Headworx

I'm on iPhone 17 now. Despite all my publicly heralded views about not replacing phones (and cars) too often, I pulled the trigger. Well, to my defense, I still drive the 2005 Subaru Forester. And the 15 is going into really good and caring hands. The key reason for the upgrade has been the telephoto lens , upgraded from 3x to 4x optical zoom and from 12 megapixels to 48 megapixels. That let Apple introduce the 8x feature which is basically the 4x optical and 2x crop (equivalent to 12 megapixels, albeit with smaller pixels). On top of that ShiftCam promises a 240mm (equivalent) Super Zoom Tele add-on lens . I'm yet to see how it works as mine is somewhere in transit. More when it arrives. For the iPhone 15 I bought the Tele 58mm Mobile Lens from Moment , but it has been a lie. While it can be physically mounted on the iPhone's periscope telephoto lens, it does not work well. Only with the standard 1x lens, so not much long lens joy.  And I love taking photos with long lense...

I have recently had a chance to play with a new prototype Bluetooth Low Energy Audio device. Or - should I be more specific - a new application (firmware) for an existing audio device that uses Bluetooth Low Energy Audio. Think of it as any type of wireless earbuds or headphones or - increasingly popular - smart glasses with audio microphones and tiny speakers. The feature allowed an unlimited number of people who were in the radio range to talk to each other. Essentially a voice group chat. That does not sound too exciting (definitely less than a space AI data center), but really brings the Bluetooth audio experience to a completely new level. Thing of it as voice chat rooms. Virtual rooms that you can "enter" with your earbuds and then chat with people. In a similar way to a Zoom call, but locally, peer-to-peer, without any supporting infrastructure or Internet connectivity. Great for events but also great for variety of other activities such as hiking or white water raftin...

Email has clearly become cheaper and cheaper to push advertising messages. This has become apparent during the recent days - the US Thanksgiving followed by the Black Friday which now seems to last for two weeks. I had several brands I liked, that I still was subscribed to, but this time most of them went just too far. Some of them were sending me multiple (three or more) promotional emails per day. So I have radicalized myself cutting off somewhere between 80% and 90% of email subscriptions. One reason is (maybe I'm aging) - I really don't need more stuff. I definitely need more peace and less time spent on keeping my inbox tidy. Gmail has recently introduced a helpful feature - [Manage subscriptions]. Shows you the complete list and for 90% of subscriptions it offers a on-click [Unsubscribe]. So if anyone is stull using email, I highly recommend going through the list and cutting down stuff.

The energy crisis was the leading theme throughout the 2025 COSM conference. And people were really crying rivers about it. With the two most severe loses articulated: We will not be able to scale the AI infrastructure sufficiently enough China will overtake us Both are - I would say - purely "American" worries. First of all, nobody knows if AI progress is really limited by energy. Dwarkesh Patel has recently discussed this with Ilya Sutskever - and the headline is "We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research". Returns from scaling out the AI infrastructure have been diminishing. Ilya argues we need to do other things than just building more capacity. And I could not agree more. The existing LLMs have already swallowed all that was ever written. And probably more. And they still remain language models, increasingly more sophisticated statistical engines, not having a clue what they are talking about. I'm not saying that LLMs are totally usel...

Last week I spent almost entirely in Arizona - attending the one of a kind COSM technology conference . It has been the only non-lighting related event for me in 2025. Very valuable, as it has a mixture of politics, philosophy, economy, and - of course - technology. Once Discovery Institute posts the conference videos, I will link and comment on some of them. I the meantime a number of assorted observations. I flew to Los Angeles on Lufthansa Airbus A380. There is a small sections of economy seats on the upper deck. The best seats ever. This plane is so unbelievably quiet. Like a Zeppelin blimp, only much faster. It is a pity they are being withdrawn. The in-flight internet sucked. Completely. I responded to the email with the purchase receipt and they acknowledged the problem, issuing a refund. Probably the simplest refund procedure ever. Then after some business meetings in LA, on the next day a short United flight from LAX to PHX. This one - on the other hand - was equipped with Sta...

I have very mixed feelings about the importance of good user experience (UX) in technology products. Very often ironizing on UX gurus' posts who think UX is super fundamental. Scott Jenson for example have cried rivers over control panels in microwave ovens. True, some of them are quite baroque, and myself - when it comes to microwave ovens - I do prefer just two mechanical dials: power and time. Same for air fryers: temperature and time. But really it does not take a super high IQ to use a microwave oven. A bit higher one is probably necessary to set up an alarm clock in a hotel: 99% of time they show wrong time and then it is unclear which time is the current time and which is the alarm time and if the alarm is on or off. Long gone are the times of travel clocks with the alarm hand and the pop-up "armed" button : nobody needed instructions to operate them. Nowadays even the iOS 26 alarm clock is misleading - if you have an alarm entry that is off and you click it and th...

Apple AirTags are really a great idea. They build on the popularity of iPhones. Periodically broadcasting tiny Bluetooth Low Energy beacons they last for a year or more on a coin cell. And any iPhone acts as a message relaying / geotagging repeater station. Physically being tiny buttons, they can be attached to almost anything - car keys, luggage, any item than can potentially be lost. What is even more exciting (but still not as ubiquitous as it could be), a Find My beacon is a very simple piece of software running on any Bluetooth chip. It can run together with other functions. One great example is the Insta360 GO 3S action camera. The one I actually lost on my way down from Mt Aorai . It was raining on the way down and the clay path quickly became quite slippery. I slid down on my butt a good couple of times (it has some quite steep sections). Upon reaching the shelter at 1400m I realized the zipper in my backpack's pocket was open and the contents (including the GO3S) was miss...