-
Have you secretly hoped I’d write about my experiences with Japanese contactless payment technology? Buckle up.
-
For the longest time, I’ve been annoyed that the ‘ExpressPay’ (i.e. EMV) feature of my American Express card isn’t supported in Japan when using Apple Wallet. It works fine in Australia but in Japan, I’ve had to use something called QUICPay. Based on the Japanese Wikipedia page, it seems QUICPay is a similar, but different, standard developed by JCB that uses Sony’s Felica technology.
-
That’s not bad in and of itself but there are two frustrating practical consequences. First, there are of course two competing Felica-based payment standards in Japan and so some places that accept the other one (iD), don’t accept QUICPay. Second, for whatever reason, charges that go via QUICPay don’t display the name of the merchant on most statements provided by American Express. I do our household budget each month and keep a categorisation of our purchases so I can see where the money is going and this is more difficult when using QUICPay than it should be.
-
In preparation for the Tokyo Olympics, large numbers of merchants in Japan installed new payment terminals in 2019 that supported EMV. My recollection is that I tried to use my Apple Wallet-based American Express (i.e. via EMV) when these terminals rolled out and it didn’t work. Of course, you’ve no doubt guessed have seen where this is going but I tried again the other day and it worked! It doesn’t work everywhere but it does work at my local supermarket and at Starbucks, two of the locations where the lack of support for QUICPay has been the most aggravating. Huzzah!
-
-
As you can no doubt discern from a 200-word digression on the electronic payment technologies being used in Japan, it was a quiet week. Dare I call it the dog days of summer (Wikipedia)? I once again took Rowan on a train trip on the weekend, this time out to Haneda Airport so that we could ride the monorail.
-
If you follow U.S. national politics at all, you’re likely aware that the current attack du jour the Democrats have been deploying against the Republicans is to call them weird. I thought Noah Smith had a good explanation of why it seems to rankle Republicans so much.
-
I found this talk by Anders Schau Knatten about what C compilation toolchains actually do to be a helpful introduction to understanding the process of turning human-readable source code into machine code. If that sounds a little dry, this 11-minute lighting talk by Tom Ballinger about how undo could work in program execution is both amusing and thought-provoking.
-
I made my way through the first season of The Good Place and have moved on to the second season. It’s better than I initially thought even if I stand by my assessment that it’s not an especially funny sitcom.
-
I am still listening to a lot of Langata but I linked to that last week so this week, how about some early 2000s electronica: ‘Denmark’ from The Chemical Brothers’s 2002 album, Come With Us (Apple Music).
