It’s a Small Detail That Can Absolutely Ruin a Vacation. Don’t Leave Until You’ve Packed This One Piece of Tech.

Downtime Aug 30, 202610:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo via Roku, Inc. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live. Sartre rightly taught us that hell is other people, but I’ve got an update for the modern world: Hell is other people’s streaming accounts. In this case, I don’t mean the HBO Max that you are stealing from your anime-obsessed brother, or the cozy restaurant piping out a quiet jazz Spotify playlist punctuated with horrifically loud car insurance ads. What concerns me here is the TV and movie streaming experience during travel, when you are at the mercy of whatever the Airbnb host or (even worse) hotel chain has pre-loaded onto their sys