Ask HN: Digital Nomads: What's Your Setup?

Let's wait SpaceX. We will probably solve our problems in some time :P

Yeah man I just hang out in San José for the most part. Pre-pandemic, fun party scene for sure which is probably one of the big things that kept me here. Now it's just nice to be able to spend like 5 bucks on an uber ride and go climbing nearby mountains and volcanoes when I get time off. Great climate in the city and surrounding area. I suggest here or some of the outlying cities and towns around Alajuela. Monteverde, atenas, that kind of place out in the jungle is super nice too and the internet just tends to be a bit better.

I find Santa Teresa's internet to be somewhat worse than Montezuma area just to the south on the other end of the peninsula. Really though what kills things is power outages more than internet.

There's co-working spaces with fibre optic, but you'd be surprised how many cheap hostels and stuff like that are buying into these plans becuase there's tons of competition all of the sudden. It's either Kölbi or American Data Networks serving it up for the most part, but the cable companies Tigo and CableTica are activating dark fibre purchases around too.

I’m not living this lifestyle, but I feel that Starlink will drastically alter this market and open up so much more remote working environments. You should consider to at least sign up for the beta so you can get access sooner, theoretically you would get 100+ mbps anywhere in the US with no caps within the next year or so, and I’m guessing they’ll make a remote-friendly plan. Right now you officially can’t travel with the dish, but they’ve unofficially said there’s no limit imposed on the dish location.

So it turns out that it's pretty easy to get around tethering data caps on phones in a couple of different ways, especially if you're on Android and have more control over your network settings.

I'm in the UK now and use prepaid GiffGaff cell service, which includes 80GB of LTE hotspot data. I don't do Zoom, but i use it for tethering upstairs sometimes because wifi and stone 19th century walls do not mix.

But honestly, if Zoom is your biggest bandwidth hog, just get a cell with unlimited data and use it instead of your laptop. If you're going nomadic, you can't reasonably expect your workflow to be unchanged from what you'd do at home or an office, right? A phone tripod stand is a lot cheaper than a big bandwidth plan for tethering.

Aside from that advice, I always carry a Raspberry Pi with me, with a couple of different setups on different SD cards, so I can use it as a local Node dev server with my iPad Pro as my workstation, or as a media server or a RetroPi game device or even a travel router if need be. Get a USB 3 external SSD and rubber band it to the Pi and, especially now with 64 bit Raspberry PiOS and Ubuntu, you've got a fairly decent little system that fits in your pocket.

I keep a lot of my gear in old fashioned tool rolls, like cables and adapters and such. They're great on space and it looks cool as hell when you roll one out on a table.

Anker makes a couple of USB battery packs that are also built in chargers for both USB 2 and USB C, and I can't recommend them highly enough. I've used them in Mexico and here in the UK and a million times on road trips, and they not only save on space but simultaneously allow you to charge themselves and your devices, rather than charging separately, and they're especially great for Pis because you can pull them off the socket and they won't lose power.

I can keep 90% of my gear in one shoulder bag and be able to work happily anywhere on earth. I also keep a MIDI keyboard in my checked luggage for writing music and a Leatherman and precision screwdriver set in there with my Dopp kit (I shave with a straight razor, which is also handy if you find yourself in a shifty motel somewhere.)

Hope that helps!

I am looking at doing this next year and I think the best option is to just get a wework pass. I plan to work from there week days and ski weekends.