Headworx

In this third episode of the China: Getting Around mini series I'm going to share tips about long(er) distance travel in China. So far we have already covered passports, eSIM data in part 1 and translation apps, mobile payments, WeChat and DiDi in part 2 . Airlines. There is not much special about how airlines work in China. Buy tickets online, show up for check-in etc. There are some differences related to items allowed in a carry-on bag. For example foldable walking poles are not allowed. So are not multi-tools designed as so called "TSA-safe" (from my experience, they are not in Mexico either). As they say "a tool is a tool and tools are not allowed". Period. Cigarette lighters are prohibited too, and there is an interesting solution - you drop the lighter before security in a box and that box then goes to the security exit door where disembarking passengers can grab lighters.  Trains. High speed trains are what China is really famous for. The network is inc...

You have the passport and a phone with the internet on it. What is next? Translate. Unless you speak Mandarin, a language translator app in the next on the list. Language has been a barrier, but translator apps break through that barrier. Use the one you like. I use Google translate. It is prudent to download the languages for offline use. Once done you can either type or dictate (or have someone else dictate) or use camera for instant translation of signage or restaurant menus. The apps are not perfect (yet), but they do a really good job. On one of the past trips, for example, we were able to negotiate a set of medicines in a pharmacy. The pharmacist was asking many questions in Chinese, us answering in English, and ultimately the medicine worked very well. Payments. As I mentioned, China has its own preferred payment systems. Credit cards would not work in most cases. Maybe in higher end hotels. But the default means of payment is by presenting or scanning a QR code. The app I use m...

I never thought I would become an expert on China and I'm still far from being one. But our business relationships with Chinese partners have been growing strongly and that is reflected in much more frequent China trips. So here is the mini series of blogs with some tips which you may find helpful. China is not straightforward for Western visitors. It is just different and small things matter when preparing for a trip. Or just knowing what to expect. May marks my second trip to China in 2025 an I plan to be here back in June. What is different is I'm the first time on my own, which I find both exciting and liberating. Being able to do things on my own has always been important, be it soldering a PCB or writing a piece of assembly code or trekking in the mountains of Georgia or Kirgizstan. Organized trips and telling people to do things for you or carry your bags is simply not my style. So you are going to China - where to start? Passport. Obviously the number one step is making...

SILVAIR published the Q1-2025 report on May 15th. Bound by the corporate governance rules I could not share our progress earlier, but now the cat is out of the bag. We had a stellar quarter. Q4-2024 was record and always in such cases the worry is if the trend would continue. It has continued. Even stronger. Despite the US trade wars introducing uncertainty in the markets. Fundamentally I think there are couple of jointly contributing factors to our overall progress: Brand recognition. Despite very low marketing budget, we continue to be increasingly more recognized. And this is both Bluetooth NLC as the only truly interoperable wireless lighting control standard, and Silvair as the leading product based on this standard. Both brands are associated with performance, quality, robustness and ease of use. A perfect combination of features. The product feature set is increasingly more complete, particularly addressing the needs of customers in the enterprise segment. Network scalability ha...

The news of Enlighted shutting down the lighting controls business have been a real earthquake for the industry. Once the absolute champion and the leader in the lighting controls and IoT space has ceased to exist. Sadly, they have not been the first ones. There was Universal Douglas in 2023  and  Touché in early 2025 . But the Enlighted case has really transformed the company name into a verb. In a very bad way: "to be enlighted" almost feels in line with "to be musked": "to be musked" can mean to be treated poorly or "screwed over" by a company, often without apology. For example, buyers of Tesla vehicles might say they were "musked" if they experienced unresolved issues with their cars. This is a play on Elon Musk's surname and is used pejoratively. So have you been enlighted? We can help. The common theme across all the above mentioned "gone out of business" events is - they all were proprietary / vendor - locked solu...

Push notifications are now everywhere and apart from being super annoying, they have really become useless. By default every app (and most web pages too!) try enabling all forms of notifications by default and it takes a lot of fluency in handling phones and computers to set them up properly. Which mostly means "disable". I think the time has come to really reverse the defaults. They should be "do not notify me about anything". And then users would be able to select the small set of really important things they want to be actively poked about. The problem has gotten even worse as most apps / services are multi-modal - they live on PCs, phones, watches, even in earbuds. And a single event gets multiplied by being pushed to all the devices. Then some services, apart from sending a notification send an email. Which sends a notification f its own. Shopping and payment apps are the worst. "we have received your order" - "we have started processing your pay...

The wireless CarPlay was working great. Until it stopped. Did not stop completely, but started losing the connection, freezing, or not connecting at all. Interestingly, I installed the Ottocast wireless adapter exactly to solve similar problems with the wired USB connection. The hypothesis (never firmly verified) was that there was too high temperature-related clock oscillator drift in my Pioneer head unit : a cold iPhone would not connect to a sunbaked in-dash radio. So the Ottocast solved the problem (perhaps by being equally "baked" with Summer sun rays and thus drifting the oscillator in the same direction, or simply by being less strict on USB timing, compared to the iPhone). That was Summer 2024. Come Autumn and Winter, and the stable configuration started behaving less stable. Freezing screen, erratic updates, not connecting at all, or disconnecting and reconnecting in a loop). Of course the iPhone was the last suspect on the list. I was checking connectors, software ...