fantasai: Worthy Products

The following items/services are things I use and would recommend to anybody.

Consumer Goods

• Uniball Signo EX and Signo 207 pens. Beautifully bold colors, delightfully smooth writing, and lots of colors. If you're looking for sparkly ink, buy from Sakura instead, but for solid color writing you can't beat a Uniball Signo.
• PaperBlanks journals are gorgeous, have a lovely magnetic clasp, and are full of high-quality writing paper.
• Kuhn Rikon paring knives come in a variety of colors, have a plastic sheath, are pretty cheap, but most of all are sharp, sharpenable knives of good quality worthy of daily use. See also Minimum Viable Kitchen for more on kitchen and cleaning equipment.
• IKEA Plastis dish brush.

Travel-related

If you travel to the south of France for W3C meetings, you're likely to be stationed either in Sophia-Antipolis or in Mandelieu-la-Napoule. If you don't want to spend a fortune on your hotel room, I have a few recommendations.

In Tokyo I highly recommend:

• Homeikan, which is an affordable traditional ryokan established in an old building with nice baths and a fantastic breakfast, tucked a few blocks away from Kasuga station.
• Family Inn Sako which is a cross between a hotel, a ryokan, and a homestay in a quiet sector of Tokyo.
• J Residence Shinjuku which is an aparthotel a short walk from Shinjuku station.

Some miscellaneous travel tools:

• Hipmunk has a really slick interface for finding good flights.
• SNCF The French train system. Note that if you're from the Americas, you must pick France as your pickup location because they can't send to the Americas.
• The Amtrak Android app is very good. You can purchase and exchange tickets on it very easily.
• Caltrain Droid is the best Caltrain schedule app. It has a very efficient UI and works offline, so there's nothing faster.

Software

Last because it's the most boring. :P

• Unicode because everyone should use it
• Firefox Need I say more?
• screen, which lets me disconnect from a server without interrupting the application I'm running within it

I would like to recommend a Linux text editor, but I haven't found any good ones. I use Geany or Kate most of the time. I don't have a mail client I love, either, but Thunderbird works well enough.