application – schrankmonster blog

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

Posted on January 16, 2020January 12, 2020 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:

Download app.
Make sure you’ve got Apple Pay set-up with at least one of your credit cards
Use the SuicaEng app to create a brand new SUICA card out of thin air and top it up right there.
(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.

HUD progress

Posted on December 21, 2019December 21, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

SwiftUI on the Web

Posted on November 8, 2019October 27, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

SwiftUI is the new cool kid on the block when it comes to iOS/iPadOS/macOS application development.

As Apple announced SwiftUI early 2019 it’s naturally only focussing on making all the declarative UI goodness available for the Apple operating systems. No non-apple platforms in focus. Naturally.

But there are ways. With the declarative way of creating user interfaces one apparently can simply start to re-implement the UI controls and have them render as HTML / Javascript…

The SwiftWebUI project is aiming to do so:

Unlike some other efforts this doesn’t just render SwiftUI Views as HTML. It also sets up a connection between the browser and the code hosted in the Swift server, allowing for interaction – buttons, pickers, steppers, lists, navigation, you get it all!
In other words: SwiftWebUI is an implementation of (many but not all parts of) the SwiftUI API for the browser.
To repeat the Disclaimer: This is a toy project! Do not use for production. Use it to learn more about SwiftUI and its inner workings.
SwiftWebUI

good wireguard tutorial

Posted on September 27, 2019September 21, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

If you, like me, are looking into new emerging tools and technologies you might also look at Wireguard.

WireGuard^® is an extremely simple yet fast and modern VPN that utilizes state-of-the-art cryptography. It aims to be faster, simpler, leaner, and more useful than IPsec, while avoiding the massive headache. It intends to be considerably more performant than OpenVPN. WireGuard is designed as a general purpose VPN for running on embedded interfaces and super computers alike, fit for many different circumstances. Initially released for the Linux kernel, it is now cross-platform (Windows, macOS, BSD, iOS, Android) and widely deployable. It is currently under heavy development, but already it might be regarded as the most secure, easiest to use, and simplest VPN solution in the industry.
bold wireguard website statement

To apply and get started with WireGuard on Linux and iOS I’ve used the very nice tutorial of Graham Stevens: WireGuard Setup Guide for iOS.

This guide will walk you through how to setup WireGuard in a way that all your client outgoing traffic will be routed via another machine (server). This is ideal for situations where you don’t trust the local network (public or coffee shop wifi) and wish to encrypt all your traffic to a server you trust, before routing it to the Internet.
WireGuard Setup Guide for iOS.

try to read/listen to japanese

Posted on February 4, 2019February 3, 2019 by Daniel Kirstenpfad

I am at the stage of “trying to comprehend” the japanese spoken language.

I’ll be a happy camper if I would understand most of what is being said and could follow daylight normal conversations pointed towards me japanese. Like, you know, when trying to make a purchase or having to ask for that one bit of information.

For this, apart from excessive exposure to the spoken language, I am using some tools to help with reading to a small degree.

For those completely out of the loop:

Japanese has no genetic relationship with Chinese, but it makes extensive use of Chinese characters, or kanji (漢字), in its writing system, and a large portion of its vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese. Along with kanji, the Japanese writing system primarily uses two syllabic scripts, hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名). Latin script is used in a limited fashion, such as for imported acronyms, and the numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals alongside traditional Chinese numerals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language

Here’s a list: