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...

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!