Last Night, I had to lie that I am in the US so I would be allowed to by Remote by 37Signals on my kindle.
Quite ridiculous and annoying.
I'm guessing here, but I think there might be some correlation between people who travel internationally a lot and people who buy high-end smartphones. Making it difficult for people traveling internationally to buy apps or to buy devices and have them shipped to their homes isn't exactly smart. I used X11 forwarding over SSH to run a browser on my VPS to make sure they let me order my Nexus 5 in the US while I'm in Germany.
There is the "ncr" workaround for some of their idiotness but it doesn't always work. I was sad to see Bing copy this cancer "feature" as well a few years ago.
1) Friend and I both have nexus devices, both setup in English with Google accounts signed in, both residing in Hong Kong. Friend creates calendar event and sends invite to to me. I get the invite in GMail entirely in Chinese with no translation links in English.
2) Install app that requires access to Google account services. App opens browser and attempts to get account permission. Google.com shows permission granting page entirely in Chinese with no English links to change language. To make things worse, the Yes / No buttons are both blue, preventing even inferring which one is which.
This last case is especially ridiculous. A nexus device, setup in English language, logged into English language Google account, browser on the device logged into Google account, and yet Google.com page displays permissions page in Chinese.
Running a browser remotely in that way can be quite painful. Running Firefox locally you can tell it to use a socks proxy on localhost:1080 after connecting to your VPS with "ssh -D 1080". You may also want to set the about:config setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true.
Or you could use VPN software, but that's more to setup, and you already have ssh access.
Just use ssh -D to set up a socks proxy and use your local browser via your remote VPS. I fail to see how that isn't obvious
ssh -D sounds like a good solution to the problem. ssh is a powerful tool with a lot of options that are well worth learning. Many of these options are not, however, "obvious". If you doing anything with UI, I hope you aren't in the mindset that every every feature is obvious.
Every time I open a page it's like Google randomly picks one (or more) languages out of Swedish, English, German (it /really/ likes German though - also always places me in the middle of Germany when I go to Google Maps) and displays them to me. The worst case I've seen was when they launched the new Google Maps preview and that page header was in Swedish, the body in English and just the button in the middle in German.
I don't understand why would that be, I've got my google account in English, I've got a UK-based address added to it,as well as a UK-based billing address. I don't understand.
Some years ago, I used the workaround of going to www.google.co.uk (google.com would still prioritize Spanish, but other regional versions, like co.uk, would show results in their language), but now it no longer works. No matter if I go to the Swedish, German or Chinese versions, and no matter my Google preferences, I still get results in Spanish.
Sometimes I even use inferior search engines due to this.
And I agree. The way Google does this with an error page for non serviced locations feels really off. It's not how the web is supposed to work. Not shipping to other countries is bad enough. This is rude.
Google should just put these things on Amazon.
That's why I had to send my sister in the UK money to get my hands on my Nexus 4... annoying, and stupid.
It's not just Africa, either.
At least I know right now that I have to log in all the time to be sure I can safely add items to my cart
If it thinks you're in Montana once, it's probably going to every time. So you'll see exactly what you see now. Heck, maybe this is exactly what they DO do, and it thinks I'm in Washington so I never get a message. :) But for the majority of cases where it can geolocate the country properly, at least to the resolution of US vs not-US, it would be helpful.
Maybe it's only Amazon Fulfillment items that do this?
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009ENG6TI/ref=ox_sc_sfl_ti...
e.g. I see "We are not able to ship this item to your default shipping address."
And hypocritical, given they are quick enough to penalise sites which present different content to there crawler than everyone else. Presenting different information by way of adding a warning ("we can not currently supply thsi item to the location you seem to be calling from, please come back later and in the meantime let's have a look at what you could have won...") would be fine, but an error feels like "you can't have one and we don't care".
I'd like to get rid of these stupid borders.
Oh well. Apple seems to have no issue with me going to their US store and purchasing for my US address.
I wonder why they don't/can't order enough.
Guess the store not crashing counts as an improvement...