Headworx

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...

It is holiday time again in August and holidays mean taking a lot of pictures. What a change in just a few years. Now we all travel with digital cameras, flash memory cards, chargers and laptops. Compare that to taking a few rolls of film four - five years ago. I was late to the digital photography, as I believed the final results were far off compared to analog films. Then in 2002 I bought the 4-megapixel Minolta F100, my first digital camera. And suddenly I realized there is no way back to analog.... Surely the quality was not there yet, but the flexibility and instant preview of the results meant better pictures and much faster learning process (the digital feedback loop is a few seconds - you shoot and you see the picture versus days / weeks long analog feedback loop). There was only the way forward - to improve the quality of digital pictures to match and surpass analog. Chasing the quality I soon realized the battle is not of megapixels. I no longer make prints. I store my photos...

At the beginning of the change there were jet airplanes. Letting us jump from one place to another in a matter of hours. Then automated long distance telephony services came along. It was enough to add two or three country code digits and we could here somebody on the other side of the ocean. Initially this was expensive. And these actions reaching the other end of the Planet were taken knowingly. You never boarded an intercontinental flight by chance. Dialing from Europe to Australia was never by chance either. But then mobile phones and the Internet arrived. Dialing a mobile phone you always dial the same number, regardless where the B-party is. Actually you do not know... And you do not pay any extra fees for talking to somebody who is traveling far away - it is the B-party who covers the extra roaming charges. By the way the roaming charges are relics of the past. On the Internet you never pay more for TCP packets sent across the ocean. Telephony operators use more or less the same...