Headworx

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 ...

It is still winter(ish) here and there but some of the Spring days are really really nice in April. Perfect time to try some new activities.  Actually I learned the packrafting idea during the 2024 New Zealand trip. A packraft is like a pontoon, but smaller, better shaped, and can be quite light. You put it in a backpack, go for a mountain hike and then raft down a river. Can be quite extreme, but it is all a choice. Packrafts are perfect for slow rivers, lakes and fiords too. The one I bought (seen on the photo) is a tad above 2 kilograms. On top of that you need a paddle (a carbon one while expensive, is super light). It folds down to a size of a bear canister so can be strapped to any backpack. You can save on weight by not carrying a sleeping mat - turn the raft upside down and lie on it. Also a simple tarp is sufficient instead of a tent. A pyramid-shaped tarp can be set up on the paddle. There are a bit bigger rafts which allow carrying a bike. And then you call the think bik...

Tesla discussions have always brought very polarized opinion. Either trash and going bankrupt or the absolute leader in AI about to deliver autonomous driving (Full Self Driving - FSD) through a simple software update. My point today is really not about Tesla but about the value of FSD in general. I wrote about this many times, with the Tyranny of Convenience being the most popular post. Today the theme is similar. It is about the concept of "enough" which is one of the key enemies of capitalism. Prospering capitalist economies (the USA being the prime example here) absolutely depend on creating and expanding consumers' desires. People must want more for the wheels to spin. And the vision of consumers even remotely calling "we have enough" is the most feared. "Enough" must be eliminated. In many ways I am a person who has enough of many things. Sometimes I even feel that my level of "enough" is definitely too high. I try not to chase new car...

I am a bit paranoid about backups. That includes planning for a backup gear when going on a multi-day remote hikes. On one hand it is really prudent to take as little gear as possible to travel light and thus reduce the risk of orthopedic injuries. Unfortunately there is no way to take backup ankles and knees... Smartphones - even if out of network range - are great in combining multiple functions in one device - a camera, a map, a satellite locator, a notepad, a book reader, a chess board, a music player etc. But no matter how good they are protected, there is still the elevated risk of damaging the phone on a trek. A simple screen crack may render the touch function inoperable and the whole device suddenly becomes useless. There is one other aspect to phones - they run out of batteries and are not ideal to use in full daylight. Displays get better, but for true daylight use like reading books, we still use Kindles. But then Kindles are limited in function - no maps, no GPS, cannot be...

iPhone photography is great and it is clearly now my main camera. As the old saying goes - the best camera is the one you have with you. And it also makes very good photos. Purists will argue that a large aperture prime lens cannot be matched (and I agree) but a large aperture prime typically weighs 1 kilogram or more (and requires an equally heavy camera). So it is impossible to have a lens like that at hand all the time. One thing the iPhone (and most smartphones in general) lack is a long telephoto. Yes they have an equivalent of 70mm or even 120mm but there are certain "telephoto moments" when there is no substitute for a really long lens. I have been on a quest to find a lightest and most pocketable long lens setup for a long time. And we are talking about focal lengths of 400mm or more. Have tried different setups, such as the Ribcage - modified Sony DSC-RX0 , but nothing has worked well so far. Playing with the DSC-RX0 I realized I really needed a viewfinder to properl...