Five years of packing by spreadsheet

For the last five years I have packed from a spreadsheet. Not a note on the fridge, not a list in my head — a proper sheet with an inventory of everything I could possibly take somewhere. Festival, trip, camping. Before every departure I copied it, threw out what didn't apply this time, and started ticking.

The sheet

Everything in one column is not a list, it's a wall. So the inventory was split into areas:

• living — tent, sleeping bag, that kind of thing
• kitchen
• kids
• tech
• fun stuff — the things nobody needs and every trip is better with
• business trip

Yes, kids are in there. Yes, so is fun stuff. No, I'm not ashamed of either.

And it worked. That's the annoying part. It worked well enough that I never replaced it, and badly enough that every single trip started with the same ritual: copy, delete, scroll, scroll, scroll. A spreadsheet does exactly what you tell it. Nothing more. Ever. It won't notice that I'm packing for the same festival as last year, and it certainly won't tell my friends what's already in my car.

Then AI arrived

And I noticed something: this can be automated. Not just automated — the same thing can be done better, cleverer, and I can give it to my friends too.

So that's how Farangur was born. (It's Icelandic for luggage.)

At its heart it does what the sheet did — only it does the copying for me. There are my things, there are the events I pack for again and again, and every thing on a pack goes through three phases: taking → ready → packed. Tap, tap, tap. That's it. And whatever I don't have at home gets a "to buy" mark, so I stop discovering it at the campsite.

Where this is going

The near plan is to join Farangur with syntrofi.com — another project that was born out of a pure need: to be at a festival with my friends.

Because that's the other half of packing the sheet never solved. Farangur is not just for you. It's for a group of friends going somewhere together — so you don't arrive with four gas stoves and not a single pan. Because the pan — well, a friend is bringing the pan. Obviously.

Try it

It's at https://farangur.com. If you also pack from a sheet — or from your head, with a nagging feeling somewhere around the motorway exit — give it a go. It's young, and I'm sure a few corners are still rough. Tell me what's missing. I pack with it myself, so I'll be noticing too.