Tag Archives: hotel

Hotel Coffee Making

Fill Tea Bag

Fill Tea Bag

Just put two tablespoons of coffee in the a tea bag, 12ozs. of water in the coffee maker, and brew.

Story

Single Serve Coffee Maker

Single Serve Coffee Maker

I’m travel regularly for work and always try the coffee in provided in the hotel rooms even though it’s always really bad. I finally decided to do something about this and decided to find a convenient way to make quality coffee in my hotel room.

I started by figuring out that most hotels have a single serve coffee maker that takes special pre-packaged bags of coffee. These filter bags measure approximately 2.75 inches by 3.5 inches. A quick search on Amazon.com showed that No.1 Small Tea Bags measure 3.5 by 2.5 inches. In practice it turnes out that the interior width of the tea bag is only about one inch, and therefore too small to fit two tablespoons of coffee in. The Large Tea Bags appear to be the next size up. Their width is just a little over 3 inches and the height is adjustable based on how the bag is folded. These also have a 2.5 inch interior width, so it isn’t too hard to fill them with coffee.

I took two of these bags, each filled with two tablespoons of coffee on my latest trip only to find my room had a full size coffee maker. Since the coffee maker had a flat bottom, I gave it a try anyway, setting the brew strength to the strongest and putting 12ozs. of water through. It turned out to produce a pretty good cup of coffee.

Original Coffee Filter

Original Coffee Filter

Filled Tea Bag

Filled Tea Bag

Coffee Filter Comparison

Coffee Filter Comparison

New Bag in Tray

New Bag in Tray

Hotel Rice Cooking

Growing up in an Japanese household, I love my sticky white rice. Many times, going on a trip means leaving sticky white rice behind, but I received a Tupperware Microwave Rice Cooker. I was skeptical at first, but after experimenting with it on a long business trip, I can make passable rice in the microwave.

The hotel I was staying in had a 1200W Microwave. For this microwave, I found 1 cup of rice, 1.5 cups of water, and 15 minutes on 50% power seemed to be just about right. For smaller, less powerful microwaves, you’ll need to increase the cooking time or power level.

My initial try was 1 cup of rice, 2 cups of water, and 5 minutes at 100% power. There was still a lot of water sloshing around, so I poured some out and put it back in for 2 more minutes. The remaining water boiled over and ended up leaving my rice dry.

Safely Printing at a Hotel

When using a hotel’s Business Center or other shared computer; I’m always nervous about the types of malware, viruses, or keyloggers might be installed on the computer. I never login to any accounts. Even if I have two factor authentication, I’d rather not give a criminal the opportunity to gather my password. When I have to print something, I’ve been printing to PDF from my personal computer, transferring the file to a USB flash drive, and printing the PDF on the hotel’s computer. This approach made me feel better, but I still felt like there was the opportunity for a virus on the hotel computer to infect my flash drive. What I needed was a way to prevent the hotel computer form writing to the USB flash drive. A hardware write-protect switch seemed to be the answer.

Now-days, USB flash drives with write-protect switches are pretty rare. After extensive searching on amazon.com, NewEgg, and Tiger Direct; I was only able to find a single modern flash drive with a write-protect switch. The Kanguru Flashblu 2 series of drives.

The other option is to use an SD card. Pretty much all of these have a write-protect switch, but the write-protection is in the card reader, not the card itself. There is a small mechanical switch in the SD card reader that detects if the SD card’s switch is in the lock position. While it’s unlikely someone trying to infect your card will have physically tampered with the SD card reader, it’s safer to bring your your own SD card reader.

Once you have your lockable memory, just unlock it, copy your pdf, lock the memory, insert into the hotel computer and print. Since malicious software can still read the data off of your memory, make sure you don’t store or print any sensitive files. I only print un-important things like movie tickets, directions, and other passes.

Be safe!