Buying the Nexus 4 (or Nexus 10 or chromebook) from Belgium

Although I don't read *every* cellphone comparison, it's clear the LG Nexus 4 offers great value for money, moreso because it just got discounted 100 dollar (and consequently 100 euro as well, at least the funny currency conversion works in our advantage for once).

Of course being in Belgium, you can't buy these devices from the Google play store. You can buy them from mediamarkt (who add 100 euro on top of the price just for fun), from ebay (the price drop hasn't been reflected in the prices yet) or you can insist on ordering it in the Play store.

One way to do this is to pretend your internet connection is in Germany, your address is in Germany and your credit card is in Germany. Sounds difficult, but it's just a bit tedious, that's all :)

Pretend you're in Germany

• Use firefox, install the 'foxyproxy' addon, configure a german proxy (see http://spys.ru/free-proxy-list/de/ ). 
• See if it worked by going to http://ctrlq.org/maps/where/
• Do the ultimate test and go to play.google.com -> you should be able to shop for the Nexus devices

Pretend you live in Germany

• create an account at mailboxde.com
• read carefully their mail about how to fill in the address and how the site works in general

Pretend you have a German credit card

• Go into Google wallet, delete your credit card and reenter it with the same values except for the address: this should be the address provided to you by mailboxde.com

Order It!

After all this effort you can finally order your Nexus device (if the site errors out try again a bit later).

UPDATE: the phone arrived after about 2 weeks, and cost about 270 in total; good deal!

Thanks to the blog of Koen Delvaux for detailing most of these steps! I was going to use the 'TunnelBear + borderlinx.com + entropay.com' route, but via Germany was simpler although surprisingly not cheaper.

Hopefully some less consumerist topic next time, and a bit sooner too...

After a long absence, here's a new short post about a new project I'm working on: Design and Interior. It's a market place for buying/selling design furniture.

For the tech geeks among us, it was made using Vaadin and hosted on Google app engine. The experience was mostly pleasant, although the NoSQL database of app engine has quite a learning curve.

Now it's time to attract visitors, otherwise the scaling propertise of app engine will be kind of useless ;)

Mobile Cloudwatch

At the left you can see the result of some weeks of hacking on the train.

This is a fully working application, if you had a phone running android (like the G1, sold starting 22nd October) you could begin using it.

The screenshot shows various settings and the current cloud status (CLOUDED).
This cloud status is collected by connecting from time to time (defined by the feed, usually about 5 mins) to the cloudwatch.net website.

In the top status bar you can see a cloud alert just went off, this is accompanied by an audible alert.

Since there is no hardware to run it on (yet) we'll have to wait a bit to test this, let me know if you have one!

Sound in the Android emulator

The Android application I'm developing needs sound, unfortunately I couldn't get sound to work!

How to check sound:
The easiest way to test whether you have sound working is to click on the volume buttons (right-hand side of the emulated phone).
Another way to check if something is wrong is the message "using stubbed audio hardware" in the startup log. My solution doesn't remove this line though.

Failed attempt using symlinking:
My pc runs Linux (Gentoo) with Alsa sound support. The emulator searches for /dev/eac which is not present on my system, so the first thing to do was to make a symlink to /dev/dsp. This failed, but I'm not excluding this method might work. Let me know if you succeeded.

Solution using OSS audio:
start the emulator with the following options:

./emulator -audio oss

OSS is the older audio stack for Linux, I'm surprised it worked but hey, at least I can continue developing now!

clouds on your phone, new sensor, uptime

Just an update on cloudwatch.net uptime: the hosting is back at my place but now we're renovating which does bad things to the fulltime availability of electricity. And did I mention the telephone cable was ruptured (so no ADSL for a few hours)? Nonetheless I expect the worst to be over.

In other news, I've been developing an Android phone application which will connect to the cloudwatch.net website and alert you on cloud status - without you needing to turn on a pc! Since most of the android-capable phones will have wifi this will not cost you in mobile data charges.

There's also a new cloudwatch sensor on the market, have a look at AAG Cloudwatcher. It should cost 300 euro or less. I'm looking into providing support for this sensor, input from people actually owning one is appreciated (I'm also still looking for boltwood sky sensor owners)

Online, kinda

Good news, the cloudwatch.net website is back online. It's a temporary hosting solution, because my internet is still not fixed. I put the server at my parents' place :)

I'm moving, cloudwatch.net downtime

Practical announcement:
- I'm moving on friday the 4th of july. This means some cloudwatch.net downtime! Minimal downtime is from 08:00 UT on 04/07/2008 to 15:00 UT on 04/07/2008. This is presuming the internet connection switch goes as expected. I would not be surprised to be out the entire weekend.

Unpractical thoughts on this:
This means my testing webcam in Ghent will move as well, to Aalter.
I've found someone else who seems willing to run a webcam in Ghent, only problem left to solve is the power bill of having a PC on all the time. For me it's not an issue because my server is also hosting the cloudwatch website and some other sites. Leaving a pc on only for a webcam is a bit pricey (someone care to do the measuring and math? I've heard 20/30 euros a month).

Which brings me to something I'd like to check out: buy an USB enabled router, install some open source router firmware on it and use it to host the webcam. It's been done before so should be no problem, and it solves the power bill. And everyone needs a router, might as well take one with a USB port. The Asus WS-500g looks like the most promising candidate, in combination with openwrt.org firmware. Most linux-supported webcams will then also work with this router. Contact me for more info if you'd like to try it yourself.

On a positive note, my new location should feature less light pollution, and a garden with lots of place to build an observatory. After all, what's a cloud detection system without an observatory ;)

Edit: as expected and totally in line with various laws of nature, moving the internet line to my new house has proven to be harder than moving desks, computers and mattresses. I'm hoping cloudwatch.net will be online later today. But I'm not counting on it...