hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2078.txt

Episode: 2078
Title: HPR2078: What's in my bag?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2078/hpr2078.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:02:03

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This is HPR episode 2007 to 8 entitled What's in My Bag.
And in part of the series What's in My Toolkit,
it is hosted by Windigo and is about 15 minutes long.
The summer is a short summer of all the crap Windigo loads back and forth.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
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Hello HPR public radio. This is Windigo and I noticed two things recently.
First of all, I have not done a What's in My Bag episode.
And I have a bag. It took me a little while to realize this to my shame.
But I have a bag that I carry with me every single day.
And it's mostly got the same stuff in it.
So I figured I should do this episode.
Also, I realized that HPR was low on shows because
Ken Fallon sent out a message saying HPR was low on shows.
So to remedy both of these solutions,
to remedy both of these situations pardon me,
I thought I would record that episode.
This is also my first off the cuff episode.
And because I'm generally a giant moron, it might sound much worse than when I think
things through and write it down ahead of time.
But this is a good test run, I think.
So anyhow, I have a Targis book bag with three pockets in it,
three main pockets.
There's the laptop pocket, a middle-ish pocket, and a front pocket,
along with a couple side pouches and tinier pockets here and there.
So that's the bag I carry around each day.
I bring it to work, I bring it when I'm traveling.
It just generally follows me around.
It's nice and handy because it can go on my back and I don't have to worry about keeping my
hands free.
So inside this bag, I firstly always put my stainless steel coffee mug.
NY Bill will appreciate that it is Stewart's store branded.
It was a gift from my mother, not really a gift.
She just had a coffee mug and gave it to me because she wasn't using it.
It's a 16-ounce stainless steel Stewart's branded coffee mug that I bring everywhere because
I drink a lot of coffee, as you will see.
Because the second item in my bag is a Stanley stainless steel thermos, which contains extra coffee.
So if I'm going somewhere, I'll usually fill up the travel mug and then fill up the coffee mug,
or coffee mug, fill up the thermos with backup coffee.
So like I said, I drink a lot.
This is also why I don't drink alcohol because this is just coffee.
Imagine if this had a serious life-altering problems associated with it.
But anyways, the third item that I bring with me is a clean canteen wide,
40-ounce stainless steel water bottle, because if you drink a lot of coffee,
you're going to dehydrate yourself and it's good to follow that up with water.
So now we get to the kind of technical stuff.
So I also usually have a one-and-a-half-foot micro USB cable with me at all times.
This was procured from a GPS, I think.
And it's just a very nice small travel size.
I don't really have anything that uses micro USB because I don't have a cell phone,
but I found that it's very handy to have this sort of thing if someone else needs it,
or I need to connect to a device.
I also keep with me some form of Ethernet cable.
Now, at the current moment, I have with me a retractable Cat5 Ethernet cable,
so it winds up in a little ball, essentially, or a reel, I suppose.
It's got a little spring-loaded reel thing, and it has a crossover adapter,
so I've got essentially a three-foot-longer-so Ethernet cable slash crossover cable
for whatever I need.
And the reason I have this one is because my usual carry, which is a flat,
maybe four or five-foot-long Ethernet cable is in use because that happens all the time.
I've gone through several of these. It's always good to have an Ethernet cable on you
if you are a computer-dark.
In addition to that, I carry with me a pair of Sony earbuds.
These go great for, excuse me, these go great with my work computer,
if I need to listen to some podcasts due to a long-boring day,
or they fit perfectly with another item that I'll mention a little bit later.
I also keep with me a miscellaneous handful of SD and USB storage,
just in case I have lots of little SD cards, a couple eight gigabyte USB drives that are great
for sending an ISO onto if I need to boot to a specific distro or tool or whatever.
Primary among these devices is a 64 gigabyte tiny keychain mounted USB drive.
Let me get it out. It's a 64 gigabyte, which is absolute madness.
It's almost as small as a standard USB connector, and it has 64 gigabytes on it.
It's so small, I can even read the name of it.
USB 3.1 Kingston, it looks like it's printed on the back, but it's the best thing in the world.
Having 64 gigabytes with you is one of those future prediction things where you could be
carrying the Library of Congress in your pocket and not even realize it. When I found out that
they were only 20 or $30, I bought two because it's like spaceship technology. That's crazy talk.
So I always have that on my keychain. It's a metal adapter. Apparently I'm a big fan of steel
because I have lots of metal things, but it's a little metal USB drive. I'm currently working on
getting it to be a USB drive as well as a bootable distro thing, so partitioning it out maybe
installing grub, but I've had nothing but failures in that arena. So it's a work in progress,
but then I'd have essentially my own working computer in my pocket just sands all the hardware,
and that would be amazing. So maybe that'll be a new HPR episode someday if I can ever get it right.
There are so many failed HPR episodes in my wake. But anyhow, let's see. The next item
is a mag light double A powered flashlight. So returning to the Windigo loves things made out
of metal topic. This is a metal flashlight. It used to have a spare bulb in the tail end of it,
but I've actually used that because it broke. It's a mag light branded because they're a very,
very good brand, and they're one of the couple things that I buy based on the brand. It's just
they're an excellent company. They make very, very good equipment. So I'd get a mag light
over a generic brand anytime. So I keep the batteries inside, but one of them reversed so that there's
negative contact touching a negative contact and positive are on the other side so that it won't
train any of the batteries through leakage. But it doesn't get much use. It's just very handy to
have around when you need it. I don't keep it on my keychain because those kind of things get very
heavy and I'd kind of like to keep what's in my pocket light and then put everything else in my backpack.
Added to the things that I keep in my backpack is a standard generic ballpoint pen. This is
actually a freebie. I got from a local councilman named Bill Loeb. Bill Loeb for their district in
case you were wondering. He is not even elected anymore. He's no longer running as far as I know,
but his pen is stupendous. It's still writing for as much as I write and I just keep it along.
You never know when you're going to have to fill out a customs form on a flight. So it's always
good to have a pen with you. In addition to those more permanent items, I also carry my lunch with me.
Usually this is any mason jar or a surprise surprise metal container like a little metal box
that clips together. It has a top and some compartments and whatever I'm eating at the moment
usually goes into a jar of box and comes with me until I can heat it up at work. If you happen
to meet me on a Wednesday and look in my bag, I will have my backup drive or if it's the Thursday
and I forgot to do backups on Wednesday, you'll see that too. I always bring home my backup drive
which is just a two terabyte internal 3.5 inch hard drive whatever the big ones are.
It's nothing fancy. It's just I have a USB hard drive dock attached to my desktop computer,
so I pop it in like a super Nintendo cartridge, do my backups with our sync and then unpop it and
bring it back to work with me so that I have super cheap and easy off-site backups.
So the only dangerous part is if I forget to do backups and it's in my book bag and I'm at home
and my house burns down and I don't grab my book bag, well that's you know that's tough luck I
guess, but ordinarily I keep my data on my computer and in this off-site backup drive that I just
trek around with. If it is a day that I'm working at the tech center, you will usually find a
reason barracks laptop with an AC adapter in my book bag. This is my, I think it's 15 inch,
pretty serious laptop. It was meant as a desktop replacement maybe five or six years ago. So it can
pull its own weight, but you have to pull its own weight too because it's chunky. They're not
really building for ease of travel. They were building for power when they made this laptop,
so it's big. I usually don't bring it around all the time, but if I'm going to be stuck at the
tech center for four hours and want my own machine to do whatever on, I bring that guy.
ordinarily it's just sitting on my nightstand and it's our movie machine so we watch movies on it.
And no matter what day it is, the last item you will find in my book bag is a Dell Mini 9
with its AC adapter. I actually have two thanks to NY Bill and I bring one with me all the time
and one of them is plugged in permanently somewhere in my house so that I can charge it wherever I am.
The Mini 9 being the most stupendous computer ever made by man. It's the greatest little machine.
This is, this is my favorite computer of all time. It's been cannibalized a couple times. There's
different parts in it. It's actually a composite of two Dell Mini 9s right now.
But if I am anywhere, I want to have that computer with me. It's performing enough to do most stuff,
but it's a perfect remote machine. I use it mostly for SSH-ing into bigger and more powerful boxes,
but it's just, it has a battery that lasts for seven or eight hours and costs $35. The battery did,
of course, not the computer. I've had it for a very long time. I want to say eight years and it's just
still trucking very light, perfect battery life. It's just, it's hard to beat. So that is always
with me. I even stuck a little 32 gigabyte USB drive in the side for bulk storage because it only
has, I think it's a six or eight gigabyte SSD in it, which is more than enough for Linux.
As long as you don't want to put anything in your home directory. So I just stashed all of my
portable movie files and music and anything else on this little external Kingston drive,
which is another one of those just about as big as the USB connector drives. So it doesn't take
up any extra space. It's just good to have with you. So I always have my Mini 9 if I need to
hack on some code when I'm waiting for jury duty or if we need to check off on flight details
while we're traveling or I even, there was a occasion this Christmas where I was stuck on a plane
next to a 10-year-old who was on a company and we talked for a while, but children are exhausting.
So I happened to have finding Nemo on my laptop and put it on and gave him the headphones that I
keep with him and that occupied him for quite a bit. So that was fantastic. That was a great story
actually. That might be an HPR episode I need to get into. But if Hitchhiker's Guide had been
designed around my life, your towel would be a Del Mini 9 because I don't use towels that much,
but this Mini 9 constantly. So with that concluding note, that's what's in my bag. That's if you bump
into me at any random time, you can probably ask for these items unless I rotate them out,
which is pretty unlikely. I even tried to downsize to a laptop bag that some people might remember
from the first Ogg Gamp comfortably fits a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut, but does not
comfortably fit most of this crap that I keep with me all the time. So it was back to the book bag.
This is about the minimal I can bring with me and still be comfortable and functioning. So
if you haven't recorded this episode, this what's in my bag episode, you should do it because it's
really interesting and it makes you kind of criticize what you bring with you all the time.
It's a nice way to reassess your life a little bit, which I don't know about everybody else,
but I can use. So this has been Windigo and I look forward to hearing your
internet. It's HVR Episode.
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