Being able to travel while being productive sounds romantic until you’ve spent hours hunching over your laptop on a hotel nightstand, untangling cables, hunting for outlets, and trying to focus in a space that clearly wasn’t designed for it. Over time, I have realized that productivity on the road has less to do with where you are and more to do with how intentionally you pick your equipment and set up your workspace. A good travel desk setup isn’t about recreating your home office, but rather about stripping things down to the essentials that actually help you think, create, and execute, no matter where you are.

Although the term minimalism has gained a bad reputation over the past years due to its overuse by influencers, the actual philosophy behind it still remains valid and plays a huge role here, just not in the aesthetic-only sense that you might have been told about by “social” media. My personal setup is minimal because every item earns its place in it. When you’re living out of a bag for months at a time, friction becomes obvious very quickly and extra weight, redundant items, or tools that look nice but don’t meaningfully improve your workflow or comfort are the exact opposite of what this minimalism is about. The goal isn’t to carry less just for the sake of it, but it is to carry with purpose, depending on the circumstances.

The point of a minimal travel setup is to have a reliable configuration that works wherever I am, whether that’s at an airport lounge, a café, an Airbnb, or a hotel “desk”, and to be able to open my bag and effortlessly set up everything needed in that situation. It’s basically a familiar, well-considered arrangement of tools that support what I do and, more importantly, that are modular, like little LEGO pieces, to offer a varying degree of completeness and availability, depending on the environment I’m in.

Core principles

Before getting into the actual hardware, it is worth being explicit about the rules I use to decide what does and what does not end up in my bag. Over the years, four principles have emerged that I now apply to every item, regardless of how cool, useful, or objectively good it might be in isolation. They are the reason the same bag works for a one-night business trip, or a month-long stay, without ever feeling like a bad compromise in any direction.

These principles are also why I tend to ignore influencer packing lists when refining my own setup. They typically focus on what to pack, while the more durable question is why to pack one thing instead of another. Hardware comes and goes, gets discontinued, gets replaced, but the criteria for choosing the next iteration stay the same. The four principles below are the ones I keep returning to, in roughly the order in which I apply them.

Modularity

The first criteria behind my travel setup is modularity. Not in the physical sense (i.e. not in the way LEGO bricks click together), but in the sense that every component is useful on its own and becomes more useful when combined with others. Nothing in my bag depends on another item being present, yet whenever two or more components are around, they recognize each other and start cooperating without me having to touch a single knob or configuration.

Let me get ahead of myself for a second to give you a short example. When I’m working out of a café, I usually have my laptop (plus my keyboard Sonshi-style) that connects to my LTE router, either over WiFi or over Ethernet. Most of the time that’s the entire setup. However, the moment I’m in a hotel for a few days, I add my WiFi router to the mix, to have a LAN that I have full control over, that provides me with a VPN to circumvent geo-restrictions on all of my devices, and that is able to easily interconnect more items further down the road.

Plugging the LTE router into the WiFi router automatically disables the LTE router’s built-in WiFi and switches it into tethering mode, after which the WiFi router load-balances WAN traffic between the LTE connection and the hotel’s own WiFi. Unplug the LTE router and it falls back to standalone hotspot mode. Plus, both WiFi networks (the one from the LTE router, and the one from the WiFi router) are named alike and share the same password. This way my WiFi clients don’t even notice the switch from one to the other.

This is what I mean by modular. Components don’t depend on each other to function, but recognize each other the moment they are together and adjust accordingly, ideally without any manual intervention from my side. Adding a piece extends the setup, and removing a piece simplifies it rather than breaking it. By dropping the Ultra-Portable Data Center into the same network, for instance, I get a near-perfect replica of my home LAN anywhere in the world, without changing a single configuration along the way. And, yes, that home LAN write-up definitely needs a refresher, as many things have changed over the years; Coming soon™.

Redundancy with different functionality

The second principle is redundancy with different functionality. Every backup item in my bag must already earn its keep on its own. The classic approach to redundancy (carrying a duplicate of an important device) means paying for the same capability twice in money, space, and weight, while the backup contributes nothing on the (hopefully many) days that nothing breaks. Instead, I’d rather find a device that I’m already carrying for its own reason and that can also step in when something fails.

Take my LTE router. The obvious redundancy would be a second LTE router, identical to the first, sitting in my bag purely for the just in case scenario. My actual backup, however, is my phone. It is in my pocket regardless, and if the LTE router ever gives up on me, the phone tethers the same way over USB and offers a similar WiFi hotspot on the go. When tethered, the WiFi router doesn’t even need to know the difference, as all that it sees is a USB Ethernet device anyway.

The same logic applies to my laptop. If its screen should ever get smashed during one of my travels, I don’t need a spare laptop, I have my tablet. Over the LAN, the tablet can SSH into the laptop, run a VNC session against my desktop environment, or, with the EVGA XR1 Pro, display the laptop’s HDMI output via VLC. And in case the whole laptop should malfunction, I can plug its USB-C hub into the tablet and use that as a temporary workstation until I can get the laptop fixed or replaced. As a matter of fact, I can do the exact same thing with my phone, because, it too allows me to connect the USB-C hub, plus my keyboard, plus my mouse and even an external HDMI display, if things really go sideways. None of these devices are in my bag because of the laptop, they are there for their own reasons, and happen to be capable of covering for it.

Weight over function, over form

The third principle is the priority order I apply to every item in my bag:

Weight first, then function, then form.

This runs contrary to the #minimalism trends on “social” media, which tend to put form ahead of everything else. In my setup, an item must first be light enough to be worth carrying, then capable enough to do its job reliably, and only after that does its appearance get a vote.

My laptop stands are a good illustration for this principle. They are simple, 3D-printed with PETg, with an infill of 20%, and far from what most people would call good looking. Their job is to raise my laptop’s screen to a comfortable viewing height, which they do reliably while weighing almost nothing. The commercial alternatives are typically machined from aluminum for uLtRa DuRaBiLiTy and for aesthetics, and weigh several times what mine do, while offering durability that I never come close to needing for the actual use case. At cents per print, breaking one is also a non-event, as I can just print another.

The same trade-off shows up across the entire setup. 3D prints over machined aluminum, plastic over metal, lightweight pouches over hard cases, USB-C cables over barrel-connector PSUs. Each swap individually shaves only grams, but in aggregate the difference between a thoughtfully chosen and a just bought what looked nice travel kit quickly adds up to several kilograms, which is the difference between a carry-on that I can comfortably wear all day and one that has me dreading every moment of it.

Calculated use

The fourth principle is calculated use. Before any item enters my bag, I run the numbers on it. The two formulas I always start with are cost per use (purchase price divided by how often I realistically expect to use it) and cost per time unit (the same idea, but measured per hour, day, or trip of actual use). Those two alone often reveal that a flashy 200 USD gadget I’d touch twice a year is far more expensive per use than the unglamorous 80 USD one I’d reach for daily.

For items where the decision isn’t clear-cut from those two, I also calculate the expected value of ownership, factoring in how frequently I’d actually use the item across different trip types, the utility-adjusted cost, weighting the price by how much the item improves the overall setup, not just its own niche, the net present value, treating gear as a multi-year investment with a discount rate, and the replacement cost comparison, to understand how much I’d pay later to replace it versus buying the better option now. Lastly, I evaluate the opportunity cost not only in money but also in bag space and grams, since both are finite resources on the road.

Now, you might be thinking that this sounds borderline neurotic for what amounts to picking out hardware, and… well… it probably is. But having had to walk away from items that I had bought and lugged around for months, only to realize they ultimately weren’t worth the bag space, has taught me to be deliberate. The few minutes spent running these numbers up front have saved me significantly more time, money and shoulder pain afterwards. Also, sitting here for now almost 15 minutes straight and reading through this write-up isn’t particularly less autistic either; You’re welcome. :-)

Setup

So what does my actual setup look like? Let’s dive into the details and go through the items one category at a time.

Power

Let’s start with the most basic item in my setup: The power supply. Depending on how long I’m planning to be on-the-go and which parts of my modular desk I’m taking with me, I either bring the UGREEN X757 15202 Nexode Pro GaN 100W 3-Port charger, or its bigger brother, the UGREEN 55474 Nexode 300W GaN 5-Port PSU. On shorter trips with only my primary workstation, my phone and/or my tablet, the portable 100W charger is sufficient. However, on longer trips I usually bring the 300W brick, which allows me to power additional (networking) equipment in parallel.

Both UGREEN PSUs are USB-C PD 3.1 capable and support at least 65W on at least one port, which means I can comfortably charge my laptop at full speed while simultaneously powering other things, instead of having to juggle multiple chargers. With almost every device in my setup running off of USB-C PD, from my mobile WiFi router all the way down to my LTE router, I can leave almost all proprietary wall warts (looking at you, Raspberry Pi!) at home and instead only bring a small bag of compact USB-C cables. As an added bonus, that also means I never have to deal with yet another set of region-specific power outlet adapters, beyond a single one for the UGREENs’ Type A/B and F plugs.

Note: Because I’m picking up my hardware in different parts of the world, every socket-bound item has a different plug, which at times makes it really cumbersome to deal with them. Therefor I try to make sure that if a device has a power plug, it is a detachable cable that I could replace for a different plug type in the future. In some cases, as it is with the UGREEN X757 15202 Nexode, this obviously won’t work and I’m stuck with the inferior and comparatively dangerous Type A plug.

I don’t have redundancy for the PSU because these items are usually easily available everywhere in case it should break.

Workstation

My primary workstation is a 14" Star Labs StarBook Mk VI, which is an AMD Ryzen 7 5800U machine with 64GB 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 (3200 MHz CL22) RAM and a 2TB SK hynix Gold P31 NVMe SSD. The device runs a hardened Gentoo Linux installation with a minimal Wayland desktop. It weighs around 1.4kg and has sadly become relatively tedious to work with over the years, due to various hardware issues and its lacking performance. Therefor I will be replacing the device with a sub-1.4kg 14" device very soon™.

Because the StarBook only has a single USB-C port and I don’t feel like taking the dedicated USB-C-to-barrel cable with me, I usually bring my uni 8-in-1 USB-C hub with USB-C PD power input. The hub adds three USB-A ports (which I desperately need on the StarBook), an SD/microSD card reader, an additional HDMI port, and an Ethernet port, and it accepts 100W USB-C PD input while forwarding up to 90W to my laptop. This means a single USB-C cable from the UGREEN charger into the hub powers both, the laptop and any peripherals plugged into it. As a side effect, the hub also makes the StarBook feel like a docking station setup, where I plug or unplug a single cable to instantly add or remove three USB-A peripherals, Ethernet, and a card reader to/from my workstation. However, having only a single USB-C port in 2026 is nevertheless limiting, which is another reason to move away from the Star Labs hardware.

To avoid completely screwing up my posture, I use two 3D-printed laptop stands, with added self-adhesive rubber pads, that raise my laptop’s screen a good ~20cm, as mentioned before. The 20% infill PETg prints are super lightweight yet stable, at least once the laptop is in place. Because the two stands are not interconnected, however, they’re not as stable as one of those foldable metal stands, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to use them e.g. on the little tray table in an airplane.

Keyboard & Mouse

I always bring my mechanical keyboard, because my laptop’s keyboard, like every integrated keyboard, is absolute garbage. To transport my keyboard, I use the NuPhy NuPack, which is intended as an accessory for specific NuPhy keyboards, but it turns out that the pouch fits a variety of other keyboards, including my Kunai Corne v3. The NuPack also has a dedicated compartment for cables and accessories, which means I don’t have to dig through my bag to find the keyboard’s USB-C cable.

When I’m at a proper desk, I lift my laptop using the two 3D-printed stands mentioned above, and I place my keyboard in front of it. When I’m at a café or in any other place with little space, I place a lightweight bridge made out of plastic on top of my laptop and use my keyboard Sonshi-style. The bridge weighs next to nothing, and is shaped to span the keys of the integrated keyboard without putting pressure on them. To complement this, I run usbec, a small helper that automatically disables the laptop’s internal keyboard whenever my external keyboard is connected, so that I don’t accidentally mash arbitrary keys on the integrated keyboard when typing on the Kunai Sonshi-style.

I almost always bring my mouse as well, despite my desktop workflow being 99% keyboard driven. There are websites and some applications (e.g. VMs) that are cumbersome to use with the keyboard alone. My mouse of choice is the Razer Basilisk V3 Pro, and depending on where and for how long I’ll be going, I might also bring the Razer Mouse Dock Pro for easy overnight recharging. On shorter trips, I instead rely on the mouse’s built-in battery, which comfortably gets me through a week of regular use, and recharge it via USB-C from the same charger that powers everything else.

Secondary screen

I used to carry a portable display with me, but ever since I bought the Google Pixel Tablet I have been using that as a “secondary screen”. While it doesn’t support actual HDMI input from my laptop without additional hardware, I don’t really need that, as my primary use case for a secondary screen is for monitoring data streams, and occasionally following along conversations and videos. For quick data sharing between the laptop and the tablet, LocalSend and Syncthing both run on the same LAN (more on that further down), and for actual remote control I tend to use either an SSH session in Termux or a VNC client.

I am however considering an external display, due to the added screen real estate. While the integrated 14" monitor is okay, my aging eyesight would definitely benefit from having a 16" or 18" display to look at. Sadly, most of those options are still too bulky/heavy to be suitable for the ridiculous weight limitations air travel has these days.

By using the tablet as an “external monitor”, the device doubles as a backup just in case anything should ever happen to my laptop. Since Android 16, the operating system mimics a desktop well enough for me to be able to work with it in case of emergency. A true portable monitor would be bigger and maybe even heavier than the tablet, yet wouldn’t work independently of the laptop. Given how most hotels and Airbnbs these days have TVs with HDMI input, however, finding a dumb output in case of display failure is easier than finding a computer to work off of temporarily.

Note: Having all that said, I’m getting increasingly frustrated of Google’s garbage hardware and, in particular, the Google Pixel Tablet. Its lacking performance has rendered the device almost useless for many serious tasks, apart from pure media consumption. Even navigating through somewhat packed Grafana dashboards (with auto-refresh) has become painfully slow these days. Hence, I am seriously reconsidering this piece of hardware long-term and I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone for more than just media consumption at this point.

Audio & Video

While I don’t consider myself an audiophile, I do appreciate the difference that decent gear makes once you’ve spent a few years collecting music in lossless formats. To not waste all those FLACs on the (mediocre) DACs of my laptop or my phone, I bring along an iFi hip-dac3, a compact USB DAC and headphone amplifier. The device handles PCM up to 384kHz and DSD256, has both a 4.4mm balanced and a 3.5mm single-ended output, an XBass+ switch for low-end emphasis, and an XSpace switch that simulates a more open soundstage. I usually pair the hip-dac3 with my phone when on the go, or with my laptop when at the desk, to listen to my self-hosted Jellyfin music library that lives on my Ultra-Portable Data Center.

Beyond the sound quality improvement, the hip-dac3 also lets me avoid Bluetooth, which I generally distrust security-wise and which I’d rather not blast at my head for hours every day. Lower-end Bluetooth headphones combined with Android also tend to produce occasional disconnects and audio glitches when running LDAC, which is something I don’t want to deal with anymore. Battery life on the hip-dac3 is solid enough that I can leave it on the desk for a full work day or carry it around for an entire flight without having to worry about it dying mid-track. And when I do need to top it up, it charges via the same USB-C source as everything else.

For video, I often carry the EVGA XR1 Pro, a USB-C HDMI capture device that turns any HDMI output into a webcam-style USB Video Class (UVC) stream. Whenever I need a high-quality video feed, for example for a video call or for content recorded for my (currently inactive) YouTube channel, I plug the HDMI output of either my Fujifilm X100VI or my Sony Alpha 7 III into the XR1 Pro, which my laptop then sees as a regular webcam. The picture quality, optics, and color reproduction of either camera blow any integrated laptop webcam (and any of those overpriced 4K USB webcams) out of the water, especially in the kind of mediocre lighting one tends to find in hotel rooms. As a bonus, the XR1 Pro also doubles as a fallback display path. As mentioned earlier, in case my laptop’s screen should ever die mid-trip, I can feed the laptop’s HDMI output into the capture device and view it on my tablet via VLC to keep working until I can get the display fixed or replaced.

On longer trips, and only on longer trips, I sometimes break my own weight rule and bring along my Teenage Engineering OP-1. At nearly 600g without its protective gear, it is by far the heaviest non-essential item that ever ends up in my bag, and the only one I let in for purely creative reasons rather than productive ones. When spending months on the road it’s important to bring something fun, and the OP-1 is the most travel-friendly synth/sampler I own. It’s a self-contained creative outlet that fits on a hotel desk without dragging an entire studio along.

The catch is that the OP-1’s integrated speaker is, frankly, a gimmick. It is fine for previewing what you just played, but nowhere near good enough for actual listening or for mixing anything down. In practice that means I always pair it with my wired headphones, since I don’t carry a portable speaker with an AUX input that would do the device justice. For transit, the OP-1 lives inside a Decksaver TE OP-1 Cover, which itself sits in a dedicated Teenage Engineering Large Duty Bag, both of which add roughly another 170g on top. The OP-1 unapologetically fails the calculated use test by any rational metric, but it earns its spot purely through the joy it brings me on long trips.

Networking

Networking is probably where the modular aspect of my travel setup shines the most. Just as with the rest of my equipment, every networking device can function on its own and remains useful in different combinations. Depending on whether I’m hopping between places or settling in city for a longer stay, I might bring only the bare minimum (just my LTE router, acting as a hotspot), or my full setup that consists of a dedicated mobile WiFi router, an Ethernet switch, and the Ultra-Portable Data Center.

The thinking here is the same as with the rest of my equipment. I want to be able to recreate as much of my home area network as possible, in any location, while still having the flexibility to leave parts behind if they don’t make sense for the trip. Tethered hotspot at the airport? Just the LTE router. Hotel room with mediocre WiFi for a few weeks? Add the WiFi router, the switch, and the UPDC. The key is that these devices are configured and wired up the same way regardless of where I am, which means I never have to mess with configurations on the road. The setup just extends, like LEGO.

Mobile data

For mobile data I’ve been carrying the Netgear Nighthawk M2 for several years now. The device is a 4G/LTE-A Cat. 20 router with a built-in battery and a small color touchscreen, and despite being almost seven years old at this point, it still holds up for the most part. When I’m out and about, the M2 acts as a straightforward mobile hotspot, providing connectivity through its own WiFi to my laptop, phone and tablet. When I’m settled at the travel desk, however, the M2 connects as a client to whatever WiFi the venue offers (be it a hotel, an Airbnb, or a co-working space) and re-shares that connection to my mobile WiFi router via USB tethering. Because of how the WiFi router is configured, plugging the M2 into it automatically disables the M2’s WiFi hotspot and switches it into tethering mode, where it acts as a USB Ethernet device. The mobile router then load-balances WAN traffic between the venue’s WiFi (making the M2 a WiFi client) and the M2’s LTE connection, which gives me a fairly resilient internet uplink without having to fiddle with any settings. Additionally, both WiFi networks, the one of the M2 and the one of my mobile WiFi router, are configured in the same way, so that clients don’t even notice the switch.

The Netgear has, however, started showing its age in the past year or so. It has begun crashing and rebooting at random, and reports increasingly nonsensical battery charge percentages, which I’m fairly certain is due to the now almost 7 year old internal battery, which is user-replaceable but seemingly very hard to find.

In addition to the battery, the touch buttons on the device have also started malfunctioning, with presses not being registered most of the time. As I begin to lose trust in the device, I’m in the process of replacing it with the GL.iNet Mudi 7 (GL-E5800). The Mudi 7 supports 5G NSA/SA, multiple SIM/eSIM cards, and runs OpenWrt with GL.iNet’s firmware layer on top, much like the Slate 7 I’m already using. Multi-SIM in particular is interesting for me, as it lets me keep separate SIMs for different countries or carriers active simultaneously, without having to physically swap cards every time I cross a border.

That said, I’m skeptical about how the Mudi 7 will perform when it comes to battery runtime. 5G modems and the more sophisticated hardware around them will inevitably draw significantly more power than the Nighthawk does. Also, the device is clearly heavier and more bulky than the M2, which is going to be a significant downside. Given its importance, however, it is a trade-off I’m willing to make. Time will tell whether the Mudi 7 will turn out to be a worthy successor, or whether I’ll have to keep the M2 on life support a little longer until something better comes along.

WiFi & routing

The centerpiece of my travel network is the GL.iNet Slate 7 (GL-BE3600), a Wi-Fi 7 dual-band travel router that weighs a mere 295g and is powered via USB-C PD. I covered the device in detail in its own review not too long ago, so I’ll keep this section brief. The Slate 7 replaced my long-running Linksys WRT3200 ACM as my primary router, mostly thanks to its compact 130×91×34mm form factor, dual 2.5 GbE Ethernet ports, USB-A tethering input, and the convenience of being able to power it directly from the same UGREEN charger that powers everything else. The built-in touchscreen is a nice extra, as it displays connection stats, VPN status, and a QR code for quickly joining the network from any device. The router runs an OpenWrt 23.05-SNAPSHOT fork with GL.iNet’s firmware layer on top, which gives me both root SSH access and a friendly admin UI, even if it isn’t a fully vanilla OpenWrt experience.

The bigger reason the Slate 7 stays in my bag, however, is that it turns whatever environment I’m in into a familiar LAN. All my devices (laptop, phone, tablet, UPDC) connect to the same network regardless of where I am, which means tools like Syncthing and LocalSend work out of the box, Jellyfin playback follows me from device to device, and SSH between machines uses local IPs without any configuration gymnastics. It also means I can run a single WireGuard VPN connection on the router itself and route the entire LAN through it when needed, which is great for circumventing geo-IP limitations on services and similar shenanigans, without having to configure a VPN client on every individual device, including the ones that don’t even support one.

Because the Slate 7 only has a single 2.5 GbE LAN port, I usually carry a Netgear GS305 5-port gigabit switch as well. I tend to prefer wired connections wherever possible, both for stability/throughput and for security reasons. The GS305 is unmanaged, dirt cheap, and has been working flawlessly for years, but it has two notable downsides: It tops out at 1 GbE, which becomes the bottleneck in a setup with 2.5 GbE endpoints, and it requires its own dedicated barrel connector cable. I’m therefore looking to replace it with something like the Ubiquiti Flex Mini 2.5G 5-port switch, which matches the Slate 7’s 2.5 GbE link, and which can be powered via USB-C, resulting in yet another barrel-connector adapter that I can leave at home.

Ultra-Portable Data Center

On longer trips, the Ultra-Portable Data Center (v2) always travels with me. The UPDC v2 is a Raspberry Pi 5-based NAS that I built in 2024, replacing the original mini-ITX-based UPDC v1. The device runs two 4TB NVMe drives in mirrored RAID1 (mdadm) on top of LUKS, served over the LAN via Samba, Syncthing and Jellyfin, and packs a 4-cell 18650 UPS HAT, a handful of environmental sensors and a small LCD into a 3D-printed cube that weighs about 800g (with the optional stand) and measures 114mm a side. It is in essence a very compact, travel-ready NAS that I can plug straight into the Slate 7’s LAN port and have all my data, services, and music library available on the road, without ever touching the cloud.

For a deep-dive into the hardware choices, the enclosure, the migration from TrueNAS SCALE, and the full software stack, please refer to the dedicated UPDC post.

One major disadvantage of the UPDC, however, is the fact that the Raspberry Pi 5 requires its own dedicated power supply due to its special 5.1V/5A USB-C PD voltage requirements, which most generic chargers and power banks simply don’t speak. This means I cannot share the UPDC’s power source with the rest of my travel setup, and I have to bring along a dedicated CanaKit 45W USB-C power supply just for the Pi. To make matters worse, despite the dedicated PSU I have never been able to fully get rid of the occasional Under-voltage detected! warnings that show up in dmesg from time to time. The Pi 5 is a notoriously whiny little b…oard in that regard, and Raspberry is arguably to blame for it. Performance-wise the under-voltage events have no noticeable impact on my workloads (which are mostly Syncthing, Samba, and the occasional Jellyfin transcode), but they’re a reminder that the Pi 5’s power story isn’t quite as easy as I would expect.

The Ultra-Portable Data Center project was a fun thing to build and has served me well, but with more elaborate and truly minimal all-in-one solutions becoming available these days (the Beelink ME mini and the UnifyDrive UT2 being prominent candidates I’m keeping an eye on), I might at some point move away from a self-built solution in favour of something off-the-shelf that doesn’t need a separate PSU. As things stand today, however, the UPDC remains the most travel-friendly option for me, and the only one that gives me an end-to-end open-source storage stack that I fully control.

Accessories

The remainder of my bag is filled with the small connective tissue that holds the rest of the setup together. Whether or not these items come along depends entirely on the length and nature of the trip, but each of them has earned a spot in the lineup the same way the bigger pieces did.

The first of these is a small, modular tablet rig made up of two parts. The Lyrcro desktop microphone tripod is, as the name suggests, intended for desktop microphones, but its 3/8" screw thread doubles as a perfectly good universal mount for anything that takes the same standard. What I most often attach to it is the KDD Tablet Tripod Clamp-Mount as well as some no-name ballhead connecting the two items. The clamp holds my tablet (as well as my phone) securely on top of the tripod and lets me park the device right next to my laptop, at exactly the same height as the screen sitting on top of its 3D-printed stands. The result is a makeshift dual-screen desk that takes seconds to assemble. As a nice side effect, the same little tripod is also sturdy enough to support my Fujifilm X100VI when I want to use the camera as a webcam via the EVGA XR1 Pro, despite being technically rated for microphones only.

Next, there is a small organizer pouch full of USB adapters that I keep refusing to leave behind, because every single one of them has saved me at least once. I carry USB-A to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A converters for situations in which whoever designed that particular hotel TV or rental car decided that 2026 isn’t quite ready for USB-C yet, as well as L-shaped (90°) and U-shaped (180°) USB-C adapters that let me plug cables into my laptop or my phone at angles other than straight out, which matters more than you’d think when working off a nightstand or when using a device on a tripod. None of these adapters cost much, none of them weigh much, but each of them turns a potential problem into a non-event the moment it appears.

I already mentioned the Razer Mouse Dock Pro briefly in the keyboard & mouse section, but it is worth revisiting here as a true accessory. On shorter trips it stays home, and the Basilisk V3 Pro’s built-in battery covers me for a week without complaint. On longer trips, however, the dock comes along, both for the convenience of overnight wireless recharging and because, in the rare event the mouse runs flat mid-day, dropping it onto the dock for a few minutes is faster than digging out a USB-C cable.

Lastly, my Seeed Studio SenseCAP T1000-E LoRa/Meshtastic card travels with my EDC regardless of the trip. The card weighs next to nothing, lives in the same pouch as the rest of my EDC, and lets me scan for and join Meshtastic communities in whichever region I happen to be in. On a fun day, that means chatting over LoRa with strangers on the other side of a city. On a less fun day, it doubles as a fully off-grid communication device that doesn’t care whether the local mobile network is up, down, or compromised. It’s a small but meaningful piece of the preparedness side of my travel kit, in case anything more serious than the usual hotel WiFi outage should ever happen.

Closing thoughts

What this setup ultimately gives me is the confidence to open my bag in any environment, anywhere in the world, and have a familiar workstation within minutes, all without having to check-in one of Pelican’s SuperMAC rack mount cases. Instead of a compromised version of my home office, I get a fully-featured, modular workspace that scales from a single laptop on a plane’s tray table all the way to a multi-device LAN with NAS, capture hardware, and high-fidelity audio in a hotel room. Every component has been chosen, replaced, or rebuilt over the years, sometimes more than once, with weight, modularity, redundancy, and calculated use as the guiding principles. Nothing here is in my bag because it looked nice on Instagram, but because it has earned its spot through repeated, real-world use.

If there’s one piece of advice I’d give anyone considering building a similar setup, it is the following:

Resist the urge to copy someone else’s packing list, including this one. Your own travel patterns, constraints, and physical comfort will dictate what actually deserves to end up in your bag. Use this post as inspiration, but pick each item based on your workflow, your destinations, and your tolerance for carrying things around. The most minimal setup is not the one with the fewest items, but the one in which every item is actually indispensable and useful.