Headworx

Dedicated management of email subscriptions looks like a great enhancement to GMail. Email these days has become increasingly less used medium for human to human communications. Humans primarily use instant messaging apps today. WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger. Or simply "text" each other. Email has become a formal notifications channel for variety of services: "here is your invoice", "your flight reservation information is...", and so on. Most of those services take advantage of knowing your email address and automatically enroll you to "updates" that are typically a plain marking spam. Making email more cluttered and less valuable / less usable. Google has been trying to keep email alive by helping fight the spam and clutter. "Manage subscriptions" is really helpful. It is available on the mobile interface through the "hamburger" (the three horizontal bars) button in the top left corner. It is also available on the PC/w...

The biggest return on AI/LLM tools seems to be spam generation and so called conversion. Bumping people's inboxes with machine-generated content costs nothing and provides small positive returns - someone clicks the link or responds to the marketing message. Zero cost and positive (no matter how small) revenue means one  thing: repeat at scale. So we are flooded with spam.  Automated filters have been losing the battle. That, combined with the simple lack of discipline to clean the inbox on regular basis, often leads to the complete loss of communication capabilities. I am an Inbox-Zero type. Never allowing my inbox to be longer than one page and often keeping the number of unprocessed messages below 5 and zero unread. But that pattern is quite rare today, at least judging by what I often see looking over people's shoulders. One idea that might actually improve the situation is an <Ignore> button. Today we have <Delete> or <Move to Trash> but they really don...

The IES Annual conference has always been the temple of light. Stunning designs, beautifully illuminated spaces, and the role of light in human wellbeing. In 2025 this has changed. The Gala and the Awards were still about illumination, but the technical sessions started to boldly drift away, to discuss - surprise, surprise - heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning. All with connection to light of course. Or - to be precise - to occupancy sensors brought to buildings en masse thanks to lighting. HVAC is shaping up to be the first significant beyond-lighting application. Forget wayfinding beacons. Forget asset tracking. Forget space utilization heatmaps. It is still all about energy savings. The lighting folks realized the HVAC crowd was unable to pull it on their own. So have come to offer the helping hand: the Lighting-HVAC Integration. As I cried almost 10 years ago - for the connected products to get really connected, we need cross-domain industry experts. And this has been happ...

I've been using iTunes for 25 years. It is a terribly bad piece of software, but one of only a few options to manage a local library of music files with somewhat universal interoperability. In particular the playlists created on an iPod transfer to other Apple (and Windows) computers as well as are recognized by independent local media management and streaming systems like the Sqeezebox Logitech Lyrion . Over the years iTunes has undergone some minor changes (the latest one is nearly as bad as the original), and some of them have somehow (in my case) resulted in the music database becoming corrupted. Long story short, the only way out was to restore the backed-up mp3 files and let iTunes rescan the entire library. The playlists were unfortunately lost this way, as neither the mp3s nor the file folder structure have any information about the playlist metadata. iTunes itself have since moved the root library folder from iTunes Music to iTunes Media (and also some other changes), so...

The post on  Bluetooth NLC vs DALI+: Capacity and Performance has generated very valuable feedback. I promised to shed some more light on my network capacity calculations, so here they are. The key assumptions are: - The Thread network operates at 2.4GHz using IEEE 802.15.4 data links at 250kbps; - Transmitting nodes use Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) method to manage the shared communication channel; - Each unicast transmission is acknowledged - There are two hops (say: sensor → router and router → lighting controller) - The minimum data frame at PHY is 50 octets (+6: preamble + SFD), so ~1.8ms - The ACK frame (including the SIFS time) is ~0.5ms - The average CSMA/CA overhead is ~1.4ms That gives us 3.7ms per hop total. So with two hops we have the channel occupancy of 7.5ms. At full 100% channel occupancy that would give us capacity of 135 end-to-end messages per second (one way). But... 100% would simply kill the network. Thread is very fr...

Whenever I come across a discussion that involves wireless communications over the Thread protocol (such as this one ), there is almost 100% chance people don't understand the underlying physics and traffic patterns. This is the result of Thread marketing since 2014, highlighting the IPv6 protocol as its key strength. And typically it goes like that: "Thread is based on IPv6 and there are more IPv6 addresses that grains of sand in the Universe". And people read this "because Thread is based on IPv6, it is a highly scalable wireless protocol". Treating the potential number of static addresses equally to the dynamic situation when these devices actually send data. If we consider the networked lighting control domain, the most prevalent pattern today is to have a motion sensor in every luminaire. The motion sensor usually has multiple functions: it is a motion sensor of course. But it also is a light level sensor enabling daylight harvesting (or dimming lights down...

Once considered the greatest thing since sliced bread, notifications have spun of of control. Meant to be the (most) important stuff, have been sliding into complete irrelevance. And have become totally distracting and annoying. The operating systems (including the flagship Android and iOS), even with their recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) features have failed to cope with the notifications' torrents. Out of box, every app wants to send notifications about everything - this is of course the fight for potential revenue through engagement and conversion. Yes this can be managed. But only theoretically, as users really drown in the ocean of options they do not understand. On top of the notifications' options there is the hierarchy - you have favorite contacts (meant to always go through), you have time - or activity - based profiles (iOS calls them focuses). Barely anyone understands the combinations. Then there are the super annoying users of (increasingly more popular) instan...