Headworx

As I posted before, my BlackBerry Bold arrived without any special BlackBerry data plan. Just the smartphone and packaged data plan from the service provider (T-Mobile Poland). This selection turned out to be a disaster for two reasons. First: the way the Bold handles packet data connections (aka GPRS) combined with the way T-Mobile bills packet data (even in packages) results in an average bill to reach 150MB a month (the real amount of transmitted data is far less than that, but BlackBerry applications open and close data sessions very often, so every 3kB or 5kB session is rounded up to the so called "first 100kB"). While this can be handled at home by selecting a large enough data plan (500MB a month in my case), any trip abroad will likely bring you close to Chapter 11... Second: there are a number of very useful applications (namely: Facebook Mobile, Google Talk) that do not work without any subscription to BlackBerry services (BIS - prosumer or BES - corporate). So even...

Having the hardware covered a week ago, today I wanted to touch a little bit on the software on the Blackberry Bold. Hardware - wise the device is almost perfect. How about software then? Well... the first impression - as with the hardware - is it's extremely well implemented, with a lot of attention paid to the details. I started my journey with the Blackberry installing the PC software in order to migrate my contacts stored in the Microsoft Outlook . I did not expect any difficulties here, and they did not happen. Both the installation process and the transfer went smoothly. On thing that can be noticed on the first encounter with the Blackberry PC software is it is designed to help you migrate from one device to a new one. These days we rarely start with smartphones from scratch. Usually we have a lot of data and meta-data to move, and sadly, very often we move the meta data manually. Re-entering passwords, Internet bookmarks, wallpapers, ringtones etc. People hate doing this (a...

So from time to time I make a switch from one platform to another. From one device to another one. From one service to a new, better (do not laugh, please!) one. They are stories worth telling. I wish marketing departments were reading them. Who knows , may be they do? So the Episode 1 of the Switch saga is going to be about my new Blackberry Bold. Faithful readers are probably aware I was a long time user of various Windows Mobile platforms, actually starting from the i-Mate SP3 in 2004 (actually still one of the best phones I had), then moving to the SP5m , and after a short period with JasJar and TyTN, I settled for the Samsung SGH-i600 almost two years ago. It was a great ride with Windows Mobile, unfortunately the platform has been steadily losing its edge. iPhones hit the market and revolutionized the way manufacturers (and users) think about smart phones. I was considering iPhone for a long time. I even got one (the 3G), but as great as the device is, it proved to be somehow p...

It has been a while since I mentioned Qualcomm here. They are pushing ahead on full throttle. A few days ago Qualcomm demonstrated a couple of devices powered solely by their latest Snapdragon chipsets. I posted a short entry on the Snapdragon platform two years ago. At that time it all was like a fantasy... Today the chip is ready and OEMs are building new devices based on it. The specs are impressive: Two 1,5GHz cores (my latest high end laptop has two 1,86GHz cores...) Built-in Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS (no GPS on my laptop!) Mobile broadband (of course, Qualcomm is a modem chipsets manufacturer) Accelerated WSXGA (1440x900) video (same as in the latest 15,4" MacBook Pro) 720p HD Video output 12 megapixel camera Judging by the above, we will hardly be able to call what is built on the Snapdragon a cellphone. With high resolution screen and two application cores, it will be a powerful teleputer. And we should see a number pof these devices flood the netbook market, currently occu...

Multi room audio has been relatively easy to solve. One central storage / Internet audio services gateway appliance (in my case the faithful ReadyNas running the SlimServer software). And a number of players (in my case a number of faithful Logitech duets) connected over the home WiFi LAN. The standard Ethernet / IP network layer has been more than enough to stream high quality audio around. And the standard Ethernet / IP network layer has given the ultimate flexibility in building / converging the network topology. Bringing audio to just another room? Piece of cake... Make sure the room is within the range of the home WiFi network and plug just another audio receiver to an amplifier and speakers. Remote controllers operate over WiFi too, so no problem there either. But when we move to multiroom video, we are far, far from where the audio solutions are present now. The reason is the bandwidth. FullHD, or 1080p uncompressed high definition video stream requires a network capable of car...

Recently I have been contemplating about a new phone. It is about time, as I have been using my faithful Samsung I600 for 20 months now. Two months ago I was given an iPhone, but somehow it failed to conquer my heart. Yes, it is a gorgeous toy. It has brilliant applications... I could play for hours with Bloomberg, rotating the screen up and down. Or watch music videos... But when it comes down to some serious business, the iPhone seems to remain a gadget... So after long hesitation, I decided to give Blackberry a try. The Bold seemed like a perfect choice. Sync - perfect, it is able to fully synchronize with Google via the Google Sync . And it is able to synchronize with iTunes music library, I decided to by my master music meta data. I was about to buy one, but then I met a friend who had been using one for a long time. What scared me was his routine task of removing the battery twice a day... to keep the berry fresh and up to the task. No data connection? Remove the battery... Unab...

So what is the next big thing after the Internet? That question still remains my top one since I formulated it in June 2008 at the Intel Capital CEO conference. It was just a week after the impressive presentation by Chris Cooper at 2008 Telecosm Conference . Still being a little jet lagged, I was immediately awaken by the vision of nano confinement fusion. Today, while the nano - scale fusion nuclear batteries are not ready, and will not be ready for some years to come, we may soon be getting an intermediate solution - the mini - scale fission reactors. They are just moving into a mass production. According to The Cutting Edge : ... nuclear battery technology pioneered by government scientists at Los Alamos—the facility that developed the first atomic bomb—has been licensed to private companies for mass production and distribution... in its initial format, each micro-reactor will produce just 25 megawatts, but enough to provide electricity for 20,000 average American-sized homes or ...

Computers on the Internet have IP addresses. Like 208.77.188.166. We are used to locate them based on names or Web addresses. Like www.example.com. DNS ( Domain Name System ) is what translates Web address into an IP address. Seems pretty easy and straightforward. But DNS is absolutely central to the integrity of the Internet and there seems to be a serious weakness that may cause us a lot of headache. Fake DNS servers. Under normal conditions you get access to the DNS servers when you log in to youe ISP (Internet Service Provider). It is in the very interest of the ISPs not to mess with DNS system and provide the proper references to DNS servers to their clients. But there is nothing that would stop me from setting up a free WiFi network providing fake DNS references. Then any computer joining such network would go to fake DNS servers to resolve any name a user types in the address bar of the Web browser. And as a result users would be redirected to fake servers. After typing in www.M...

Last week I found myself in a situation prompting me to figure out the new setup for my virtual office. My previous setup was mainly based on the Microsoft Exchange 2007. My laptop running Outlook 2007 with local cache of all mail / contact / calendar items residing on a server. Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone on top of it, synchronizing everything over the air via the ActiveSync protocol. This worked flawlessly. I had all emails and contacts and calendars in sync all the time. My phone, my laptop plus a working copy on the Exchange server. The challenge now has been to do the same, sans Exchange. So I started thinking about my new setup. These days we tend to sore everything in The Cloud (the Internet). I use GMail and Google Documents for my private stuff a lot, so my first steps were to try setting up everything around Google services. I soon found out this was not that simple. Starting with contacts, my first goal was to move my database of contacts from Microsoft Outlook to Go...

Crapware is probably a better word for what I used to call bloatware . The software that you can live without. The same software that comes preloaded on your machine when purchased. Eating your CPU, RAM, battery. Eating your nerves when your machine hangs or stalls or takes too long to boot. The problem is now widely noticed and as necessity is the mother of an invention, anew class of software utilities emerges. Decrapifiers. Computer viruses spawned a wave of anti-virus software products, even entire companies, some of them listed on stock exchanges. Big industry. Then came firewalls. Software fighting against other software trying to get on to your computer and wreck havoc on the desktop. Now we have decrapifiers. Utilities promising to clean your windows machine to the state comparable with Macs. One of them is the PC Decrapifier . It is a good start. No perfect by all means, but good and helpful for starters. And looking at the dynamics of the amount of crapware coming with new PC...

A few weeks ago I posted an entry touting the entry - level SLR camera, namely the Nikon D40. I am a very happy D40 owner, it serves as my secondary camera and a great learning tool for the family members. We use Picasa as a "cloud" storage for photos and one thing I would really love to have (and have been writing about for a while) is eliminating the PC as a man-in-the-middle between a camera and an Internet photo storage / sharing site. Last week I have finally found some time to configure and test the new release of the before mentioned Eye-Fi SD card . Eye-Fi is a special storage card. On the outside it looks and behaves just like any other SD card. 2GB capacity may not sound big these days, but it is plenty enough for casual usage. D40 reports it can store some 500 snaps on it, which is more than enough. But the Eye-Fi is not an ordinary storage card. It has a dedicated computer and a communication device inside. Namely an 802.11 b/g WiFi transceiver and antenna. And ...

Last week I cried out loud my 802.11n hassles . People may wonder why move to faster wireless network at home, but the answer seems to be pretty clear: multimedia. More and more homes are equipped with some kind of a multimedia home server. In my case this is the Infrant / Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ . It serves three main purposes: Stores my digital pictures (the ones myself and other members of the family snap with our cameras) Stores digital videos (mostly satellite TV recordings I collect, like the Formula-1 races) Stores digital music (MP3 rips of CDs I buy and eMusic downloads) All the three types of content go through my laptop. Pictures are copied from memory cards to the laptop, cataloged with Picasa and sent to the NAS. Videos are downloaded from the hard drive of the Dreambox satellite tuner, and then converted from .TS (MPEG-2 satellite transport stream format) to .MPG (MPEG-2 native format) and sent to the NAS. Music goes almost the same way. Each time the laptop does some proces...

My wireless home has now 36 ethernet devices scattered all over the place. The only consistent way to count them is to look at the DHCP status log of the DFL-800 router / firewall that is the heart of my network. And BTW I consider the DFL-800 to be one of my best tech / gadget investments. It is not cheap and learning curve is steep. But it can do a lot and has never failed. Recently I have decided to upgrade the WiFi to the 802.11n standard, promising much better coverage and high throughput. Actually I have been in a need for both, as our newly finished veranda happens to be out of reach of the old and faithful Linksys WRT54GL. I knew the operation would be dangerous, so I started the whole process studying opinions of early 802.11.n adopters. They indicated I should stay away from Linksys, as their new boxes are nowhere near the classic WRT54GL. So I decided to pick the Asus WL-500W . And soon after plugging it in I found out my laptop (Lenovo X61s with Intel 4965AGN dual band n...

I have been a very happy user of the Asus EEE PC 901 for several weeks now. I really started looking into the EEE line just when it launched with the 701 model. The 701 was an excellent idea: as full portable computer as possible for as little money as possible. But I soon realized the 701 specs were falling a little short from my expectations. The main reason was the screen, and especially it's horizontal resolution of 800 pixels. The main reason for buying a netbook is Web browsing and 800 pixels across is just not enough. 90% of web pages nowadays are designed for XGA or 1024x768 resolution. So 800 screen means you are getting a horizontal scroll bar most of the time. Handling just one scroll bar (the vertical one) is what we are used to. Most Web pages are simply longer than the monitors we use. But two scroll bars are just too uncomfortable. So I was really happy to learn Asus planned to launch the 900 series with 1024 screen. And then just after the Centrino - based 900 had ...

FullHD has gone mainstream. So it has been just about time to find a partner for the Sony PlayStation 3 . I have to admit the PS3 does not show any signs of physical or mental fatigue. It is still as beautiful and as jaw-dropping as on the day one in May 2007. The idea of setting a living room multimedia hub around the PS3 proved to be right. In tandem with the ReadyNAS , the PS3 is used very frequently to play and replay digital photos and DVDs. It also perfectly serves time-shifted recordings originating from the Drambox, the Linux - based satellite receiver. And it upscales standard movies to HD resolution. And yes, it plays Blue-Ray discs too. And... it is a game console. So, the perfect multimedia hub needs a perfect display. I was looking for something of a decent size (say 80 inch diagonal), that does not clutter the wall. So a projector was the default choice. And FullHD (1920x1080 native resolution) was the key requirement, as I did not want to lose any detail from the pin - s...

We are nearing October 2008 that will mark full three years of my blogging. I posted a lot on gadgets and devices and I have to admit not all of them proved long term as good as initially expected. To be honest: most of them failed and I either sold them on an Internet auction or they found the way to the big box I keep in my basement... So the winners are: Sony PSP . I love the console, the speed of the games. And the latest version even has VoIP (as predicted). HTC SP5M . I lost it. And it was not 3G. But it would make it to the winners lounge. Non-touch Windows Mobile is really a good piece of an operating system. Google storage . I use it everyday. My Gmail is less than 20% full. And my Picasa holds my entire photo collection. Microsoft DirectPush . Love it. Even the 3G iPhone has it. HSDPA Internet on the go. Everybody is using it. Pandora . Fantastic. Shame the labels are killing it. Squeezeboxes . Have four of them, in use every day. Google Browser Sync . The only reason I sti...

Two years ago I wrote about the Paperless Home personal project. Using very simple and cheap scanner I started scanning every important piece of mail (or other documents) coming in paper form and converting them to the digital format. I continue organizing my personal documents this way, getting rid of almost any piece of paper as soon as it arrives and finds its way to my secure FDE drive . The end result is great. Whenever I have a need to get one of these documents it is a quick file search away and my physical cabinet for storing papers is almost empty now (well... may be not, but it is not filling up anymore). On the other hand, the process of scanning the papers has been fairly labor intensive. The scanner I used to use (an old Canon flatbed) was slow and the software was limited. Things like scanning double sided, multi page documents were taking long time and I could imagine not many people being patient and having enough perseverance to keep this process running every time so...

The vacation summer season is over again. I really enjoy traveling and it happens we do travel quite a bit by car in June-July-August season. Looking around it is hard to find a car without a portable navigation system these days. Some would say we have just passed the GPS revolution. But really? Surely having a nice map guidance in a car is a good thing. And as the roads are more and more crowded, electronic maps help detour traffic jams. Actually I use two devices together to make it through. The first one is from the analog era - a CB radio. Extremely popular in Poland now, helps me learn what lurks before me. A traffic jam, a speed camera or a radar / laser equipped police officer hunting for a pray. Recently I was contemplating what would it take to recreate the CB Radio experience in the digital era we live in. An ad-hoc, peer-to-peer social network with alerts, chat rooms, where people you are connected with are selected on a location basis - the ones within a 10km range around...

So everybody is talking now about the dropped calls on the 3G iPhones. Well... I wrote a piece on this subject two years ago: http://headworx.slupik.com/2006/11/disconnected-umts.html . So let us try to understand once again what is happening. 3G iPhone is a UMTS device. This measns it works on 3G/UMTS networks known as WCDMA networks (Wideband CDMA or Wideband Code Division Multiple Access). WCDMA is an evolutionary generation step for GSM networks, but the two standards differ so much, this can hardly be named evolution. It would be like saying iPhone is an evolution of a rotary phone. Sure, both allow people to talk to each other, but are so far away technology - wise... WCDMA networks generally have much smaller cells. This means the distance between the mobile terminal (iPhone) and the base station is relatively short. And this means there have to be many base stations to cover a given area. Many more than 2G GSM base stations. Network planning has to be very careful, especially i...

The second week of my holidays is just about to end. Of course these days holidays are really on-line/connected holidays. No broadband yet, as spending a quality time in remote, very little populated areas leaves me with just a bar or two of GPRS/EDGE coverage. I somehow anticipated that, packing a 3 meters long USB extension cord in my luggage, so my Option USB 225 cellular modem could be fixed to a long wooden stick with a duct tape, and placed outside the window in order to catch the precious data packets. I was not able to make or receive phone calls (attaching my mobile phone to the same wooden stick did not work), but s-l-o-w d-a-t-a c-o-n-n-e-c-t-i-o-n was working filling my Inbox and emptying the Outbox. On the other havd there were days when coverage was working only on the beach and for obvious (sand!) reasons I was not willing to bring the laptop with me. So the Samsung took over the communication tasks. Samsung is a great piece of phone. It has its drawbacks (sound quality...