Jacob's 2026 Setup

The Everyday Carries

There’s a few pieces of kit that I bring around nearly every day. Unless there’s an unusually specific circumstance, most of this gear will be with me at all times.

The Bag: Bellroy Tokyo Totpack, Everglade

I don’t like how expensive good backpacks are becoming these days, if I’m honest. But I am glad I splashed out on this “totepack” from Bellroy a couple of months ago when my old bag died after a lot of years of heavy daily use. It’s got enough storage space all around, with a good number of pockets.¹ The main compartment also still has plenty of room in the middle of it all.

The straps are very comfy too, and can pack away in the back to use exclusively in tote-mode. Which is great when using as a carry-on. It is a 20 liter capacity, but the opinionated organisation on the inside means it can fill up quick if you don’t plan how to put things in well. That said, as a chronic over-packer it’s a good counterbalance to my instinct that helps me be more intentional and choosy when travelling. The straps being detachable from the bottom also means I can hang things like my rosary or chotki from a strap for ease of access while walking. But I’ll write more about that on the other place

The Phone: Google Pixel 10, Obsidian

I’m not going to lean too heavily on images on this page, all being well. If you’ve seen the Pixel 9, you’ve seen the 10. The only reason I got the 10 was because I found a good open-box return one on Amazon for a decent discount. Oh, and Qi2 is nonnegotiable for me since switching from an iPhone 13 Mini. I use the dbrand Grip case with red Area 51 skin. Though I’m debating swapping the skin to the Gold Rush variant. We’ll see.

The Laptop: M2 MacBook Air, 16gb Ram, 256gb storage, Silver

As a long-term Linux user, am I happy that my daily-driver laptop is a Mac? Definitely not. Did I have much other options? Nope! I like to get refurb/slightly older hardware usually as I’ve found it’s usually better for the money and my development needs aren’t bleeding-edge enough to warrant the price of the latest-and-greatest.

I got a great deal on an old Dell Latitude initially when I moved to England. But it was so thick, square, and heavy that my back literally ached when I had it in the bag for longer than 15 minutes.² I also hated the keyboard I swapped it up for an XPS 13 9370. But the place I had bought it from had it listed as the standard when in fact on delivery it turned out to be the 2-in-1 variant. That was both annoying to get running well under Linux and barely had a 2 hour battery on full, with TLP optimisations running. Not to mention the thermal issues I was having.

Then I found it, the golden goose-egg Linux laptop for a Jacob like me: The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen2. It was A-mazing. It’s battery life was good enough with TLP running in a Fedora install. The keyboard was great. The screen was nice. It was oh-so light and portable. I loved it. For the month that it lived. It randomly stopped charging one day from both ports and the display-out stopped working as well. Surprisingly, when I took it in for the warranty check CeX actually refunded the thing. Unheard of.

Maybe it’s something about PC laptop manufacturing over the last 5-10 years. I’m not really sure. But second hand, or even most refurb, PC laptops I’ve had in the last few years have all either had massive degradation issues or just really bad reliability after a short period. I know the Apple Silicon MacBooks have unrivaled battery life, and the keyboards are nothing to sneeze at either. The notch on the display is annoying, sure, and I definitely find MacOS irritating at times.³ But if the one non-Linux system I’m running these days is still UNIX certified, I guess it’s not too much to complain about.

The eReader: Boox Palma 2 Pro, White

I’m planning to do a whole other post on why I love eInk/ePaper and eReaders. Lest to say, the Palma 2 Pro is one of the nicest, most convenient eReaders I’ve ever owned. It runs Android, so I can load KoReader on it via F-Droid and have my reading setup really dialed in. Its colour ePaper display is great too. The colours themselves are a bit dimmer than something like recent Kobos offer, but I really only use them for differentiating highlights in text and for nicer cover/table/image rendering.

KoReader also has great Readwise integration. So my notes and highlights from my books are always accessible to me from other devices, and my Obsidian setup too. Pretty neat.

The Audio Kit

Audio may seem like a weird thing to have on an everyday carry list. Don’t you just use Spotify or Apple Music and some headphones?⁴ Well, I was streaming music for as long as Spotify has been alive, yes. But as of late I’m really caring more about owning my media, supporting those who make it, and having access to it all on my terms.

So to that, my EDC audio setup is as follows:

• Snowsky Echo Mini (Audio Player/DAC): Snowsky is actually a sub-brand of FiiO who are well renowned in the audio space. This nifty, retro, little guy can support a good-sized microSD card, has a wide range of formats it supports, and is pretty intuitive to use.

  As a bonus, it has a balanced output jack, and can be used as a DAC over USB-C, just the same way you plug it into transfer data.

• FiiO Jade Audio JH13 (IEMs): While the Echo Mini does support Bluetooth, if you’re going to go local-media a good pair of in-ear monitors never hurts.⁵ These are fairly affordable, the cable doesn’t tangle too badly in the front pocket of my bag where the Echo Mini and IEMs sit, and they sound really nice for the price range. Amazing passive noise cancellation too if you get the ear-tip size right.

  They look pretty neat too.

• Sony WH-1000XM5, Midnight Blue (BlueTooth Headphones): When I do want to use BlueTooth, whether with the Snowsky or any other device, I had bought a discounted XM5s from Sony.⁶ Just before they released the XM6s, which address most of my criticisms of these, as it happens.

  They sound great⁷, connect well, and the multidevice is smart enough a lot of the time. The app isn’t too janky. I got the Midnight Blue variant which look great. The ANC/Transparency is also top tier on both fronts. It also has nice hardware integrations with other apps like Endel too, but more on that later.

  However…The speak-to-chat feature is infuriating and bothersome for someone like me who hums along to tunes or mutters to himself as he goes. I keep turning it back off, but every few software updates on the headphones and it turns back on. Thankfully you can have a quick-toggle for it on the app homepage which is nice. The on-head detection has been hit or miss for me also. It’s serviceable most of the time though, I guess. They don’t fold in for storage, and the cups face out when you have it on your neck. Which basically means their hard to store and feel weird when not on the head. Both of these faults were remedied in the XM6s though.⁸

  Overall, they get an 8.5/10 from me.

• Loop Engage Earplugs (Earplugs): Sometime, I just want less noise.⁹ But I still want to be able to reply if my wife or anyone else is trying to talk to me. My sister got me these for Christmas a few years ago. They’re great. Game-changing really.

  I’m not sure how much of the marketing I believe on how every set of earplugs Loop offers do totally different things, but these do their advertised job well. Loud low or rumbly noises are strongly dimmed out, and scratchy or high-pitch sounds are still audible but less sharp. Voices sound a little less full on the high-end, but still plenty loud enough to hear and respond to.

  Thanks, sis.

The Charging Kit

That covers pretty much all the devices that live in my bag or pockets. So how do I keep them charged and going?

Well, I’m glad you asked!

 Coming Soon...