Headworx

So the Apple Tablet (iPad?) announcement is scheduled in four weeks. It probably won't hit the stores for another five months, as it was the case with the iPhone. As any wireless device it has to pass FCC tests, so there will not be a point to keep it secret anymore by Apple. The world is waiting. Joining the speculating crowd, let me try to share my thoughts of what it will be like. Looking back, especially at the iPhone announcement, we may be certain Apple is trying to address everything we do not like or do not feel comfortable with when using portable Internet devices. Size. We may be sure it will be as thin as possible. I would say the thickness will be similar to the iPod Touch (thinner than iPhone). Hight / width probably twice the iPhone. And the screen will fill the entire surface. Display. Everyone agrees OLED is very probable. The iPad does not have to compete on price. And OLED is the cutting edge today. The screen resolution is probably 720p (1280x720) and I think it

I mentioned the Sheeva Plug computer several times here on this blog. Today I start a series of posts that will continue on the tech.slupik.com , devoted to Sheeva development, and to plug computers and other embedded systems in general. But let me post the inaugural story in both places. At the moment I run two Sheeva servers in my little data center. I have the third one set up as a development / staging environment. There are many ideas continuously coming to my mind. Most of them require testing various scenarios and it would simply be inconvenient to mess with the production machines. That is why I purchased the third one. hey, at $99 it is not a life changing decision. When the third Plug arrived, I thought to myself it would be nice to have a permanent environment in place to play with it. Environment here means a host machine, needed to prepare the Sheeva to run and then a simple I/O for screen and keyboard and a web browser. The hardware requirements for such a machine are pr

2010 is approaching us fast. 2000 seems like yesterday. The other day I was thinking about all these technology achievements of the last 10 years. And really there is not much, we, as a civilization, should be really proud of. Especially compared to the 90's. Between 1990 and 2000 we have essentially invented the Internet. 32-bit Windows and Linux operating systems were born. GSM mobile telephony conquered the world. MP3 players arrived. Digital photography too. I could go on and on adding to the list of technology achievements from the decade before. So what about the current decade? Social networking you may say. I cannot argue the fact the number of users of Facebook closes to half a billion. 100 million of them play Farmville. But is there really value there? Quality? I mean value that moves us as human beings to the next level. In 1990s there was the Pulp Fiction. Today we seem to have pulp reality. In the 80's we used to write letters. Not often, but very personal. Then c

Being an absolute fan of wireless connectivity, the truth is I run most of my important network services at home over the wired Ethernet. Surely I have wired DSL connection. Theoretically 3.5G HSPA should be at least as fast as my 1 Mbps fixed line. In bulk asynchronous file transfers - probably it is comparable, but the latency of plain old DSL is an order of magnitude less. And latency matters when using synchronous protocols. My wireless LAN is 802.11g. I tried a number of 802.11n setups, but the interoperability and stability was simply unacceptable. Actually of all 802.11n access points I tried, only the Apple Airport was successfully connecting to my Lenovo X200s. And even the Airport was temporarily interrupting the transmission of big data chunks. For usual Web activities the LAN speed usually does not matter. Even the 802.11g is at least 10 times faster than most DSL lines. But along Web browsing we use more and more multimedia over LAN. Most of you are probably familiar with

It has been three months now since I posted a note on the Sheeva Plug Computer . I have been quite busy with the Sheeva all the time. Currently running three of them. Two in a full production environment and one as a development system. The three Sheevas make for my small data center. The first one, as originally intended, runs MeteoHub. MeteoHub is a software, that collects and processes data from weather stations. In my case initially it was just one station - the Davis Vantage. MeteoHub was doing a perfect job with the Davis weather station. The configuration was very simple and everything was running smoothly from the very start. My appetite was growing. Davis has just one internal temperature sensor and I thought it would be nice to have temperature measured in many places around the house - the attic, the cellar, the garage and so on... I found a source of cheap (~$8) wireless temperature / humidity sensors manufactured by Oregon Scientific and bought 10 of them. Then I used a un

Every now and then I think how the future of wireless data will look like. Recent weeks somehow have brought a significant clarification, at least I can see things clearly now... :) Let's start from the definition of the problem we have. It is simple. Wireless data transmission is too slow. Yes I mean the home and office WiFi networks. Even with the latest 802.11n standard just ratified a few weeks ago, a simple four twisted pair copper CAT5 cable is almost an order of magnitude faster (1 Gigabit per second versus 100-something Megabits) and a couple of times cheaper (a home gigabit switch is $30 today...). But more importantly I mean mobile cellular data. Yes we have 3G and even 3.5G HSDPA networks in place. Delivering on average 1 Megabit per second to mobile terminals. 1 Megabit used to be a high number a while ago. Especially in mobile scenario. But it no longer is considered high today and won't be in the future either. You may say new standards like HSPA+ and especially L

Today I have moved to my new home entertainment setup. The gear remains the same. There is the good old Panasonic PT-AE2000 full HD projector and the good old Sony PlayStation 3 . But the setup is very different. Moving the projector far to the back of the room, I've managed to get a picture with 140" (>350 cm) diagonal - at 16x9, the image is 120" (~300cm) wide. At the same time I 've moved the sofa forward, so my eyes are only about 80" (200 cm) away from the screen. To picture these proportions it is like keeping a nose 6" (15cm) away from a 14" widescreen laptop. There are some unexpected effects of such extreme setup. Firstly, at FullHD (1920x1080) I see no pixels nor grain. The image is very smooth (I suppose the Panasonic display engine makes some clever tricks here...). Secondly, I feel I no longer play a game. I am IN the game. This is especially true with simulators, like the Blazing Angels or H.A.W.X. from Ubisoft, where you fly a plane u

Two weeks ago I gave Amazon's Kindle a number of thumbs down, the truth is I still stand by what I initially said... The Kindle has been completely unprepared for European market. Today, however, I would like to focus on one, in my opinion very important piece of the Kindle puzzle - the Whispernet. Whispernet is a virtual mobile data network. Amazon uses the Whispernet to silently, automagically deliver digital content (books and other stuff) to Kindles. Initially, in the first and second generation Kindles, the Whispernet has been based on Sprint's CDMA network. This was the main technical reason why Kindles were not offered outside USA, as CDMA in practice does not support international roaming. The third generation Kindles (the international ones) use GSM - based Whispernet, so they are able to roam abroad. Unfortunately we still have absolutely ridiculous GSM data roaming prices. Anywhere on the Planet subscribers get virtually unlimited data plans for $10-$20 a month. But

Integrating audio / video entertainment systems around a house is not a trivial task. It is still much easier today than some years ago, when the only way to go was to install a dedicated system from vendors like Bose or Bang-Olufsen. I have been playing with multi - room audio and video for a long time and basically there have always been three areas to solve: Media transport. Making sure a CD or a radio station can be played in any room, with individual volume adjustment. My first installation was just a number of power amplifiers with speaker cables around the house. Three years ago I moved to an all-IP solution, storing my entire music collection on a NAS server (the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ , running Logitech's SqueezeCenter streaming audio to a number of SqueezeBoxes ). For stored videos I use the same NAS server, streaming the content DLNA-compliant way down to Sony PS3 console. For live video there are Linux - powered Kathrein UFS-910 DVB-S satellite set-top boxes. Remote co

So is Amazon running scared by Barnes & Noble? I have to admit my expectations were set high last Monday when Amazon announced Kindle was available worldwide. The start was excellent. Ordered the same day on Monday, shipped from the USA on Tuesday, delivered by DHL just two days later passing a customs clearance. This is the current record time for any item ordered from the USA to Poland. In te meantime, on Wednesday, they kindly credited me back with $20, due to "Consolidation of family of 6" Kindles." (whatever this means besides aligning with the price of B&N's Nook ). Unpacking the device was reminding me unpacking the first iPod for the first time. The feeling of a device of a completely new class... It was turned off and there was an image on the screen. I thought it was a piece of paper to peel off... But actually this was a displayed image... WOW! "It needs to be charged" - I thought and looked in the box for a power supply. First was the ca

A few days ago a friend of mine lost her Yahoo mailbox. She was fooled by a phishing page to give her password and soon the phisher got control of her mailbox, forcing her out by changing the password to his own. A standard recovery should be to reset the password and change it to a new one, forcing the phisher out. As it is practiced in such scenarios, an automated process tries to figure out if a person claiming the rights to the account is authentic, by asking predefined questions set up when the compromised account was created. And very often people just do not know the answers to their very own questions, making the recovery impossible, as they cannot prove their identity. For some reason Web sites have been ignoring a perfect second factor authentication device - a personal mobile phone. Years ago phones have been tied to places. Today phones are as personal as toothbrushes. Everybody has their own. Phone numbers are even more personal. With mobile number portability being a sta

Last week I've reached an important milestone in a lifetime long project of setting up a (multi) home network by setting up an IPSEC tunnel between two distant locations. Actually the real distance is not really THAT far - about a half an hour drive, but in Internet terms they could be separated by an ocean. I do not have too many practical applications for this setup yet, the entire project is mixed fun and education. There are many hosts on both networks, most of them are tiny dedicated computers, doing their everyday jobs. Among them are NAS servers (replicating contents between the two locations, using rsync protocol). Or weather sensors, talking over IP to the central data collecting unit, that also does charting and other calculations. There are cameras set up, so staying in the city during winter I can have a look at my summer country cottage. There are digital satellite receivers sharing crypto cards, so we can watch TV in either location, without physically taking the equ

I heard about the OCZ NIA a number of times. But my perception was they were still in the marketing phase (before production started). To my surprise the product has been actually available in OCZ retail chain for some time now. Mine arrived last Wednesday. A metal box with a size of a pack of cigarettes, USB cable on one end and a rubber head band with a small proprietary connector on the other. All packed in a big box (probably to justify the price - I payed ~$150 - quite steep for a HID controller) with high quality finishing touch. The only disappointment was a small paper insert advising to download the most recent drivers before plugging the thing in. The drivers are working - and this is the good part - even on my Windows 7 laptop. I think I should tell what NIA is... NIA stands for Neural Impulse Actuator, and is a HID (Human Interface Device) controller that lets you control your PC (and I do mean PC - sorry, no Mac's at the moment) with impulses your brain sends to vario

A warning note tonight. Flash memory wears out. And fails. We are prepared to pay premium price for the latest and greatest SSD drives that lift performance of our systems to then next level. While the performance side is true indeed, we have to face one serious risk: flash (solid state) memory is generally not safe. At some point in time my SSD drive will refuse to write data. But this will probably be caught by the operating system (at least this is what I hope...). Or worse - it will silently lose stored data and will refuse to read it. This is a relatively high risk. Why do I write about this? Because I have just had a really bad week, with four devices that failed due to flash wear problem. The first was the Toshiba Network Camera. It simply refused to store new configuration changes and went dead after I tried to upgrade its firmware. The second was the accompanying NSLU-2 based little FTP server. It rebooted one day and reported there were no USB drives connected to it (well...

So after a week with x64 Windows 7, I have to confirm the Earth is suddenly a better place to live :) As I said a week ago - after getting here from Vista, there is no going back. Everything is so much better... The only thing that has suffered is the battery life. Remember I was getting an average of 8 hours on my x200s with low power setting. And it could have been stretched up to more than 10 hours... Now my power meter shows around 7 hours when I start working on a fully charged battery. That is about 15% less... My theory here is the screen backlight. Screen can take as much as 50% of the total energy consumed by a laptop computer. In my opinion the long battery life of the Lenovo x200s is achieved partly due to the Intel L9400 "Santa Rosa" processor optimizations, and partly due to LED backlight technology (previous display technologies were using fluorescent lamps). The display in the x200s can be very bright, so usually I run one of the lowest backlight settings. And

Ufff... I have just (almost) finished migrating my system (the Lenovo x200s) from Windows Vista (32-bit) to Windows 7 (64-bit). And I feel the result is worth the effort. It took me a lot of time - I started two days ago. The upgrade process itself was triggered by my hard drive running out of space after taking more than two thousand pictures during the summer holidays. As some of you may remember, I have been using the 200GB Hitachi FDE (Full Disk Encryption) drive for the last 18 months... It has been performing flawlessly... But now it is simply not spacious enough... And I am not going to give away the convenience of having all my personal data and files with me at all times. This is also the reason why I have opted for the FDE drive. The FDE concept is simple - the drive has a security chip in it and always encrypts data. You control the encryption by setting a drive password in BIOS. With no password, the drive happily releases the key used to decrypt data when passing it to t

A few weeks ago a friend of mine inspired me to install a weather station. Indeed this is a nice hobby project and gives a lot of potential areas to learn something... My obvious goal was to have all weather data coming from the station collected on some sort of server and be able to display it over the Internet. Weather stations typically consist of a suite of sensors (temperature, humidity, rain, wind) you place outside a house and a console that collects and displays collected data on a LCD screen. On higher end models a console can be connected to a computer to relay sensor data. My requirements have been quite simple. The sensor suite should be very stable (no way to climb a roof in winter to push a reset button), running on solar power for wireless connectivity to a console (cabled connection increases potential lighting damage). The console should have Ethernet /TCP-IP interface. After some digging here and there (mostly in Google) I picked the Davis 6152 Vantage Pro 2 . The bui

Summer holiday season ends tomorrow. As usual I have traveled a lot in a car recently. The roads down here in Poland are very crowded, so more often than ever I tried to depart as early as possible, like 3AM in the morning. By the way this pattern reminds me the early days of the Internet, when the only way to get decent download speed was to get up at 3AM and log on to a computer... This time a year ago I posted on predictive mobile navigation, a system utilizing a feedback from GPS devices, even as early as users plan their journeys... A year later and there is a GPS device with bi - directional communications. But it has been introduced to the market for quite a different reason... Yanosik bears its name after Juraj Jánošík , the legendary outlaw who robbed nobles and gave the loot to the poor and has always been a symbol of resistance. This time it is the resistance against police highway patrol and speed cameras, but if properly developed can have many more implications in future

My fascination with the CDMA Ev-DO @450MHz has been fading recently. Actually it simply does not work here at the seaside, where I am now... By the way this was the secret selling point - I was hoping for a decent mobile data connection spending my holidays at the seaside. As reported a week ago, the first day I arrived, I found there was no coverage at all. Then I moved to another place by the sea, where signal of three bars looked promising... But unfortunately I was not able to connect and filed a tech support incident with Orange. They promised to reboot the base station... The next morning I tried to set up the CDMA connection again, but the results were no different... Three to five bars of signal and no connection... A few hours later Orange called me just to explain everything was fine, only the network was congested, and the signal meter was just a mock-up... "You may not be able to use the service even if there are five bars... The signal meter reading is irrelevant...

I have been pretty high on the new CDMA Ev-DO service @450MHz by Orange.PL recently... Consistent 1Mbps connection for the entire Krakow to Warsaw train ride... I have been testing the dual - mode CDMA/GPRS-UMTS ADU-635HA modem for two weeks now... The service has been very promising, but to be honest the modem itself does not seem to be the state of the art... Being the size of a soap bar, it requires a battery of its own (thankfully the battery recharges from USB port while the connection is not active) and works best with an external antenna... And most importantly... being dual mode... it DOES NOT support EDGE. No EDGE did not seem to be a big problem initially... I thought "well, OK, why would I need EDGE when there is much faster CDMA Ev-DO...?". Unfortunately things are not as simple... Two days ago I arrived at my friend's place - a small village at the Baltic Sea. An guess what... No CDMA there... (it was supposed to be everywhere... but it seems the coverage is

As promised (and as I was hoping...), I already have some days of playing with the ADU 635 modem behind me. A short explanation. ADU 635 is a dual mode CDMA / GSM usb modem. I got mine from Orange.PL. Orange has a CDMA Ev-DO mobile data network running in the 450MHz band - the band they have had since the early 1990's, when analog NMT mobile network was operating there. Orange has a GSM - UMTS network too, so dual mode CDMA / GSM - UMTS device makes sense for them. My personal goal wast to test the 450MHz Ev-DO network performance on the go. I often travel on a train from Krakow to Warsaw, and it usually takes three hours one way, so together this is six hours per day. Trains, operated by a state - owned company are not the state of the art and they do not have an on board broadband connection. So people (like myself) use cellular modems. These modems are GSM / EDGE / UMTS, but the UMTS network is not available along the way. EDGE is sometimes very bad (I assume this is when many p