A tech addict's travel setup

Alexander Fortin has travelled and lived abroad for about thirty years. He wrote this from Hua Hin, Thailand, on his first long trip in a while away from his house in the Dominican Republic. What he wants is to walk into any apartment or hotel room and, for a stay of more than a few days, have his digital life working without joining a new Wi-Fi network on every device: files syncing with Resilio Sync, video from his Plex server, games on a TV, and music through real speakers, since he insists nobody should listen through TV or laptop speakers. He assumes some internet connection (venue Ethernet or Wi-Fi, or a paid cellular plan), a TV or monitor with HDMI, which he'd buy cheaply for a long enough stay, and power outlets.

What he carries

The list is long and he calls it exhausting to read. An iPhone 16 and M1 MacBook Air with Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad are the two things he couldn't do without for a day. The rest is a GL-AR300M travel router, a USB LTE modem, a five-port gigabit switch, a Beelink EQ N200 mini PC as the server, an Anker docking station, a Fire TV stick, a Kindle Paperwhite, a Nintendo Switch with dock and pro controller, a Sonos Port, a Sonos Roam, Sonos Ace headphones, a Minirig 3 speaker, a Reloop Ready DJ controller, a small Aveek audio mixer, a solar power bank, and a bag of cables including five Cat.6 patch cords. Anything with a battery goes in the cabin.

The router is the home

The GL-AR300M runs OpenWrt, sits in his /etc/hosts as minirouter, and is the piece he considers most important. Arriving somewhere takes about five minutes: power it up, open its admin page, and set the WAN side to whatever the place offers. That can be repeater mode on the venue's Wi-Fi, the LTE modem with a local SIM, or USB tethering to the iPhone when he's in a hurry. Every device already knows the router's own network, so nothing else needs configuring. Wired devices hang off the switch: the Beelink server, the Sonos Port, the Switch dock and the laptop dock. The Roam, iPhone, Kindle and handheld Switch join over Wi-Fi.

Audio routing

The Sonos Port looks the most out of place in a travel bag, and he defends it hardest. It works as an audio router between any input (TV, DJ controller, laptop sound card) and any Sonos output. That means the TV on both speakers at once, a podcast on the Minirig while the Roam goes to the bathroom with something else, a live DJ set through every speaker in reach, sleep timers, and music as an alarm before an early flight. The mixer goes between sources and the final speaker when more inputs are needed.

Why bother

Owning the LAN means the Fire TV stick streams from his own Plex server, Resilio Sync backs up photos and video to storage in the same room rather than across the internet, and the Sonos devices just work. For access from outside, the Beelink connects at boot to an external WireGuard hub in a star topology, so his phone or laptop can reach the server's private hostname from anywhere. The only extra configuration was one persistent SNAT rule on the router. He prefers building this himself over Tailscale.

The non-technical reason is simple: whatever he doesn't take has to be stored, lent, sold or bought again later, so he takes everything he owns. He doesn't own many clothes, so there's room.

The article closes with a disclosure that a coding agent drafted the Mermaid network diagram, tempted by free inference tiers, and that he typed every other word himself. He adds that he doesn't know how that could ever be proven. That is the problem human-made-disclosure describes: a human-authorship statement nobody can verify, useful as a stance rather than as evidence. For a fixed rather than portable version of the self-hosting motive, see cleberg-server-build-summary.