- An all-black LAMY Safari fountain pen filled with a mix of water, Platinum carbon black, and inkjet printer ink.
- A blank sheet of A4, folded in half three times.
- My passport.
- A fully loaded Secrid card carrier.
- A really nice rock. It has been in my pocket for a year. Don’t think about it.
- A dumb watch. (Casio W-59. Very small, light as a feather. Green LED-backlight LCD display. 50 metre water resist. Tough, within reason. Effectively infinite battery life.)
- A beta of the PinePhone Pro, equipped with dreemurrs archlinux.
- A USB drive containing all of my computers’ boot partitions and Archiso.
There is one ISO and three boot partitions.
First of all, I formatted the USB drive with one vfat partition. Then I copied the contents of the ISO over. That and some prodding in grub.conf is enough to get the ISO working, and there is a whole lot of extra space in the vfat partition.
The entire contents of all of my computers’ hard drives is encrypted, but that leaves the boot partition. So I moved the boot partitions onto the vfat partition, each in a separate folder labelled by the host. Then, I added entries to grub.conf for each host. The USB drive boots and a boot menu appears with all of the ISO’s entries, plus a list of hosts. I choose the right host, then boot.
(I need the USB drive mounted before I can update the kernel or the microcode.)
O wow! This is totally not what I imagined. I imagined something like Ventoy. You literally made portable your boot partitions which without, the device is unbootable. Since it’s on a portable USB, you can essentially brick any device as easily as pulling the drive and cutting power. That’s ingenious!