justin․searls․co
Breaking Change artwork

v37 - Whose bone is this?

Breaking Change

Video of this episode is up on YouTube:

Coming to you LIVE from a third straight week of Japanese business hotels comes me, Justin, in his enduring quest to figure out how to exchange currency for real estate in the land of the rising fun.

[Programming note: apologies, as the audio quality at the beginning of the podcast suffered because I fucked up and left the hotel room's air conditioner on (I caught it and fixed it from the pun section onward)]

Had a few great e-mails to read through this week, but now I'm fresh out again! Before you listen, why not write in a review of this episode? podcast@searls.co and tell me about how amazing it will be before it lets you down like your best friend and/or workplace mentor and/or parent figure.

Href time:

Show those show notes…

TIL you can (re)set a sleep timer with Siri. Listening to a podcast while falling asleep and my timer paused playback before I nodded off. Clicked the AirPod stem to resume playback and said:

"Siri set a sleep timer for 15 minutes"

This actually worked! I've been getting up and tapping my device like an idiot all these years.

1.8k likes · May 21, 2025 at 11:14 PM UTC

All the Pretty Prefectures

2025-06-13 Update: Miyazaki & Kochi & Tokushima, ✅ & ✅ & ✅!
2025-06-07 Update: Staying overnight in Nagasaki, which allows me to tighten up my rules: now only overnight stays in a prefecture count!
2025-06-06 Update: Saga, ✅!
2025-06-02 Update: Fukui, ✅!
2025-06-01 Update: Ibaraki, ✅!
2025-05-31 Update: Tochigi, ✅!
2025-05-29 Update: Fukushima, ✅!
2025-05-28 Update: Yamagata, 🥩!
2025-05-25 Update: Gunma, ✅!
2025-05-24 Update: We can check Saitama off the list.

So far, I've visited 46 of Japan's 47 prefectures.

I've been joking with my Japanese friends that I'm closing in on having visited every single prefecture for a little while now, and since I have a penchant for exaggerating, I was actually curious: how many have I actually been to?

Thankfully, because iPhone has been equipped with a GPS for so long, all my photos from our 2009 trip onward are location tagged, so I was pleased to find it was pretty easy to figure this out with Apple's Photos app.

Here are the ground rules:

  1. Pics or it didn't happen
  2. Have to stay the night in the prefecture (passing through in a car or train doesn't count)
  3. If I don't remember what I did or why I was there, it doesn't count
都道府県 Prefecture Visited? 1st visit
北海道 Hokkaido ❌
青森県 Aomori ✅ 2024
岩手県 Iwate ✅ 2019
宮城県 Miyagi ✅ 2019
秋田県 Akita ✅ 2024
山形県 Yamagata ✅ 2025
福島県 Fukushima ✅ 2025
茨城県 Ibaraki ✅ 2025
栃木県 Tochigi ✅ 2025
群馬県 Gunma ✅ 2025
埼玉県 Saitama ✅ 2025
千葉県 Chiba ✅ 2015
東京都 Tokyo ✅ 2005
神奈川県 Kanagawa ✅ 2005
新潟県 Niigata ✅ 2024
富山県 Toyama ✅ 2024
石川県 Ishikawa ✅ 2023
福井県 Fukui ✅ 2025
山梨県 Yamanashi ✅ 2024
長野県 Nagano ✅ 2009
岐阜県 Gifu ✅ 2005
静岡県 Shizuoka ✅ 2023
愛知県 Aichi ✅ 2009
三重県 Mie ✅ 2019
滋賀県 Shiga ✅ 2005
京都府 Kyoto ✅ 2005
大阪府 Osaka ✅ 2005
兵庫県 Hyogo ✅ 2005
奈良県 Nara ✅ 2005
和歌山県 Wakayama ✅ 2019
鳥取県 Tottori ✅ 2024
島根県 Shimane ✅ 2024
岡山県 Okayama ✅ 2024
広島県 Hiroshima ✅ 2012
山口県 Yamaguchi ✅ 2019
徳島県 Tokushima ✅ 2025
香川県 Kagawa ✅ 2020
愛媛県 Ehime ✅ 2024
高知県 Kochi ✅ 2025
福岡県 Fukuoka ✅ 2009
佐賀県 Saga ✅ 2025
長崎県 Nagasaki ✅ 2024
熊本県 Kumamoto ✅ 2023
大分県 Oita ✅ 2024
宮崎県 Miyazaki ✅ 2025
鹿児島県 Kagoshima ✅ 2023
沖縄県 Okinawa ✅ 2024

Working through this list, I was surprised by how many places I'd visited for a day trip or passed through without so much as staying the night. (Apparently 11 years passed between my first Kobe trip and my first overnight stay?) This exercise also made it clear to me that having a mission like my 2024 Nihonkai Tour is a great way to string together multiple short visits while still retaining a strong impression of each place.

Anyway, now I've definitely got some ideas for where I ought to visit in 2025! 🌄

Soapy Snake

One thing I love about Japan are all the obscure Metal Gear Solid spin-offs that we never saw stateside.

Want to know the only thing worse than worrying a lot? Being really good at worrying.

Most people's worries never come to pass. But when I worry about something, the odds are extraordinarily good it will go exactly as terribly as I feared.

2.2k likes · May 7, 2025 at 12:03 AM UTC

My brother gives me shit because I use my real name on Reddit, but in my mind it's more like I'm playing Reddit with permadeath enabled.

66 likes · May 6, 2025 at 9:26 AM UTC

If this is losing, I don't want to win

In Japan, it's common for bars to have a dice game with rules like:

  • Snake eyes: free drink
  • Even number: half off drink
  • Odd number: double size, double price drink

I "lost" with both of these 1L whisky-fruit highballs. I sure don't feel like a loser, though.

A non-zero number of people assume rotary clubs are full of nerds who are really into assessing the authenticity of signing important documents for some reason.

532 likes · May 5, 2025 at 2:26 AM UTC

How to use a Pants Press in a Japanese business hotel

One of the best parts of all these ridiculous side quests I accept is that I never run out of new situations to figure out. This week: how to iron my shirt and press my pants from a Japanese business hotel the day before a meeting.

Thankfully, we have YouTube

Of course, models vary between companies and I actually had to follow this less entertaining video to get figure out what to do with a standing "Twinbird" press (apparently the #1 seller in pants presses):

When I was young and learning how to do my own laundry, I remember always thinking "permanent press" sounded like too much of a commitment.

2.0k likes · May 3, 2025 at 2:59 AM UTC
Breaking Change artwork

v36 - Hedgelord

Breaking Change

I'm going away on a trip for an unexpectedly long time, and you'll never guess why! (You might guess why.) Anyway, here's something to remember me by.

If you've ever been worried about whether something you cared about would work out okay, email podcast@searls.co and tell me about it so that I can share your story with a bunch of strangers on the Internet.

Video of this edition of the show is up on YouTube.

References available upon request:

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Opinion | Ads linking to paywalled articles are stupid

I saw this promoted post in my Reddit feed and thought, "huh, maybe WaPo is trying to entice new readers with ads pairing gift links to articles and targeted demographics that might engage with them."

LOL, no. You click anywhere on this and you instantly get hit with a paywall.

Who is this for? Current subscribers that don't read the Washington Post? People who planned to subscribe and forgot?

Absolute idiocy.

This one's tough, Sam

One of my favorite things about OpenAI is when they A/B test ChatGPT responses and the computer arrives at two identical responses, but still insist you tell them which answer was better.

I'm feeling the response on the right, personally.

TIL you can create a new rails app inside the current directory without creating a new one! For example, to build out a rails app around them:

$ rails new .

The app module will be named after the current working directory.

3.4k likes · April 23, 2025 at 3:23 PM UTC

I really hope that for the next Vision hardware release, Apple makes the light shield (functionally) optional. The original is so much more productive and pleasant when you remove the light shield and retain your (human) peripheral vision and airflow over your face's skin.

3.0k likes · April 23, 2025 at 11:22 AM UTC

Been "vibe coding" (ugh) all afternoon, and 3 hours into my agent building an agentic REPL (I know), it decided to just remove all human-facing output because it figured out how to read underlying logs I don't have (apparent) access to.

Was like that scene in Her when the AI just decides to peace out and go do its own thing. Welp.

2.5k likes · April 22, 2025 at 10:08 PM UTC

Radioactive Condos

Searching for real estate in Japan has been a humorous lesson in the differences of how we market things here. You'd think of all countries, Japanese developers might be sensitive to promotional images that make their brand-new condo building appear to be radioactive. ☢️

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