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Comment by QuiEgo | Hacker News Reader

When I travel, I like carrying as little as possible. These comments are fascinating to me, people are brining more devices than I have in my whole house and needing to make a LAN for them.

Personally I just connect my phone to WiFi and then use Tailscale and call it a day.

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It's really dependent upon the expected downtime at the hotel for me. I do about 150 nights in hotels a year.

Some of those trips I'll have extended time of 18+ hours of not really doing anything outside of the hotel other than grabbing dinner. For those types of trips I'm definitely more apt to bring additional devices like my GLinet travel router and MAYBE a streaming stick. I've also brought RPis or MCUs for tinkering during my downtime.

However, other trips I'm with you. I bring my phone, laptop, iPad (required for job), and chargers and that's about it for devices. I really try to limit my packing to things I know I will use and honestly for probably 50% of my travel that's clean clothes, toothbrush, phone, and wallet.

My travel I describe above is solo, work related. When the family comes we tend to tow a 9,000 lbs condo on wheels, so literally the "kitchen sink".

Over time, I've taken less and less stuff. I still take my iPad in a keyboard case for longer trips, and as a backup for 2FA incase something happens to my phone, but now I mostly feel like my phone alone is "good enough." Doomscrolling on the phone works just as well on the road as at home :).

I do load my phone up with eBooks for unexpected downtime, and I do have an emulator on it. I would not chose to use my phone for reading or gaming normally, but on the road it's "good enough" - jack of all trades, master of none.

Of course if I'm traveling for work my work laptop comes, but I never put personal accounts on it.

The only trips I've been on with 18+ hours of down time were due to weather events (getting snowed in on a ski trip). That was with a big group. We just played card games, cooked, talked, and consumed copious amounts of alcohol to pass the time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Jesus, that's a lot of away time. What do you do?

Plenty of us travel with family!

I also think the variable state of hotel TVs is a factor even when travelling alone. Being able to plug your own device into the HDMI is valuable.

Fair enough, I get the TV for kids thing.

For me, I can't remember the last time I used a hotel TV. When I travel, I want to do stuff at the place I'm visiting, the hotel room is just a place to sleep and shower.

If I do want to watch something, I much prefer the experience of my much nicer TV and surround sound system at home. That said, I don't watch much TV, so maybe this is easier for me.

If I have downtime when I travel, I tend to just read, or do the same thing I do at home - doomscrolling news, reddit, HN :)

> For me, I can't remember the last time I used a hotel TV. When I travel, I want to do stuff at the place I'm visiting, the hotel room is just a place to sleep and shower.

Again, really depends on what kind of travel you’re doing. What you’re describing sounds like leisure travel, which is awesome. But travel for work is often very different. You’re exhausted from a days work and you’re also often staying in very uninspiring places with little to explore.

I've certainly had work trips like this, and if bringing more devices helps you through it more power to you! This whole thread is kind of fascinating to see how people cope with having their normal day-to-day upended by travel.

For me, even in the boring towns, I've had good luck finding at least restaurants and breweries to explore. Sometimes I do end up falling back to reading books or playing old games on an emulator on my phone. For me, I'm willing to take the compromises of the phone-based entertainment for traveling lighter.

My "family" is multiple devices. M networks (hotel, airport, lounge) and N devices means O(M * N) wifi setups, so carrying a known 200g router means I only have to do O(M+N) setups.

But yeah I also have P family so O(M * P * N) would be a headache.

If your home WiFi uses PSK auth like 99.223% of all homes, you can get to 0 setups by using the same WiFi SSID+PSK on your travel router as the one on your home network.

I have a dedicated travel AppleTV for this. AppleTV is great at hotel captive portals (forwarding the web page to your phone). I am already logged into all my streaming apps, including my home DVR (ChannelsDVR).

Sounds interesting but I assume only if you have an iPhone and both are tied to an account?

Yes

Depends a lot on the travel, yes? If I’m going to be out on the town a lot for a couple of days, I’m traveling light. If I’m going to be somewhere for a week and know I’m going to need a lot of decompression time playing Animal Crossing back at the motel, I’ll pack for that instead.

I'm not sure there's a dichotomy. I travel for a week at a time across the country, and bring only a backpack that fits under the seat on the airplane. But there's a GL.iNet router in that bag, since it gives all my devices Mullvad + Tailscale. Good use of space in my opinion, since I can access all the services I host from my home 3000 miles away with zero extra config.

Some people spend 100+ days a year in hotels.

I spent about 30 days this year in hotels and don't envy these people at all.

Yeah same. It is borring, yet unfamiliar enough to chill. Same thing kind of applies to eating out for every meal.

I spend about 200 days in hotels and I don’t want the extra weight or deal with dns/paywall issues

I did 82 days last year. Everyone travels different, but for me I feel like any time I spend watching TV in the hotel is wasted time - I'm in a whole other city, surely there's something I can do? The hotel is just somewhere to take a shower and sleep. I don't watch much TV in general though so I guess it's easier for me.

If I'm traveling for work, I'm working all day. At the end of the day I often just want to rest in the hotel room, especially if I take my dinner in a restaurant.

Typically I don't watch the hotel TV though, as I don't want to figure out what channels are on it and I probably wouldn't want to watch them anyway. If I watch anything it will be on my iPad.

I’m with you, I just turn on Bloomberg and leave it there. When I travel for work, I work all day (some client meetings ant night) and either work out at night or in the morning depending on time zone. Then I enjoy just walking around the city a bit and then sleep.

It really depends. I have a friend who works in hospitality. She travels to some of the nicest hotels in world-class cities. Most of my friends who travel for work are staying in a chain hotel near an office park 25 miles outside the core city they are ostensibly traveling to.

Completely different experiences when it comes to experiencing/exploring the city.

As a someone who has traveled for work more days in the year than not, I'd much rather not require yet another device to carry and deploy in an ever changing network environment.

The multi-uplink is intriguing. While on the surface it seems that an ostensibly 'plug and play' carrier aggregation dongle (no idea if this is actually a feature) would be a easy solution to smooth out poor connections, many networking hiccups encountered during travel just boil down to impossibly terrible RF environments, regardless of the spectrum or protocol.

If this thing can circumvent the China firewall reliably and broadcast non-firewalled Wi-Fi in my hotel room for all my devices so that I don't have to set up VPN on each one, they absolutely have my business.

However I don't think Unifi's default protocols are useful for that. To get reliable performance over China's firewall, you need plausibly-deniable obfuscated protocols, e.g. encoding all your packets inside a stream of requests of JPEGs of cat pictures over HTTP port 80 or some such.

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