a trade-off, it just slides into a gap.

What I can’t tell you: what those hundred and twenty grams are worth after twenty nights and five washes, what the stated silk actually is, and whether the centre seam holds up on someone who moves while sleeping. No listing documents it, and I don’t have the object.

Three objects out, one retained. None of these reasons requires having slept inside it.

The section’s filter

Four conditions, all four mandatory.

It fits in a forty-litre bag. Yes, in the volume of a closed fist.
It clears cabin security. Yes, it’s fabric.
It costs under about fifty euros. Yes, for the simple versions.
It’s objectively ridiculous and it solves a real problem. Ridiculous, yes. Real, yes, but not for everyone.

It’s that last nuance that decides the verdict.

Defensible, and no more

I’m not putting it in the indispensable category, and I’ll say exactly why.

An object is indispensable in this section when it solves a problem you’re guaranteed to have. Last month’s clothesline falls into that category: you will wash clothes, whatever your travel style.

Here, no. If you sleep in hotels, the object serves no purpose and still adds weight. If you’re staying with locals, it sends an unpleasant signal I have no interest in helping you send. It only becomes useful past a certain number of nights in places where you don’t choose the bedding.

I won’t write anything about what this object protects against or doesn’t. That’s a health question, no listing backs it up, and an unsourced reassuring sentence on this ground would be exactly the kind of thing this site calls out elsewhere. The rule is in what I refuse to do.

What I take away from this family isn’t the object. It’s that the only question it addresses is one nobody asks out loud, and that the market turned it into a camping item. It should have been sold as what it is: an accessory that makes it bearable not to know.

A room with no clothesline, in Lisbon, in January

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The room was eleven square metres, on the fourth floor with no lift, with a window facing the wall of the building opposite. Lisbon in January means fourteen degrees indoors, humidity everywhere, and no heating, because the country long considered winter to last about three weeks.

I washed two t-shirts and three pairs of socks in the sink, on a Sunday night. I’ve done this every week for years, and it’s never a problem in a room with a radiator or a balcony.

Here, there was a chair, a door, and a shower curtain rail mounted at an angle.

What the room forces on you

By Tuesday morning, the t-shirts were still damp. Not wet, damp, which is worse: it smells like the bottom of a bag, and that smell doesn’t wash out next time. I wore one anyway, because I hadn’t planned on being held hostage by my own laundry.

An unheated room does two things to laundry. It slows evaporation, which was predictable. And it forces you to spread the fabric out, because a garment folded in half over a chair back dries at the edges and stays wet at the fold. A chair back isn’t a miniature clothesline, it’s an object that does exactly the opposite of what you’re asking of it.

What you need is two anchor points and a line strung between them. The whole family of objects covered here tries to solve exactly that, and most of them do it by adding a problem of their own.

The object

A braided elastic cord, two strands twisted around each other, with a carabiner at each end. You hook it between two points, part the strands with a finger, slide in a corner of fabric, and let go, and the twist is supposed to close back up and pinch.

I haven’t verified that last point, for lack of having the object. What I can check is the listing: 1.8 metres at rest, 3 metres stretched, nylon and polyester, no pegs included and none required.

There’s nothing else to it. That’s the entire point of the object. Travel pegs sell in bags of twelve, you lose three a month, and you have to remember to replace them. Removing a consumable from a forty-litre bag counts for something.

It costs about the price of an airport coffee. It’s also ridiculous: it looks like something out of a 1970s mail-order catalogue, and I can easily picture the comment it would draw in a dorm room.

Four objects out, one retained. None of these reasons requires having tested anything: suction cups, pegs, and drilling are all stated by the sellers themselves, and it’s those very statements that disqualify them.

None of these figures have been verified by me. They come from the sellers and are marked as such, which is the only honest way to publish them.

The section’s filter

Four conditions, all four mandatory.

It fits in a forty-litre bag. Yes, the entire family fits in a pocket.
It clears cabin security. Yes. No blade, no liquid, no battery.
It costs under about fifty euros. Easily.
It’s objectively ridiculous and it solves a real problem. Yes to both, and that’s rare.

Verdict: indispensable, and the argument fits in one sentence. In an unfamiliar room, what doesn’t exist can’t break.

These three questions stay open because I haven’t bought the object, which is this site’s rule, not an exception. The details are in what I don’t test.

The t-shirt I wore damp that Tuesday ended up in the trash three cities later, because the smell never left. One garment lost over forty-eight hours of failed drying, out of a bag that holds six. That’s the real cost of the problem, and that’s why a section devoted to ridiculous objects starts with this one.