I'm traveling for work right now and prefer to keep everything I need for an overnight trip in my everyday carry backpack. This means I need to keep things light: a change of clothes, toiletries, an e-reader, a laptop, and the necessary cables to keep everything charged. One particular cable — an HDMI to USB-C cable — is a very welcome luxury. It costs me under a sawbuck and makes staying in even the most questionable murder motel a lot more comfortable:
It's a pretty obvious hotel hack, but not everyone thinks to include one in their travel kit. Once you've settled in for the night, plug it into your room's TV, and you're set for several possibilities: Connect it to a Steam Deck: BOOM! Gaming on a big screen. Hook it up to your smartphone and start streaming the mini-series you're currently binging. Need to do some work? Why not hook your laptop up and use the television as a second monitor — just be careful not to bleed your eyes out of your face from sitting too close.
This one is available in various lengths. I've been using it for over a year, and it's been a solid, inexpensive purchase. Currently, the best per-foot value is to spring for the six-foot iteration, which is likely more than enough cable for most folks to set their hardware up next to the TV or game while sitting on the foot of their bed.
You could bring a regular old HDMI or Roku stick with you from home, and they'd work fine for watching a bit of the content that you love. But they lack the versatility of this insanely inexpensive accessory. Given the ubiquity of HDMI and USB-C, the number of things you use a cable like this to connect one piece of kit to another is pretty vast.
