ctphipps

Tokyo equivalent with animated trains, weather, flights and more: https://minitokyo3d.com/

Or the one that made it into an Australian TV advert. Guy walks into a service station. “Got a windscreen wiper for my Lada?” “Yeah, mate. Sounds like a good deal to me.”

French as in language alone...

Residents might, but the huge number of international visitors who rely on Google Maps wherever they go won't need to go hunting for alternatives when arriving in South Korea. And the other parts of the Google ecosystem that rely on Maps will start to function in South Korea again.

Apple finally got the green light to enable Find My in South Korea back in April. Before that, you disappeared off the map when in South Korea, at least as far as Find My is concerned.

I’m seeing a square favicon/app icon, not really an official company logo. Should there not be an option for the actual logo?

Same for credit cards that offer travel insurance as long as the flights/rental cars etc. are booked through them. They'd most likely need to see the charge from the airline in order for the coverage to be effective.

Apple has much less consumer friendly return policies in many non-US markets. Take Hong Kong for example: "All products purchased at Apple Store in Hong Kong cannot be returned or exchanged. Exceptions for exchange will be allowed for defective products only." https://www.apple.com/hk/shop/help/exchange_return

I'd have a hard time arguing that the AirPods are defective because the non-bundled mat on the box didn't ship.

The fact that the credit reporting agencies can (and do, when not prohibited by state law) charge a fee for each freeze and unfreeze event is what prevents me from doing this. While the fee isn't expensive compared to dealing with the ramifications of ID theft, it's the principle of paying the data guardians to guard my data better that I object to. Especially when I have no choice (assuming I want to live a modern life) but to have them manage my data.

The headline seems sensationalized. The article doesn't mention a recommendation not to use, it simply was the absence of a recommendation at all.

"...asked the group to raise their hands if they would recommend private American citizens use products or services made by Apple competitor Huawei or smartphone maker ZTE."

The US Government is not in the business of recommending device brands or services to private individuals, and not making a recommendation is not the same as recommending against.

Wow, that kills your arrivals product in the US then. $375 for someone who will meet me with a smile, watch me line up for immigration and carry bags? An interesting tidbit is that Japan Airlines offers a similar service for free for familes: https://www.jal.co.jp/en/inter/support/family/

This is the way that mobile data roaming works - the Internet egress point is your home carrier's, not the carrier on which you are roaming. Nothing special about T-Mobile here.

...and way behind in others. Try finding a pre-paid voice & data SIM in Japan (hint: it doesn't exist due to arcane regulations - non-residents can only get data-only SIMs). Most WiFi spots require registration that require you to confirm identity via a verification email (think chicken and egg).

Any way of scripting this to automate button clicks etc? I use PhantomJS for this now but found it to be incredibly unstable for complex pages.

In which case the ban would apply to the final sector, but for all intents and purposes, passengers boarding at earlier airports would also be prohibited to bring electronics onboard as checking luggage during a flight connection is pretty much unheard of (unless of course it's an overnight stopover).

Or people traveling with kids (for whom iPads on board are a saving grace on long haul flights).

I'd take good domestic bandwidth as a good (albeit primitive) first start. Overseas bandwidth/peering can be a commercial next step - if the last mile and domestic bandwidth is the bottleneck then there's no catalyst to kick-start international connectivity negotiations.

Let me run a stable FaceTime chat from Canberra to Sydney. Then let's worry about Canberra to Los Angeles...

Can't agree with this sentiment more. I've been involved directly in two separate decisions over the last 5 years where US companies decided not to invest in product and operations launches Australia specifically because of the cost of bandwidth to residential users. This is not just about home users wanting to streaming movies, Australia is losing jobs because of this short-sighted, political farce over the NBN.

The clincher is that my mother, who lives in the nation's capital, has only two options for Internet connectivity at her home, both are ADSL1, neither offers downlink speeds in excess of 8Mbps and uplink is capped at 256kbps, with actual speeds more like 2Mbps down/128kbps up.

Why? Because Telstra, the national telco decided to implement micro-exchanges in the form of roadside cabinets (RIMs) in the 1990s, thus locking out all other players from offering ADSL access, and themselves from being upgraded to ASDL2/2+.

Almost 30 years later, these RIMs are still a key part of their landline infrastructure and due to lack of competition and the delays in the NBN, they're able to charge the poor customers that are connected to them top dollar (~AUD$70/month) for third world Internet speeds.

Nice as this all seems, the process for accessing the information in one's koseki is amazingly primitive. Most times that you need to do something official in Japan as a Japanese citizen, a copy of your koseki is required. Open a bank account and you'll need one. Apply for a passport and you'll need one etc. You'll not only need an original hard copy transcript of your koseki (tōhon/short-form or shōhon/long-form), but it will need to be dated within the last 3 months.

How do you get one? Online? No. Got to visit your city/village/ward office. Any local city/village/ward office? No, it's got to be within the district where your koseki is held. OK, let's take a trip back to our hometown in the evening - surely there's a 24 hour kiosk in the lobby where I can print one out? No. Come during business hours, fill out a paper form requesting a transcript, take a number, wait in line to submit the request form. Go over what you wrote in the request form with an extremely nice and polite bureaucrat. Take another number to wait in line to pay about US$1.50 for the hard copy. Then a final number to pick up the hard copy. Wow.

Why's this so hard? Well, although the contents of the koseki are of course computerized, these records are held at the ward/village/city office level and not nationally. Sure, the police, immigration authorities and others likely have a way to access each ward office's system, but as a citizen you have to physically trudge down to the office in the region where your koseki is held and request a copy. Not so bad if you're living near your family (since your koseki is typically kept at the ancestral home of your family, not necessarily where you live day-to-day), but if you've moved across Japan or internationally, you're screwed. Hope you have a family member you can deputise to go get one for you or that you have a good number of frequent flyer points to burn.

The article seems to say it's pretty straight forward from overseas at any Japanese consulate. Well, not so much. Strangely enough, write access from overseas is pretty easy. Read access from overseas doesn't exist.

Case in point - my wife and I recently had a baby born in the Bay Area who is eligible for Japanese citizenship. No problems, we head to the consulate and fill out the paperwork, provide all the birth proof documents and pay a small fee. The consulate sends the birth details to the city/village/ward office where our koseki is held and that ward office adds our baby to it a week or two later. Now, we need a passport. Can we just ask the consulate to authenticate our baby since they just added him to our koseki? Nope. We have to fly to Japan to visit the city/ward office where our koseki is held, or deputize a family member in Japan to do so for us, obtain a hard-copy of the updated koseki, have it posted to us in California and we then bring it into the consulate to prove our baby's citizenship - citizenship that they themselves just authenticated a few weeks ago. Wow. On top of that, there's no way of knowing when our baby has been added, so we just need to ask our family members to go down once a week for the next few weeks, request and pay for a copy and when our son appears, claim success.

So yes, it's a great system, but it's so very paper and physical presence based that it hurts.

Surprisingly enough, especially for Japan, foreigners have it easier. Since foreign residents are not on a koseki (well, they are in the case that they're married to a Japanese citizen but only in the "comments" section of the koseki, not the actual core of it and that's a whole 'nother story), none of this paperwork is required when foreigners want to deal with the Japanese bureaucracy. Instead, foreigners are required to carry a plastic ID card (called a "Zairyu card" in its latest permutation) and this has all the necessary information. No 3 month expiry, no ward office visit. So, there's at least one area that non-Japanese have it easier in Japan that citizens!

I'm always surprised the Japanese (or more specifically the Japan National Wagyu Registration Association) don't kick up a fuss about the name 'Wagyu' being used for the name of the breed (no matter where it is raised) and not the origin of the meat.

'Wagyu' in Japanese literally means 'Japanese Cow'. I wonder what it would take to name an existing cattle breed 'US Beef', send breeding stock to somewhere with lots of land and cheap labor and starting a new domestically raised 'US Beef' industry.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Not according to your signup. It requires me to affirm that "I am a US citizen or permanent resident."

I'm a legal long-term US resident but not a permanent resident (i.e. green card holder). I have a SSN, working permission, credit history, bank accounts but not a green card holder. Sounds like the word "permanent" should be removed or replaced with "legal".