Headworx

Last week I wrote a bit about the Linksys WRV200 wireless home router. It eventually saved my day struggling with the Nabaztag , and definitely deserves more coverage. Basically I had two issues using my old WRT54GC router . The coverage was not enough - even though I was using an external antenna, I had to install a second WAP54G access point. The good thing was the WAP54G could have been configured as a "wireless repeater", so no extra cabling (only power supply) was necessary. The second issue was the need to have a VPN access to my home network from outside. VPN is a secure "tunnel" you can set up over the Internet, so even being physically "outside" the firewalled network, you can work over this "tunnel" as you were inside (for example print on the home printer or watch a home camera or schedule a TV recording using the web interface to the home TV receiver). After short evaluation (and being a happy Linksys customer) I decided to go for ...

We have adopted a rabbit this Christmas. A smart rabbit, that is - the Nabaztag . The idea of an electronic pet connected to various online services is cute. I will not go into the deep functional details, as you can watch the presentations on the Nabaztag.Com web site. And unfortunately I cannot tell you more from own experience, as we barely managed to get it running before the my.nabaztag.com site went down this morning "due to overwhelming rabbit registrations". But it definitely seems the rabbits have been a commercial success and most of them found their place under Christmas trees. I can only imagine the frustrations of hundreds (thousands?) of people unpacking their rabbits and then trying to configure them over the web service that stopped working. It looks like the Nabaztag concept is really great, but then we have two very fundamental flaws in the execution. First is an overloaded server that cannot handle Christmas traffic. But I think (and hope) the company wi...

Christmas around the corner so may be this is the right time to put together a personal gadget wish list? This time I will try to think of what can be improved with the current state of the art. So no new technologies, just what we have available, but put together as better, smarter designs. Here we go: Notebook power supply with several (2-4) USB power sockets. Hey, I take my notebook computer with me on almost all my trips. I bring several other gadgets as well. All of them are charged over the Universal Supply Bus. But at the moment I have to either bring an extra charger or leave my notebook running overnight to charge them. Targus, Kensington, APC, do you hear me? Bluetooth A2DP portable speakers. I love taking my music with me. I have a pair of Altec Lansing inMotion portable iPod speakers. They produce very good sound, but there are several drawbacks: (i) they do not charge over USB, (ii) most of the time I do not bring an iPod anymore - on a train or plane I listen to the song...

Last week I had very nice holidays in Morocco. Unfortunately there was not any good Internet connection. I wonder why people generally do not demand this going to n-star holiday resorts. You can get everything there, food, drinks, girls included, but the only connectivity option is slow and very expensive (roaming, 2$ per 100KB) GPRS. Ah... there was an Internet cafe with several PCs. So after several days of being completely off-line, I decided to give it a try. Bought 1 hour of on-line time (4$). Unfortunately there was no way to connect my laptop. I could only use one of the "public" computers there. Quick check showed the PC was running Windows XP SP1, no firewall and no antivirus. How could it survive is a mystery to me. But still touching an unprotected XP SP1 machine was something I could not feel comfortable with. I fired the Microsoft Internet Explorer and started typing the first URL address when I realized I better not did that. Public machine, hundreds of peopl...

Mobile operators. Is their future bright or clouded? In the advent of VoIP are they going to be downgraded to the role of IP packet transport providers, aka “dumb pipes”? This is what is happening to the fixed telephone operators. The fixed guys experience a massive drop in voice revenue, yet they are able to compensate the loss with data services, mostly DSL lines. The long distance charges are disappearing, but again they can potentially be compensated by IPTV services, bringing the fixed line to a triple-play service (voice + data + television). All together the monthly bill you get from your fixed operator most likely remains the same as it used to be ten, or twenty years ago. What is different is what arrives through the line – it used to be just voice, then voice plus analog modem - based dialup data, then voice plus high speed DSL data, then voice plus data plus on-demand TV. Ultimately the standard voice service will probably disappear, leaving us with pure digital, high speed...

Last week's announcement of the Snapdragon platform by Qualcomm went barely noticed. Looks like the majority of QCOM audience is focused on the royalty tension with Nokia. This is as expected. News is always driven by emotions, and emotions in turn, are driven by the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) factor. Often it is difficult to spot the real gems, and the Snapdragon seems to be the real gem. We have talked about convergence here many times. You probably can feel it coming. Even the cheapest mobile phones offer games and music playback. The more advanced ones have email readers and cameras, while the top of the line models can be used as personal navigation devices, either with built in GPS receiver or with an external "Bluetooth GPS Antenna". But at the same time when phones become converged teleputers, there are plenty of other devices screaming for connectivity. iPods, Zunes, PSPs, GameBoys, Nuvis, digital cameras... Just show me any electronic gizmo that is not buil...

Hutchinson , one of the leading mobile network providers, known as "3" across Europe, and mostly in the United Kingdom announced officially unlimited Skype calls for a flat fee. Skype is just a piece of a broader package named X-Series. This is kind of a breakthrough. Hutchinson probably sees Skype invading mobile phones inevitable, so they decided to jump in as soon as possible to be the leader of that trend. Initially there will be two top of the line handsets supporting X-Series services, Nokia N73 and SonyEricsson W950i. It will be very interesting to watch it work (or fail). People ( myself included ) have already been talking for years about Skype on mobiles. But it has not happened so far. Why? There are several very fundamental technical issues giving Skype very hard time. Let us go through them. Latency . This is the killer number one. People have been dreaming of Skype over GPRS or EDGE. I even happened to use such setup once. I mean I uninten...

UMTS is probably the most common form of a so called 3G (third generation) mobile network. The 3G buzz has been aloud for almost six years now. The outrageous money spent by the operators on the spectrum licenses in early 2000's still weighs on the operator's balance sheets. The promise of lightning fast mobile networks is still around. But how is reality? I mean the average mobile phone user. Does she/he care? There are three advantages promised to be delivered with the ascent of UMTS. First and the most spoken about has been the fast packet data transmission. Has it happened? It surely has. Last week I was stuck in a traffic jam in rainy Warsaw (btw Warsaw just stands still when it rains... I don't know why, but this is 100% reproducible). So sitting in a car I was checking mail on my Teleputer. One of my important customers asked me to forward him a product presentation. So I turned on my notebook, found the 4MB PowerPoint file, hooked the notebook to the UMTS Teleputer...

Like a thousand years ago, we are still in search of The Holy Grail. Regardless of the industry sector, we keep on dreaming about the killer application that will make all the customers happy and all the suppliers rich. Of course in mobile communications sector everybody is doing the same, since the conception of the first mobile network. We are not talking here about client applications running on smartphones, focusing rather on the applications running on the network, available to all mobile subscribers, regardless of the type of the handset they use. I think the first one has been the voice mail. Before mobile, we used to have answering machines at home. Especially in the US , everybody used to have one. But then you could not attach it to the mobile phone, so it had to be hosted on the network, and this way started to be available to all subscribes in form of a service (VAS or Value Added Service). Up to this day voice mail has been the most profitable VAS hosted by mobile operato...

You have to back up your files. Only my Mom does not have to. She is new to the computers world, and the only things she has been using are online applications (all from Google), namely Gmail, Documents and Spreadsheets. So Google admins take care of her data. But you have to back up. I doubt you have everything already moved to an online service. So... what do you use for backup? Windows backup? Ok, this was a joke. What if you plan to migrate to MacOS or Linux some day? Do you want your data to be left in some proprietary format? If you think, you probably back up individual files and directories, in their native format. Like pictures in *.jpg and music in *.mp3 and so on... So how do you track what has already been backed up and what hasn't? My "MyDocuments" folder contains some 50 thousand files. Far too many to keep track of them manually. For several years I have been using a very nice utility, called SyncToy from Microsoft . Some of you may not be eager to put a j...

I have already talked about Google Office . Just two months later we have a brilliant integration of spreadsheets and documents (formerly Writely, redirecting now to http://docs.google.com ). The suite may not be enterprise ready yet, but it surely does almost everything a typical consumer may want to do with document editor or a spreadsheet. We used to use an Open Office at home, but are migrating towards the Google Documents and Spreadsheets. The starting point for the service is a list of recently edited documents, sharing with family members and others is a no brainier (just enter an email address and that is it). And we are moving our picture library to http://picasaweb.google.com , although the sharing model within Picasa should be improved to match the overall security of the documents service. Google Calendar has made some significant improvements in the meantime as well. What is especially important (and has been reflected in the recent blowout earnings report) are the inte...

The recent IPTV buzz brings to my mind another convergence story. Television and Web applications together. The match seems natural. Assuming the screen you will be using for IPTV is going to be a HD (High Definition, where minimum resolution is defined as 1280x720 with 1366x768 being more common), makes it quite reasonable to display a Web page on. Web on TV was approached several times in the past, but the ordinary (non-HD) TV sets used to give us just a fraction of what was needed ( 544x372 , which was about 5 times less than HD). And the IPTV screen is connected to the Internet, where it streams the content (movies, news, shows) from. OK, so we have two important components of an Internet-enabled PC already in place. A screen and a connection. What else is needed? Input controller. I hate remote controls. I have dozens of them scattered around. I use just 1% of the functionality they provide. Volume up / volume down (that refers to the TV set), channel up / channel down (that re...

Last week I spent most of my time traveling. The goal was the 10th annual Telecosm , at Lake Tahoe , California . But going across the Atlantic for the two mind-blowing days, I always try to see some more places on the way. This time I picked Dallas , TX as the destination of my flight and then drove across Texas , New Mexico , Arizona , and Nevada up to Tahoe. As I have been using GPS navigation even when driving around my home town, I thought it would be a good idea to rent a GPS unit as an option together with my car. What a disappointment it was! I got something looking like an old mobile phone. Antenna, keypad, small monochrome display. After many months with a Kenwood unit built into the dashboard of the Subaru or another months of using the iGO on my HTC smartphone, the unit I was supplied with by Alamo together with the rented car was like bad memory from the past. Actually it was a Motorola iDen phone, equipped with a GPS receiver and a simple Java application capable ...

This time the story won't be about how powerful software is , but how much power it consumes. And we are not talking about processor power required to run an application either. We talk about the power consumption. Strange, you think? No longer strange... This issue affects all users, but has most impact on those who live their lives on batteries. I mean using battery powered notebooks or PDAs. The stress modern applications put on processors is growing at least along the curve of Moore's Law . And despite engineering efforts put in the design of new processors, the power consumption of portable devices is still far from what we would like to have (a notebook recharged once a month?). Recently there has been much talk about so called performance per watt, a number representing how many CPU instructions can be executed consuming a watt of energy. But does this really matter to the typical end user, who struggles to get his 3 hours of notebook life from the batteries? Performance...

CNET has recently published an interesting comparison of Apple Newton and Samsung Q1 UMPC . Ten years gap between the two devices should potentially result in an absolutely killing victory of the Q1 Windows - based UMPC, but apart from flash and hype, Q1 has very little advantage in terms of day to day productivity. It is very interesting to see what components of a mobile device got the most technological lift. Definitely LCD displays are much better today than before. Apple Newton is a gray scale unit (who can remember gray scale laptops today?). Q1 UMPC shines with active matrix colors. But overall the comparison is very sad... Especially when you look at battery performance. Q1 runs for 2.5 hours, while the Newton scores 30 hours (on a pack of AAs ). You probably remember I predicted the UMPCs would not hit the hall of fame . There was a reason - I have a Newton at home :). It shares the shelf with other vintage machines. I do not use it for just a few reasons: lack o...

USB Cells ( http://www.usbcell.com/ ) are the ultimate confirmation of what the USB standard is being really used for. The design confirmes the power (pun intended) of standards. AA battery: the most popular energy source, and USB plug: the most popular plug in the world. And you thought there was nothing innovative left to be improved in an AA battery.

How much innovation can be unleashed around computer mouse design? For years we have been experiencing various designs, the old faithful rolling ball is gone and replaced by optical sensors with LEDs or even lasers. Cords are gone replaced by proprietary radio protocols or standard Bluetooth. Mice have wheels, multiple buttons, touch pads, but... let me as you a question? First, do you use a notebook? If yes, do you feel absolutely comfortable with its touchpad or pointer stick? Or do you prefer to use a mouse whenever possible? I guess the latter is the case. But do you carry your mouse everywhere where the notebook goes? Why not? Ahh.. it is bulky. OK. Other obstacles? I see... it is a wireless one and its USB transceiver is bulky. Fine, get yourself a Bluetooth mouse, you won't need any external transceiver. Anything else? Still too big to fit in your briefcase? If you are a frequent traveler, you probably face the same dilemmas as I do. Despite usi ng IBM Lenovo Thinkpad (...

The saga continues. HTC, the most successful mobile phone manufacturer in recent years has just introduced another plug - see the picture on the right. To reduce space and BOM (Bill Of Materials), they use the mini USB socket on the phone to drive headphones. This is going crazy... Not only we are (again!) forced to use the headphones supplied with the phone, but it is impossible to charge the device and listening to the music at the same time... Fortunately I don't care anymore... The new HTC TyTN supports Bluetooth A2DP and I am happy to use the SonyEricsson DS970 headphones, both for calls and for music. A2DP feels like freedom...

Yeah, the old topic surfaces again. The best browser?.... I still love Opera . If you had your tabbed browsing done properly once, you don't want to go back. But unfortunately Opera has some incompatibilities, notably with Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server we use at work. So I used to have Internet Explorer 6 for those "special" sites. Then Internet Explorer 7 has come around and I fell in love with its ClearType fonts. That love proved to be short lived, as I found out ClearType can be turned on and fine-tuned by using the ClearType Tuner (BTW I still cannot understand why this feature is hidden so deep in Windows - Steve Jobs would make ClearType alone the key selling point and differentiator of Macs). Unfortunately many web sites are not compatible with IE7. Notably I have had several problems with Blogger itself when run on IE7, so I decided to use FireFox for publishing Headworx posts. This is a shame. HTML used to be so simple. And now we have true browser madness...

I have not been written about Google for some time. They are making progress on many fronts. Recently launched Google Trends service is a significant milestone. Before Trends, Google was indexing external data. They were just an index to information created elsewhere. With the launch of the Trends, suddenly they added a lot of the information to the Internet. While Google does not own nor has any rights to the information they index, Trends is their own data. By using the Google services we all agree to their terms . And among other things be aware that "Google's servers automatically record information when you visit our website or use some of our products, including the URL, IP address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your request.". By doing that they are able to deliver great new product without touching your privacy. Trends is really great and my perception is we are still far away from its full potential. Just give it a try. For example, look h...

Information Week published an interesting article ranking " The Greatest Software Ever Written ". The pole position in the 12-item hall of fame is held by UNIX operating system, conceived at Bell Labs as an individual pet project. During many years UNIX migrated to various flavors, with Linux being the most known and widely used today. We all know Linux is strong at server side, while most of the client machines running Windows. This is easy to understand, especially when we look at the roots of each operating system. Windows was growing on client PCs, replacing DOS being its first major goal. In the meantime it became clear Windows internals are strong and solid enough to power servers. But still the most evident part of Windows is its GUI (Graphical User Interface), something servers can live without. What is more - it is hard to imagine Windows without GUI, and this makes somehow difficult for it to invade several market niches. One of such niches is so called embedded s...

Recently I got some controversial comments from one of the readers to my BlueSoleil post . Tam Hanna says the power supplies will never be standardized. And I have to admit, I do not agree. While device manufacturers still want to be protective of their own market shares (and avoiding standards is their way to go), there is a de facto power supply standard already present on the market - USB. At the moment 90% of my gadgets are powered / charged using USB. That includes a mobile phone (HTC), my wife's phone (SonyEricsson), an iPod, a Bluetooth headset , my son's Gameboy and Sony PSP. I even have a GP PowerBank USB , to charge standard AA batteries from any USB port. And the USB standard makes it way forward. One of the ultimate gadgets is pictured here world power adapter (a single, reconfigurable mains plug that fits US, European, British and Far East / Australian standards). Designed by swiss travel products, apart from being just a plug adapter, it has a USB power socket...

S ometimes I happen to go through a lengthy process of configuring something (usually related to one of my computers or parts of my home network ). Sometimes it looks like others may face similar challenges, so I decided to launch a dedicated blog ( http://techbulletins.blogspot.com/ ), where, from time to time, I will publish some technical information. For starters there is a how-to on upgrading an IBM ThinkPad hard drive . This process was more difficult that it seemed to be initially, and I could not find a good step-by-step guide on The Net, so I decided to write it down and archive. Blogger seems to be the best place to store things like that.

mylo , the recently announced WiFi communicator by Sony is another missed opportunity. I ranted about missing keyboard in otherwise fantastic Sony PSP. Now they release mylo - a keyboard equipped PSP2 that... does not play games... Will they ever learn? For years it was obvious mobile phones would be used to play music. Yet Sony buried the Walkman brand and designs for a long time and could not figure how to equip and market their mobiles. Only recently they have "discovered" the phone can indeed be a Walkman (with a great market success...). So how difficult was it to take the current PSP, give it a mylo - style keyboard and create a PSP2 (even the branding would be almost free, thanks to the PS2 popularity). This would be exactly the device loved by teenagers. Games, movies, accelerated graphics, WiFi, web browser, RSS reader (all these features are in the current PSP), plus a messenger/ email keyboard and VoIP support. Giga dollar giga market. Seems they just don't w...

S lowly, below radars, Google moves toward the goal to provide integrated Web - based Office - like suite. Just a couple of days ago I noticed the tabs in the top - left corner of my GMail changed. Now they show Mail, Calendar, Photos, and Spreadsheets... And Writely - based "Word" is surely coming. Is something missing? PowerPoint? Not quite... Picasa Web Albums can easily be used to prepare presentations and slideshows. There are no fancy animations yet, but we are getting closer. Network computing in a full swing. I love this!

What is the oldest design, still absolutely common among all the Star Trek 21st century computers we use today? Yes, even the Titanium Intel Core Duo Macs... The QWERTY keyboard , patented almost 130 years ago. And the primary design goal was for it to be as slow and uncomfortable, as possible. Ironic? Yes, it is. And if you look at the keyboard on the mobile phone, it is even worse for what it is used nowadays. 12 numeric buttons to be the input device of choice for mobile email, chat, instant messaging, SMSes, navigating 500+ entries in the address book... 8_44_444_7777 1 444_7777 1 2 1 5_666_55_33_!!! (this is a joke!!!). We are flying to the moon, building ultra fast HSxPA mobile networks, launching cell-based Sony PS3 supercomputers to the masses, yet all these designs share 130 years old design at the very center. Time to break free? At least this is what Digit Wireless thinks, giving us the Fastap design. And I do agree. Despite T9 and other approaches to solve the text ent...

ClearType seems to be the most forgotten feature of Windows XP (yeah, I know, everybody is thinking of Vista now and XP is no longer of any interest...). But if you happen to have a notebook (or an LCD screen, preferably connected to a digital video port), you should try it. There are several ways to turn ClearType on. First (the least obvious) is: right-click somewhere on an empty desktop area, select Properties, then the Appearance tab and Effects button. Second line from the top lets you select ClearType as a "method to smooth edges of screen fonts". There is a better way. Go to Windows XP Powertoys page and you will find the ClearType Tuner application there. Install it and run. It will guide you through a simple wizard that will select the best ClearType settings for your environment. And if you have not been using ClearType yet, you will not believe how brilliant your screen is going to look. Sometimes the best gems are just lying at our fingertips and we do not see...

Here it is. The next thing I had to do with my new Sony Ericsson stereo bluetooth headset was to make it work with my iPod. This is an obvious direction. The whole idea is to get rid of the cables and have just one universal headset that works with a phone, a notebook (including VoIP calls) and a music player. And of course switch automatically between the devices, especially to pause the music when the phone rings and resume playback once the conversation is done. Up to this day there has not been a product able to do this, although the scenario seems to be so natural and expected... One day (must have been some two years ago) I even proposed the iPod itself could behave as a bluetooth phone headset, pausing the music and taking calls as needed. But nobody listened... So now what is pictured here is how the upcoming next generation (delayed) iPod will look like. A headset, a phone and an iPod. Working together seamlessly. Too impatient to wait? Then follow my formula. First you ha...

A2DP . Advanced Audio Distribution Profile. Or just wireless stereo. This will be big. It was mentioned here before, when I wrote about annoying headphone plugs incompatibility problem. And guess what... it has been solved. How? By getting rid of cables and plugs. Yes, cables are gone, forever. Bluetooth has been with us for years. Most of us have been using a wireless headset with a mobile phone. But then we used to have a separate headphones for media player (like iPod) and another set for use with a PC (for Skype or Google Talk or another form of VoIP). Personally I hate carrying three devices serving the same purpose, and that is why I complained ... Now it is time to throw all the previous sets away. Thanks to the Sony Ericsson HBH DS970 Bluetooth stereo headset. DS970 has everything I wanted: It is a sound isolating in-ear design, perfect for noisy environments, without an extra bulk. The drivers deliver very good sound with rich bass (as always with Sony, I should say). The ...