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Building a travel toolkit

2025-01-02T00:00:00Z

The container for my toolkit, a UGREEN “travel accessories” bag

For a while now, whenever I’ve traveled anywhere I’ve dumped a selection of tools into my backpack just in case I need them. Originally this was mostly focused around being able to open and fix my laptop if anything went wrong, but over time has slowly expanded to include other useful tools.

Repeatedly packing these tools and then returning them to where they belonged was tedious, though. I couldn’t just leave them in the backpack as I often needed them for non-travelling purposes, and I didn’t want to just buy duplicate tools that spent most of their life a few meters away from each other, so I ignored the problem and just dealt with the tedium.

Eventually I acquired enough tools that — while not quite duplicates — I wouldn’t miss often if they were kept in the backpack. Building on these I’ve created a little travel toolkit that contains everything I might want (and more) while away.

The base

The biggest challenge I had before was finding a screwdriver set. I have an iFixit Mako set that did the in-and-out-of-the-bag routine for several years. Nothing else covered the range of drivers I wanted for generic electronic tinkering and more chunky work. I finally found one in the form of a Wera Tool-Check PLUS TR-Edition. “TR” stands for “Tool Rebel” and is Wera’s “fan club” brand. Its signature features over the normal Tool-Check PLUS are a fancy fabric case and a 152mm bit extender; but it also comes with a much different set of bits, which is why I picked it up.

Here’s a comparison

Type	Standard version	Tool Rebel edition
Phillips	2x PH1 3x PH2 1x PH3	1x PH00 1x PH0 1x PH1 1x PH2 1x PH3
Pozidrive	None	1x PZ1 3x PZ2
Slotted	1x 5.5mm	1x 4mm 1x 4.5mm 2x 5.5mm 1x 6.5mm
Torx	1x T10 1x T15 1x T20 1x T25 1x T30 1x T40	1x T10 1x T15 1x T20 1x T25 1x T30 1x T40
Security Torx	1x T10 1x T15 1x T20 1x T25 1x T30	1x T25
Hex	1x H3 1x H4 1x H5 1x H6 1x H8	1x H1.5 1x H2 1x H2.5 1x H3 1x H4 1x H6 1x H8

There are only five bits present in the standard version that are missing in the TR edition: 5mm hex (pretty uncommon) and four sizes of security torx (rare). In exchange for those and the removal of a bunch of duplicates, you get two extra phillips sizes (0 and 00, both very useful for electronics and spectacles), some pozidrive bits (extremely common on random hardware/furniture/etc), smaller hex bits (for electronics, 3D printers, and so on), and a few other bits and pieces.

Overall it’s a vastly superior selection for my needs. And while it doesn’t have the full range of bits provided by the iFixit kit, it does cover almost everything I’m ever actually likely to need while travelling, and it’s probably around a third of the size.

The other core part of the toolkit is the bag. I had a UGREEN “travel accessory” bag hanging around unused, and noticed it was almost the exact right size for the Tool-Check. Now, how many other tools could I stuff in there?

All the tools

The array of tools that make up the travel toolkit

The kit can be broken down into a few sections:

Screwdriving

The aforementioned Wera Tool-Check
Its 152mm bit extender

I’ve talked enough about this already, I think, so I’ll spare you any additional commentary on screwdrivers and bits.

Splitting, gripping and cutting

Engineer tweezers
Engineer mini snips
Engineer mini screw removal pliers
Knipex mini waterpump pliers
Two iFixit spudgers (one metal, one plastic)
iFixit jimmy

I have bigger or slightly different versions of these that stay in my normal toolkit. The tweezers and snips are useful in a variety of situations, and the spudgers are handy for getting inside laptops and other devices. The pliers are less useful, but they’re one of those things where when you do need them there aren’t any good alternatives.

Sewing

Two needles
Some black thread
Set of mini clips

You never know when you’re going to rip a seam in something. I find the clips a lot less fiddly than using pins for keeping material in place when I’m trying to sew.

Computering

Retractable ethernet cable
RJ45 coupler
USB-C to RJ45 adapter
Dual USB-A and USB-C thumb drive, with an Arch ISO on it

Sometimes Wi-Fi just doesn’t cut it, or you need to fiddle with a router that doesn’t expose its admin UI over Wi-Fi. The USB-C adapter is for use with my phone, as it’s often easier to move that get the laptop where it needs to be.

I can boot from the thumb drive into an Arch environment, and from there reinstall my laptop from scratch if needed. There’s enough space left over so it can be used to transfer files as well.

Miscellaneousing

Fabric tape measure
Spirit level
Sharpie
Superglue
Spare batteries: 2 CR2032s, 2 AA, 2 AAA

I’m almost certain I won’t use the spirit level, but it’s tiny and I had a spare so it went in. Everything else is just in the “generally handy to have” category.

Putting it all together

The nicely-organised side of the toolkit

The Tool-Check PLUS fits almost perfectly into one side of the UGREEN bag, leaving a little wiggle room along the side for the longer parts like spudgers. The middle pockets can’t fit much in, but keep the batteries and sewing bits out of the way. Everything else is in a big zip-up compartment in the other side, which is slightly messy but still easy enough to dig through to find whatever I need.

The complete kit weighs in at around 1.2KG, so it’s not exactly lightweight, but it goes in a bag with a heavy laptop and all of its peripherals so it’s not as noticeable as it might otherwise be.

It remains to be seen how much use I’ll actually get out of any of this. Maybe I’ll put a bit of paper in so that I can track how often I use each tool…

A look at the DNS habits of the top 100k websites

2017-08-16T00:00:00Z

I was thinking about switching DNS providers recently, and found myself whoising random domains and looking at their nameservers. One thing lead to another and I ended up doing a survey of the nameservers of the top 100,000 sites according to Alexa.

Most popular providers

The top providers by a large margin were, unsurprisingly, Cloudflare and AWS Route 53. Between them they accounted for around 30% of the top 100k sites.

The top 10 providers overall were:

Provider	Country	Sites
Cloudflare	United States	19%
AWS Route53	United States	10%
GoDaddy	United States	4%
DNSPod	China	3%
Dyn	United States	2%
Akamai	United States	2%
DNS Made Easy	United States	2%
Hi China	China	1%
UltraDNS	United States	1%
Namecheap	United States	1%

You have to search fairly deep to find a provider that’s not American or Chinese: OVH (France), Gandi (France again) and RU Center (Russia) all come in at around 0.5% of the top sites.

One thing I found particularly interesting was the relatively small number of sites that use Google’s hosted DNS service – out of the 100,000 sites only 0.4% appear to use Google Cloud DNS. That’s 25 times fewer than are using Route 53.

Different strokes for different folks

This graph shows the relative frequency of some of the big providers for sites in different positions in the top 100,000 list:

Graph showing popularity of DNS providers across sites grouped by position

There are a few interesting transitions that can be seen here. The very large sites tend to manage their own DNS, as can be seen with the large ‘Self-hosted/other’ number in the top 100 category. As you move down into the top thousand, you get to sites that still have significant requirements but don’t quite have the need to run their own DNS infrastructure; here you can see Akamai peak, and Cloudflare usage jump up an order of magnitude.

As you travel further down the list, DNS becomes a much more mundane affair and you see ‘premium’ providers such as NS1, Dyn and Verisign drop off, and commodity providers such as GoDaddy start to soar. Cloudflare remains a popular option for these sites thanks, I imagine, to its generous free plan.

Resilience

In October 2016, Dyn was subject to a large DDoS attack that cripped a significant number of major websites. There are two main ways that individual sites can mitigate such an attack: they can host DNS themselves (in which case it’s as vulnerable to a DDoS attack as the rest of their infrastructure), or they can use multiple DNS providers effectively hedging their bets.

There’s one other potential issue that may affect DNS resilience: the reliability of the TLD’s nameservers. Shortly after the Dyn outage, the majority of the nameservers for the .io, .ac and .sh TLDs went down. If your nameservers were under one of those TLDs, clients would again be unable to reach them. The easiest way to reduce the risk of this happening is to have namesevers under multiple TLDs.

As you would expect, the use of these techniques tend to be more common with the higher ranking sites:

Graph showing use of resilience techniques by site position

Most popular pairings

Of those sites that do use multiple providers, there are some fairly common pairings:

Chart showing frequency of pairings of top providers

Dyn is obviously frequently paired with a number of providers. In fact, of all the top 100k sites using Dyn 40% also use a different provider. They’re second only to NS1, who despite having smaller absolute numbers, appear alongside one of their competitors on 72% of the sites that use them.

NS1 also suffered from DDoS attacks over the summer of 2016. It seems that after a major outage, customers wisely tend to hedge their bets and introduce a backup provider.