Headworx

DLNA stands for Digital Living Network Alliance ( http://www.dlna.org/ ). They are a collection of companies with an aim to make home networking and multimedia entertainment interoperable and hassle - free. Among the members are giants like Microsoft and Sony and around 250 others. And I am happy to report this alliance seems to be working. During my so-called "free time" I keep on putting together a home entertainment network. Wrote a bit on that on my Tech Bulletins blog ( http://tech.slupik.com/2007/11/digital-home.html ). This project is still a work in progress, but from what I have assembled now it looks like the DLNA - compliant devices are really interoperable. So far I have been able to put together two main components of the system: The Infrant ReadyNAS file / streaming server . Depending how you look at it, you may consider the ReadyNAS as a heart of the system. Currently I have it equipped with four 500GB drives, yielding capacity of around 1,5TB (the fourth drive

Belkin has been my vendor of choice for years when it comes to USB infrastructure. You may ask what unusual is these days in USB hubs... they are so plain simple... Yes and no. As long as the hub works there is nothing to talk about. But I happened to have a number of USB hubs from other vendors and they were either sporadically freezing, generating a lot of frustration (for example when a long multi-page ADF document scan freezes after finishing some 70% of the work) or they simply did not allow to draw more than 500mA of power per port. Nowadays we have a lot of devices drawing their power from the USB bus. And many of them exceed the official rule of 500mA. I should say kudos to the USB hub manufacturers (like Belkin) or notebook manufacturers (like IBM/Lenovo) who save us on power supplies and unnecessary cords, allowing for current overdraft. We have heard a lot about UWB (Ultra Wide-Band) and Wireless USB standards. They promise to deliver what USB delivers today, but without wir

I wrote about the Microvision PicoProjector (PicoP) before . Now I am happy to report they are making a good progress. At CES (Consumer Electronic Show) 2008 in Las Vegas Microvision presented the SHOW Prototype , a working product to prove their technology really delivers. The device is about the size of a cigarette pack. This is still too much to be implanted inside a mobile phone, but there are many devices that would benefit having the PicoP built-in. Notebooks: many notebook users frequently conduct presentations (internal or external) in a group of a few people - be it coworkers or customers. The small meeting rooms usually have walls, but often lack projectors. Personally I would love to have the PicoP built-in my notebook. Yes, I would sacrifice 150 grams of weight to be able to "beam" a PowerPoint slide deck or an Excel Spreadsheet anywhere. Or to show the pictures just acquired from a digital camera to my family and friends. Spending half of my life with notebook co

Today I have got myself involved in a very interesting discussion on the outlook for IPv6 rollout. I have to confess I have been thinking about the IPv6 from time to time, and my views on the iPv6 are even more radical than ever. Contrary to the public belief of IPv4 address space exhaustion, I think we will ride the NAT kludge for a while... and I am 100% certain the migration to IPv6 will take more than the average of current estimates. But let us start from the beginning. The main difference between IPv4 and IPv6 is the number of hosts that can be addressed on a network. This seems to be obvious, but is not. By number of hosts we should consider the number of publicly available servers, or even aggregation points. For example Google.com counts but my laptop and my cellphone do not, as they are not servers - they are clients. Clients usually sit behind NATs (Network Address Translators), a kludge that allows many client devices on a private network share one common external IPv4 addr