Is a movie prop the ultimate laptop bag?
blog.jgc.org
blog.jgc.org
- Gets the rainwater or any other hazardous material in.
- Extremely easy to check out what's inside for a thief.
- Can slide out easily and fall when toppled.
Terrible overall. Could make it to Top 10 Worst Laptop Bags though.
Just use a Tom Bihn that uses a separate, rigid, harder to access sleeve inside your backpack for laptops.
Maybe also add lower-budget recommendations.
I live in a university town with lots of rich kids, which seems like the kind of place to find good-quality used backpacks if there were one. If there's an easy way to get my hands on free used backpacks that I'd actually want to use, then I certainly don't know about it.
https://www.dependableexpendables.com/products/silent-grocer...
The solution proposed to me is ridiculous:)
It's getting a bit old, so I guess it's time to upgrade... maybe for something a bit smaller, but it has served me well so far.
Minor scratches won't affect functionality in any way, in fact, I think there is a certain beauty to it. A laptop is a tool, a tool is meant to be used, and usage leaves marks. If it looks spotless, it is as if no work has been done on it.
personally I use an old shoulder bag, but we've all got our proclivities
They also mentioned theft deterrence as secondary goals, so my recommendation stands for everyone else who doesn't have random hatred towards backpacks. :)
As for bags as status symbol, men don't go into that but women have these things called handbags. No man in history has been interested in a woman due to her taste in handbags, which is fine since the signalling is only to other women. Compare with cars where a Porsche is only going to be noted down to model number by men, with women not caring about the specification, to them it is just a Porsche with colour being the only noteworthy aspect.
Naturally this does not apply to all men or women, however, there are patterns. Showing off is also about poor utility. A rucksack designed to carry a laptop is far too functional to be high status. However, if you make a handbag and design it so it can barely carry so much as a toothpick, then that is high status, much like how a Porsche car is high status because it is essentially not practical.
A laptop bag designed for the task, much like a Dell laptop bag of old, might stand out as advertising its contents but it is far too well designed for the task in hand to be desirable. Hence the owner won't be a showoff.
I chuckled when I read that because the post's introduction casually mentions attending Cloudflare's board meeting.
> Can slide out easily and fall when toppled.
What..? Do you live in some ideal zero-friction world or what?
That sounds like almost any regular backpack then. They can also be pretty weather proof, don't need to be carried in one hand, aren't open topped showing what's inside easily, and padded. Any simple and cheap backpack would solve this exact problem but better surely, unless your desire is to be different rather than just to move your laptop from one place to another with little ceremony.
You're missing some context here — this is in San Fransisco.
This was in nice suburb in New Zealand, so it was a bit of a surprise. The replacement window cost many times the value of what they took, and I was finding small pieces of glass for a while afterwards despite careful vacuuming.
Since then I'm more careful that there is nothing removable visible at all through windows. Ideally, anyone looking through the window should think I am the kind of compulsive person that carries every single thing inside each night. Unfortunately, the trick to making that work almost requires it to be true.
A friend had her ancient Toyota’s back window smashed in and they stole an old dirty blanket lying on the back seat that they could have gotten for free from any number of places (clean and in better condition)
In a warm climate New Zealand suburb.
My takeaway at the time was that a subset of thieves will steal anything, with zero rational basis and no regard for consequences.
A paper bag would be just as enticing.
One thing I learned living in a dangerous area was that you should keep zero visible things inside your car when it's parked, otherwise someone will smash the window. :(
I disagree! Out in the woods, a few pages ripped out of an old street directory found in the trunk once saved my ass... quite literally. Couldn't have used a smartphone or GPS for that!
>Ideally, anyone looking through the window should think I am the kind of compulsive person that carries every single thing inside each night.
When I have to park my car in a shady-looking spot, I usually open my glove box to reveal nothing but garbage inside, and a note saying "nothing to steal here". I obviously can't prove this works, but I would like to believe it does, because thieves might consider it a courtesy that saves them unnecessary hassle.
Where I'm from, a simple and cheap backpack is just as much a target as a laptop bag. The only solution is to just keep an eye on your stuff, and be aware of your surroundings, at all times.
But that’s a luxury and I know it.
We have that and it's one of the few perks of our suburban hell. My neighbor was gone for two weeks and had 10-20 packages on his doorstep. Our only concern was that rain might get to them.
Maybe that's changed, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zwWpqsI_3s purports to be from 02022, and in its first minute, I count 17 pedestrians of whom 4 are wearing backpacks. So maybe backpacks are mainstream in SF now.
Perhaps it's a coincidence that Joe O'Brien died this week at 48 or 49 https://old.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/1nn3jel/joe_obrien_1... after being ostracized from the Ruby community†. But there aren't many people who die that young. Social isolation is a top risk factor for depression.
______
† for, in my view, good reason: he fired his employee after she turned him down when he sexually assaulted her in a bar. I don't think he deserved to die for this, but I also wouldn't have wanted to hang out with him.
Looking poor is also an expression of wealth where wealth is defined money one has not yet spent which provides options in the future. (Source "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel.)
Bro - the highest trim line civic hybrid has an MSRP under $35k…
But as soon as you put a leading 0, (besides confusing people) you seem to be telling people to definitely use arbitrary fixed lengths for years and analogous purposes. Even though they weren't necessarily doing that before.
Sincerely,
"neilv "Anyway I'm creating the Long Long Now Foundation to solve the shortsighted 5-digit year issue. Look for more news in Q000001 of 002026
Even people who lived in the farther-out suburbs usually drove to BART.
Also it's hardly a hot take, I am sure 90% of the ones who do that commute would agree!
Huh? By extension you seem to be implying anyone who doesn't drive to work is not a "professional", which is bananas.
Smart people took Caltrain, BART, or a company sponsored gentrification shuttle into work and reclaimed the time they'd spend driving to "work". (AKA shitpost -- I noticed a remarkable uptick in trolling during commute hours back in the days I lived in the bay during rush hour.)
Anyways, no, carrying a backpack is not a sign someone is "poor" in SF, or anywhere else -- it's usually a sign they value their back.
Some folks wear messenger bags instead, but those were usually bicyclists.
The majority of all commuters in SF do not commute by car: https://www.sf.gov/data--vision-zero-benchmarking-commute-me...
This has been true for at least a decade. The trend, even ignoring COVID, is that a decreasing proportion do so.
The majority of all commuters in SF do not commute by car
I've used a messenger bag for decades and never felt marginalized in the least. Plenty of other folks seem to rock employer swag backpacks. vOv
(aside: transit is up to 25% again recently, apparently; https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/remote-work-home.... And that graph has an even more interesting number which is that in 2019 transit was the plurality.)
There were a lot of people who didn't use a car in that context at all, but people who could mostly did.
I prefer to use a laptop sleeve, and then it doesn't matter if it is padded or not.
Otherwise they are hard to open/close if they are just a bit too small, or they are floppy if they are too big.
I currently have three laptops, they all have their own dimensions. So I would need three sleeves to carry anyone of them at any given time. For work, I switched between three sizes in the last two years.
Meanwhile, my 5yo hiking backpack with a water pouch dedicated space is able to carry any of those laptops safely.
That goes inside another thin bag for safe carry. If I'm visiting somewhere new and carrying other things, bag-in-bag works well; leave the day bag in the conference room, the thin bag with the laptop comes with me.
Why, exactly? Is the thought that a thief is less likely to steal your laptop if he thinks it's a bag of groceries?
All of the other shortcomings seem to vastly outweigh the gain (lack of bang/bump protection; the fact that you're carrying a laptop in a grocery bag makes it more likely to naturally sway and bang against your leg as you carry it; that if you set it down like a grocery bag it will probably topple over due to lack of structural integrity; that you're leaving it out in the open rather than concealing it in your backpack; etc). And for all that trade-off, I'm not even sure what problem he's trying to solve in the first place that he feels his laptop bag should be inconspicuous above all else.
In Barcelona there are a lot of cases when a thieve on a motorbike would try to snatch a bag or women handbag from a pedestrian waiting on a red light.
With a back pack it does not work. The drawback of a backpack is that a thief can just open the backpack or even cut with a sharp knife and one would not notice. But more expensive back-packs with a good design have protection against cutting and easy opening while on the back and with a cheaper one can be held in front.
However what is even cooler is that someone actually circuit bent a sgi O2 into laptop form factor. Unfortunately the link to the project page is dead, my disappointment is immeasurable.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050212100138/http://www.jumbop...
And the bit on product placement
https://web.archive.org/web/20000414090221/http://www.bftr.c...
I have an O2 in storage and have been meaning to try a rebuild of this for... well, at least a decade at this point. Since I finally have a decent 3D printing setup now maybe I can actually make some progress this winter!
The ruse would fail instantly you took the camera out of the bag. Or when you have no child, and look like you are wealthy enough to have a camera hobby.
Well, I found one but it brought us full circle. It looks like a grocery bag and says Big Stinky Diaper Bag. https://www.lifesoleil.com/cdn/shop/products/fai1-ecb007-cre...
https://www.marymaxim.com/products/flower-bed-diaper-bag-pat...
We used to tote around one of these: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/388909924480
Not very fashionable, has wet wipes hanging out the side, the pockets have stitched icons for what they're meant to hold like a soother and diapers, etc.
Having a child as a prop would definitely help, but a frazzled look and some wet wipes hanging out the side would probably help it along quite a bit.
For this movie bag, it would be cool to see some more modifications. Maybe sew in a laptop sleeve and accessories pouch to make everything fit better?
1. Like this: https://i.etsystatic.com/42664500/r/il/709f97/5624109170/il_...
mine's a Decathlon OWS 500, but i guess that it's as good as any.
Some people are "pocket for everything" organizers and some just aren't. I throw it all together anyway, and at least this has a modicum of stealth and misdirection. Nice to have extra space to chuck in a few things, too.
For a hacker community (original definition) many seem to dislike actual hacks...
I think the Toshiba Toughbook had a handle. I think many folks here, given their druthers, would design something that looked like a Toughbook, then become disenchanted with it for various completely foreseeable reasons, and go back to using their standard issue MBP.
(There were generations of these with handles, but at least in the early ones, the handle didn't dominate the dimensions - things like "removable drives encased in impact gel" did.)
(And if you go much farther back, the TRS-80 Model 4p - but "sewing machine class" portables kind of had to.)
One is simply not carrying something obviously containing expensive electronics which might be a target for theft. But having thought about this for a while that's not my biggest motivation. I hate ostentation. That's the reason I wear a Casio watch, would never wear clothes with a brand name plastered all over them, and drive a very boring car.
I do have a laptop sleeve that I use to protect the laptop and it slips easily into a bag. Prior to my silent bag purchase I did use random shopping bags (including canvas bags that seem to have sprouted like weeds in my cupboard), but after the board meeting situation mentioned I decided I'd try to find a long-lasting "paper" bag for the hell of it.
And I stumbled upon movie prop bags! Oh, and I hate backpacks.
You think when people see you get your laptop from a "paper bag" that doesn't create an impression? I'd say a regular laptop bag would be far more inconspicuous. Your solution just makes you seem like you go out of your way to be special. Same as if all your colleagues wore suits and you choose to wear cargo pants and a t-shirt. At least in that case you can argue comfort. This bag isn't as comfortable to carry, not as functional nor as inconspicuous as a regular laptop bag
What bothers me is the hypocrisy not the attention seeking.
You think that "creates an impression" is linguistically identical to "designed to impress"?
im·press verb 1. make (someone) feel admiration and respect.
Your solution just makes you seem like you go out of your way to be special.
This is pure projection.
I saw a homeless guy on the sidewalk today. Can you believe that? Such an ostentatious display of freedom from responsibilities.
I only wear counterfeit Casio watches.
Not a joke... but I see the humor in saying it which is why I did. It's is a loss leader, counterfeits Casios tend not to be as waterproof. YouTube video can help you ensure you buy counterfeits.
> A bunch of people here question
Sucks you have Hacker News talking about you. Just remember they are not real life... of pretend that's true at least.
Cool blog post.
It's like all power has been diverted to the Criticism Drive, with none left for the Self-Reflection Array... but only for oddball ideas of course. Conventional ideas and reasoning only.
For (supposedly) a hacker community I expect we can do better, and thanks OP for sharing! I'll be grabbing one of these bags even just to experiment.
But part of me wants to spend at least one day wearing the team outfit for a team on a sport that I know nothing about, for example, rugby or just normal football (not American 'foot ball'). With this outfit would be desirable footwear, maybe with a Nike swoosh, which is something I have never worn.
Maybe add some fake gold jewellery to complete the look. How would my interactions differ with just a simple change of attire? Would I be drinking lots of beer by the end of the day?
Including ones with two sizes of handles (one set of handles for dangling from hands, the others for slinging over shoulder), which I guess you could alternate based on whether you're visible to to muggers.
I even saw a canvas design that had a color and finish to look very reminiscent of grocery store brown paper bags.
The similar bookstore canvas tote bags might be seen as more likely to contain a laptop or tablet (since some people use them just like others do backpacks). So I like the grocery one.
One advantage of the movie prop one -- in the office -- is that I could imagine a stylish designer type carrying it to a conference room table, more easily than a frumpier canvas bag.
Personally, I use a functional plain all-black backpack that looks presentable in the office (including carrying into the conference room, but put on the floor/chair), yet understated on the street.
Rickshaw Bagworks is the made in SF successor from the previous Timbuk2 CEO.
bike ride in the rain? -> waterproof messenger backpack
downtown stroll to satisfy my inner hipster? -> tote bag etc ...
All I know is that I'm a "single compartment" person ... I've always found that having a separate compartment for everything just comes at excess weight and loss of flexibility.
I'd give the movie prop a try for sure. Still looking for a decent source of Tyvek to take an attempt at making my own bag (it's not super commonly used where I live).
(Howerver, you'll need to get a movie prop baby, if you don't want people to think you're a ABDL.)
Has anyone else here made their own backpack like that and stumbled into issues and considerations they didn't expect?
Both of these sleeves are vertical envelope style, with a tucked tongue closure, and they're generally carried in some other backpack/bag. So these are basically the padding. They replaced _really_ low budget bubble wrap envelope laptop sleeves.
What I'd say from observation of the crafting/development process is that you're going to do one to figure out the issues and one to fix them all. (Or more, having seen a bunch of shoes made in my dining room)
Not sure what the point is for a laptop but I've been doing this with my cameras for decades. It's the ideal way to carry a camera because it combines quick access with inconspicuousness and theft protection.
Unfortunately, backpacks are a better solution due to padding and reinforcements.
Unfortunately because they attract attention by thieves.
Moreover I don't like walking with one hand busy carrying a bag, especially when I bike or commute between public transportation means.
I’ve been robbed and assaulted in Zürich, one of the safest cities on earth.
Never let your guard down, be vigilant.
Fits in small and larger bags as needed too.
Fits great.
In Sweden I wouldn't think twice either...
I use a weather proof backback (Ortlieb). I got it two years ago and it's great. I walk a lot around town with it and the hip belt is great for offloading most of the weight from my shoulders. I can easily walk for a few hours with this thing. I have the 16" macbook pro, which is not exactly light.
It's really sad that SFO is now the car burglary capital of the world.
> For me, the ultimate laptop bag is one that looks nothing like a laptop bag; it should look like nothing special at all.
If this was a security through obscurity tactic, why would they publish this blog post?
To me it seems like a pretty good strategy, with the downsides being you have to lug it around by the handle (no back or shoulder strap, which would spoil the camo effect), and it doesn't have pockets for small things like cables / dongles / etc.
Why else try to hide that this is laptop bag?
The airport?
Maybe it's more of an anecdote than based on facts, it looks like burglaries are actually down in San Francisco now
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-bipping-car-bre...
and for god sakes move to nowhere, kansas
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Best bag? No
Fun? Yeah
It has three usable heights (standing, sitting, with/without external keyboard) and actually prevents neck and eye strain.
Today’s new note for the 'zen' side: 'This box is not the ultimate laptop stand. Do not blog about it.' 0% joking. Well except for the zen note.. that was the joke