Headworx

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 ...