American travel writer and broadcaster; runs Rick Steves' Europe and writes the guidebooks, packing advice and travel-tip articles on ricksteves.com.
uses
These are a must for listening to music, tuning in to audio tours, or simply drowning out whiny kids on the plane. (I never travel without my noise-canceling Bose headphones.)
Rick's Packing List, bylined “By Rick Steves” on his own site. The page carries no publication date; the date used is the most recent Internet Archive capture confirming this text was live (20260826230234).
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Hardware, services4 years
Software5 years
Podcasts, courses, other8 years
Books25 years
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.