Categories
Technology

Cutting through red-tape with Stripe

It’s not all about the technology. Stripe does one thing that makes it light-years better than its competition: Time to market. Or in simpler terms, its activation process to allow you to receive actual payments.

My wife and I run a small website selling vintage items from Germany to Japan. So far, my wife was asking all her customers to pay via bank-transfer. This is naturally time-consuming and for most of her customers, Japanese housewives and arts & crafts lovers, inconvenient. A few months ago I suggested to her to introduce credit-card payments on her website. How difficult could this be to implement?

Categories
network Technology

Android Teleportation (or silly location restrictions)

My wife and I recently had a baby. Amongst the toys and cloths we received as gifts, there were a few CDs and DVDs with music for the little one. We then realised that we no longer have a CD or DVD drive in our computers. So we bought an external USB DVD/CD. When playing the DVDs, the region-selection menu appeared. I nearly forgot about it. Oh, the good ol’ copy-protection of the 90’s. So I chalked it up as one of those oddities of life, and thought how silly it seems today in the Internet age and all that. My wife is japanese, and I’m Israeli. And we live in Berlin. Naturally each side of the family wanted to send us Music in their own language, so there you go.

Only a few days later, my wife asked for my help with her Nexus 7. She bought a few eBooks from a Japanese site. Those work fine on her iPhone and Mac. But somehow the Play store won’t install the app (never mind the question why someone needs a bespoke app to read books).

“This item is not available in your country”.

This time I was determined to work around this.

Here’s a quick howto which does not require a rooted android.