Updating your Google account's country after moving

One of the first things I wanted to do after moving was to switch my Google account's country to USA so I could play around with the US-only features on products like Google Now.

After searching for a while I couldn't really find much other than people saying to call them, so I did. Turns out it's all based on the billing address on Google Wallet, here is the process you follow to update your region without waiting.

1. Sign into your Google Wallet

2. Add a new card whose billing address is in the desired country

3. Open the Play Store and go an item available for purchase

4. Click through until you hit the "Accept and buy" screen, you don't need to press this

5. Close the Play Store and clear data for the Google Play Store app on your phone/tablet or clear your browser cache

Your account should have been updated to the new country. If you have any other apps that have country-specific features then be sure to clear their data too.

Use Symbol Hound to search for symbols

I stumbled upon this little gem, a search engine called Symbol Hound that unlike Google, doesn't ignore symbols in fast it is actually optimised for searching with them. It only searches within Stack Overflow but that means it's very focused on programming and really if you're not finding your answer to a programming operator question on SO, it deserves to be asked.

For a long time now I've searched Google using quotes around the term for things like C# "+= operator" hoping that it would work this time. Finally searching for symbols should be a breeze :)

Enabling USB debugging on your Nexus 10 under Windows

I just received my new Nexus 10 and am loving it. As usual when it comes to setting up Android development, I had a few issues. It was really never the smoothest process in my experience, at least it's nice and smooth for the most part when it's all up and running. Not many relevant results came through so here's how I got it up and running under Windows 8.

1. Install the USB drivers using the Android SDK Manager
   
   
   
   
   
2. Open Device Manager and update the drivers for the device under "Other Devices" as described here.

Now go have some fun optimising your apps for XHPDI!

Type ? to view hotkeys in Google services

A handy little trick that's global to most of Google's core services. Press Shift + / (?) or Ctrl + / to display an overlay containing the hotkeys for the application. To hide it you can repeat the hotkey, press Esc or click off the overlay.

Having an easy to learn shortcut that's common across services is a really nice feature for the power user who wants to learn all of the hotkeys.

Here is the overlay for Drive.

Using google-code-prettify in your blog

Until now to make my source code pretty I've used a pretty dodgy method that involved going from Visual Studio to Word to Blogger and surrounding the lot in a div to apply some styles to the whole thing. This has resulted in HTML source looking something like this:

<div style="background-color: #f0f0f0; border: 1px dashed #CCCCCC;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">position</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">fixed</span>;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">top</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">50%</span>;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">left</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">50%</span>;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">width</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">200px</span>;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">height</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">150px</span>;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">margin-top</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">-75px</span>; <span style="color: darkgreen;">/* negative half height */</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;">margin-left</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;">:<span style="color: blue;">-100px</span>;
<span style="color: darkgreen;">/* negative half width */</span></span></div>

Disgusting I know, not only does it look gross but it also makes it a lot more difficult to work on posts using my mobile. So I decided to look into a prettyprint alternative, I found google-code-prettify as one of the first search results and went into investigate. It is a very simple process to get it up and running using the following steps:

Google Drive is not yet enabled for your Google Apps domain

I woke up this morning, started playing with my phone only to see that Google Drive has been released! I've been waiting for quite some time, having abandoned SugarSync a few weeks ago as I stopped using it a while ago due to what I felt was not the greatest integration with all my devices.

 

Not so fast! It is not enabled for my domain yet. So I went and investigated how to turn it on. Everything looked find with Docs and Drive settings. The problem was in my Google Apps domain settings, I was not on the Rapid Release track and I did not have new services set to automatic.

According to the official Google Drive transition notes, it looks like I may not be able to get to use Drive for another 5 weeks. So... Set your Google Apps domain to the rapid release track!