Headworx

Fear not... I will not bore you with another end-of-the-year story with a list of best/worst gadgets/events/you-name-it... I just wanted to tell you about the latest gadget I enjoy. After testing a dozen or so Bluetooth phone handsets it looks like the Retro, available from ThinkGeek.com delivers the best sound quality I have ever had. I can hear the conversation very clearly and the other parties always report very good quality of my voice. Plus it is very comfortable to handle, although a little bulky to carry around. I plan to use it in the office, so the bulk won't be a problem. The funny thing is the 100-years old design is unbeatable. Large acoustic converter delivers really good sound, the handle is comfortable and the round end is very comfortable to hold at the ear. The microphone faces your mouth directly, so it captures what is needed. Oh and if I forgot to mention - it recharges via mini - USB port :) Happy New Year!

So it has been nine days with Windows Vista so far... My general view has not been changed, in fact nothing spectacular has happened over the last week. I decided to give the upcoming Vista Service Pack 1 a chance. This means I will not upgrade to Windows XP until SP1 comes out and things do not improve. Several issues are still on the very top of my list of Vista shortcomings, but two are worth mentioning here. First, the entire system freezes at least once a day. This is something I have not experienced since the Windows 98 days. Both Windows 2000 and Windows XP used to run extremely stable on my hardware. I kept on suspending / resuming machines for months, with just a small number of reboots a year, mainly when the Windows Update service forced me to do so... And having heard so much about how secure Vista is, I have never imagined it can crash on a daily basis. Of course this may relate to some non-Microsoft software, as the Lenovo X61 (my primary machine) came loaded with junk. I...

My old and faithful ThinkPad T41 is dying... Must be some kind of mechanical fatigue, as it runs very well when sitting on my desk, but any attempt to move it results in a total blackout. Suddenly I have a fixed laptop... On the other hand this is the most graceful death of a computer I can imagine, since I can still access all the data and settings while preparing a new machine. Generally I have been very happy with IBM/Lenovo, so I decided to stick with the manufacturer. I have anticipated a lot of changes in notebooks over the three years I have been using the T41. But after a quick browse through what is available today, I found (to my surprise), the industry has barely moved an inch forward... At least judging by the specs. I decided to go for a convertible, notebook / tablet design, so the obvious choice has been the X61 from Lenovo. Quick look at the specs and I am surprised: CPU speed: 1,6GHz (my 3-years old T41 is 1,5GHz, but OK, the X61 has actually two cores...) Storage capa...

I have been in a waiting mode for couple of years now. Waiting for a Internet tablet I would use... My last one was Compaq TC1000, I liked it a lot... May be it was a bit slow with video content, may be its battery did not last long enough to forget the charger... May be its pen input system was not too precise and reliable... May be full Windows XP installed there was an overkill... But all in all it worked. When I sold it in 2005, I did not imagine at that time it would take two years (and counting) for the world to come up with a solution. So in the meantime we have had: HTC Universal with VGA display and 3G/UMTS/WiFi - too slow Iliad e-reader and now the Kindle from Amazon - both just not designed for generic web access The iPhone - good design, but it is a phone, not a web browser Nokia N800 - not bad, but it crashes everytime I try to access my GMail on it Microsoft Origami - bad idea by design, trying to put the entire big OS on a tablet OQO - a good concept, but it has been pai...

We live in a connected world. The number of connections we have is not just a number of phone calls. Email floods us. Most of us have a number RSS feeds delivering them various notifications. Or bookmarks within a Web browser that are clicked frequently. We participate in various forums, consuming the feeds. And then comes facebook . The phone calls are definitely a minority. The old world of synchronous call sessions is going away... Three weeks ago I posted some musings on the Telecom 2.0 , mostly based on the fantastic speech by Lee S. Dryburgh. Inspired, I decided to set up a facebook account for myself. After some two weeks I think I start to realize the potential the facebook brings us, especially how it is posed to change the way we communicate. The foundation of facebook (as is the case with other community sites) is the network of people - to - people connections, coupled with various ways to publish a personal live data stream. Seems quite simple, but I must say, being new to...

Alma is the grocery store I like the most. The pity is it is not close to where I live and it is almost always crowded... So I do not shop there too often. You may imagine my delight when I have recently learned they opened an Internet grocery store - the Alma24 . Yesterday I went to check how it works and I am very happy... It took me less than 15 minutes to register and complete the first order. The service is very well engineered, searching and browsing the product catalog is smooth, there are obvious options of adding to cart or adding to shopping lists, converting cart to a shopping list or loading a prepared shopping list to the cart. At the end of the process you select the delivery time by picking one of the available one hour time slots. Somebody must have spent a lot of time and effort working on the user experience, as you do not have to re-confirm anything until you finalize the order. So now, as it is very likely that I will move my grocery shopping experience to the Web,...

The first, experimental Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ unit arrived just before the weekend. I say experimental, as in the longer run I plan to base a significant part of my home computer / entertainment network on these devices. I have picked the ReadyNAS for several reasons. Basically it is a storage server or even simpler a hard disk with Ethernet interface. There are many units like that on the market. The Infrant is special for several reasons, most of them seem important to me: It has redundancy built-in. Up to 4 SATA drives (my initial unit has just two with two empty expansion slots) in various RAID setups. Hard drives do fail. So if you think of storing a significant amount of data, the drive setup should be redundant. In my configuration the Infrant box will have 4x500GB drives, resulting in a 1,5TB capacity with redundancy (4th drive). 500GB drives seem to sin in a capacity/price sweetspot and typical home should do fine now with 1,5TB. Later when larger drives become cheaper the sto...

I have just returned from the NMS Communications Connect conference taking place in Madrid, Spain. They did a very good job selecting the speakers and panelists. There were many, including Brough Turner, the CTO of NMS who confirmed my earlier musings of voice (quality) being the killer application of a next generation telephone network. Brough said - and I do agree - better voice could be more pervasive than anything else. Remember - at the moment our conversations utilize the same bandwidth they used to 100 years ago. Finally the industry starts to understand? Good, better late than never... Community services, Facebook included, and user generated content in general, were the hot topic as well, when the participants finally seem to agree with the Telecosm law of separation of content from conduit. I could hear "we need more content innovation" and while "consumers are smart, not dumb as most of the carriers used to think", the "locked-in users turn into a...

Last week when I wrote about the Momento Connected Photo Frame , I said in the last paragraph " What we really need now are cameras able to upload photos to Picasa with a press of a button. ". Wishes do come true (more on that later...). Here comes the Nikon Coolpix S51C, a compact point and shoot camera, with built-in WiFi. According to Nikon's press release, the S51C can upload images to Flickr. Really exciting! My Momento frame, ordered a week ago, is still somewhere in transit, I hope to get it tomorrow... And after reading the Nikon's specs on the S51C, I was almost ready to buy one. What a nice couple they would be: snap a photo with the camera, press a button and off it goes instantly to Flickr, where it is immediately pulled from by several photo frames scattered around my family. Imagine myself being in Australia, taking a picture of Ayers Rock and my Mom having it displayed automatically on her photo frame in a matter of seconds. No computers in between. No ...

I remember back in 1987 at the university, we had a lecture on liquid crystals. Two weak points were mentioned in reference to this technology: first, the LCD displays were monochrome, and second, they were too slow to be used to display motion pictures. Five years later I bought my first color LCD laptop (so called active matrix those days) and it had bright and clear and fast LCD display, violating just about everything I had learned about liquid crystals a few years before. The drawback was the price, something in the range of 10 thousand dollars. And today? We have LCDs everywhere. From watches to mobile phones to digital cameras to MP3 players to computers to TV sets... And now even the photo frames have LCD displays. That is natural... why use paper to print digital photos, when you can upload them directly to a "frame". Or a couple of them. As I write, a typical, decent 7 or 8 inch photo frame costs some 100 dollars. They used to have fairly low resolution (480 horizon...

For years ATI and NVIDIA, known for their high performance graphics boards, have been the synonyms of fast games. Recently everybody have been talking about Sony PS3 and its ultra high performance graphics based on the NVIDIA RSX engine coupled with the Cell processor. And suddenly it looks like what was initially designed for games finds its way into high performance servers. A few days ago Wired reported about an astrophysicist who replaced his number - crunching supercomputer with a cluster of PS3s. This trend becomes even more mainstream, as some serious companies offer serious programming tools. Terra Soft Solutions has a version of Linux tailored for the PlayStation and RapidMind offers its stream programming toolkit for the console. This year's acquisition of PeakStream (a competitor to RapidMind) by Google amplified the trend even more. All these platforms and solutions share a common paradigm - multiple processing cores and parallel execution of tasks. What seems now a ...

Exactly a year ago I posted about GPS devices. Part of the post was about GPS - enabled cameras and how automatic geo-tagging of pictures would streamline the process of sharing and storing the pictures. Now after a year the GPS technology has made inroads into many consumer products, but I am still not aware of any consumer photo camera with built in GPS unit. On the other hand as some of you already know, I have been shopping for a new DSLR camera recently. I finally settled on the FujiFilm S5 Pro and one of the important contributors to my decision (versus Sigma SD14) was the GPS support. The FujiFilm S5 Pro is an interesting design, as it is based on the Nikon D200 body (I posted on the S5 Pro last month), and supports most of the accessories designed for the Nikon, GPS being one of them. I was naive to expect the Nikon GPS solution would be elegant. But the reality is Nikon is not an iPod and while being a "professional" it is quite often bulky and conservative. So how...

I was completely surprised when I learned last week that copying music I owned was actually stealing music. Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, during her testimony on October 2nd, 2007 said "When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." and then that making "a copy" of a purchased song was just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'". First I thought I misunderstood something, so I kept on reading... So for all my life I have been purchasing CDs just to learn when I rip one to my iPod, I am stealing? Seems like a good reason to stop buying CDs at all. I do not remember when I listened to the physical CD I had bought. I buy them, rip to the iPod and put back on the shelf. Listening to a CD is so inconvenient these days... I think not many people do it the way it was originally designed. But if this is a crime, then fine, I will not buy a CD anymore. At least not a "legal...

Apple is closing on Microsoft at the operating system race track. Of course this does not mean Mac OS X sales are anywhere near the sales of Microsoft Windows, but there are areas where Microsoft used to race alone, without any competition and that competition starts showing its strengths. One such area is a Tablet PC. Apple was early to the market with the Newton . Way too early, just before the Internet in fact. And they finally dropped the product line. Microsoft tried to approach the Tablet PC a number of times. They had various Windows CE - based designs, like the Vadem Clio (too early and too slow). Then decided Windows CE was not up to the task (that seems strange to me, but well...) building the first generation of Windows XP - based tablets like the Compaq TC1000 (I really liked that one and am thinking of buying its more powerful brother - the TC1100 - back). And then they started persuading us Vista is the way to go... Until last week when they gave up... Allowing users, ...

I decided to buy a new digital camera. Technology moves fast ahead and my current Minolta A2 is ageing. I have been quite happy with the A2, but it starts showing its wear... And there are some general capabilities of the camera it just does not have. I went through my albums and among things I would like to have improved are white skies. Indeed on most of my pictures the sky is white. This means the dynamic range of the sensor was not high enough. The bright portions of the image saturated the image sensor, most of the time resulting in a white sky. I do not complain about other aspects of the images that much. Resolution of 8 megapixels is fine for the moment. 28-200 lens are OK too. So I started some research to find a camera equipped with a high dynamic range sensor. On one hand there is a cornucopia of new models from the market leaders, namely Canon and Nikon, followed by Panasonic and Sony. On the other hand two designs have attracted my attention: Sigma SD-14 and Fujifilm S5 Pr...

Last week was full of speculation of Apple bidding for the 700MHz spectrum in the US. While this may or may not prove right, I have another concept for Steve Jobs. Why not become an MVNO or Mobile Virtual Network Operator? In Europe we are experiencing a tsunami of emerging MVNOs. Some of them are purely virtual, being no more than a brand, a web presence and a calling plan. Some build the entire core network infrastructure, including MSC's (Mobile Switching Centers), HLR's and all the galaxy of components composing a mobile network (less the radio transmitters and antennas). Each of them is targeting its own audience. Looking at this picture it looks pretty natural Apple should become an MVNO. The iPhone buyers are not happy about the AT&T alliance. They can live with AT&T just because they love Apple and they can withstand any torture just to be able to use the Apple product. This is a very loyal audience, feeling superior to anybody else. They are ready to spend a co...

I have a basket full of various portable devices, each of them aspiring to be the king of portable Internet. The one I do not have is an iPhone, for several reasons. First and most obvious is we do not have AT&T coverage here in Poland :), but then I think the iPhone is not that great when it comes to mobile Internet. Especially the screen resolution of 320x480 is far from what is needed for decent web browsing. And then there are various reports of incredibly weak Safari performance and its Web 2.0 (AJAX) incompatibility. And while the World was waiting for the holy iPhone, Nokia quietly developed the second version of the Linux - based Internet tablet. The N800 is a successor of the N770 and its specs are really attractive (especially the screen at 800x480, 2.5 times more spacious than Apple's). After reading many very positive opinions on the N800, I finally decided to get one myself, and have to admit it has exceeded all my expectations by a wide margin. Here are the pros ...

Mobile Internet, wireless data cards, WiFi, UMTS, 3G, HSDPA, WiMax... look how many standards we have developed. I often try to think which way the future will develop. So far we have been thinking of WiFi as more "Internet oriented" and GSM/3G as more "telephony oriented" technologies. But this is going to change... Since the first day of "cellular packet data" known as GPRS we have been using "telephony oriented" networks to access the Internet, and vice versa, by means of Skype et al, Internet networks have been providing us with voice communications. But still a notebook is more of an Internet device and a mobile phone is more of a telephony device. The divide is more and more blurred however... With the commercialization of technologies like GAN - Generic Access Network ( I wrote about UMA a few weeks ago ) the meaning of "carrier" as both the service operator AND the access network is taking a split. Voice telephony operator no lo...

Buying a new car is somehow out of the scope of this blog, but may be a good reason to talk about some automotive electronic gadgets. Actually I have changed a car recently, and the number of factory provided gadgets was not the most important factor of my decision. So it arrived quite stripped in terms of on board computers, audio - video systems and communication devices, as while they are nice, I do not consider them the most important aspect of automotive technology. But having said that I have to admit there are some gadgets that make me feel comfortable while driving, and a good handsfree phone system is one of them. Because of my profession and my gadget drive, I change mobile phones quite often, so the only reasonable option is to have a Bluetooth handsfree kit installed, to avoid changing the main unit every time I change a phone. Bluetooth is very handy as well, as there is no need of taking the phone out of the pocket and is especially recommended to women, as they are able ...

Last week I have been traveling around Poland. Saving sunny coral reef resorts for depressing days of November, I really like Poland in Summer. A friend of mine took off a few days before and stopped for a few days at a remote lake in Tuchola Forest . This used to be some 6 hours drive from where I live, so without much rush I programmed my Garmin GPS unit to guide me there. Unfortunately I soon found out I would not make it in 6 hours, as all the major roads were under construction. After spending an hour in a traffic jam and moving just a few hundred meters, I decided to take the first road away I could. We do not have the TMC (Traffic Message Channel) implemented in Poland, so my GPS, while it knows A LOT, is not aware of blocked roads and traffic jams. On the other hand we are experiencing enormous growth of popularity of CB-Radios (drivers alert themselves about police radars and speed cameras, but also about traffic conditions). The immediate thought was how nice it would be to ...

I was thinking of adding a network (IP) camera to my home network for a while. First idea was to have it wireless (WiFi) connected. But as I wanted to have an outside look at my house and garden, WiFi was not solving anything - I still needed a wire for power supply. After a quick browse through various on-line shops and auction sites, I soon realized the task to pick a really good one was not that trivial. There are hundreds of USB web-cams on the market, but for me USB was not the option. The original idea was to be able to run the camera without any PC and to be able to view the video stream from any PC. Thus it had to be a standalone, network - connected camera. Then there are a few (Linksys, Dlink) vendors offering fairly inexpensive network cameras. Unfortunately when I dived deeper into the specs of these cams, I soon found out the output picture was not going to be what I wanted. The low end cams offer QVGA (320x240) resolution (comparable to a resolution of a mobile phone disp...

Being a fan of all sort of wireless technologies, the recent announcement by T-Mobile USA to start UMA service grabbed my attention. The service has been rolled out as Hotspot@Home. Not long ago I thought UMA is just another dream tangled in technical and regulations problems and would not see the light for some time. So this surprised me and I started digging around, being soon redirected to http://www.umatoday.com/ . There I quickly learned actually the leading carrier in UMA deployments is not T-Mobile, but Orange, and - funny - the service has been available in Poland since April 2007 as Unifon . UMA is an abbreviation of Unlicensed Mobile Access, another TLT (Three Letter Technology), being recently renamed to GAN or Generic Access Network. Whichever acronym we take, the concept itself is really cool. In short, by using dual mode (GSM + WiFi) handsets, it allows a handset to connect to your home / office WiFi hotspot instead of connecting to a cellular tower. It does not require ...

I have finally done it. I mean I have installed Linux on my Sony PLAYSTATION3. This was my third attempt (third time lucky :), as they say). And now I am writing this post on the game console within the Firefox browser, using a wireless USB keyboard and the buil-in WiFi connection. The first attempt was to install Ubuntu following the http://psubuntu.com/ page. This basically goes down to downloading and burning a PowerPC - based Ubuntu setup ISO CD. Sony has an option in the System Menu to set up a third party operating system on the console and following the prompts I had Ubuntu running on the PS3 in less than an hour. Unfortunately the WiFi connection was not working... I browsed a few forums and soon found out the only option to connect over WiFi was to go for the Yellow Dog Linux from terrasoftsolutions.com . I ordered an install CD for $50 + P&P and run the setup next weekend after it had arrived. The WiFi did not work again, but then I had no time to spare digging for the ...

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday Google would launch a search service for mobile content. Content - based services are in their infancy now. The reason is - it is still extremely difficult to find content we really like. Take music. You have to know the name of an artist or a song title. Then you go to google.com and search for it. Or go directly to Amazon or iTunes for a purchase. This is the traditional way. Boring... Music is about emotions. How often we hear something on the radio and scream "I want it now". Artist? Title? Don't know and don't want to wait - I like it, give it to me. For a long time Pandora has been the only service close to the above mentioned scenario: I like it, give me more like this, now . But with all due respect, Pandora is hand - made in fact. There are people who listen to songs, classify them into categories - no magic, just hard work. Google announcement does not bring us any closer to a content search we would love to have...