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Physical Item Essentials | About
Originally written on September 15, 2025
An inventory of tools, habits, and workflow.
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Coffee (non-sugared, "deep" black coffee || sugary and caffeinated dark mocha venti)
Laptop and USB-C monitor when cafe, with laptop sleeve
Large hiking bag (not computer bag that had compartments for both laptop and monitor, which broke).
Note-taking, writing, code editor = VS Code
Two bluetooth headphones, white and black, for home (alternate between charging), bring one for cafe
Quiet, small, wired, non-mechanical (rubber membrane) keyboard (11 1/8" x 4 3/4" x 11/16"), 150₱, for both home and cafe use. I have written a million words with this keyboard.
Regular wired mouse
Down arrow key, loose and detachable, in the clamshell glasses case
Blowing nose - hand towel, used shirt, handkerchief, tissue
Smartphone (not a "no smartphone" minimalist ascetic kind of person), with many scratches, for hotspot, for mobile data, for reading downloaded 19th century books and web comics—headphones is connected to it, not laptop, for music listening even while at the cafe
Starbucks card (keep it in front of me on my side of the long table at all times, not in pocket), when cafe
At least two books, but up to, and usually, eight books—ranging from mass-market pocket-sized paperback, to huge medical texts, to variously sized other academic texts—when cafe.[1] Stacked from the bottom of the bag beside pouch for cords, laptop sleeve, and extra shirt.
Uniform: Lavender-purple athletic mesh shirt, mustard-yellow fleece sweat shorts, mustard-yellow corduroy jacket, one light-gray smooth or one olive-green rugged pair of cotton trousers, hiking shoes (which, because broken, is substituted with my older half-brother's expensive purple sports shoes), whatever-colored socks, headphones.
Extra shirt, when cafe
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This is not a ban, just a preference, which means I do play with these when I feel like, but for artistic and creativity reasons.
Physical note-taking: pencils, pens, highlighters, sticky notes, notebooks.[2]
Sketchbook and drawing: while I have drawn physically for years, I prefer to draw digitally nowadays, but I do it at home. (And my drawing tablet is broken as of writing.)
Mementos or gifts: wristbands, watches, neck-wear, lanyards, photographs, found objects, jewelry, toy keychains
Camera
Portable musical instrument
Snacks and water bottles (eat salmon dill on multigrain bread and ask for water at cafe and drink coffee)
Fidget toys
Scents
Pocket knife or multi-tool
Lighter
Stickers (save for those my brother placed on the laptop)
Bookmarks (I use receipts and straw wrappers to bookmark.)
That said: in terms of reading time and total words read alone, I read much more digital books out of practicality (e.g., dim lights in bus when going home in the evening). There is a gulf between my print sphere and my digital sphere. Donated and purchased books determine the former, while Google Books, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg—specifically their 19th century public domain books and "Preview" and "Borrow" of 20th century books—determine the latter. For the most part, although there is a drastic difference between the available books from each sphere, both create opportunities for serendipity and encompass fiction and the academic. ↩︎
Reasoning: too slow, clunky, and inconsistent when I prioritize the explicit content of the words than the artistry and self-expression of the handwriting. To over-state the point in jargonese: I need regex search and replace (using Python or just VS Code fuzzy code), low overhead, data efficiency, compatibility, "robustness", archivability, and LLM analysis, summary, and pattern matching and substitution. To put it simply: imagine the scale of ten million words in around only 55 MB (compared to a single video that can go for thousands of MB) and the ability to search key terms in only several seconds of load time. ↩︎