Headworx

A good friend of mine has recently brought my attention to the EC2 service by Amazon . I touched this subject some 18 months ago, when Alexa opened it's search infrastructure to developers. Lots of things have changed since then. EC2, the Elastic Computing Cloud, accompanied by S3, the Simple Storage Service delivers the entire data center of any size, personalized and dedicated. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz x86 processor, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth. Starting a Web 2.0 company has never been easier. Of course you need a good idea and development skills. And you still need to code your system. But the obvious barrier so far has been the start of commercial service once the application has been coded. I wet through th...

What is a projector? It takes a light source, passes it through an image (celluloid film or LCD filter) and beams on the wall in front of us. The wall reflects the image and the reflected light comes into our eyes. Very simple idea, nobody even wanders how this stuff works these days, as projectors have been with us since the Lumière times. But what about sound? Can we project sound and bounce it off the walls? Sure... every loudspeaker does that. But there is a distance between a loudspeaker and a sound projector... similar to the difference between a light bulb and an image projector. To project an image, we need to seer the light very precisely. Dim some areas, tint some other... To project sound we have been using multi - speaker setups, commonly referred to as home cinema. It takes two speakers to recreate a flat musical scene, it takes a few more, to create a surround scene and have some sounds come from the places in front of us, and some other sounds coming from behind. Basica...

Every now and then I have to post on wireless headphones . There are several reasons why the subject returns. I do travel a lot. And I want my gadget bag to be as small and light as possible. On the other hand I carry a lot of gadgets with me and the process to optimize the bag contents is a never ending story. One of the threads within this process is getting rid of power supplies. Notebook, Camera, Sony Playstation Portable, iPod, portable speakers, mobile phone... the battery life in each of these devices is too short to consider going for a week long trip without a charger. Fortunately this problem is almost solved by the USB ( Universal Supply Bus :P) standard. Almost - but not fully solved, as most of the personal electronics manufacturers do not understand the device power plug should be mini USB, full stop. So still one charger but a number of cables. HTC, Motorola and Blackberry seem to be the only three who understand. The rest, Samsung included, still tries to reinvent the...

iPhone is going to hit the market this month. There will be a tsunami of posts and reviews, and I plan to stay out of the crowd. Especially that the first release is going to be US-only (still a very typical approach by many companies...), I will not have much of a chance to play with it. Do I want one? Sure I do. Would it be my primary phone for day use? Probably not. The reason? My current phone has a QWERTY keyboard and every new phone I buy in the future will have one. As long as we will be entering messages other ways than using our brain waves, a QWERTY keyboard is on my list of must - have features of a phone. Mobile phones are not just phones anymore. People use them to snap photos, listen to music, organize their tasks and calendars and - sometimes - to make phone calls. Apart from making calls, I also listen to music on my phone and use it as a simple photo camera as well. But there are much more important tasks I do on my phone, other than music and photos. Among them are:...