Episode: 2022
Title: HPR2022: Whats in my bag
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2022/hpr2022.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:24:46

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This is HPR episode 2022 entitled What's in My Bag and is part of the series What's in My Toolkit.
It is posted my first time post-bit box and is about 26 minutes long.
The summary is what I carry in my computer bag when I hit the road.
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Hi there. This is Bitbox. This is my first attempt at an HPR episode and we're going to do What's in My Bag.
What I'm going to do since I don't really need to use the Royal Wii I guess.
I'll get to that in just a second here. Just a quick introduction.
Bitbox that came from Bill in the box. My name is Bill. I live in a box as in I'm an over-the-road truck driver, long haul.
So I spend about three to three and a half weeks out of every month, the year round in the truck.
So there's Bill in the box there. I do this horrible thing to myself because every time I come home there's more bills in my mailbox.
Anyway, I'm about 50 years old there and I've been doing this for a long time, trucking that is.
Computers less so. I got into them about 10 years ago but as Mr. Fallon would probably scream right about now.
That's another episode. We'll leave that one alone for right now.
So anyway, What's in My Bag. First of all, the bag itself is a messenger style bag. It's made by Swiss Gear.
I'll include a link in the show notes. I wasn't able to find the exact version that I've got. Mine's about seven years old.
But I did find one that's a very close approximation of it by the same manufacturer.
It's a really good bag. It's heavy duty. There's nowhere to tear on this and I've really put it through a beaten as in heavily overloaded overstuffed.
You know, stressed on the zippers, the strap, the whole nine yards. It's a very durable bag. I'm very happy with it.
I could wish it was a little bit roomier but then if it was a little bit roomier, I'd pack more stuff in it and it'd probably get even heavier.
There's a front pouch, a front zipper pouch there that has multiple pockets in it there.
This is where I keep, well, probably 80% of my accessories there that go into here in a minute.
Inside the main compartment is a couple more pockets there. When you have two laptops in it is I frequently did.
I don't carry the older laptop anymore but for a while I was carrying both laptops. You can't put much in these without crushing them.
You can't put anything delicate in there. These inner pockets without crushing them with two laptops in there is just not enough for them.
On the back and the outside there's just a slim pocket on the backside there which has room for a while.
I usually have a couple of magazines in there or paperwork if I'm working on something.
I'll give you the information on my current laptop, the one that I use right now.
It's a Toshiba Satellite P855 S5312, pretty standard. It's not really a high-end laptop.
I've made a couple of modifications to it. It's a 15.5-inch screen.
Came originally with six gigs of RAM and two chips which is kind of odd there. It was a two gigabyte and a four gigabyte but they were a match set.
I upgraded that to 16 gigabytes, two eight gigabyte chips. That's the maximum this computer will take.
It's not a bad laptop. I've gotten pretty comfortable with it there. The keyboard's not the greatest there.
It's got the chicklit keys and they don't have much travel tone. When you push down on them I actually like the keyboard on the other laptop better.
But you make do with what you got.
It originally came with a 750 gigabyte spinning hard drive. Like I said, I do my job.
I spend a lot of time in the truck as I mentioned there. It's got a really big diesel engine which means a lot of vibration when it's running.
Anyway, the engine runs a lot. A spinning hard drive, you're putting your data at risk. I decided I wanted to put it in an SSD.
I ended up getting two of them. Samsung SSDs, they're the 850 EVO in the 500 gigabyte size, two and a half inch cell state drives. I'm pretty happy with them.
They've performed well. They're nice and fast. I haven't had any issues with them at all.
I took out the CD RW drive on the laptop and I purchased a little adapter and it fits in that same slot as the optical drive was in.
You can mount your two and a half inch drive in there. It screws in nice and tight. The SSD into the adapter I mean.
Then you slide it into the optical drive bay where the optical drive was. It plugs right in.
I have both of those SSDs in this laptop. Originally I had one in each laptop there but like I said, I stopped carrying the older laptop around and took the SSD out of that, put it in this one and made an extended drive out of it.
Anyway, it currently runs Mint 173. There is of course the power cord and the power brick for this laptop.
Yeah, just real quick. The other laptop, the original laptop that I had was I got back in 2009. It's a HP Pavilion DB5. It was a good little laptop. I don't like the plastic case on it there but it was a good little laptop.
Power cord for it of course. It's got a little 300 gigabyte drive. It only has eight gigs of RAM maxed out.
I use a, okay, that's it for that laptop for now. I use a Logitech wireless mouse. I'm not sure the model number here. I've gone through several of them over the years.
It's got a little USB kernel that plug into the side of the laptop there. They just plug and play with the Linux distributions that I use.
I haven't had an issue yet. The next thing I want to talk about would be the two, I carried two terabyte drives. There's two different kinds here.
The first one is by Western Digital. It's called My Passport Ultra. That's a two terabyte passport drive there. It's a, maybe a size of a wallet.
Half the size of a paperback book there. It's a three and a half inches. Maybe slightly more than that by about five inches.
And say five eighths of an inch thick. And it hooks up with the USB 3.0. It's pretty quick. Nice little pocket size drive there. Two terabytes.
I've got another one that's the same size that I like better, but I can't get anymore. It's a Tishiba Canveo. Again, two terabyte drive.
One of them is my, call it on-site backup. It's got my files. It's got files on it that I don't carry on my laptop that are, that are things that I want to have around just in case.
It's also got my actual laptops files backed up on it. The other one, the Tishiba is basically my, my movie library. I use Handbrake a lot.
So, as I said earlier, my Tishiba laptop, I took the CD DVD or W out of it. So, you walk into a truck stop and buy DVD movie. You can't watch it.
I do have a DVD, an external DVD read write, but I don't carry it around with me. It's a little bit too delicate to take with me on the road.
I just don't feel the need with the book drive, follow movies anyway. Plus, there's always Netflix and whatnot. Moving on. Again, like I said, I get sidetracked.
Okay, continuing on. And for the audio files, among you, I apologize for the quality of this recording. Anyway, here's a piece of, it's just a scrap of microfiber cloth that I keep in a little ziplock baggy.
For cleaning, I can't stand a screen with fingerprints on it there. The outside of the laptop, especially the Tishiba. I mean, you can clean that with regular cleaning cloth, you know, a Clark's wipe or wet paper towel or whatever. And that's not a problem there, but I like to have a nice soft piece of cloth for the screen.
Also, as I said, it's a cleaning cloth in a ziplock baggy. I got this tip from one of Klatuz podcasts. I think it was, I think it was part of his urban camping series there. He mentioned in his backpack.
Somebody had given him a bunch of markers one time that came in a bunch of little ziplock bags. And he said he used them for storing all his various power cords and USB cords and what have you.
And it struck me as a really good idea because I've had the tangled birds nest of wire a few times. And it's annoying, very annoying, especially when you get two power cords. I don't know how many USB cords, various connector wires, USB extensions.
I mean, it had charger cords for your phone and stuff. I need reading glasses these days, especially in dim light or so forth. And on Amazon, you can pick up very cheap reading glasses. You can buy them in bulk. They come in like packs of five.
All you need to know is roughly what what strength you need them. And I use 1.25 or 1.5s.
And I keep the, I mean, these things are practically disposable. I can pick up five sets for eight or ten dollars.
And as often as I scratch the lenses or lose them or sit on them, it's usually keep two or three pair in the glasses. There's two pair right now.
Next, I have a cheap set of earbuds for listening to music. But in the truck stop restaurants, you know, you can't play your music loud. So if I want to drown out the people around me and get my business there, I plug those in, sometimes using for the phone, sometimes for the laptop.
Okay. And one of the inner pouches there, one of the things that I can carry that doesn't hurt to be mushed up against the laptops is a wake-com and to us tablet. This is the CTH 480.
It's, I think it's seven inches by eight and a half or something like that.
Anyway, it's a, it's the one that's got, you can turn the switch and it'll allow you to use, you know, it'll receive finger touch, touch input.
Okay. And you turn that switch off and it'll only take input from the pen, from the pen. I'm not an artist or anything, but I like to fool around. Sometimes it's nice to have.
It's the successor to the the Babboo tablet there. I'm sure some of you are familiar with that.
I have a couple of USB 3.0 cords there. These are replacements. The ones that came with the, my little passport drives weren't the greatest and they weren't very long.
So I ordered a couple of spares off of Amazon. These are with some manufacturer cable masters and they've been pretty good. They're nice, thick, heavy-duty cables.
And I haven't had a bit of problem with them. They, you know, they're sometimes the connectors are a little fiddly on some of those cords, especially if you get them cheap ones.
These have been really good. I'm quite happy with them. Okay. So there's a couple of those. Pardon me if it's noise shuffling things around here.
I also have a TP-link high gain antenna there. Just plugs into the side of the laptop and the USB port.
This one's a TL hyphen WN722N as in tango, Lima, whiskey, November, 722, November to high gain Wi-Fi antenna.
I have another Wi-Fi antenna that I got because it has a better set of antennas to go with the antenna.
Anyway, this one is Alpha AWUS 036H antenna. And it's got really good pickup. I can sit at the back of a truck stop parking lot and pull in Wi-Fi signals from all over the place.
I can pull in the signals from, I don't know, I'd say probably between a quarter and a half mile with the antenna, the one antenna on it there.
I'll put notes. I'll put details on the show notes, a link to the antenna. Both of them. Okay. I have here a little pocket dictation recorder. It's not what I'm using. I'm using my phone to record this.
Anyway, this is an Olympus VN hyphen 8100PC. It's just a little cheap digital recorder. I think I got it for $20 or $25 at Walmart.
And I use this for taking notes when I'm driving down the road so that I don't have to, if you've ever tried to write on a notebook sitting in your lap as your dodging traffic going on a highway, you can imagine how much handier this comes in when you spend 11 hours of driving on a highway every day, day in and day out.
So, I keep that. I've had that for a few years. It doesn't do anything fantastic, but it does the job. Not a real high quality recording, but I don't know, maybe I'll put a little sound clip in one of these times from that or do my next HBR episode on that one.
So, you can compare the sound. Okay, next. I forget what you call these things there. It's like a USB port expander there. We plug it into the USB port on the side of your laptop there and it's got four more USB ports on it.
It's just a little cheap thing made by Targus. I don't know if you can see a part number on this or not.
Model ACH7 for the zero SUS. If my eyes aren't getting worse, the prints get smaller on these things.
Anyway, that's a proof surprisingly durable. It looks pretty cheap, but that's proof surprisingly durable.
I get a little adapter from my power cord for the Toshiba from Power Plus as in PWR, Hyphen, PLUS, www.powerplus.com.
Anyway, it's just a little 90 degree adapter there. When I'm in the truck, their space is kind of limited and I'm always worried I'm going to bust off that tip of my power cord where it pokes out of the laptop there as I'm brushing by it going from the bunk in the back to the driver's compartment in the front.
It kind of pokes out into what passes for an aisle in my truck and not being the skinny youth that I used to be. I'm always afraid I'm going to bust it off with a hip as I go by.
So I got this little 90 degree adapter. Not real happy with it. It's a little slim and it doesn't fit too tightly in the socket. I don't like that. I'd like it to be a little bit snugger.
But it does take the turn the plug there to 90 degrees so it runs parallel to the side of the laptop.
Okay, I've got a odd little thing here. I took half a dozen cheap metal key rings, just the ring parts there and hooked them together in a chain there.
And from them I hung my USB flash drives. I've got six that are 16 gigabyte and those carry distributions on them, you know, bootable drives or live images, whatever you want to call them.
They're by silicon power and they're a zinc alloy. They're very durable. They have a they're just maybe an inch long with a with a link with the loop on the top that you could maybe stick the tip of your little finger through and they're no bigger around than the USB port on the side of your computer there.
But they're very durable. If you're carrying sensitive data that you might have to get rid of in a hurry as you're passing through airport security and you might want to smash it under a boot heel. These are not the drives for you.
I carry these all the time. They get smacked around. They haven't taken so much of a scratch as a scratch. I marked them just to be able to tell them apart.
One from the other. I numbered some of them that I just put data on just, you know, one, two, three, four, et cetera.
The other ones I marked like M for Mint, F for Fedora, D for Debian, U for Ubuntu, K for Cali, NST for network security tools.
Anyway, so I can tell them at a glance. What's what? There's a couple of them handed a slightly different shape.
They're 64 gigabyte. Those are nice. Anyway. I have a here's a little cheap sand disk, 15 or 16 gigabyte. I think it is a USB stick.
Cruiser glide 16 gigabyte. This is a card reader just for like microSD. It takes microSD, standard SD memory card.
I can't even read that alone there, but I got it so that I could slap the mini SD cards in there. It's USB 2.0.
I've had another adapter here. I don't remember why I got it, but it's a female USB to mail mini USB or micro USB to connect my phone, to be able to connect my phone into a USB cord there.
I can't remember for the life of me why I got that.
I have USB to micro USB charging cord and data cord for my Samsung Android phone here, the one I'm talking into.
I have a 10 foot USB mail to female extension cord here. This is the USB to mini USB cord that goes to the alpha antenna.
Okay. I have a it's an SDR radio antenna. It's made by a company called NewElec. It's R's and Romeo, 820T is in tango. SDR and DVB-T.
It's got a little cord there and a small whip, maybe six inches tall there that plugs into the side of it there.
And then you just plug that into the side of your laptop and if you've got some SDR software, you can listen to pick up radio stations with it all across the spec.
There's some quite interesting stuff you find on there, but that's probably another episode right now.
Okay. And last but not least, I think. Yeah. Almost last. I picked up this iFixit 54 bit driver set. It's a nice compact screwdriver set.
It's got a flexible tip and just about every bit you can imagine seems like to me in here. I used to mostly about six to 10 bits.
The rest of them there. I've never used it just in the case, but I have them. Should I need them?
Okay. And the last two items, these change periodically. Obviously there, there's a copy of the February issue for this year of Linux Voice Magazine.
And this is February also for Make Magazine. I don't know. I get Linux Voice pretty regular. I tried to make it looks interesting there.
I really had a time to sit down and monkey with it, but it looks like an interesting magazine.
And that's pretty much it. Very so their odds and ends occasionally get stuck into the nooks and crannies in my bag. But as you can imagine,
when all this stuff is in there, it's full. There's actually a little bit of movement in there nowadays because I've, like I said, I've taken out the HP laptop.
And I only carry the Tishiba around, but it's still pretty full.
So again, this is Bitbox. I will put contact information in with the show notes. Feel free to drop me an email or reply to the HPR comments.
And assuming this episode makes it up to the website and you hear it, if I can do it, anybody can do it. Thank you for listening.
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