Headworx

So much for iPhone privacy. I had thought that paying in a physical store with contactless Apple Pay was more or less protecting my privacy. It turns out this is not the case. I mean of course paying by credit card you give your static credit card number to the merchant. But that should be it, right? Just the number. Not your email, home address, phone number and God knows what else. So I was quite stunned in Queenstown, New Zealand, after landing I went to a sports shop to buy some freeze dried food and a gas canister. When paying I rarely pay attention to the details other than the transaction amount but I thought there was a glimpse of my phone number and my email on the terminal for a short while. This was confirmed later this day when I received a bunch of emails from the store - welcome, coupons etc. Had I provided them with this data voluntarily? Nope. I even went through my email history and there was no trace of any earlier communication from that store chain. So they must hav...

Phones are now absolutely essential items in our (connected) lives. It becomes impossible to read an email (2-factor authentication), authorize a financial transaction (often as simple as a credit card purchase) or board a plane. The trend keeps going further, as we have been now transferring identity documents to phones' "wallets" (including many official government-made applications). Then there are social aspects like electronic messaging, photo sharing. And navigation (car or trail / backcountry). At the same time it has become increasingly more difficult to make a simple backup device, as many of the above mentioned services are tied to digital security / identity chips that by design are impossible to backup and require full reinstallation of the digital services. I covered this in my recent phone migration blogs here and here ). Long story short - changing a phone (voluntarily as an upgrade or being forced to as a result of a device loss or damage) requires plenty...

There are several things that give me goosebumps. Or make me think how little we comprehend / understand about the weird world we live in. Physics - the way we have it now - is completely bent. Totally far from being intuitive and understandable. Take the John Wheeler's double-slit experiment . A source of light and a screen with two thin, vertical slits. You shine the light through the slits, the light acts like a wave., interferes with itself, resulting in a ripple-like pattern on the wall. Turn the light down to only a single photon. The photon acts like a particle: hits the wall in one specific spot. But after enough photons arrive, the same interference pattern emerges. The single photon interferes with itself. Now add a detector to the slits, to figure out which slit the photon actually passed through. When you do this, you never get an interference pattern on the far wall. The OBSERVATION (not any interaction with) of the photons affected their behavior. Then there...

There are myriads of legal nonsense situations we encounter every day. Somehow the most often they are related to general information technology (IT). Definitely #1 are the EU cookie banners. David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) - the creator of Ruby on Rails - has been perhaps more vocal about the EU Cookie Mandate (specifically cookie banners) than almost anybody else. He views them as a prime example of well-intentioned but fundamentally "stupid" and failed legislation. He points out that companies have spent billions of dollars on compliance, legal fees, and implementation, yet there has been no material improvement to user privacy. Most users simply click "Accept" to get the banner out of the way, effectively granting the very tracking permissions the law intended to curb. And the bureaucracy refuses to admit the solution didn't work. And #2 are variety of Terms of Use (ToU) that must be accepted to do something. For example, when you first pull the battery tab o...

I'm writing this post in December, 2025, in preparation for couple of weeks' holidays In January / February. I understand packrafting now may sound a bit extreme, but hey, it is peak summer now in New Zealand. And NZ is where it all started - I found this article (see the snapshot) in an old magazine that was left in one of the New Zealand's mountain huts. That was in 2024 - almost two years ago. Since then we have completed a white water packrafting camp to get familiar with packrafts and river rafting / kayaking in general. That was in Slovenia, and is a great idea for an active summer adventure in Europe. Then we found a great supplier of packrafting gear in Poland - I mentioned packraft.pl in my Spring'2025 post on the subject. Now we are back to where it all began. Not as ambitious as Mitchell Radford, but his documentary is definitely a good one to understand what this activity is all about.  We're also trying to pack much lighter than he did. 39 kg / 85 lbs...

2025 was very travel - intensive for me. Needless to say I managed to ern the 1K status flying only in (often deeply discounted) economy class.  This can be nicely seen in the Flighty app . The app that I called useless (because all it offers is already possible in the native airline apps). But on the other hand Flighty is really pretty and the visualization of flights overlayed on top of Apple Maps is cool :) Travel is the inherent part of my job and I do it by choice. Honestly speaking I do not understand many people that I meet who "feel for me" and do not like to travel at all. Yet they still either do international business or actively participate in global standardization efforts through different standards committee memberships. My response in such case is almost always in the lines of "have you been sentenced to do this job?", which of course may be rude, but ultimately I believe that everyone is the architect of their own fate. And in most fee / democratic ...

I'm about to leave for a 4-week mostly off-grid holidays. This takes some preparation: planning places to visit, updating topographic maps, completing the gear. At the same time I've been preparing my online / electronic side of things for the prolonged absence. This basically includes two things: 1. Minimizing the stuff that will bloat my inboxes. Mostly to avoid the post-absence trauma of dealing with hundreds (if not thousands) of different kinds of notifications and messages. These days just about everything wants keep you "up to date", and this is an enormous trap. The mails and notifications are mostly useless, outdated or conflicting. And they contribute to 90% (or more) of messages you get. So very patiently I have been removing myself from any distribution lists and subscriptions. That has worked, as over the recent days I have been receiving significantly less traffic. Calming and liberating this feels. 2. Making sure the phone battery lasts as long as possi...