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 panel-loading cabin bag that stopped me swearing

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:55:00 GMT

This article wouldn’t exist without the missed bus in Chiang Mai. I wanted to understand what, in a cabin bag’s design, actually makes the difference between two minutes of packing and eight.

The problem isn’t the volume

After an overstuffed bag, the instinct is to look for something bigger. Wrong lead. Volume wasn’t the problem the day of the missed bus, the opening was. A standard bag, with a single top opening, works like a tube: reaching the bottom means removing everything above it. Packing neatly becomes a vertical game of Tetris, slow by design, regardless of how much room there is.

A panel-loading bag works the other way. The front panel folds all the way open, contents visible and reachable at once, like an open book. The gain isn’t in what it holds, it’s in how fast you can close it without thinking about it.

Schematic: on the left, you have to remove what's on top to reach the bottom; on the right, the front panel folds down for direct access.

What I couldn’t verify in person

I don’t have this exact bag in hand. What follows is a spec-sheet analysis, not extended real-world use. I haven’t had ten months to put it through rain, budget-airline weigh-ins, or the wear of rubbing against a bus luggage rack every other day. This article is what it is: a design comparison, not a wear-and-tear diary.

What the spec sheet says, and what it doesn’t

Volume and weight come from the product sheet, for both bags. The pack time comes from somewhere else: my own bag, the one from the Chiang Mai story, cost me eight minutes of fumbling on a curb. A panel-loading bag, on paper, packs in two. That gap isn’t measured on this exact model. It’s inferred from the design, and from what happened with mine.

Why I ruled out the other three options

Three serious alternatives, each with a specific reason rather than a vague “worse.” The rolling case deserves naming on its own: it solves the packing problem by skipping folding entirely, but creates another one the moment the route leaves paved ground. For long-term travel across Southeast Asia, that’s not a small detail.

What I still don’t know

This product doesn’t have a verified reference on my end yet, and without one, no purchase link. Just the name, in plain text. I’d rather publish an incomplete article than a link that doesn’t reliably go anywhere.

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.

What's in the cable pouch, six months later

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I was looking for the white cable, the one that charges the phone. I found it after two minutes, under everything else, and kept emptying the pouch anyway because it was faster than zipping it back up.

The desk in my room, in Batumi, one afternoon in June. Eleven cables. Two adapters. A USB stick whose contents I don’t know. A memory card reader. Two wall chargers. A mouse. An office rubber band that’s been holding a coil together for four years and has survived a flight, four countries, and one replaced laptop.

This isn’t a travel organizer with elastic compartments. It’s a zippered canvas pencil case, the kind kids use, that I never chose and can no longer place the origin of. I wrote a piece back in April about soft organizers, with one model kept and three ruled out. I still haven’t bought one. That’s consistent with how this site works, and it’s still a little embarrassing.

Why this pouch never gets sorted

I’ve packed my bag every two weeks for six months. I’ve taken out a book in Marrakech, a pair of shoes in Bangkok, two T-shirts along the way. Each time, the decision gets triggered the same way: the object is too big, too heavy, or it’s taking up space I want to give to something else.

A cable triggers nothing. It weighs about as much as a handful of coins, it folds, it slides into a gap, and it never competes with anything for space. The threshold above which I start asking whether an object deserves its spot sits somewhere above the entire pouch, and well above any of its individual contents.

The buildup isn’t a lack of discipline. Sorting out bulky items is an automatic mechanism, and below a certain size, there’s no mechanism left at all.

What was already there in January

Four objects made it through the flight, the strait crossing, the spring heat, and two months in Asia.

The coil of cables held together by the office rubber band: the white phone cable, a braided fabric cable bought in Portugal, and two micro-USB cables. One of the two still gets used, it charges the clip-on speaker. The other hasn’t served any purpose in at least two years, and I couldn’t tell you which device it used to power.

The cheap phone charger bought in Lisbon two weeks before the flight. Still there, still in service, it’s the one that charges the phone every night. I published a piece in June about gallium nitride chargers. I haven’t bought one of those either, and the reader who finds that contradictory is right on the substance and wrong on the method: what I write over there is what I would buy, not what I’ve bought. That distinction holds up the whole site and it’s laid out in how I choose.

The plug adapter I’ve been hauling around out of superstition for four years. It got used for the first time in April, in a room in Chiang Mai. Once in four years, which proves the superstition right and every calculation I could have made about it wrong.

The mouse, which I’ll get to below because it deserves its own section.

What climbed aboard along the way

Three objects, three one-off reasons, no actual decision.

A USB-C to USB-C cable bought in Chiang Mai, in April, because the previous one had gone sticky. The length printed on the packaging, which I kept for two days before throwing it out, said one meter. I never checked it against a ruler, and I don’t own one.

A USB-C to USB-A adapter, bought in Taipei in May to plug in a drive a guy in the next room wanted to hand me. The transfer took four minutes. The adapter stayed for six weeks.

A memory card reader, and that one I didn’t even buy. It was sitting in a drawer in a room in Hanoi, next to a charger and a sock, and I took it. I don’t own a single device that uses a memory card. I took it anyway, and if you want to understand how a pouch grows, that sentence says it all.

What never got used

The second micro-USB cable. The USB stick, which probably holds a 2019 presentation and hasn’t been plugged in for long enough that I no longer know what’s on it. The card reader. The Taipei adapter, since the day I bought it.

Four objects out of nineteen, and none of the four ever came close to leaving the bag, because leaving the bag requires you to think about it, and you only think about it when it becomes a nuisance.

That leaves five black cables that all look roughly the same, in different lengths, and I couldn’t tell you which one came from where. I don’t count them among the useless ones, since I don’t know what they plug into. I don’t count them among the useful ones either, for the same reason.

What melted

The laptop’s original USB-C cable, left for two hours on a windowsill in Marrakech, in March, while I worked on the other side of the room. The sheath changed texture. It turned sticky and stayed that way, which turns a cable into a dust magnet and an object you’d rather not touch.

It still works. It’s in the pouch. I kept it in that state for six weeks before buying another one, and I only threw the sticky one out while writing this piece, which makes it the one object all day whose fate was decided by the writing of an article.

The mouse, and what happens when you finally look

There’s a small wireless mouse in this pouch, with a receiver tucked into a slot under the lid. It’s the third unit of the same model. I’ve already written here that I kept rebuying it without ever looking at what else was out there, and I’ve also written that I should be embarrassed by that sentence.

Six months later, I looked. An hour spent on product listings, which is little for an entire category and a lot for an object at this price point.

What I found comes down to one observation. Most travel mice I looked at are rechargeable, and it’s sold as an improvement. On a desk mouse, it probably is. In a cable pouch, a rechargeable mouse is one more cable, one more charge to keep track of, and an object that can die in the middle of an afternoon of work in a café where the outlet is taken. Mine runs on a battery that lasts for months, and I’m only noticing that now that I’m counting cables.

Only one of the candidates I looked at doesn’t advertise any charging in its listing. That’s the one I settled on, at the top of this page, and I’m settling on it for that one criterion alone, which also happens to be the only one I can verify without having the object in hand.

Rebuying the same model was, then, a good instinct. It was a good instinct by accident. Across three units I never knew why I was right, which is no better than being wrong, and I’m noting that here instead of congratulating myself for it.

A word on the third entry above, because the reasoning can sound like a pun. The only kind of storage that actually sorts anything is the kind that refuses something, and a pouch that counts its layers as a selling point is announcing in advance that it won’t refuse anything at all.

I threw three objects in the room’s trash bin that evening: the sticky cable, the second micro-USB cable, and the memory card reader. The next morning, before heading downstairs, I fished the card reader back out of the trash and put it back in the pouch. It’s still there. I have no explanation to offer, and I don’t feel like inventing one.

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.

The current isn't a constant

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The evening it happened, I was working at the table in the apartment I rent by the month. The ceiling light dimmed. Not off, just dropped a notch for a second, then came back. It happened four or five times over two hours, with nothing else in the room moving.

The laptop didn’t notice a thing. The screen didn’t flicker and the session didn’t drop.

The next morning, the small unbranded wall charger I’d bought on the road wouldn’t charge anything. Two ports, no LED, no warmth. I tried it on three different outlets in the apartment before admitting the problem wasn’t the outlet.

What I can’t tell you

That the power killed it.

I have no reading, no trace, no instrument, and no way to know what actually ran through that line while I was watching the ceiling light. I have a twelve-hour coincidence between two events, and a coincidence has never made a cause.

I’m not drawing anything from this about a country’s power grid either. I have one outlet, one evening, in an apartment whose age and wiring I know nothing about. Writing a general statement from that would be exactly the kind of shortcut I spend my time picking apart in other people’s work.

How I got by

Badly, and slowly, which is the most common answer in this section.

I didn’t buy anything on the spot. For three days, everything ran through the laptop’s ports, one device after another: the phone while I worked, the headphones in the evening. It works. It’s just a queue, and you have to remember to move it along.

The real cost wasn’t there. It was that I now found myself watching the ceiling light instead of the screen.

What I’d left unresolved in May

Two months earlier, the Chiang Mai storm killed my power strip. The unit died overnight. The laptop, the phone, and the headphones, all three plugged in behind it, came through unscathed.

I told that story leaving the question open, because I didn’t have the answer and wasn’t going to make one up: did that strip protect me, or was it just the cheapest link in the chain, the one that fails first because it’s the most fragile?

Two months on, I went and read up. The honest answer fits in one sentence. Both readings are compatible with what I saw, and nothing I saw lets me choose between them. A strip that dies while protecting and a strip that just dies first produce the exact same scene the next morning.

It’s frustrating to write, and it’s the only true thing I have to say about that night.

Three threats, and a vocabulary that blurs them

What the reading did give me is that I’d been asking the wrong question. There isn’t one electrical threat, there are at least three, and the objects sold to address them don’t all target the same one.

The brief spike. A voltage rise that lasts a very short time and passes through the line. It’s the only thing a so-called surge-protector power strip claims to handle. It’s also the only one of the three that fits in a bag.

The direct hit. In everyday usage, the term lightning arrester first refers to a fixed installation device, mounted in an electrical panel by someone whose job that is. It doesn’t travel, I have nothing to say about it here, and I won’t be giving installation advice. What interests me is that the word travels anyway. It turns up in the listing for a desktop power strip sold online, and that migration isn’t harmless: it makes the buyer believe they’re getting panel-level protection in an object meant to sit on a table.

The drop. Voltage that sags and recovers, the one-second outage, the ceiling light that dims. None of the four objects I looked at claim anything against this. What handles it is a device with an internal battery that takes over; it goes by a different name, it weighs a different weight, and I don’t carry one. I’m not recommending any here, I haven’t checked any, and I’d rather tell you the category exists than pretend my power strip covers it.

The vocabulary does the work the data doesn’t

Of the four listings I checked, one claims surge protection, another uses the word lightning arrester, a third promises no protection at all, and the fourth sells twelve ports.

None of the four publish an absorption rating.

You’ll find joule figures all over this category, in comparison sites as much as in comments. I won’t write a single one, because I didn’t find any on the listings I opened, and a number with no source is worth nothing at all. An unsourced value is no better than no value. It’s just more reassuring, which makes it worse.

The arithmetic of twelve ports

The fourth candidate lists twelve ports and fifty watts. Both numbers sit on the same line of the listing, and all it takes is reading them together.

Fifty watts gets split across whatever’s plugged in. A laptop alone claims such a share that there’s not much left for the other eleven. Twelve ports isn’t a capacity, it’s a number of holes.

It’s the fastest elimination this site has made in six months. It took no expertise, just reading the end of the listing after reading the beginning.

What I settled on, and what it doesn’t settle

The model I’m going with lists six outlets, four USB ports, and surge protection, in a format sold as a travel charger.

Six outlets is two too many for me. I’ve never had six things to plug in at once, and a desktop object you carry while traveling always drags along unused bulk. I’m going with it anyway, because it’s the only one of the four claiming protection in a format that agrees to be carried, and the choice is made among what exists, not among what I’d like.

What it doesn’t settle: the night of the ceiling light. Nothing I can fit in a forty-liter bag addresses the case of voltage that sags and recovers.

None of these three reasons requires having plugged anything in. They require reading a listing in full, and the method is detailed in how I choose.

No M in this table, and no T. I haven’t plugged in any of these objects, I don’t own an electrical measuring instrument, and I won’t turn a line from a listing into a personal reading. This table compares promises, not performance.

The dead charger stayed in the cable pouch for three weeks. Every time I opened it, I’d find it, pick it up, put it back. Not out of sentimentality. I couldn’t decide whether it was proof of something or just a cheap object that had reached the end of its life, and as long as I hadn’t decided, throwing it out would have meant deciding. It ended up in a gas-station trash can, on the way out of town, which is how most questions that never get settled end up settled anyway.

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.

Six chargers, one day, five eliminated

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I started this article the way everyone does: with a spreadsheet. A power column, a ports column, a weight column, a certifications column.

I lasted twenty minutes. What stopped me was the next column, the one I couldn’t fill in, called “when does this actually matter.” The first four columns all came from the same place: the seller’s listing. Every row in a grid is a claim made by someone with a product to move, and I was dutifully lining them all up.

I took a day in Seoul instead and used it as my grid. Places don’t sell anything.

One note before I start, because the title promises six candidates and I don’t have six listings. Four exist as specific, open, checked models, checked on 11 August 2026. The other two are entire families, ruled out upstream, without my looking at a single unit. They count among my six, and they have no product source, which is exactly why I’m telling you now instead of in a footnote.

7:10am, the room

One wall outlet. Just one, behind the headboard, thirty centimetres off the floor, reachable by kneeling on the mattress.

Two devices to fill before heading out, and eighty minutes to do it.

First elimination, and it’s a whole family: single-port chargers. With one outlet and a short window, every missing port is a device waiting its turn. My own laptop’s original charger belongs to this family. It’s in my bag, it works fine, and it’s the only object in this entire article I can speak to firsthand.

This elimination targets no specific model and rests on no listing. It rests on one outlet and one departure time.

8:40am, the café

A long room, tables against the wall, a floor outlet every three metres. Two customers already have something plugged in.

Second elimination: the four-port model sold with a two-metre cable. The listing advertises that cable as an included feature, a selling point (listing checked on 11 August 2026). In a café with floor outlets, two metres of cable between the outlet and the table is a tripwire across a walkway.

Length isn’t a flaw in itself, it is one here, and “here” is exactly what no spreadsheet contains. I’ve already knocked a cup off a table this way once.

11am, a shared workspace

Large table, a power strip in the middle, six blocks already plugged in and fighting for room.

Third elimination: the hundred-watt, three-port model. Its listing states the composition: two connector types, one of them the older rectangular kind (listing checked on 11 August 2026). A third of the ports taken up by a connector none of my devices use anymore, except one old speaker cable.

The listing also advertises a hundred watts total, without publishing what each port delivers with two devices plugged in together. That breakdown is the only figure I actually care about, and none of the four listings checked publish it.

I’m not claiming to know what this charger really delivers. I plugged in nothing, measured nothing. I’m noting an absence on a sales page, which is a far more modest fact.

3pm, the cable pouch

Nothing special about this hour, except that I’m repacking my bag before heading out, and the cable pouch is open on the bed.

Fourth elimination: the four-port gallium-nitride model. Its listing lines up four technical badges and a total power figure (checked on 11 August 2026). Four ports are only worth anything with four cables to go with them, and those four cables live in a pouch I carry every day.

The charger weighs what it weighs. It’s the cables that add bulk, and a charger gets chosen together with its pouch, or it doesn’t get chosen at all.

7pm, back in the room

The moment of the day when everything charges at once, and the only one where I genuinely need several ports.

Fifth elimination, and it’s the second family: blocks that combine a wall plug with a built-in battery. The idea is appealing on paper. It puts a lithium cell inside an object that stays plugged in all night, and turns my charger into a power bank, with all the rules that come with it. The Lufthansa Group, which I wrote about this spring, has banned the use of power banks in flight since 15 January 2026. An object that changes regulatory category just to save me one outlet doesn’t tempt me.

Again, no listing behind this refusal. A family, a line of reasoning, and I’d rather write it that way.

10pm, what’s left

One candidate. Three ports, 65 watts advertised, gallium nitride.

It wins by elimination, and I’m not going to dress that up as enthusiasm. None of the five reasons for rejection applies to it: three ports rather than one, no long cable forced into the box, no older connector advertised in its listing, only three cables to carry, no battery inside.

Two things I don’t know. Its listing doesn’t advertise an older connector, which doesn’t guarantee there isn’t one. And its power split across the three ports isn’t published, exactly like the other three: that flaw is common to all four, which makes it useless as a reason for elimination.

Why a day instead of a spreadsheet

This is the one article in this logbook where the method interests me more than the object.

A spreadsheet compares products against each other, with rows supplied by sellers. A day compares products against places, and places don’t sell anything. The outlet behind the headboard, the café’s floor outlet, the crowded power strip at the shared workspace, the pouch open on the bed: none of these four things appears in a product listing, and all four ruled someone out.

The limit of this method is obvious. My day isn’t yours: if you work eight hours at the same desk with four outlets under the table, my fourth elimination is worthless for you, and the four-port model probably becomes the right call.

Two eliminations are missing from the table above, single-port chargers and battery-integrated blocks. They’re not there because they target no specific model, and a reason with no source has no business in that right-hand column. They still count among my six.

No M anywhere in this table, and there won’t be one. Measuring delivered power needs an instrument between the outlet and the device, I don’t have one, and copying a listing’s number while presenting it as a personal reading is exactly what this site exists to call out.

These three questions stay open because I don’t buy four chargers to keep one, and the method behind that is laid out in how I choose.

That same evening, I emptied the cable pouch onto the bed and counted. Five cables for four devices. The fifth goes to a speaker I’ve replaced twice since, with a connector nothing else I own still uses, and I’ve been carrying it from country to country for probably two years now.

The number of ports I need isn’t set by the number of my devices. It’s set by the number of cables I’m willing to carry, and I’ve just discovered I had no control over that number at all.

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.

The cabin bag everyone recommends, and I skip

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In a laundromat open onto the street in Taipei, I counted the same bag three times in one hour. Same boxy silhouette, same compression straps on the sides, same way of standing up on its own when you set it on the ground.

Three people who didn’t know each other and had read the same pages.

I’d read them too. For six months, every time I’ve searched anything about cabin luggage, I keep landing on the same figure, delivered in the same tone reserved, normally, for international standards.

Where the number comes from

Forty centimetres, thirty, twenty.

One of these bags’ listings advertises those three dimensions, a capacity of twenty-four litres, and names two airlines outright (product listing, checked on 11 August 2026). The seller is more honest than half the pages recommending it. It states exactly which gauge its product answers to, and nowhere does it claim that gauge applies anywhere else.

This size is one airline’s boarding rule. Nobody voted on it, and another airline could publish three different numbers tomorrow without answering to anyone.

An object sized around one ticket seller’s rule rarely says so in its title. This one does, and that’s also the main reason I’m passing on it.

Twenty-four litres, or the volume of the box

Take the three numbers on the listing and multiply them. Forty by thirty by twenty comes to twenty-four thousand cubic centimetres. Twenty-four litres.

That’s exactly the capacity the listing advertises (product listing, volume checked on 11 August 2026).

What the seller calls capacity is the volume of the rectangular box the bag has to fit inside. A real bag has walls, seams, a zip running along three sides, a padded back and rounded corners, because no fabric makes a perfect right angle. All of that eats into the twenty-four litres. None of the listings I checked publish a usable volume distinct from the outer one.

My own bag is advertised by its maker at forty litres, a figure I’ve never verified and that probably suffers from the same flaw. The gap is still massive. I’m being offered a drop from forty to twenty-four, for money, to earn the right to board on an airline I fly maybe twice a year.

Fitting a gauge and being comfortable to carry are two different jobs

Twenty centimetres of depth against thirty of width gives you an object deeper than it is wide. The load sits far from your back and high up, because that’s the only way to fill a box.

I’m not going to give you a lecture on biomechanics, I don’t have the qualifications. I can talk about the bag I carry, since I actually carry it: it’s noticeably taller than it is deep, it sits flat against the back, and days covering fifteen kilometres on foot taught me that’s the only parameter that really matters.

What I don’t know, I’ll put on the table right away: these four bags might be excellent to carry. I’ve had none of them on my back, none of their listings publish an empty weight, and I’m not going to dress up a geometric guess as a comfort verdict.

The point I’m sticking to is narrower, and it’s verifiable. These bags were designed around a boarding check. Comfort comes after, if it comes at all.

The regulatory bet, and it needs saying

On 21 January 2026, the European Parliament passed a text providing for a free cabin bag within a limit of one hundred combined centimetres and seven kilos. The Council of Ministers is blocking it. As I write this, none of it is in force.

Most of the French-language web tells the opposite story. I’m not naming names, that’s not my job, but if you read somewhere this winter that the law had passed, you read something false.

In parallel, and since August 2025, the airlines belonging to Airlines for Europe have voluntarily committed to a free personal item of at least forty by thirty by fifteen centimetres. A voluntary commitment, not an obligation.

Do the arithmetic with the listing’s numbers. Forty plus thirty plus twenty comes to ninety combined centimetres, under the hundred-centimetre limit the passed text proposes. And twenty centimetres of depth is five more than the fifteen in the voluntary commitment.

So the bag sits in an odd gap: too deep for the floor airlines agreed to of their own accord, smaller than what a still-blocked text would allow. It’s set to a third value, an airline’s, the only one of the three that can change without warning anyone.

One more detail: the bag’s empty weight would eat into that seven-kilo allowance, and none of the four listings checked publish it.

What I do instead

Nothing clever. I keep the forty-litre bag and the tote, I pack less into it than before, and on the two or three trips a year where an airline enforces its own gauge, I either pay the fee or check the bag.

That costs money. A bag in this category costs roughly what several cabin-bag fees add up to, which makes buying one defensible for someone flying the same airline every week. I’m not that person, and if you are, you don’t need me to do the division.

If I had to buy one anyway, my entry-level criterion would be simple: a listing that publishes empty weight and inner dimensions, not just outer ones. Of the four listings I checked, not one does both.

Three of these four reasons are absences. That’s deliberate. I’d rather pass on a good bag over a silent listing than keep a bag where I don’t know the two numbers that actually decide anything.

No M anywhere in this table. I measured none of these bags myself, touched none of them, and a listing’s dimension doesn’t turn into a personal reading just because I copied it down.

These questions stay open because I don’t buy four bags to rule out four, and the full mechanics are in what I don’t test.

I should tell you something that undercuts everything above. In April, in Bangkok, I had one sitting in a cart, ready to pay. What stopped me wasn’t any of the arguments in this article: it was the delivery address, a guesthouse I was leaving the day after next. The reasoning came afterward, calmly, once the expense had already been avoided by accident. I distrust myself enough to know what that’s worth, and I’m writing it anyway, because half the material convictions I read elsewhere probably have the same origin.

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 Hanoi-Đà Nẵng night train sets its own rules

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The compartment is about the size of a hotel bathroom. Four berths, a metal ladder fixed to the right, a small table under the window. The door slides and clicks shut with the sound of a locker room bench.

Three people you didn’t choose sleep a metre away from you for an entire night, and it goes fine. That’s not the problem. The problem is that this space makes three decisions for you, and you only find out about them once the train has left.

What the berth imposes

The light. There’s a nightlight in the compartment ceiling and it never turns off, not for a moment. The corridor is lit all night, and the door has a window in its upper half. At every stop, platform light comes in through the window at an angle, right at face height on the bottom berth. You control none of it, because three other people live in the same room and none of them asked your opinion on the lighting.

The noise. The rails, the joints, the horn at level crossings, the corridor door, conversations at three in the morning, the person above you climbing down the ladder. None of these sounds is loud. They’re irregular, which is worse, because sleep gets used to a steady drone of ventilation and wakes up at a door instead.

Your belongings. You sleep with everything you own in the room, including a forty-litre bag that doesn’t fit under every berth in every car, and a small bag holding the objects whose disappearance would turn the trip into something else entirely. You’re about to fall asleep. Meanwhile, nobody’s watching anything.

Three constraints, and the mistake in the lists I’ve read for ten years is stacking them into the same paragraph. Comfort is solved with tiny objects worth discussing seriously. Watching over your belongings isn’t, and a list that treats both the same way ends up handling both badly.

The noise, and the number that means nothing

I own noise-cancelling headphones, use them daily, and that’s exactly why I can say they’re useless here. You can’t sleep on your side with a rigid earcup jammed between your ear and the mattress. I tried: your head rests on the housing, the headband slips, and the ear underneath overheats within twenty minutes. Headphones like these are made for sitting up.

That leaves earplugs. They fit in a jacket pocket and take up close to zero space. Sorting through them, though, was miserable, and that’s where I spent most of my time.

Two listings, two numbers.

The first states 27 dB and ties that figure to a standardized measurement, the kind published by hearing-protection manufacturers. The second states 45 dB and cites no standard, no protocol, no lab, no test method.

I’m not writing that 45 dB is impossible. I have no idea, it’s not my field, and I have no way to check it. I’m writing something simpler and more awkward for the seller: these two figures aren’t comparable. The first points to a shared method, which lets you set it against a competitor’s. The second points to nothing, which makes it meaningless. It could be 45, 12 or 60, the listing gives me no tool to find out.

Between a higher number with no reference and a lower one with a reference, I take the lower one. That’s my main criterion across this entire category, and it’s more useful than half the comparisons I’ve read.

The standardized figure doesn’t tell me what I’ll actually hear in this compartment either. It comes off a test bench, with sounds that aren’t corridor doors.

The light

A mask takes up the space of a rolled-up pair of socks and adds no noticeable weight. It’s the least debatable of the three answers, and it still has a catch.

A flat mask lays fabric over the eyelids. If you move your eyes while asleep, you feel it, and for some people that alone cancels the entire benefit. The model I’m keeping is built around two hollow cups that leave a gap in front of each eye, and its listing sells exactly that absence of pressure as its main selling point.

The object is bulkier than a flat mask once it’s in the bag, since it contains air by design. The trade-off is between that bulk and a sensation on the eyelids, and nobody can make that call for you.

Your belongings, and the answer I don’t have

This is the constraint I have the least to offer on, and I’d rather say so outright than pad the section.

A serious physical answer to this constraint exists. It’s a two-metre sheathed steel cable, eight millimetres in diameter, with a lock on the end. Those dimensions come from the seller, not from me, and they’re enough on their own to answer the question: two metres of steel cable, in a forty-litre bag, for three or four train nights a year. I ruled it out; the row is in the table below.

That cable also requires a lock, and I left mine in a drawer in a Lisbon room back in February, after picking it myself in forty minutes out of boredom.

What I actually did that night doesn’t deserve the word method: small bag against me, big bag on the floor, and the light sleep that produces. I’m not going to dress up a personal arrangement as a safety instruction.

One word on the second row. I’m not writing that the weighted mask is bad. I’m writing that the two listings contradict each other on what actually helps you sleep, one selling soothing pressure and the other the total absence of contact, and neither publishes anything that would let you decide between them.

No M anywhere in this table, and there can’t be one: I never had any of these five objects in hand. The first four rows are sellers’ claims that I’m copying without validating them, the only thing I’m adding is the right-hand column.

These three questions stay open because I don’t buy five pairs of earplugs to keep one, and the method behind that is laid out in how I choose.

That night, I had neither mask nor earplugs. I slept with a jacket hood pulled over my eyes, the fabric sliding every time I shifted position, and I woke up at almost every stop, including one long one where the train sat still long enough for the silence itself to become the real problem. That’s where, around four in the morning, I started building this list in my head. A gear article written by someone who owned none of the objects it describes, on the one night he could have used them.

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.

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.

What the bag held in Bangkok

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The room looks onto an inner courtyard and the air conditioners of the building across from it, which make a constant sound of running water. I set the forty-liter bag on the bed, opened both zippers, and turned it all out at once, which is the only honest method.

Three months since Lisbon. In between: Portugal, Spain, a strait, Morocco, a thirteen-hour flight. The bag was never once emptied during that stretch. It was opened, rummaged through, closed again, crushed into trunks, carried through a security-checkpoint conveyor belt, but never emptied.

Sorting against a trash can

At home, you sort against a closet. The object you’re unsure about goes in the cupboard, and the cupboard is a machine for postponing the decision by six months.

In a rented room, the closet doesn’t exist. Every object either stays in the bag or goes in the trash, tonight, with no third option. That makes sorting fast and a little brutal, and it produces information that sorting at home never does: the list of what didn’t survive the trip.

What went

Two cables. A thin cord whose sheath had split right at the connector, and a cable of an outdated standard that used to power a device I’d gotten rid of before Christmas. Three months of carrying it for zero plug-ins.

The charger for the laptop stolen in January. It weighed what it weighed, and it had been useless from day one. I carried it from Portugal to North Africa, then to Southeast Asia, out of an inertia I can’t explain any better than that.

A rigid case. It came with an accessory, kept out of reflex, never filled. It’s the only hard object in the bag, so the only one that could break something else by crushing it.

A stack of papers. Receipts, boarding-pass stubs, a city map folded down to a square. They weigh nothing, and they take up exactly the pocket where I keep my notebook, which is a cost with no weight.

There was also a T-shirt, the one I’d worn damp in Lisbon, but I told that story back in January, and it had already been gone for a long time.

The common thread

Go back over the list. None of these objects survived three months because I was hesitant to part with them. They survived because I never saw them.

The two cables were in the roll, held by an office rubber band for years. The charger was in the left side pocket, the one that holds the electrical gear, the one you open just to grab whatever’s on top. The rigid case was at the bottom, under the clothes. The papers were in a pouch with other papers I actually needed.

A cable roll held by a rubber band counts as one object in your head, and a side pocket counts as one too. Packing doesn’t just order the contents, it manufactures composite objects, and a composite object never gets inspected: it just gets picked up and put back down.

The bag I carry is well organized in the sense that I can find anything in three seconds. It’s badly organized in the sense that it hid four pieces of trash from me for a quarter of a year.

The three layers

What the trip produced, without my deciding it, is a three-tier system of access.

The pants pocket: reachable standing up, in a line, in three seconds. The small bag kept between your feet: reachable seated, without standing up, which on a plane is the very definition of accessible. The bottom of the forty-liter bag: reachable once a day and no more.

The problem is that the middle layer has no object. It has a bag, and inside the bag, loose clutter. The rubber-banded roll is an attempt at a middle layer, and its weakness is exactly what I just described: it clusters without showing.

The object I’m looking at

A flat fabric pouch, with several sewn compartments, meant for electronic accessories. It does nothing more than separate what used to be loose clutter, and the argument fits in one word: it shows. Opened flat on a bed, an empty compartment is visible. In a rubber-banded roll, a dead cable isn’t.

I haven’t bought it and I haven’t had it in hand. What I can verify sits in the seller’s listing and spec sheet, checked August 11, 2026: a travel-accessory organizer pouch, available at the time of checking. What I can’t verify is a longer list, and it’s written above in the verdict.

One point deserves to be said plainly, because it holds for the whole category: none of these listings publish their interior dimensions. The one serious question anyone asks in front of an organizer pouch is whether the laptop’s power brick fits inside. No seller in this category answers that question, and I’m choosing among the ones that don’t.

None of these three reasons requires having had the object in hand. A missing dimension, an off-topic sales pitch, and a three-tier stack are all written by the sellers themselves, and it’s those words that disqualify. The whole method is laid out in how I choose, and it’s worth exactly what sales listings are worth, which isn’t much.

In a zipped pocket I never open, under the lining, I found the backup bank card. The one meant to be used the day the other one gets swallowed by an ATM three thousand kilometers from my bank. Expiry date: February. It had spent six weeks traveling in the role of a safety net it could no longer fill, and I only discovered it because I emptied the bag onto a bed. The middle layer isn’t just for cables.

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.

The power bank you can't turn on anymore

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three words appear in the listing’s title, ahead of even the model name: allowed on the plane.

It’s true. The seller isn’t lying, and doesn’t need to be dishonest for the phrase to produce the effect it produces. A reader buying a power bank for flights reads those three words as a permission to use it. It isn’t one. It says the object has the right to board.

What it has the right to do once aboard is a different question, one that’s changed recently, and most of what you’ll read on the subject still reasons from how things used to be.

What changed, and where

The Lufthansa Group, which covers Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian Airlines, Eurowings, Edelweiss Air, and Brussels Airlines, has applied a four-point rule since January 15, 2026. Power banks remain allowed in the cabin. They can no longer be used during the flight. They must stay accessible. The maximum is two power banks per passenger, at 100 Wh each.

Source: the group’s page on this update, checked August 11, 2026.

Two earlier facts put this in context. Charging a power bank off the plane’s USB outlet had already been banned at that same group since May 2025. And Air France had already banned in-flight power bank use before that date, per information found on the airline’s baggage information page, checked August 11, 2026.

I only publish a link for the source whose exact address I can give. For the second, I give the nature of the document and the date, and nothing more. It’s less satisfying than a URL, and more honest than a URL reconstructed from memory.

The origin cited for these decisions is a fire aboard an Airbus A321 in South Korea, in January 2025, attributed to a power bank. I’m relaying that attribution as it circulates in the airlines’ own communications. I haven’t read the investigation report, and I’m not certifying the cause.

What I’m not going to tell you

That this is the rule everywhere.

That would be the natural shortcut, it would be wrong, and it would mislead in both directions: the person counting on a use they’ll be refused, and the person checking their power bank into the hold believing it’s now banned from the cabin. Every airline publishes its own conditions, and they don’t all change on the same day. Seven airlines appear in this piece. There are hundreds of them.

The useful move fits in one sentence: open your airline’s baggage page, the week you fly. A March article doesn’t answer for a November flight.

I’m also not going to suggest tucking it away somewhere out of sight. The rule cited above demands the opposite: the power bank has to stay accessible.

The calculation everyone skips

The regulatory threshold is expressed in watt-hours. Product listings are expressed in milliamp-hours. Almost nobody explains how to get from one to the other, and wrong conversions circulate everywhere.

A milliamp-hour measures an amount of charge, not an amount of energy. It’s a flow rate multiplied by a duration. It says nothing until you know at what voltage that charge is stored.

Energy is obtained by multiplying charge by voltage.

Take the model I settled on. It lists 27000 mAh, or 27 amp-hours. Lithium-ion cells have a nominal voltage of 3.7 volts, and that’s the value used by convention on the markings.

27 times 3.7 gives 99.9.

A little under 100 watt-hours. Just below the threshold, with a tenth of a watt-hour of margin, which is obviously no manufacturing accident.

This is where the trap sits. If you run the same calculation with the USB output’s 5 volts, you get 135 watt-hours, and you conclude the battery is over the cap. That conversion circulates, it panics people three days before departure, and it rests on the wrong voltage. The value that counts is the cell voltage, and the number that holds up in practice is the one printed on the casing.

I haven’t seen that marking, since I don’t have the object.

The counterargument

A big power bank is the most recommended object for flying, and it’s recommended for the reason that’s now falling away.

The sales arguments I found all talk about the flight: lasting through a long-haul, working eight hours on a laptop in the air. At the six airlines cited above, since January, those uses no longer exist. The object boards, and it sits off in the overhead bin, within reach, so it can be pulled out quickly if something happens.

That doesn’t make it useless. It shifts its reason for existing to the ground, and the ground is where I needed it in the first place: the Seville bus-station hall with its one outlet behind a vending machine, the room where the only outlet is behind the bed. A power reserve is for the gap between two outlets, not for thirty-five thousand feet.

Buy it for that, and the reasoning holds. Buy it for the flight, and you’re paying for a heavy object that will spend the flight doing nothing.

An objection I’ll raise against myself, because someone else would otherwise. The model I settled on runs into the same arithmetic: 99.9 Wh at 140 W drains in roughly forty-three minutes. The difference comes down to the amount stored, a third higher under an identical cap. None of these batteries replaces a wall outlet. They’re reserves, and a reserve is judged by what it holds.

None of these five listings publish their watt-hour value in the title checked. For a category of objects whose regulatory constraint is expressed in watt-hours, it’s the one unit missing from every title.

These questions stay open because I haven’t bought any of these five batteries, and the rule that requires me to say so is in what I don’t test.

On the March flight, the person next to me pulled a power bank out of the seat pocket, plugged in their phone, and set it on the tray table. A crew member asked them to unplug it and put it away. The exchange lasted twenty seconds, and I only caught one sentence, said without hostility, with the confidence of someone who’d done their homework: “but it’s allowed on the plane, it says so on the box.” It was. It did say so. I won’t name the airline, since I hadn’t reread its baggage page that day. What sticks with me is that three months earlier, I would have said the exact same sentence, in the exact same tone, just as certain I was right.

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.

A reader heads to Morocco and asks about outlets

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A reader writes to me. The message is short and polite, he’s leaving in April, and his question fits in three lines.

I’m going for two weeks, Marrakech then Essaouira. I can’t find a clear answer on the power adapter. There’s one at every price point, some double as chargers, some don’t. Which one would you get?

I’m going to answer, just not that question. It has a one-line answer, that line is going to disappoint him, and the rest of the article starts after it.

The one-line answer

He doesn’t need an adapter at all.

Morocco uses type C and type E plugs, at 220 volts. That’s the French standard, and the Portuguese one too. His plug fits the socket. His charger works. There’s nothing to buy and nothing to pack.

I checked this under the least glamorous conditions possible. Arriving in Tangier at the end of February, the first thing I looked at in the room, before even putting my bag down, was the wall outlet. It was identical to the one in Lisbon. I’d carried a universal adapter around all day, in a side pocket, the way I’ve been carrying it for four years, at the end of a day of four transfers between two countries where I plugged in exactly nothing.

Four years moving an object around without ever checking whether it did anything on my route. I’m not in a position to laugh at my reader’s question.

What I’m not going to do is hand you a table of plug types by country. Hundreds of those exist, all identical, and they’re the reason my reader couldn’t find a clear answer: when fifty pages answer the same question, none of them risks saying the question doesn’t apply. An article that concludes “buy nothing” has nothing to sell at the bottom.

The room, at ten at night

Where the problem actually shows up is three weeks later, in a room in Marrakech, upstairs, with a window looking onto a courtyard.

There’s an outlet. One, thirty centimetres off the floor, behind the head of the bed, which means either moving the bed or sleeping with cables running across the pillow. The table where I work is at the other end of the room, under the window, because that’s where the light is.

On the table, four things that need to be full by the next morning: the laptop, the phone, the headphones, the speaker. The hard drive charges off the laptop, the mouse lasts for months, the paper notebook needs nothing at all.

Four devices, one outlet, one night.

That constraint has nothing to do with the shape of the plug. An old room has one outlet per room because it was wired back when a room held one lamp, and new construction puts four above the desk.

Which shifts the question. The right object isn’t the one that turns one plug shape into another, it’s the one that turns one outlet into four.

The second problem, a mechanical one

There’s a second issue, and I found out about it by living through it two nights running.

This particular socket isn’t firmly fixed to the wall. It moves a few millimetres when you pull on it, and it’s mounted slightly crooked, as often happens in a building rewired over an older one. A light charger holds fine. A heavy block doesn’t: it hangs off its two pins, the weight acts as a lever, the pins slide out two or three millimetres, and the contact turns intermittent.

I found out in the morning, with a half-charged laptop and a phone that hadn’t taken any charge at all. No breakdown, no spark, no drama. A charge that stopped at some point I never saw, because someone closed the room door a bit hard.

And a heavy block delivering power sheds heat, in a recessed socket, with no airflow behind the bed. I’ll note that fact and stop there. I’m neither an electrician nor an engineer, I’m not going to hand out electrical safety advice, and you’ll notice the pages that hand it out for free never sign it with their actual profession.

The practical conclusion, though, I can draw: for the same number of ports, the more compact block wins, and a block that gains ports by gaining bulk gains nothing.

What I’m keeping, and what I don’t know

The one I’m keeping is a universal block with four USB ports, two type C and two type A. It keeps the adapter mechanism, which I have no use for here, and it adds the four ports, which are the entire value of the object. If you never leave the type C and E zone, a multiport charger with no adapter does the same job in a smaller shell.

Now, the uncomfortable part. The listing I checked doesn’t publish this block’s total power. Not the overall figure, not the per-port breakdown.

Further down, I rule out two products over their stated power, and I’m keeping the one whose power isn’t stated at all. That’s an inconsistency, and I’d rather write it in bold than let someone else catch it: I’m keeping it for its port count, which is verifiable, while ignoring the number that would decide whether it can charge a laptop. You’ll find that exact question, unresolved, in the limits section below.

The last reason is the same one that made me rule out two laptops back in February. I’m applying it a second time without hesitation, with one caveat that honesty requires: I’ve just kept a product whose power also isn’t published. The difference is in what I’m asking of it. The four ports are written down, and the four ports are what I’m buying.

Four cells out of fifteen say “not published.” That’s the real information in this table. On a category of object sold by wattage, two listings out of five give no wattage at all, and nobody blinks, because nobody builds the table.

These questions stay open because I don’t buy five blocks to keep one, and the method behind that is laid out in how I choose.

The universal adapter I’ve been carrying for four years finally got used this year, and not by me. A woman I ran into in the riad’s courtyard was heading back to London and had spent ten minutes asking around for “the three-pronged thing.” I had it, at the bottom of the side pocket, under a pouch I hadn’t opened since Seville. She left with it. I waited until I was back in the room to check I wouldn’t need it before summer.

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 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.

Replacing a laptop in four days

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Four days. That’s what I had left in Lisbon before getting back on the road, and it’s the constraint that structured everything.

This buying scenario doesn’t exist in comparison sites. They all assume you have time: to read, compare, wait for a sale, hesitate between two configurations. An emergency replacement follows different rules, and the first is that an unavailable product isn’t a candidate, whatever its merits.

The three constraints

They didn’t move a millimeter in four days, which is already telling.

It has to be carried all day. On my back, in a shoulder bag, fifteen kilometers on foot some days. Weight is my first criterion, before power, before the screen, before the price.

It has to last a workday without a charger. Not an office workday. A day where the charger stays in the room because the café has no outlet and the library closes at five.

It has to be delivered before I leave. Four days, a temporary address, no possible return afterward.

How I found six candidates

I didn’t read a comparison site. I opened two on the first evening, and closed both within ten minutes for the same reason: they ranked machines I couldn’t receive before I left, and neither mentioned availability as a criterion.

The method that worked is dumber than that. I filtered by screen size, between thirteen and fifteen inches, then sorted by whatever shipping window the seller displayed. That left about thirty listings. I eliminated anything whose listing carried neither weight nor battery life, which cut two-thirds of them in one pass. That left about ten machines, six of which were something I could actually have carried.

This approach has an obvious flaw: it favors manufacturers who write good spec sheets, not the ones who make good machines. I own that, because I had no way to assess the second quality in four days, and because the first one is at least verifiable.

It also had a side effect I hadn’t anticipated. In four days, I didn’t look at a single product photo. Not one. I spent my time in spec tables and manuals, and I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve bought something worth more than a thousand euros without ever wanting to know what it looked like.

These last two eliminations might look petty. They aren’t. When weight is your first criterion and the sales page doesn’t give it, the page has already answered your question: it’s not an argument the seller is leading with, so it’s probably not a strong point. I’d rather rule out a good machine over a silent spec sheet than keep a machine where I don’t know the one piece of data that matters most to me.

The keyboard case is different, and it’s the only one in this table that’s really worth something. I typed on the previous generation of this machine for two years, every day, on trains and in cafés. I know what I’m talking about, and that’s rare on this site. What I don’t know is whether the manufacturer has fixed the feel since, and nothing on the spec sheet says either way.

No M in this table. I haven’t weighed these machines, I don’t have an instrument, and I’m not going to turn a seller’s data into a personal reading.

A note on the weight of the machine I settled on: the spec sheet displays a value that corresponds to a shipping weight, packaging included, not the weight of the device itself. I’m not repeating it here. This is a common issue, and it’s exactly why a spec sheet that doesn’t publish a clear weight is a signal, not a detail.

Why that one

It ticks all three constraints without making me guess a missing value, and it was available immediately. This isn’t brilliant reasoning. It’s the reasoning that’s left when you have four days.

Six months later, what I can say, and this is firsthand, not analysis: the battery life holds up to what’s advertised, the system’s ergonomics cost me a week to adjust to and nothing since, and the keyboard doesn’t make me type badly. That last point wasn’t in my criteria. It should have been.

What I can’t tell you is whether it’s the best machine on this list. I haven’t tried the other five, and nobody can tell you that without having carried them on their back for six months.

Revision log

The M5 generation has since come out, and the model described here is now down to residual stock. If you’re reading this today, the current equivalent is the same 13-inch, one generation later. The reasoning behind the three constraints doesn’t change; the spec-sheet numbers do.

These three questions stay open because I don’t buy six machines to keep one, and the method is detailed in how I choose.

What this episode cost me wasn’t the price of the machine. It was discovering, in four days, that my number-one criterion for five years hadn’t been weight. It had been habit. I replaced the same category of object that had been taken from me, switching brands by accident rather than by decision, and I got lucky that it landed right.

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.

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.