How to KEEP your Samsung Fridge after lots of frustration … 2 years without water or ice buildup! … Samsung refrigerators are pieces of shit! (part 2 of 3)

UPDATE: Ice is building up at the back of the fridge again. Water hasn’t it my crispers yet, but it’s probably time to start cleaning up soon. So, Samsung refrigerators are STILL pieces of shit!

After a couple of nightmares with my Samsung RF18HFENBSP fridge, I’m happy to say that I’ve not had an issue for over 2 years now. My friend has the RF197ACRS with the exact same problem. Hopefully this fix covers his issue as well. I’ll update this post if there’s any different results, but I don’t expect him to have any issues using the same remedies for at least 6-9 months.

Here’s what I did to correct (fix) it.

  1. Buy a bigger Samsung drain evaporator. This one should help. I think what’s happening is that the original evaporator is too small and unsatisfactory in keeping the condensation warm enough to avoid freezing. If you’re ready to do the repair and don’t have this thing, you can try using a large paperclip or a metal wire. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008KFG9NO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
  2. Eat whatever you can and try to cut down to only be using an ice box for all of your items. You should remove everything from the fridge. The way I did it was just before I went on vacation, I ate all I could to an empty fridge. I fixed the fridge immediately when I got back to an empty fridge, conserving the power while I was on vacation. It should take less than a day for all of the ice to melt out if you leave it all open. There’s a lot of insulation, so if you leave it closed, it’ll take a lot longer. Open the fridge door and pull the plug to let the fridge thaw out. Leave some towels on the floor by the fridge and inside the fridge where you will find the puddles so that you don’t have water all over the place. You can find plenty of videos online on how to remove the panels. Here’s one:
  3. To install the drain evaporator, I just used a pair of pliers and made sure that the clamps were bent enough to touch the wire. Nothing special. After you’re done installing the new drain evaporator, just close everything back up.
  4. Consider adjusting the temperature and keeping it a little warmer. For a little while, I had mine at 4 and 40. I found it might be a little warm, so I put it back to 2 and 38, but my friend said that if you keep it warmer, it won’t freeze. At 4 degrees, the ice cream comes out soft. I think it’s pretty nice. Unfortunately, the boss of the house doesn’t like it that way.

Hope this helps you!

Not all SD card readers are alike!

If you asked me a year ago what SD card reader to get, I probably would’ve said to just get whichever one works. Well, clearly, I was wrong!

I’m obviously not a hardcore photographer/videographer or professional multimedia editor or anything like that!

I tried out a handful of readers that I’ve had over the years. Here are the readers ranked from slowest to fastest. Probably from oldest to newest also.

This one I’ve had probably for over 10 years. These were like $2 or something back then. I think I either got it on eBay or some discount website. They were for convenience for me – back then, sometimes, I used these as USB sticks.

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 058f:6335 Alcor Micro Corp. SD/MMC Card Reader

Image result for sd card reader

This one came with one of my cameras or something. It was probably a cheap camera that recorded to microSD. It’s not terribly slow, but not reliable. Maybe it was the Linux driver, but there were many times when I couldn’t write the entire microSD card before it just hung. Pulling it out and remounting corrected this, but was done almost every other time when writing an entire sd card.

Bus 001 Device 025: ID aaaa:8816 MXT microSD CardReader

Image result for sd card reader


This one came with my Raspberry Pi. It’s also not terribly slow, but not fantastic. What I like about it is that it supports both, USB-A and USB-C.

Bus 001 Device 024: ID 14cd:1212 Super Top microSD card reader (SY-T18)

Here’s the speed of an internal microSD card on a 2021 Dell Inspiron 5502/5509. Pretty disappointing speed!

Also crap, this was something like $30 – pretty expensive, but elegantly fits on the MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, not very reliable. When plugging in too many things, you could get very annoying, random disconnects.

Bus 001 Device 029: ID 05e3:0749 Genesys Logic, Inc. SD Card Reader and Writer

This one turned out to be the fastest one I had. The speed is below, using an adapter from USB-c to USB-A, it still ran pretty fast.

128177930240 bytes (128 GB, 119 GiB) copied, 4157.25 s, 30.8 MB/s

Avianca Lifemiles for the Win!

I was thinking about canceling one of my mileage credit cards. Before doing that however, I have to transfer the miles to some travel partner or spend it. As I was considering which travel partner to use, I came across Avianca from several travel sites, so I figured I would shop around and take a look.

It looks like for almost all of the places I want to go, Avianca is lowest in terms of miles and fees! You can take a look at the chart below for reference. I just picked a few airlines to compare and entered the points. I didn’t enter the American airlines because I’m already familiar with them and use them regularly.

That said, Chase Ultimate rewards don’t transfer to Avianca. It’s okay though. Capital One Spark and Citi both do at 1:1.

If you’re interested in getting a Capital One card, right now, they have various cards with different bonus levels, but the best one to probably get is with a 50,000 mile bonus after a $4500 spend in the first 3 months. They’ll give you 2 miles per $ on anything that you spend it on. There’s a $95 annual fee after the first year, but you can get $100 credit for Global Entry or TSA Pre✓. Please use my referral link here: https://capital.one/3jgk5CB

If you don’t have a Chase Sapphire Preferred, you should get it NOW. It’s like the Reserve deal they had a few years ago, but better. 100k bonus is worth almost a couple of plane tickets or $1250. Only $95 annual fee, but you can get $50 back if you book a hotel through Chase travel. https://www.referyourchasecard.com/6c/3ISV1VU99F

Destination (roundtrip)OsakaTaipeiHKGHonoluluMiamiNY
Airline
British Airways10/6-10/17N/AN/A82k + 758 (stopover LDN)26k + 11.2026k + 11.2026k + 11.20
Air Canada10/6-10/17100k + $120100k + $9086.4k+8330,316 or 25k + $53.1625k + $5345k + $53
Asia Miles80k + 1552HKD60-80k + 2275HKD60-80k + 5197HKD30k + 308 HKD30k + ??27k  + 10k + 193 HKD
Avianca LifeMiles70k + $2631.5k + 26.5k + 8075k + 35k + 8055k + 30.4027k + 11.2025k + 11.20
Singapore Airlines108k  +  USD 195.5596k + 138.6996k + 25235k + 11.2025k + 11.2025k + 11.20

Why you should use Bing instead of Google!

There are a number of reasons why I like Bing over Google, but the main reason is because Bing pays me for each search I make and Google doesn’t. It’s worth just under a penny per search, but it’s not nothing consider I do a number of searches daily and also use it as a decent news source. The Bing rewards pays for all of my Skype usage, which is probably about $5/month and once in a while, I grab $5 Amazon or Target gift cards.

I find the quality of the content to be similar *most* of the time. I do searching on Google probably less than 5% of the time – mostly for doing reverse lookup of phone numbers that call me.

I would encourage you to try out Bing for yourself! Join the rewards programs and reap the benefits! Here’s my referral link. https://account.microsoft.com/rewards/rafwelcome?rh=D40EAE1A&ref=7510 (I get points if you sign up using this link.)

SD cards of different brands are slightly different sizes.

I recently downloaded an img file online where a lot of people claimed the image was too large for their SD cards. For that reason, I got a bit curious to know which card he used, which cards were larger/smaller, etc.

These were the partitions on that image.

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
image.img1 32768 262143 229376 112M c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
image.img2 262144 14598143 14336000 6.8G 83 Linux
image.img3 14598144 250347519 235749376 112.4G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

The last sector is marked in bold. The person that shared the image claimed that the card he used was the same Samsung 128gb EVO select card. I guess he was lucky. I have 2 of those cards and this image didn’t fit on either of them.

I went through all of my SD cards to check their sizes hoping to find one that fit. Here are the sizes in order from smallest to largest.

Team 128GB Elite microSDXC UHS-I U3, V30, A1, 4K UHD Memory Card with SD Adapter, Speed Up to 90MB/s (TEAUSDX128GIV30A103)

Team 128GB Elite microSDXC UHS-I U3, V30, A1, 4K UHD Memory Card with SD Adapter, Speed Up to 90MB/s (TEAUSDX128GIV30A103)

Disk /dev/sde: 117.75 GiB, 126437294080 bytes, 246947840 sectors
Disk model: MassStorageClass
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc9f931c9

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sde1 32768 262143 229376 112M c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sde2 262144 14598143 14336000 6.8G 83 Linux
/dev/sde3 14598144 246947839 232349696 110.8G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

This was the smallest of the cards. The difference in size is only a couple of gigabytes, but if you tried to load the image on this card by the byte, you would not be successful.

SanDisk 128GB Extreme MicroSDXC UHS-I Memory Card with Adapter – C10, U3, V30, 4K, A2, Micro SD – SDSQXA1-128G-GN6MA

Disk /dev/sdd: 119.08 GiB, 127865454592 bytes, 249737216 sectors
Disk model: MassStorageClass
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc9f931c9

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1 32768 262143 229376 112M c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdd2 262144 14598143 14336000 6.8G 83 Linux
/dev/sdd3 14598144 249737215 235139072 112.1G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

This card was also one of the smaller cards.

SAMSUNG (MB-ME128GA/AM) 128GB 100MB/s (U3) MicroSDXC EVO Select Memory Card with Full-Size Adapter

Disk /dev/sdd: 119.25 GiB, 128043712512 bytes, 250085376 sectors
Disk model: MassStorageClass
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc9f931c9

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1 * 32768 250085375 250052608 119.2G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Front view of the Kingston 128GB microSDXC Canvas React Card + SD Adapter

Disk /dev/sdd: 119.48 GiB, 128286982144 bytes, 250560512 sectors
Disk model: MassStorageClass
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc9f931c9

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1 32768 262143 229376 112M c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdd2 262144 14598143 14336000 6.8G 83 Linux
/dev/sdd3 14598144 250347519 235749376 112.4G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdd4 250347520 250560511 212992 104M 83 Linux

The difference in sizes are trivial, but as you can see, the image would only fit on 1 of the cards. I’ll show you in a later post how I got the image to fit on any card.

Things to look out for when buying gift cards from Raise.com

I love Raise. I used to buy gift cards from Raise.com all the time. It used to give me the opportunity to earn an additional 5% in airline mileage. It’s not so much anymore, but it’s not nothing and was always worth it for me, until now.

Actually, I would say go ahead and keep doing it, but be careful.

I wanted a laptop from Walmart, so I went to Raise and bought some Walmart gift cards to acquire the laptop. It worked great and I was expecting something like 4-5 points per dollar (3 points for the Walmart shopping portal and 1-2 points for Raise.

This would’ve been great, but the nightmare began after I returned the laptop. Walmart refunded my credit card and one of the gift cards, but not both. I went on chat with Walmart.com multiple times and the answers varied between they would investigate, they would credit it, and they would need to escalate. Every time, they had me waiting 24 hours in the meanwhile. Finally, I called and they told me the gift card was used for several returns and was blacklisted or something like that. They said I needed to provide a picture of the original gift card along with the receipt of purchase of the card to get the credit. Fine.

I sent them the Raise receipt along with a screenshot of the digital gift card. Did they accept it? Of course not. Response:

Hi Alton,

We have researched your Gift Card concern and determined that this Walmart Gift Card was bought from a third party. Please contact the third party seller for assistance on the gift card.

Thank you for contacting Walmart, where we are always happy to help!

– Walmart Gift Card

Are they really happy to help? I doubt it. The woman on the phone didn’t sound happy. They wouldn’t pass me over to anyone else. The only thing they could offer me say they’re sending the message in and wait for 24 hours.

What did I do then? Well, the only logical thing to do is go to Raise. I went to Raise and gave them the story. They told me that if I was able to redeem the card the first time, that’s all that they were responsible for. I think that’s the right thing, actually. If the card worked, it’s Walmart’s fault that they’re not returning my credit. I then asked if they could help me with the receipt. Of course not. Raise could not provide it.

So here I am, stuck. What would you do?

As much as I hope to get some good advice here, perhaps I can offer some advice so that you don’t run into the same problem.

  1. When buying gift cards, unless you’re sure you’re not returning the item, avoid any gift card that doesn’t end in .00 or standard number. For example, buy a card that’s $10, not $10.34. Don’t buy an $18 gift card, buy a $20 gift card.
  2. Use your gift cards asap. Don’t even buy the gift card unless you’re getting a really good discount or you are planning to use it immediately. There are hackers out there, script kiddies actually, that will run numbers randomly to try to hit the right combinations. I’ve fallen victim to it a couple of times. I hope that you do not.

Good luck! Please comment down below!

Install & Configure OpenLDAP in Linux

I’m doing this only because I’ve done this multiple times and never documented it and had to go through and do multiple google searches each time. Hopefully this is the last time.

First off, install the OpenLDAP server and clients. I’ll install the client on the server too so that I could easily troubleshoot. If you’re using IPtables, you’ll need to open up ports 389 and 636 as well.

yum -y install openldap-clients openldap-servers

Next, I want to do some logging so that I could get messages if I need to troubleshoot. Here’s how to enable the syslog side of logging. Configuring the details of logging from the LDAP server side comes from the cn=config information.

mkdir /var/log/openldap
echo "local4.* /var/log/openldap/openldap.log" >> /etc/rsyslog.conf
systemctl restart rsyslog

Configuring TLS for openldap. This just edits the /etc/sysconfig/slapd file and adds ldaps to it so that it will listen on that port.

sed -i "s,ldap:///,ldap:/// ldaps:///," /etc/sysconfig/slapd

Restart the LDAP server for ldaps to take effect.

systemctl start slapd
systemctl enable slapd

Extending schema of openldap so that it accepts a bunch of the common attributes that typical directory servers have. The adschema attached is to support the MemberOf attribute, commonly used by AD servers. You can put the file anywhere you want. I happened to do this in Vagrant, so my file was in /vagrant.

ldapadd -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -f /etc/openldap/schema/cosine.ldif
ldapadd -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -f /etc/openldap/schema/nis.ldif
ldapadd -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -f /etc/openldap/schema/inetorgperson.ldif
ldapadd -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -f /vagrant/adschema.ldif

I’m also extending the schema using some of the schema files provided by OpenLDAP itself.

Now it’s time to configuring rootdn. This is basically the top of the LDAP tree. You should download the file and edit it. Change your directory manager password and the rootdn to whatever you like. You can use dc=xxx or o=xxx.

ldapmodify -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -f /vagrant/config.ldif

Now we can add the users. Here’s a sample ldif for the users. Obviously, you’ll need to change the directory to match your rootdn.

ldapadd -x -D cn=ldapadm,dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com -w password -f /vagrant/directory.ldif

Congratulations! Your LDAP server is now running. You can test by running this:

ldapsearch -x -D cn=ldapadm,dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com -b 'dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com' objectclass=* -w password

It should return your entire directory that you uploaded in directory.ldif.

I enabled SSL earlier, but if you try an ldapsearch with SSL, you’ll get this:

[root@centos7 certs]# ldapsearch -H ldaps://192.168.0.117:636 -x -D cn=ldapadm,dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com -w password -b 'dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com' objectclass=* -ZZ
ldap_start_tls: Can't contact LDAP server (-1)
additional info: TLS: hostname does not match CN in peer certificate

If you want to ignore this and move forward, the setting is on the client side. You can change it in /etc/openldap/ldap.conf. Just put in there:

TLS_REQCERT never

If you get a message like this:

[root@centos7 certs]# ldapsearch -H ldaps://192.168.0.117:636 -x -D cn=ldapadm,dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com -w password -b 'dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com' objectclass=* -ZZ
ldap_start_tls: Operations error (1)
additional info: TLS already started

The issue is that you’re trying to run StartTLS in 2 places. You can omit the -ZZ and run like this:

ldapsearch -H ldaps://192.168.0.117:636 -x -D cn=ldapadm,dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com -w password -b 'dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com' objectclass=*

or run with the -ZZ like this:

ldapsearch -H ldap://192.168.0.117:389 -x -D cn=ldapadm,dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com -w password -b 'dc=poc,dc=segmentationpov,dc=com' objectclass=* -ZZ

That’s just using the default certificate that comes with OpenLDAP. If you want to use your own certificate, you can put them in

ldapmodify -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -f tls7.ldif
SASL/EXTERNAL authentication started
SASL username: gidNumber=0+uidNumber=0,cn=peercred,cn=external,cn=auth
SASL SSF: 0
modifying entry "cn=config"
SV-LT-1361:Downloads altonyu$ openssl s_client -connect 192.168.0.117:636
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=0 C = US, ST = CA, L = San Francisco, O = ShocKNetworK, CN = ldap.poc.segmentationpov.com, emailAddress = [email protected]
verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = CA, L = San Francisco, O = ShocKNetworK, CN = ldap.poc.segmentationpov.com, emailAddress = [email protected]
verify error:num=21:unable to verify the first certificate
verify return:1
Certificate chain
0 s:/C=US/ST=CA/L=San Francisco/O=ShocKNetworK/CN=ldap.poc.segmentationpov.com/[email protected]
i:/C=US/ST=California/O=ShocKNetworK/OU=Security/CN=zangief.shocknetwork.com/[email protected]
Server certificate
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIEqzCCA5MCCQCsXDM+kPyf+DANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQsFADCBljELMAkGA1UEBhMC

Freeze your credit file!

I’m not one of those crazy fear mongers that like to talk about the end of the world, etc. I am an pessimist most of the time though. There’s been tons of blog posts and even the media has told people to do this. It used to cost money to freeze your credit file. Because of security breaches, the government made this free. You should take advantage of this. The reason I’m posting this is because there are still many people I know that haven’t done this and very few people that I talk to have. You’ll hear about a new data breach once every few months or so and sometimes it’s big, sometimes it’s not. Regardless, your information is probably out there for purchase on the dark web. Back when Scott McNealy was CEO of Sun Microsystems, he said “You have zero privacy anyway … Get over it.” I think it’s truer today than ever.

That said, even if you data isn’t out there, you should protect yourself. One important way is to freeze your credit report. The links are below, but they can change at any time.

Note: You can unfreeze anytime for free and it’s instantaneous, but if you’re looking to get a bank loan, mortgage, credit card or something else that will require your credit to be checked, you might want to do that before freezing your credit files. If you have already frozen your credit files and need credit cards, etc, just ask them which credit bureau they’ll be running. Most banks will tell you. When they do, you can do temporary lifts and it’s a pretty simple process.

https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html

Experian was hacked a few years ago and gave up a bunch of T-Mobile customer data.

https://www.equifax.com/personal/credit-report-services/credit-freeze/

Oops. I couldn’t freeze on Equifax’ website. Ended up having to call them. 888-298-0045. At least you can do it through the automated system. No need to talk to a person.

https://www.transunion.com/credit-freeze

TransUnion was hacked in 2019 and shared a bunch of data on Canadians.

All credit bureaus have been breached at some point. They will be hit again. Please, freeze your credit files.

Some additional things to do are to keep an eye on your finances and monitor your personal credit report and financial activity. Nearly every bank now will also do credit monitoring for free. Sign up if you need to. If your bank doesn’t do it, find one that does.

Some travel tips you must know and some you probably already know.

Some of these things are a little redundant with travel packing list post.

Install the travel apps. I use TripIt, Hopper, and a bunch of different airline apps. I’ve been told that Synchronize, Currency, and Speak&Translate are also quite useful. I also have Uber and Lyft. Different places will have other taxi apps e.g. Grab Taxi is Singapore’s best taxi app. Just check and install them before you go. I can tell you that Uber works in France and Australia.

Download streaming content into your phone or tablet. Many places in the world now, including planes have wifi, but you’ll be surprised how many places don’t have them. I recommend if you’re using Netflix or whatever you’re using, download whatever your entertainment is just in case so you’re not too bored on a plane or airport or somewhere else.

Download offline maps. Google maps allows you to download offline maps of wherever you’re going onto your phone. Just in case you don’t have good service where you go, I recommend downloading the maps.

Find a good phone carrier. I think T-Mobile is probably the best carrier for travel considering the unlimited (slow) data in almost any country you go to. I also never need to change my number when visiting other countries. One trick my wife and I use is that we tether our phones to each other so that we can make regular phone calls for free while moving.

Carry a travel adapter. This is redundant with my travel packing list. Most plugs on airplanes are universal and European adapters tend to stay in much better than U.S prongs.

Drink lots of liquids on the airplane. It’s very easy to get dehydrated on planes. It’s tempting to drink alcohol when it’s free, but I don’t drink alcohol often on planes and wouldn’t suggest it. Staying hydrated might help get over jet lag as well.

Be careful with the local water. Talking about you staying hydrated, find out if the local water is drinkable. Even if the local water is drinkable, it may not taste good or it might be safe enough for locals, but not you. You might consider buying bottled water. You might also consider boiling the local water if you have a kettle in your hotel room. Sometimes, I drink boiled water when I run out of bottled water and the room’s mini bar is out.

Take down your hotel address. I love Google maps. Put your hotel address in your locations or favorites. Also take down the room number and put it in notes or something.

Beware of Free Public WIFI. You’re not sure who’s snooping on wifi. You might want to avoid using it or just using it for unimportant things like directions and stuff. You don’t know how safe it is. Consider using a VPN for surfing. It’ll slow you down, but might be more secure. I have lifetime subscriptions with VPNSecure.me and KeepSolid.

Subscribe to a VPN service. That’s one way to be able to view some of the content you’re used to watching at home, be it YouTube TV or something else.

Alert Your Bank and Credit Card Company of Your Travel Plans. This can help you avoid some embarrassment in some places. You don’t want to be on hold with your bank while far away.

Withdraw money from ATMs – Do not exchange currency at counters. Exchange currency counters, especially at airports are a total ripoff! I use ATMs at airports all the time though. First Republic bank reimburses all of my ATM fees and seems to give me the best rates.

Get a credit card without exchange / foreign transaction fees. Those exchange/foreign transaction fees could be quite expensive! There are plenty of credit cards out there now without the fees and that also give you some great travel rewards. Consider those. There might be an annual fee, but some annual fees are worth it. Some banks will waive or credit annual fees if you just spend some more money.

Spend money in their currency if your credit card does not have exchange fees. If they ask what currency you want to pay in, always pay in their currency if you have one of those no-fee credit cards. The rates are always better.

Use the hotel safe if possible. Prior to doing so though, check if the administrative code has been changed on the safe. You can find some videos on how to do that on YouTube, like in the one below.

Use the “Do Not Disturb” door hanger if there’s a physical one. Some now have a button for you to press so it may not make a difference. The reason I do is because first off, I don’t want to be disturbed when I’m in the room. Secondly, it’s easier for someone to think the room is there’s if all doors look alike. If yours has the door hanger, they’ll know the room isn’t there’s unless they used it also. The downside of this is that you will need to remove it if you want the room cleaned. Some hotels will give you more points if you don’t have the room cleaned. I don’t want people seeing my things so I often will leave the door hanger on the door and skip the cleaning service regardless of whether or not I get the additional points.

Have a backup! Keep some cash, identification (or copy of it), and a credit card with your luggage. Of course, keep some with you also.

Keep medication/contacts/toiletries on you! If you take any regular medication, always keep some in your carry-on, backpack, purse, or whatever you carry with you in case your luggage is lost. A set of extra contact lenses would help as well. A comb, toothpaste and toothbrush can come in handy in airport/airplane bathrooms. Some airlines are nice enough to provide you these things. Others may only do it in first class. I also like to have earplugs that I sometimes put under my headset.

Bring Clothes, just in case – Hopefully, you’ll never have to deal with lost luggage, but it never hurts to be prepared. I usually keep a shirt, pair of socks, and underwear in a ziplock bag in my backpack just in case.

Use your downtime. You can check into your hotel room well in advance nowadays with most hotels. I usually have Uber open immediately after landing. If you’re traveling for business, you can do your expense reports while waiting for a flight or in an Uber back to the hotel. It beats having to look for all of your receipts. I usually snap a photo immediately after getting it and just throw it away.

Carry a water filter bottle. I often bring my Brita bottle. If you’re not drinking bottled water, you can boil water and drink it as is. I like to use the Brita bottle because I always feel it makes my water taste a little better. Also with a straw, I drink way more water for some reason.

Keep some hand sanitizer with you! Considering that there are germs everywhere and that there’s a nasty Coronavirus around, carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer and spray it or rub some regularly. I dry out my hands every once in a while, but I fear getting sick on a trip more than anything!

Steal hotel laundry bags – for division of clean and dirty clothes, they come pretty handy. If I didn’t use some clothes, I just leave them in the bottom of the suitcase and then just use the bag on top of it and throw the dirty clothes on top of that. That way, when you get home, you could just throw the dirty clothes right into the washer and put the clean clothes away.

Steal the hotel shampoo, conditioner, lotion, etc, but only if it’s good quality and you’re going to multiple cities. You never know if the hotel in the next city will have comparable ones unless you’re staying at the same hotels all the time.

What are your tips? Please share in the comments below! Thanks for reading!

Chinese handwriting keyboard on amazon fire tablet

It took me a little effort to find this, so I figured that I would do a blog post on it. It’s pretty easy to do. Just follow the instructions on installing Google Play Store. You can find plenty of them. Here are a couple:

https://www.howtogeek.com/232726/how-to-install-the-google-play-store-on-your-amazon-fire-tablet/

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/07/11/install-play-store-amazon-fire-tablet/

Once you’ve installed the Google Play store, you could go into it and install the Gboard. Hope this works for you! If you have any issues, please comment below.