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...