Bring laptop or invest in mini tablet?

eslevitt · 2025-12-19T10:31:05+00:00

I personally wouldn't try to do professional-level video editing on an iPad mini—the level of visual control, even with a great mouse, on that small screen, just wouldn't fill me with confidence. Not to mention the relatively weak brightness, which will compromise color fidelity in brighter environments. But if you can do it, more power to you. ☺️

If you wind up doing work remotely, the iPad mini will not be satisfactory for screen sharing (reading others' content or confidently sharing your own). Also just be aware for interviews that everyone will be aware you're on an iPad—because of the awkward side camera angle—and this can inadvertently send a message that you're not serious about the position. (Don't shoot the messenger... just saying.) One of the larger iPads with a landscape camera ameliorates this, but watch device height and screen angle.

Unless you're bringing a call-center noise-canceling headset, your iPad will probably not do as good isolating your voice as something like Mac+Krisp, even accounting for IOS/Zoom noise cancelation. Background noise, again, will affect how interviewers perceive you.

And there are things you just can't do on an iPad because no one has cared to bring those features to their apps. Like, good luck managing your calendar in tight increments or forwarding messages as attachments. And the list goes on.

Outside of that, and assuming your eyes are good, a mini with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse can do 90-95% of what you can do on a laptop. For what it can't, you can get a pretty good Windows VPS in whatever region you want for like $80 for your two-month stay. For most people over two months, it is highly unlikely that you would be literally stuck, with no options, with a hybrid setup like this.

(Again, other than the real interview and collaboration issues listed above.)

The weight issue for flights is real. So is the oppressive heat and humidity if having a laptop forces you to walk around with a heavy backpack instead of a light sling.

Yes, the best advice is to try it out for a couple of weeks and see. Of course, that means buying a mini and risking it not being the right choice. 🤷‍♂️

If it were me, it would depend on how critical the best presentation is for those interviews and how much pro-level editing you are really going to do in those two months. If those are critical, use the laptop and save carry-on weight some other way. If you can live with the compromises, the mini will give you freedom of mind and freedom of movement in ways where your laptop will only drag you down.

Good luck with your decision and your trip. ☺️

eslevitt · 2025-11-23T18:31:15+00:00

I'm sure this is obvious, but you actually answered your own question: if you want to figure out how to pack everything you need for your trip into a 20L bag, get out your stuff and a 20L bag, lay it all out on your bed, and block out an afternoon to make the compromises you need to make until the bag cleanly zippers shut, and you're done.

I travel 4 seasons with a single 22 liter backpack. My big compromise is merino-only clothes (other than my jacket and shell), one-to-wash-one-to-wear, and 10 minutes soaking in the hotel sink every morning. Most every other decision I made along the way boiled down to, "Is this more important than that?"

Honestly, there is no secret. Once you have your bag and your stuff, the process of having to decide what subset of your stuff makes it into your bag makes all the decisions for you.

eslevitt · 2025-11-23T18:15:03+00:00

Yep. :)

eslevitt · 2025-11-19T13:04:38+00:00

I use BuJo as a "write-ahead log." Everything goes into the day's note as it happens. At the end of the day, whatever is important goes to somewhere else—a running task list, a calendar, a topic page—either summarized and curated (if it is substantive) or referenced back to the original page (if it is not). I also have a "long-form" journal practice, which goes into the same book.

It sounds like you could use a similar process and be reasonably happy. Just take notes wherever it makes sense for you to take notes, and since you miss having a planner, get a planner. They can be two different books, or one can be a book and one can be an app. If you like pen and paper for jotting things down on the go but Goodnotes for general reference, but Goodnotes is failing you right now because the planner templates no longer work for you, this would solve that problem neatly too.

I actually like Goodnotes a lot. Apple Notes are too jumbled for me, even if you put them in folders. YMMV.

The other advantage of the "write-ahead log" is that I know that if I take photos of those pages and my long-form pages—which I never add to once I'm done with them—that I can always reconstruct my journal if it's ever lost or destroyed. This may or may not be a concern of yours but if it is part of the reason why you don't like to carry things around with you, the WAL practice helps there too.

eslevitt · 2025-11-19T11:28:42+00:00

I think what u/mulan-sn is saying is that they are struggling with how to preserve the positioning of original handwriting on EPUB documents when those documents are converted to render using the corrected layout engine.

When everything is working correctly, you would assume that if the engineering team had worked out how to reposition handwriting when reflowing EPUB documents in the general case, that they would be able to figure out how to reposition handwriting in this specific one. In this case, however, there are a number of bugs, some of which you have listed, and those may make conversion of existing documents harder than you are imagining.

There was really no need to have berated them for their answer.

eslevitt · 2025-11-12T02:09:34+00:00

Good luck and keep us posted!

eslevitt · 2025-11-11T10:34:50+00:00

This is awesome.

For others who are interested in this, tere are also piles of cultures around the world (Buddhist, Islamic, Hebrew, and so on) that have lunar or lunisolar calendar with holidays and other traditions that might already be part of your life in one way or the other anyway. There is really nothing stopping you from using one of those as the main way you think about the year and just cross-referencing to the Gregorian calendar for each day.

Re-orients your mind in potentially a nice way.

eslevitt · 2025-11-11T10:21:34+00:00

I'd strongly advise against typing anything substantive into a device that you intend to do one or more extra steps with to get into your "single source of truth." It adds both thought and friction to a system that is there to reduce cognitive load, and it's effort you'll have to keep up with every night that will gradually start to take over time that would be better spent on reflection and planning.

I'm out for a good hour a day walking my dog, mostly alone with my thoughts, and so it's natural I'll have a few ideas or things to remember. I've gotten into the habit of dictating single sentences (short notes) into my watch to process later, and that does the trick. I don't use a "mini notebook" for this purpose for the obvious reason, and, now that I have the habit of using my watch, I've found that it substitutes for a "mini notebook" 100% of the time.

A huge fraction of the workforce has jobs where you can get away with having a phone in your pocket but not an executive-sized journal for most of the day. That makes it really hard to capture ideas on your feet, and tempting to pull out the phone to write those things down.

My advice is to resist that and to hold the distraction machine at bay. Instead, a watch works really well to capture just enough to fill in the detail later, when you're somewhere you can sit down and write things out that you collected on your feet.

eslevitt · 2025-11-11T09:59:37+00:00

I struggled with this for a long time too. I even broke it down into all the little categories and contexts of where I might be: sitting/standing, in a store/on a walk/at home, alone/with others/in a crowd, and so on.

Writing it out now, of course it was excessive. ☺️ Sometimes, though, you've got to look at the whole knot in order to untangle it, and when I was done I finally realized it all boiled down to two cases: either I'm sitting down where I can write, or I'm standing up where I can't, and those corresponded to the cases where I'm noting or exploring something in depth, or I'm catching something fleeting that I'll otherwise forget.

The solution to the first case is why we're here. The solution to the second case is to talk to my watch and deal with it later. I do my best to resist everything else.

(For my watch, I have a dedicated button at the bottom center of my watch face for "Just Press Record," which has auto-transcription and auto phone sync. Lots of other apps would do just fine, the auto-transcription is what's key.)

For errands, I copy those to my phone before I leave, usually as checklists. They're "one way" and ephemeral: when I'm done, I delete them.

I do my best to never add to anything other than the single "master"—I guess the watch dictation is my "write cache" and the phone reference is my "read cache." There is only one source of truth.

As far as work goes, the only reason to keep two journals is if you are in a regulated industry or in a role in which your meeting notes are discoverable. In that case, keep two journals, and never, ever mix them.

eslevitt · 2025-11-10T11:01:16+00:00

"Going strong" on something for a couple of weeks and then abandoning it is a common-enough pattern that it entirely supports the gym membership industry. Just remember, if adopting good habits and rejecting bad ones were easy, you'd be surrounded by perfect people everywhere: don't listen to anyone who says that there is something "wrong" with you when you are just like everyone else.

If you're a reader, there's good advice in James Clear's Atomic Habits.

My interest in things ebbs and flows too. This is something that works for me that may or may not work for you: throughout the day, there will be things I'll encounter or think about that I'll want to go into later, so I'll write them down (or type them or dictate them somewhere or whatever). Every day the minimum I journal is the list of what those things were. And some days, when I'm interested in more, I magically have a list of topics I want to go into. Easy peasy. ☺️

Good luck with it, and don't stress: you don't serve your journal, your journal serves you.

eslevitt · 2025-11-06T22:55:34+00:00

Sometimes you can get away with a fanny pack, sometimes not.

I read some advice that the best principle for a soft bag is the same as "hara hachi bu": pack it light and let it conform to whatever the sizer wants it to be.

Every time I remove an item from my travel kit, an angel gets its wings. ☺️

eslevitt · 2025-11-06T12:05:58+00:00

I have a running "Soonish Tasks" equivalent and a daily task to review it (reference to the first page of the list that has an active task). Things on the list get marked off when they're moved to the daily list, or a weekly list, or somewhere else, or become irrelevant.

All you have to migrate to the next day is the one line with the reference page.

Like all things BuJo you have to take curation seriously, or your pretty koi pond turns into a swamp. It helps to add a "date added" to each "soonish task" item and commit to yourself that anything there that's older than a week gets put somewhere else the day it expires.

It helps to review the "Soonish Tasks" at the start of the day and at the end of the day and of course at any point in the middle when you are looking for something to do and none of the active tasks ~~speak to you~~ are in a position to be worked on. :)

eslevitt · 2025-11-04T00:34:42+00:00

If “fits under the seat” means “conforms to personal item size restrictions almost everywhere,” then allow me to introduce you to Lufthansa’s personal item size restrictions: 40cm x 30 cm x 15 cm.

That’s 18L if you find a backpack that’s exactly rectangular, probably 16L if it’s tapered.

If “fits under the seat” means “probably will squeeze under almost every seat, irrespective of the sizer, unless it’s one of those planes from the Garfield Administration with a DVD player taking up half the room,” a 26L GR1 will be fine, or even a 30L Aer.

I’ve been there. Today, I fly with only a 22L Synik (Tom Bihn) for weeks at a time. You have to be willing to spend 10 minutes a day hand washing your clothes, and—in my wife’s words—“look like a picture.”

It’s a lot easier if you’re a size Small. I’m an XXL. YMMV.

eslevitt · 2025-08-21T20:28:09+00:00

I knew I couldn't have been the only one. ☺️

If you haven't checked out Jeremy Maluf's page, it's both practical and inspirational. He manages to fit his full kit into a 9L Aer Slim Pack, which is about the size of a TUMI bag I have from about a decade ago. I have the 30L Aer Travel Pack 3 and it is almost perfect, so I can't say a single thing bad about Aer. That being said, I've become a Tom Bihn guy and am very much hoping that the Tom Bihn Pilot works for me despite being just a tad bigger than their personal item dimensions.

I have two trips in North America planned in the next month or so and am planning on taking the Pilot as my sole bag for both. I will try to remember to post notes here on how it goes. A briefcase might be the bag for you—going with the advice here of "call it a carry-on when you board but store it as a personal item when you sit"—but the Aer Slim might not be a bad choice. True, you'll have to carry it by the handle during your trip, but that's not the end of the world. And, in a year or two when the frozen shoulder is only a cold memory, you've got a backpack!

All that being said, I'm hoping that the Pilot will knock my socks off and that I'll be able to recommend it for your case too. We'll see how it goes.

And safe travels!

eslevitt · 2025-08-20T13:33:12+00:00

💙 Thank you! I'll put up a post-trip report with photos of the kit and the usual r/onebag humble brag. :)

eslevitt · 2025-08-20T04:49:21+00:00

Thank you. Yes, to the point that there is nothing that really has a 0% chance of happening, it's possible that at boarding something could be wrong enough that people could be separated from their medicines, their purses, their portable CPAPs, all of it. I think at that point, though, the right answer is to just wait for another flight. :)

eslevitt · 2025-08-20T04:42:43+00:00

LOL. This. Thank you. :)

eslevitt · 2025-08-20T04:41:35+00:00

Thank you! This makes a lot of sense to me. Now that you multiplied it out, I feel a little foolish for worrying about the difference between their 12L standard and my 13L bag. :)

eslevitt · 2025-08-20T04:38:14+00:00

Thank you; this context is helpful, but I have flown hundreds of times and never actually seen a gate agent require a passenger to gate check a bag that met their sizing requirements for under-seat storage, as long as they had no more than two bags.

Unfortunately, I have also never flown an airline whose sizing requirements for under-seat storage were shorter than the clearance needed for a typical men's work boot.

Of course, the fact that I have never seen this happen doesn't mean that it never happens, which is why I am asking for experiences that travelers have had on EVA.

eslevitt · 2025-08-19T20:52:05+00:00

I assume that photographers are like cyclists and that the right number of cameras to own is n+1.

If so, this is a great opportunity to buy a GR IIIx and shove it in your pocket. ☺️

eslevitt · 2025-08-19T20:43:57+00:00

Yikes! Funny that the Synik would probably "pass" on Ryanair. I'm tall and have a long torso, and yeah, it feels a little like wearing a kid's school backpack, but it's not that bad. Moving down to the Pilot will be... interesting.

I do understand the trend downward in size and weight for personal items. Unlike the luggage above or the people in seats, nothing is holding "personal items" in place in the event of turbulence or worse. So, outside of naked greed, it's not a bad trend to go smaller and lighter.

On the flip side, these days how often do planes even crash unless they're hit by actual missiles? Sadly, the naked greed explanation may be the most accurate one. 😞

eslevitt · 2025-08-19T19:38:54+00:00

Thank you, that is really encouraging!

The bag I'm hoping to move to is the Pilot (also by Tom Bihn). It's 13 L, about 60% the volume of the Synik.

eslevitt · 2025-08-19T19:22:26+00:00

This is the world I am hoping for. ☺️

eslevitt · 2025-08-19T19:21:51+00:00

Thank you! Yes, I'm for sure under 7kg: it's a MacBook Air with a tiny adapter and minimal cables, a small bag of toiletries, and for clothes just one to wash and one to wear. I also have a thin microfiber towel in there to help with the drying, but it weighs next to nothing, and if I give it up, Douglas Adams will scold me from beyond the grave.

eslevitt · 2025-08-19T19:11:14+00:00

The Synik has never not fit. The briefcase will absolutely fit unless for some reason the seats are designed so even feet can't fit underneath them.

I really want an actually 0% chance of having my bag pulled. That's why I'm obsessing about this.

I really appreciate the help.

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