Travel Tip: get an electronic public transport card in Japan without any hassle (iOS)

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Previously you had to be in Japan or to have a japanese AppStore account to get access to software that allows you to manage and add SUICA cards to your wallet and use it right-away for public transport.

Now with the 2020 olympics approaching more and more tourist support-apps are made available to non-japanese audiences.

Just like this little helper:

So the scenario was: You arrive at an airport in Japan. And the first thing you needed to do to use the public transport system was to get such a SUICA card either purchased or topped-up.

This is a straight forward process and they even came up with “Tourist SUICA” cards that will deactivate themselves after a certain amount of time and are cheaper to purchase upfront – still it was a process you had to know how it works.

With the above helper app you’re simply doing this:

  1. Download app.
  2. Make sure you’ve got Apple Pay set-up with at least one of your credit cards
  3. Use the SuicaEng app to create a brand new SUICA card out of thin air and top it up right there.
  4. (optional) push your SUICA card to your watch to simplify the purchase processes even more – you’ll just tap your wrist to pass through gates or purchase goods.

Google Maps now allows offline maps for Japan (!!!)

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

For years now Google Maps did not allow us to download Offline Maps for Japan. It is an extremely useful feature when you are out and about and you might not yet have full mobile coverage or your plan is not set-up yet.

A week ago this was not possible and I have just now noticed that you can now select the Japan area for a custom offline map in the Google Maps app on my iPhone and on my iPad.

This is great news! Do you use the offline map feature?

Musashikosugi Curry Fest

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

If you do not know japanese curry yet you are missing out big time.

Unfortunately due to typhoon 19 the Musashikosugi Curry Expo had been cancelled along the overall Kosugi Festival 2019.

But the curry stamp rally did start earlier than the typhoon hit the city and carries on still until end of october.

It works like this:

You go to each restaurant. You eat a meal. You get a stamp.

The more stamps you collect the higher valued the prices. More meal coupons even electronics!

But anyway. It’s all about japanese and indian curry. And for that

As you too might want to tick all 28 restaurants of your bucket list take this map I made of all 28:

As you can see – on the iPhone Google Maps app you even get a nice progress bar of those you already visited. I’ve been to parco curry already – so that counted.

Hack-The-Planet Podcast: Episode 009

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

a source of iptv streams

Posted on by Daniel Kirstenpfad

Collection of 8000+ publicly available IPTV channels from all over the world.

Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks.

Github: iptv-org/iptv

Using the streams is as simple as it gets: Just open the provided playlilst files in your favorite media player. The above example is th VLC media player.