As I continue to build this blog into a real “digital home” for myself, I have now added all photos from my old Flickr account to the blog. All of them are present in the gallery! Please note that I have automatically migrated some image metadata like titles and description from Flickr, but many of the older photos only have descriptions or titles in German, and some do not have any text associated with them. ...

This is just a collection of signs and ads I came across and found amusing and/or interesting during my stay in Japan. Note: Photos are not in chronological order. Earthquake Evaculation Monument The interesting thing about this sign is its mounting system, not its content. This sign at Tokyo Station is very easy to understand, but I am surprised it is necessary in spite of the very clear, multilingual displays at the platform. ...

Monday, December 29th - Transfer to Tokyo Time to get back to Tokyo. I stayed in a different hotel near Shimbashi station this time. Since all my hotels were budget options, I wanted to hedge my bets in case one of them absolutely sucked, but all the places I stayed were pretty nice. I had reserved a seat on the Shinkansen in advance, but woke up way too early. I was still able to change my reservation to an earlier train, but still had to wait an hour for a train that had a window seat on the left side available. ...

Monday December 22nd - Transfer to Osaka With week 1 already over, I hopped onto the Hikari after an awful night of sleep. My original plan was to leave the train at Nagoya and visit the SCMaglev museum. However, this plan failed because storing my luggage near Nagoya station was simply impossible. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because the trains hadn’t even been that full, but the coin lockers were filled to the brim. ...

I am in Japan! (At least I am while writing this part.) I’ve wanted to go there since 2018, finally had the funds to go in early 2020, and then COVID struck. After that, various personal things got into the way, and only this summer did I finally decided to spend my christmas vacation this year there. The itinerary was rather simple: one week in Tokyo, then one in Osaka, then another week in Tokyo. All direct flights from Munich to Japan go to Haneda, and I did not want to take a multi-hour train trip directly before going onto a 14-hour flight. Thus, staying in Tokyo for the first and last part of the trip, and bracketing Kansai in between, seemed to make sense. ...

Now that I’ve decided to reactivate my blog, I might as well start sharing inconsequential life updates on it. I recently started collecting typewriters - I didn’t really mean to, it just kind of happened, and now I own, like, eight. I don’t care a lot about mint condition or anything like that, I want to actually experience what it was like to use them, and my favourite piece is also among the more scratched-up ones. ...

You might notice that this website looks a bit different now. There’s a reason for that: Thanks to the current ongoing drama around Wordpress.com, Automattic, and its competitors, I no longer felt confident in having my website hosted there, and frankly, I didn’t feel confident using a self-hosted Wordpress instance either. This post will give you a quick rundown of the changes, and then a somewhat longer ramble about the new tech stack, and my experience upgrading. ...

Boso View Express, or BVE for short, is one of those train simulators that have been around for a very long time but never quite managed to establish themselves at the top of the food chain, at least not here in the west. But if you want to simulate Japanese railways, BVE is essentially the holy grail. You can find a huge variety of routes and vehicles, all of them with appropriate train protection and signalling systems courtesy of a highly-flexible plugin interface, for absolutely no money at all, but there is a downside: Basically the entire community is based in Japan, communicates in Japanese, and works on Japanese computers - which makes it difficult to get into the sim, or even to get it working, if you are not able to read and understand at least a bit of Japanese. (Google Translate, while definitely useful, often chokes on technical jargon.) This guide aims to help you install the sim and addons, understand principles of how Japanese railways generally are operated and how they differ from what we Westerners would expect, and also point you to some up-to-date, high-quality add-ons.

It’s cold as shit, so I figured I might as well sight, edit and upload my vacation photos from Venice, several months ago. There’s far too much to reshare here, but you can see them on my Flickr. Highlights include: Animals! Shipping! A Weird Funicular! A Tramway But Done Wrong! ...