The Fancy Payment Cards of Taiwan

If you’re an old-schooler, you might still go to the local bar and pay for a beer with cash. You could even try and pay with a cheque, though the pen-and-paper method has mostly fallen out of favor these days. But if you’re a little more modern, you might use a tap-to-pay feature on a credit or debit card.

In Taiwan, though, there’s another unique way to pay. The island nation has a whole ecosystem of bespoke payment cards, and you can even get one that looks like a floppy disk!

It’s Not About The Money, Money, Money

A regular adult iPASS card. Like many mass transit smartcards, it’s based on MIFARE contactless technology. Credit: iPASS
Like so many other countries with highly-developed public transport systems, Taiwan implemented a smartcard ticketing system many years ago. Back in December 2007, it launched iPASS (一卡通), initially for use by riders on the Kaohsiung Metro system which opened in March 2008. The cards were launched using MIFARE technology, as seen in a wide range of contactless smart card systems in other public transport networks around the world.

The system was only ever supposed to be used to pay fares on public transport using the pre-paid balance on the card. Come 2014, however, management of the cards was passed to the iPASS Corporation. The new organization quickly established the card’s use as a widespread form of payment at a huge variety of stores across Taiwan. The earliest adopters were OK MART, SUNFAR 3C, and a handful of malls and department stores. Soon enough, partnerships with FamilyMart and Hi-Life convenience stores followed, and the use of the card quickly spread from there.
iPASS can be used across much of the public transport in Taiwan, and the cards are also compatible with smartphone wallets. Credit: iPASS
As iPASS cards continued to gain in popularity, companies started lining up to produce co-branded cards. Many came with special deals at select retailers. For example, NPC issued an iPASS card that offered cheaper prices on gasoline at affiliated gas stations. Furthermore, no longer did your iPASS have to be a rigid, rectangular plastic card. You can buy a normal one if you like, but you can also get an iPASS built into prayer beads, laced into a leather bracelet, or even baked into a faux floppy disk. The latter specifically notes that it’s not a real disk, of course; it only has iPASS functionality and will not work if you put it in a floppy drive. It is, however, a startlingly good recreation, with the proper holes cut out for write protect and density and a real metal sheath. On the translucent yellow version, you can even see what appears to be the fabric inside that would be used to protect the spinning magnetic platter.
Novelty iPass cards are common. Some are merely fun prints or designs, while others go far outside the usual smartcard format—like this novelty floppy disk. Credit: iPASS
Other novelty iPASS “cards” include a keychain-sized Taiwan Railways train and a Japanese shinkansen. Where a regular iPASS card costs NT$100 or so, a novelty version like the floppy disk or train costs more like NT$500-$600. That might sound like a lot, but in the latter case, you’re only talking about $15 USD or so. If so desired, though, you don’t need to carry a card or keychain, or floppy disk at all. It’s possible to use an iPASS with contactless smartphone and smartwatch wallets like Google Wallet and Garmin Pay.

iPASS Cards are typically sold empty with no value, and must have money transferred to the card prior to use. Notably, the money stored on the cards is backed by the Union Bank of Taiwan. This provides a certain level of peace of mind. Even if it wasn’t there, though, there isn’t so much to lose if things do go wrong—as any individual card is limited to storing a maximum of NT$10,000 (~$320 USD).
You can use a little train as your iPASS card if you’re willing to spend just a little more money. Credit: PCHOME.TW
Similar Taiwanese pre-paid payment cards exist, too. EasyCard has been around since 2002, initially established by the Taipei Smart Card Corporation for use on the Taipei Metro. It similarly offers novelty versions of its cards, and these days, it can be used on most public transport in Taiwan and at a range of convenience stores. Like the iPASS, it’s limited to storing up to NT$10,000, with balances backed by the Cathay United Bank. 7-Eleven has also joined the fray with its iCash cards, which are available in some very cute novelty styles. However, where there are tens of millions of users across EasyCard and iPASS, iCash has not had the same level of market penetration.
As Easycard demonstrates, you can put a contactless payment chip in just about anything. Credit: PCHOME.TW
Generally, most of us get by using payment cards linked directly to our main banking accounts. However, if you happen to find yourself in Taiwan, you might find the iPASS to be a very useful tool indeed. You can load it once with a bunch of money, and then run around on buses and trains while buying yourself snacks and beverages all over town. Plus, if you buy the floppy disk one, you’ll have an awesome souvenir to bring back with you, and you can entertain all your payment-card-obsessed friends with tales of your adventures. All in all, the banking heavyweights of the world would do well to learn from the whimsical example of the iPASS Corporation.

hackaday.com/2026/01/28/the-fa…

Seems like a good time for a new intro!

I'm a queer anarcha-feminist chronically ill person living near (but not in) Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, with plans in the works to move further from the city and into the woods instead.

I've always enjoyed meandering around outside looking at leaves and frogs and picking wild berries, but since discovering birding in 2024 I feel like I'm falling in love with the natural world around me in a new way. I'm pretty bird obsessed, but also just learning in general to observe closely, to listen carefully, and to name what I see and hear with greater specificity.

As newly a bird/wildlife/nature photographer as I am a birder, mainly using my recently acquired Olympus E-M1 II camera and Panasonic Lumix 100-300mm II lens. I share a lot of photos here!

After writing about self-directed education, as a grown unschooler, for many years, I've recently shifted focus towards my new blog/newsletter Forest Words instead, to explore all that I'm most passionate about right now: forest-words.ghost.io

Chronically in pain, and a regular cannabis user in order to manage it. I don't CW that drug use (or politics). I do try to CW images of predation/gore and alcohol though. I add image descriptions to all my images.

White settler. Land Back and the destruction of all hierarchical systems of power is the only way forwards on this beautiful burning planet.

Wikipedia as a Storage Medium

We know that while the cost per byte of persistent storage has dropped hugely over the years, it’s still a pain to fork out for a new disk drive. This must be why [MadAvidCoder] has taken a different approach to storage, placing files as multiple encoded pieces of metadata in Wikipedia edits.

The project takes a file, compresses it, and spits out small innocuous strings. These are placed in the comments for Wikipedia edits — which they are at pains to stress — were all legitimate edits in the test cases. The strings can then be retrieved at will and reconstituted, for later use. The test files are a small bitmap of a banana, and a short audio file.

It’s an interesting technique, though fortunately one that’s unlikely to be practical beyond a little amusement at the encyclopedia’s expense. We probably all have our favorite examples of low quality Wikipedia content, so perhaps it’s fortunate that these are hidden in the edit history rather than the pages themselves. Meanwhile we’re reminded of the equally impractical PingFS, using network pings as a file system medium.

hackaday.com/2026/01/28/wikipe…

The Amazing Maser

While it has become a word, laser used to be an acronym: “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”. But there is an even older technology called a maser, which is the same acronym but with light switched out for microwaves. If you’ve never heard of masers, you might be tempted to dismiss them as early proto-lasers that are obsolete. But you’d be wrong! Masers keep showing up in places you’d never expect: radio telescopes, atomic clocks, deep-space tracking, and even some bleeding-edge quantum experiments. And depending on how a few materials and microwave engineering problems shake out, masers might be headed for a second golden age.

Simplistically, the maser is — in one sense — a “lower frequency laser.” Just like a laser, stimulated emission is what makes it work. You prepare a bunch of atoms or molecules in an excited energy state (a population inversion), and then a passing photon of the right frequency triggers them to drop to a lower state while emitting a second photon that matches the first with the same frequency, phase, and direction. Do that in a resonant cavity and you’ve got gain, coherence, and a remarkably clean signal.

The Same but Different

Townes with his original maser (public domain).
However, there are many engineering challenges to building a maser. For one thing, cavities are bigger than required for lasers. Sources of noise and the mitigations are different, too.

The maser grew out of radar research in the early 1950s. Charles Townes and others at Columbia University used ammonia in a cavity to produce a 24 GHz maser, completing it in 1953. For his work, he would share the 1964 Nobel Prize for physics with two Soviet physicists, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov, who had also built a maser.

Eclipsed but Useful

By 1960, the laser appeared, and the maser was nearly forgotten. After all, a visible-light laser is something anyone can immediately appreciate, and it has many spectacular applications.

At the time, the naming of maser vs laser was somewhat controversial. Townes wanted to recast the “M” in maser to mean “molecular,” and pushed to call lasers “optical masers.” But competitors wanted unique names for each type of emission, so lasers for light, grasers for gamma rays, xasers for X-rays, and so on. In the end, only maser and laser stuck.

Masers have uses beyond fancy physics experiments. Trying to detect signals that are just above the noise floor? Try a cryogenic maser amplifier. That’s one way the NASA Deep Space Network pulls in signals. (PDF) You cool a ruby, or other material, to just a bit of 4 °K and use the output of the resulting maser to pull out signals without adding much noise. This works well for radio astronomy, too.

Need an accurate time base? Over the long term, a cesium clock is the way to go. But over a short period, a hydrogen maser clock will offer less noise and drift. This is also important to radio astronomy for building systems to use very long baseline interferometry. The NASA network also uses masers as a frequency standard.

All Natural

While we didn’t have our own masers until 1953, nature forms them in space. Water, hydroxyl, and silicon monoxide molecules in space can form natural masers. Scientists can use these astrophysical masers to map regions of space and measure velocities using Doppler shifts.

Harold Weaver found these in 1965 and, as you might expect, they operate without cavities, but still emit microwaves and are an important source of data for scientists studying space.

Future

While traditional masers are difficult to build, modern material science may be setting the stage for a maser comeback. For example, using nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamonds rather than rubies can lead to masers that don’t require cryogenic cooling. A room-temperature maser could open up applications in much the same way that laser diodes made things possible that would not have been practical with high-voltage tubes and special gases.

Masers can produce signals that may be useful in quantum computing, too. So while you might think of the maser as a historical oddity, it is still around and still has an important job to do.

In a world where lasers are so cheap that they are a dollar-store cat toy, we’d love to see a cheap “maser on a chip” that works at room temperature might even put the maser in reach of us hackers. We hope we get there.

hackaday.com/2026/01/28/the-am…